Over the past couple of years, a comforting narrative took hold: namely, that intolerant progressive identity politics and “cancel culture,” of the kind that characterized the mid-2010s and early 2020s, have receded. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that’s not always true, especially around certain topics. I’d know. I’m a junior at Columbia University, and I’ve spent the past 48 hours under a barrage of messages, like the ones above, urging me to commit suicide or demanding that my career and life be destroyed. 

My crime: publishing an essay in a student magazine, the Columbia Sundial, that questioned the ironclad narrative on campus that Jane Doe, of the “Cornell 7” controversy, is a victim of rape.

My co-author, Christina Ma, and I argued that the case highlights a contradiction in American liberalism: we celebrate libertine sexuality while infantilizing women when this yields predictably troubling results, such as those at Cornell. “The sexual revolution,” we wrote, “created a hyper-liberal, pro-sex culture that insists that ‘women can do whatever they want with their bodies.’ In the world that, for better or worse, follows from it, we cannot claim to stand for sexual freedom and then recoil in disgust when there’s a possibility that a young woman simply chose to exercise it.” 

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More to the point: I believe that this globally divisive topic should be — indeed, must be — subjected to good-faith, reasonable contestation. (I write here in my personal capacity, and not as the Sundial’s deputy editor.) My detractors disagree. Even in our supposedly “post-woke” age, any debate on the Cornell matter is immediately mistaken for “misogyny.” To investigate is to promote “rape culture.” To raise doubts is to undermine the “lived experience” of all women. 

The Sundial was founded in 2024 to foster debate, counter excessive editorial censorship, and publish ideas from an array of perspectives that Columbia’s other publications won’t touch. The project has been difficult: the general student body finds the publication too “conservative,” conservatives find it too “liberal,” pro-Palestinian students consider it to be “genocidal,” and Zionist activists on campus complain when we publish Israel-skeptical views. 

Yet precisely this heterodox ethos, Ma and I and some others on staff believed, needed to be carried into our coverage of the “Cornell 7.” The process was controversial, even on our board. Our three-member editorial board, of which I am part, subjected the piece to extra scrutiny. One board member even ended up resigning after the article was published, in the wake of the massive backlash that ensued.  

Nonetheless, Ma and I pushed the piece through, and it received the sign-off of all members of the board, including the since-resigned member. On the same day, we published a piece from an opposing point of view, taking issue specifically with my own writing and public statements on the “Cornell 7” affair. 

Within hours of the story going live, Ma and I received more than 60 comments on Instagram and more than 100 “shares.” As of the time of this writing, it has garnered more than 300 “shares.” Students posted about it relentlessly, and with limited exceptions, in abusive language — attacking both Ma and me, and the Sundial writ large. Very few people messaged me personally; instead, they chose to harass other members of our staff for being associated with me. 

The Sundial is no stranger to controversy. At the height of the Gaza encampments, the magazine dissented from pro-Palestinian groupthink. But no backlash has been as intense, uncompromising, and extreme as the one that now confronts us. 

The campus, en masse, has turned against us. The student-run Columbia Political Review published an open letter to the Sundial. It claimed a commitment to the “dissemination of multipartisan ideas” but added that “journalism relies on standards of respect and zero tolerance for sexism and sexual assault.” It accused us of unspecified “inaccuracies,” and of perpetuating “a culture of campus violence, rape, and assault.” The CPR also pressed the Sundial to re-evaluate its publishing guidelines and “commitment to public safety,” and conduct a review of our decision-making process.  

Even the Columbia Open Discourse Alliance, or CODA, of which I was once a board member, has condemned us. The group wrote in a statement that “CODA exists because we believe in free expression and the open exchange of ideas, including ideas we disagree with.” But, you know, not really. The statement went on: “Open discourse requires that every member of our community be able to speak. This article does the opposite: it promotes rape culture and works to silence survivors of sexual assault.” 

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CODA also canceled a student press panel that was scheduled to take place, in which the Sundial’s editor-in-chief was slated to participate. The Columbia Daily Spectator, the campus’s principal student publication, weighed in with their reporting, which heavily relied on claims that our essay raised concerns about “safety” and quoted two of our staff members who are circulating a petition around campus for the Sundial to “cease organizational operations” until their demands are met. 

Our student opponents, in effect, believe that prevention of sexual assault — a term that has come to encompass any activity that the accuser finds unwanted or distressing — can be accomplished through punishment of the perpetrators; to this end, allegations of sexual assault must be believed without question. 

This activist position has long elided the difference between violent rape, a crime, and a host of other more ambiguous situations that are regrettable but not criminal, and are difficult to punish by law. Our essay argued that the libertine culture that both men and women participate in is responsible for many situations perceived as assault, and that in order to prevent this form of assault, the culture itself might need to change.    

Activists may wish to silence this perspective, but student journalists and self-proclaimed “free-speech” organizers shouldn’t. It is distressing that students can believe that they are in favor of “multipartisan ideas,” “open discourse,” and “journalism” — all while silencing dissenting voices on topics that are less comfortable. Members of my generation, who were mere children when the first wave of cancel culture crested, appear to have learned nothing where it really matters.

But these risks, while worthy of focus in themselves, carry with them a deeper question. AI, like printing and writing before it, is the kind of technology that shapes the evolution of civilizations. In turn, how well societies adapt to those changes depends on the existing cultural landscape, including deep assumptions about human nature, the relationship between mind and body, and how society functions.

Here, concerns with AI safety throw the differences into sharp relief. While Trump dismisses safety concerns, the major AI companies increasingly agree on the need for safety. However, it remains to be seen whether this extends beyond rhetoric to a willingness to curb their own competitiveness. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s concern with ensuring China does not surge ahead may be honest — but it also provides a convenient reason not to follow through on slowing down frontier development. If China will build its own AGI anyway, better that a US firm gets there first. It might bring on the apocalypse, but at least it will be an American apocalypse rather than Armageddon with Chinese Characteristics.

Trump’s dismissiveness towards safety concerns seems to be in tension with the AI companies’ approach of calling for a slowdown that, for game theoretic reasons, they cannot implement just yet. But they both reflect a general modern Western concern with freedom from constraint. In the labs’ case this is often accompanied by messianic visions of AGI just beyond the horizon — a silicon savior which will achieve miracles ranging from eliminating pestilence to generating limitless material abundance. This is a vision of unbridled progress enabled by free competition and innovation, guided by the utopian visions of individual technologists but directed towards universal benefit.

A different version of this is represented by Trump and the deepening relationship between Big Tech and political power. On one level this is apparent in the entourage of tech leaders who accompanied Trump to China and attended this week’s summit. On another, it is manifest in the visions of technologists like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, their personal ties (volatile as those can be) with figures in the Trump administration, and, in the case of Thiel, the provision of AI as an instrument of law enforcement and military power. These are far from visions of universal benefit, instead being centered on national supremacy — a will to power channeled through transformative technology. This is the counterpart to utopian liberalism and the contemporary form of the Nietzschean impulse, channeling the drive for self-actualization into the strongman leader rather than pushing it as a universal objective.

Both visions have a common origin traceable through the Enlightenment and Christianity. This is a faith in the ability of the mind, expressed in the self, to operate independently of the body — and ultimately a desire to free it from physical constraints. Our society is one in which professional and personal existence is increasingly online, in which the work of the mind is elevated over that of the body, in which we express ourselves through self-applied identity labels dislocated from our biology, in which we are beginning to demand the right for our minds to choose when and how to end the existence of our bodies. This is fed by an economic culture of maximal choice — self-actualization through consumption. It should not come as a surprise that the contemporary West’s vision of AI is one of disembodied agents who reason and communicate solely via language and apparently require nothing else to become superintelligent. Pure, unconstrained digital selves.

Meanwhile, in China, they build robots as well as LLMs. Of course, the Americans do too, but the robots are far fewer. China has become a world leader in the field, giving it a major advantage in pursuing embodied AI — a potential path to AGI made that much more plausible by the fact that a robot-borne program can interact directly with the physical world. The Chinese government has pursued a systematic AI strategy for a decade and has done so as part of a wider focus on developing “new quality productive forces”, foundational technologies enabling a fourth industrial revolution. This is accompanied by a drive for energy security and electrification as well as comprehensive frameworks for AI governance — that is, the pursuit of policies across economy and society that enable the deployment and diffusion of artificial intelligence. The CCP has emphasized safety since the beginning, and identified early on that the requirements for AI would vary significantly depending on its application to areas as diverse as security and surveillance, manufacturing, infrastructure, law, healthcare, and care for the elderly. It has regulated accordingly, tailoring rules to each sector (including a remarkably robust and not unironic concern for consumer privacy). China’s companies face ruthless domestic competition, but also operate in a society which leapt from industrialization to digitalization in decades rather than centuries. They release their models earlier in development than their American counterparts, but do so in a country in which the Party-state is able to enforce and manage safety concerns in a way Washington cannot.

The CCP intends that China leads the world in AI, but does so in a way which maintains domestic and international stability. The promise of leadership, in the CCP’s view, will be realized not by the individual breakthroughs of a genius techno-utopian or the company he runs but by deploying the technology across manufacturing, healthcare, administration, and surveillance. Xi and his colleagues grasp that while LLMs (and other AI models) might appear to us as disembodied minds, key to the control of their development is control of the physical stuff that allows them to exist, right down to the minerals that go into the chips. And they understand that there is an opportunity to lead by providing the rest of the world with open-weight models and the international initiatives and regulatory frameworks to govern their use. It has been China that has offered a Global AI Governance Initiative, hosts the World AI Conference on governance, and engages in extensive AI and data governance agreements across the Global South.

None of this eliminates the potential risks of losing control. But it does mean that China is significantly better placed to mitigate them, and to respond effectively should they occur. None of the above, equally, mean that Chinese AI is inherently more benign. To the contrary, under the watch of the CCP it enhances an already pervasive surveillance machine, enables more efficient repression and pre-emptive action against potential dissenters, and grants the CCP a potent means to control the flow of information through Chinese society and beyond. On the plus side, in a world of Chinese AI we may well be less likely to all die at the hands of MechaHitler.

Just as self-actualization-through-technology, Nietzschean or utopian, has its conceptual roots in the West’s intellectual heritage, so this alternative vision of AI — an all-of-society enhancement that is context-specific, regulatorily-iterative, embodied, and safely controlled — has its roots in China’s. It is the kind of approach one might expect from a civilization whose philosophy has emphasized a continuous relationship between the mental and the physical, the mutual influence of society and the wider cosmos, and the complexity of the web of factors that influence individual behavior. Such principles lie behind ideas ranging from traditional Chinese medicine to Confucian moral self-cultivation, emphasizing propensity and interconnectedness over determinism and separation.

As with Western thought, this tradition has optimistic and pessimistic flavors. The countercultural impulse of the Daoist sage to retreat into the mountains and be at one with the way of the cosmos is the sibling of the Legalist statesman’s understanding that his enemies are best destroyed by comprehensively targeting the intricate network of economic, demographic, political, and military factors on which their rule depends. The Confucian conviction that all humans can improve themselves through practicing the correct rituals finds its counterpart in the Maoist awareness that those forced to repeat the same behaviors can be “brainwashed”.

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So there is much to fret over, regardless of who drives the direction of AI. Ultimately, it is hard to avoid the uncomfortable conclusion that this technology may well spell the end for the societies we in the West consider ideal. For many decades, if not centuries, our societies have seen rapid technological change, but never in that period have we been confronted by a technology with quite so much transformative power over how we receive information, how we communicate, and how we relate to others and ourselves. Writing and the printing press were technologies which, through interaction with economic shifts as profound as the emergence of a merchant class or the newfound sustainability of cities, enabled the thorough and often bloody transformation of political systems. Such technologies define the development of human civilization for centuries thereafter.

Printing emerged far earlier in China, and did so into a society that had developed many of the trappings of early modern European states centuries beforehand, from bureaucratic government to standing armies. But for us in the West, the arrival of printing caused immense disruption, ushering our societies out of feudalism and into an era of mass literacy that made liberal democracy possible. AI now appears to be a similarly transformative technology, and is swiftly being embedded in the bureaucracy, in the military, and across a corporate sector over which the government has little control. The institutions of Western democracies are ill-equipped to deal with such a radical shift in the creation, control, and distribution of information and the new centers of authority it is creating.

In contrast, China has developed its economy and institutions alongside the emergence and proliferation of digital technologies. It has also done so at a time when advances in science and technology tend towards an emphasis on complexity, messiness, and unpredictability. Contemporary scientific understandings of evolution or the relationship between mind and body, for instance, are entirely at odds with the mind-body dualism of the Enlightenment. A philosophy that worked for a world of steam and printing — discreet manipulable objects and Newtonian physics — is not necessarily up to the messier challenges of silicon and neural networks. A society whose systems of thought are predisposed to understand humanity and the world in a way which complements the science underpinning modern technology is surely likely to adapt to that technology more effectively — and implement it more effectively too. CCP-sponsored AI might very well wish to read the contents of your mind, but a brain-computer interface designed by Xunzi would perhaps be less likely to assume that one can straightforwardly transfer the mind’s contents to a machine with no ill effects than would one designed by Descartes.

For these reasons, it is likely to be China that ultimately better adapts to an AI-enabled world. It is not that China and the West are incommensurably different, nor that they do not face analogous challenges with these new technologies. It is simply that adaptation is an evolutionary process, and in evolution success depends not on perfection but on being marginally better suited to one’s conditions than the competition. China’s approach is much more orientated to the complexity of this technology, and unlike the US, China is building an architecture designed to facilitate the spread of its own vision. America risks failing to anticipate the profound domestic challenges AI is catalyzing, while China gains an international reputation as the more responsible AI superpower.

We should take this prospect extremely seriously. Of course, we must worry about US-China strategic competition, from the economic challenge of supply-chain interdependence to the escalation risks posed by two superpowers increasingly reliant on military AI. But we must also think about culture, and what might enable us to better adapt. This is especially pressing for those of us outside America and China. We face two alternatives — the apogee of unconstrained self-actualization or efficient, holistic security. Or, for the more pessimistic, MechaHitler or MechaMao.

Now, however, all these pillars of the postwar order are collapsing at once, and largely in the same theater. The American-Israeli war in Iran, the ongoing migrant crisis at Ceuta, the dismantling of Hamas’s hold on Gaza — it’s easy to imagine these are discrete events. But they aren’t. They are the load-bearing assumptions of the postwar settlement giving way altogether. When empires are ready to collapse, the gods of history have a way of creating splintering geopolitical emergencies that push toward entropy. The Dow Jones might hit 60,000, and the world might soon have its first tech-trillionaires, but on some level we all know these signs of progress and stability are just mutually agreed-upon fiction. What we’re living through now is the Great Unspooling of the postwar liberal order.

The postwar order began with the Holocaust. The discovery of the Nazi death camps completely remade the Western moral imagination. Thereafter, any sustained suggestion that ethnicities or religious groups differ in their readiness for Western institutions became taboo. Out of that hesitation to acknowledge the reality of profound cultural differences came the belief that nations must henceforth be “ideas” rather than long-fought inheritances. Along the way, the West promised that Jews would never be left to the mercy of antisemitism — a vow that took institutional form in the state of Israel. For 80 years, these vows held. But now they’re breaking down, with the war in Iran and the attempted dismantling of Hamas.

To that extent, Marx got it wrong. It wasn’t class-conflict, exactly, but immigration and a dependence on population growth, that are the great “contradictions” of liberal capitalism. The West has become a system dependent not only on cancer-like growth to survive, but also on population enlargement, for which it must have ever-increasing markets and thus ever-increasing populations capable of supplying them. Insert mass immigration from non-European origins to societies with mostly European ancestry, wrap it all in a narrative of innocence in which every migrant merely seeks a “better life” — with no ancillary consequences whatsoever — and you have liberal capitalism’s core contradiction, its timer set to explode.

Over the last decade, it’s become increasingly popular among the more cynical portions of the online Right to believe that the West will “fall” as a result of mass migration from non-European societies. Even the anti-populist Right suspects, as Jonah Goldberg argued in The Suicide of the West, that Western culture is in the midst of an extended self-immolation. Certainly, the ground-swell of resistance to mass migration explains President Trump’s rise as much, if not more, than any other factor. Ten years ago, in that fateful GOP primary loaded with more than a dozen “serious” candidates, Trump was the only one to realize the fervor of the resistance against immigration boiling up from the American demos. 

And now, a decade later, with Covid and the Biden presidency intervening just to extend the fun, we’re still living through the same dilemmas, except now the immigration issue is more prevalent in Europe, and it all could come to a head with Trump’s ill-fated decision to launch a war in Iran. 

Every US president since Jimmy Carter would have liked to launch a regime-change war against the mullahs. Yet when looking at the practicalities, they decided the chances of prevailing without astronomical financial costs, not to mention loss of life, were simply not viable. The result was funding Saddam Hussein, the Iran-Iraq War, then two separate military campaigns to remove Hussein from power and of course a two-decade-long occupation of that intractable nation on Iran’s eastern border. Nearly $7 trillion later, here we are: the Middle East less stable than ever, and Iran able to hold the global economy hostage by choking off free passage through the Strait of Hormuz.

Insert a chief executive without a sophisticated understanding of either international politics or the tenuous nature of the postwar order, and now we’re six months into a kiss-and-kick battle where even conservative outlets are questioning the sanity of Trump’s decision-making. A rational mind would accept that there are truly only two options left at this point. Either admit defeat and leave with our tails between our legs — just like we did in Saigon in 1975 and Afghanistan in 2021, and are now quietly starting with our bases in Iraq — or else “fully committing” as Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and a coterie of others on the Right keep suggesting. That latter approach would likely mean an all-out bombing campaign against Iranian electrical grids and water treatment plants, perhaps even with lower-threshold “tactical” nuclear weapons.

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The fact that Trump hasn’t yet pulled the metaphorical trigger, and indeed seems reluctant to do so, is chock-full of irony. After all, the kind of no-holds-barred military approach Trump continues to threaten is precisely the one used by the Allies against both Hitler’s Germany and Imperial Japan. And while there are plenty of reasons to have qualms about the bombing of civilian targets in Germany and Japan, it’s also hard not to conclude that the ruthlessness of that effort motivated their unconditional surrender, paving the way for the very postwar order now threatened by Trump’s quixotic refusal to go all-in. 

All the while, the President’s own Penelopean method of dealing with Iran — weaving by day, unraveling by night — proves that the United States, and the broader Western world whose helm it still commands, no longer has the stomach to defend its own interests to the actual death. Perhaps it’s simply that in an age where internet-connected video cameras sit in the palms of even the poor and destitute, no Western leader, not even Trump, can green-light the killing of tens of thousands of civilians overnight. 

Benjamin Netanyahu, of course, is not so squeamish. And his willingness to be despised — by West and East alike — exposes a fault line the postwar order was built to conceal. The Holocaust may be the origin point of contemporary Western liberalism, but the modern State of Israel has never mistaken itself for a member in full standing, bound by the same pieties and constraints. In the West, as the notorious GOP operative Lee Atwater understood, “perception is reality” — yet Israel, almost alone among nations, has decided it can live without the West’s good opinion. That indifference is the tell. Even if the Israelis are ultimately correct in their assessment of what needs to be done, their indifference to perception will have consequences. 

The “Judeo-Christian tradition,” it turns out, was always a hyphen doing the work of a treaty — another tenuous invention of the post-1945 settlement. It is now failing like the rest of this dying edifice. From the Israeli perspective, the country is trapped in an existential battle for survival. October 7 proved their enemies will stop at nothing — not even if the result is their own annihilation — to undermine the Israeli “settler colonialists.” In many ways, Hamas’s atrocity was the moral grand finale of the suicide bomber. It proved there are no boundaries of barbarity the Islamists will not cross, while Israel itself clearly cannot constrain itself by the niceties of the Geneva Convention and the make-believe agreements of international law. 

It’s hard, here, to argue that Israeli resolve is wrong-headed. Notice, though, that none of our inherited categories can hold during this war. All through the postwar period, it was easy for America to cast its enemies, whether Fidel Castro or Ho Chi Minh or Saddam Hussein, as the “next Hitler,” or anyway, something close. But whatever its many cruelties, Hamas is certainly not a threat on that scale, and neither is its ally Iran. With the absence of viable communist and fascist movements, the great tension of world politics, as Benjamin Barber so aptly put it 30 years ago, has become “Jihad vs. McWorld.” Two monoliths of cultural excess, both lacking self-reflection, much less true spiritual or intellectual growth: one neoliberal, the other neofeudal.

It’s a cliche to say that Islam never had something like the Protestant Reformation — and, as Reformation historians like to point out, the cliche gets it backwards. Modern Islamism arguably is Islam’s Reformation, what with its scriptural literalism, its iconoclastic fury, its millenarian certainty. But what Islam has arguably never had is what came after: the cultural exhaustion that provided the space for a genuine liberalism to come about. Perhaps, it will eventually get there. Perhaps it won’t. One thing, though, is certain — neither the United States’ military, nor Israel’s, can force any realization upon it. 

Yet if the settlement can’t be imposed abroad at gunpoint, it will not come from naively believing that all who seek residence in the West come with a willingness to respect its core tenets of tolerance and individual responsibility.

The broader illiberal treatment of women by some non-Western immigrants to Europe is a ticking time bomb. While many of the abusers were only Muslim in culture — they are far from practicing — that only intensifies the point of conflict. As people from Islamic countries dissipate across the globe, tensions are likely to continue rising, especially as Western populations continue to reject mass immigration at every electoral opportunity. Western leaders, of course, are more eager to prove their cosmopolitan bona fides and dedication to postwar liberal principles. 

Eventually, this divergence between what most of the population wants and what leaders prefer will bring down governments across Britain and the Continent, whatever liberal stalwarts like Andy Burnham might do in the short term. Meanwhile, as evidenced by Abdul El-Sayed’s triumph in Michigan’s Senate primary last week — overcoming the party establishment and a record $65 million in outside money — the Democratic Party is living through a takeover by an internal youth faction for whom the entire idea of border integrity is suspect. El-Sayed has previously favored not only abolishing ICE but making Michigan a “sanctuary” state for illegal and undocumented immigrants. 

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Which brings us to something that’s rarely discussed, in the US anyway, about the war in Iran: it has the direct potential to destabilize not just the Middle East, but the whole of Europe too. Whether MAGA were really involved in constructing the crisis or not, what the nearly 70,000 migrants who stormed Ceuta over recent weeks prove is that, in the blink of an eye, mass migration could destabilize nearly any European nation. Or else there’s 2015, when Angela Merkel decided it was a fantastic idea to allow 1.5 million migrants fleeing the war in Syria — some of whom were merely pretending to have been displaced — into Germany. 

Within a decade, Germany, even in its most urban and populated areas, went from a safe nation with high levels of social trust and generous social safety nets, to something rather different. Some 25 years ago, I studied in Germany on a student visa. In the land of the autobahn and Dunkelweizen beer, the concept of ungovernably dangerous areas was simply unheard of. Not anymore. Germany’s a different place now. The change might irreversible. And, depending on how the war in Iran goes, Europe’s political and social problems surrounding immigration could become even more intractable. If the Iranian regime does indeed eventually collapse, Western Europe and the UK would face an immigration crisis unlike anything since, you guessed it, the Second World War.

At the last war’s conclusion, with Hitler dead in his bunker, more than 10 million ethnic Germans were expelled from East Prussia and across Eastern Europe — many from lands which had been German-speaking for centuries. Few know anything about these expulsions, because to recognize German trauma in any way is to risk association with Nazi sympathies. In the postwar liberal era, we treat as the greatest error in all human history the belief that ethnicity and culture have anything to do with a nation’s aptitude for democratic life, which explains the great contradiction of sustaining the modern liberal order. The West built its dominance on precisely that conviction of its own superiority — then amputated that part of its thinking, with the missing limb now functioning like a phantom appendage, tormenting every political faction with an itch it cannot find a way to scratch.

The West — including very much so the Anglosphere — was not always so polite. From the American Revolution to 1945, most Anglo-American elites — Left and Right — believed the capacity for democracy was a biological trait, available only to what were once complacently called Anglo-Saxons. Supposedly, democracy was invented by ancient Germanic tribes, then carried to Britain by the 5th-century Saxons, perfected by the Glorious Revolution and then perfected again by the United States. This “germ theory” of democracy’s origins was no fringe folklore. Everyone from Jefferson to Teddy Roosevelt advanced it, and Woodrow Wilson taught it — his textbook The State tracing the origin of self-government exclusively to “Aryan” racial stock. 

The idea of democracy being limited by Saxon biology was, of course, absurd. Japan and South Korea run more functional democracies than either the US or the UK. The mythical Saxon tribes Wilson revered were in fact illiterate raiders who had never seen, much less cast, a ballot. The point here isn’t that their orthodoxy was correct. The point is that the men who built the America we know believed wholesale in what you might call “ethnopolitical” thinking right up until 1945 made voicing that perspective out of the question.

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In the end, though, the discoveries of the Nazi death camps made every link between peoplehood and political inclinations verboten. For the next 50 years, nearly everyone in the English-speaking humanities pretended the Anglo-supremacist paradigm never existed, or else quickly filed it away as little more than a curiosity within the catch-all term of “white supremacism.”

The taboo against ethnopolitical thinking produced a strange two-way traffic across the Atlantic. Western Europeans looked to America for models of flourishing multiculturalism — importing, in effect, that American civic-creedal idea that a nation is an “idea” rather than an inheritance. Meanwhile, American academics imported the Frankfurt School, German Marxist exiles who managed the neat conceptual trick of outsourcing blame for the Third Reich onto the “authoritarian personality” of intolerant commoners — this from an intellectual Left whose predecessors had written the Weimar Republic constitution, held the Reichstag during the entirety of its life until 1933, and still failed to stop Hitler. Hannah Arendt’s harder lesson, that modern evil becomes banal because bureaucracy strips agency from nearly everyone, sat poorly with progressives and Left-liberals in love with bureaucratic re-engineering, so the Frankfurt version won. Ever since, the transatlantic Left has agreed on a few core principles: the people are the problem, borders represent prejudice, and anyone can be made a good liberal citizen. 

The postwar taboo of ethnopolitical thinking produced a soft-skulled liberalism that can no longer say who belongs. Why? Because belonging is for “everyone.” It’s kind, in a way, to treat every border as a prejudice. But it’s the brand of kindness a 5-year-old offers to strangers whom they should probably not trust. This, to be clear, isn’t to embrace blood-and-soil nationalism, but rather a full-throated embrace of cultural differences and making decisions based on an accurate understanding of them. Iran was always going to fight their “Great Satan” to the death, something Trump both failed to anticipate and seems reluctant to do himself. 

The last irony of the Great Unspooling belongs to Donald Trump: the arch anti-immigrationist, who would happily restore the norms of a world before 1945, may yet be the one who finishes off the Anglo-American, postwar order. Not by tearing up its treaties or even by mocking its pieties, but by refusing to back down in Iran merely to save face, but then excusing this action as what’s necessary to “save Israel.” Thus, unleashing upon Europe precisely the migration wave that its post-Holocaust morality cannot repel and its populations are incapable of absorbing. The further irony may be that doing anything less may put Iran and thus, eventually, Hamas, in a stronger position than it occupied not only prior to the war, but prior to Oct. 7 itself.

You will be familiar, of course, with this style of political discourse. It is hard to avoid these days — particularly in the United States, where for at least the past five years, whole news channels have given themselves over to an endless barrage of Epstein speculations, vaccine panics, Russian collusion allegations, and UFO babble. It is characterized by a kind of hyperactive manufacture of hidden plots to explain what is going on in the world, coupled with an almost hermetic fascination with the deeper meaning behind coincidences and symbols: the logo of a D.C. pizza shop, for instance, is evidence of the pederastic blood rituals that go on in the upstairs room; or Donald Trump’s bizarre grammar on Twitter and Truth Social, which actually contains hidden kabbalistic messages about his ongoing war with the Deep State. It is invariably met with noisy disapproval in other, more respectable media corners, where academics and experts rally like the counterrevolutionaries of the Vendée, “debunking” the feverish allegations, “calling out” the online rabble, and usually agitating for a return to good, old-fashioned virtues like “trust in government” and “standards in public life”.

Perhaps the greatest debunker of them all was Richard Hofstadter. As a young historian in the Thirties, Hofstadter had flirted with Marxism-Leninism, but by the time he gained tenure at Columbia during the most feverish years of the Cold War, he had traded in his class-based conception of history for a more institution-friendly liberalism. His magnum opus — The Paranoid Style in American Politics, recently reissued — was first published in 1964, when conspiracy theorizing in America was at a high point. The US government was still reeling from McCarthyism; rumors were swirling around concerning the death of JFK, and the Republican Party was in the process of being hijacked by arch-paranoiac “pseudo-conservative” Barry Goldwater. Hofstadter believed that liberal America needed new, diagnostic terms if it had any hope of weathering the storm.

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In the end, it was a term from psychiatry, “paranoia”, that seemed the best fit. This was partly because it was non-partisan (paranoia, Hofstadter generously points out, is “not necessarily right wing”) but mainly because “no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind”. After all, Hofstadter explains, paranoia isn’t simply a kind of madness. In fact, the paranoid mind is in many ways “far more coherent than the real world”. The greatest paranoiacs are sticklers for careful scholarship (“McCarthy’s 96-page pamphlet, McCarthyism,” observes Hofstadter, “contains no less than 313 footnote references”). They display the kind of maniacal interpretative zeal that is also found among rationalist philosophers: everything must fit into their schema, and nothing — no verbal similarity, no coincidence, no pizzeria logo — is permitted to go unexplained.

As a history of conspiracy panics in US political life, The Paranoid Style in American Politics does an excellent job. Hofstadter manages to amass an extraordinary amount of detail in just a few pages: beginning with the immediate post-revolutionary period, when John Robison’s treatise on “the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies” captured the imaginations of New England puritans, who worried that secular secret societies might undermine the congregations and institutions they had worked so hard to set up. Even more winningly outlandish is Hofstadter’s account of the forgotten American tradition of anti-Jesuitism, with its profusion of salacious, tell-all memoirs from ex-nuns — one of which, Awful Disclosures, written by Maria Monk in 1836, was probably the bestselling book in American history until the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. By the time we reach the 20th century, it is hard not to agree with Hofstadter’s well-known contention that “American politics has often been an arena for angry minds”.

But what about explaining the American propensity for paranoia? Like all good academics, Hofstadter is very clear about the explanatory claims he is not making: “In using the expression ‘paranoid style’”, he assures his readers, “I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes.” But if this essay is not an attempt at psychological classification, what is it? Hofstadter’s final interpretation is curiously toothless: “a mentality disposed to see the world in this way may be a persistent psychic phenomenon, more or less constantly affecting a modest minority of the population,” he speculates; “certain religious traditions, certain social structures and national inheritances, certain historical catastrophes or frustrations may be conducive to the release of such psychic energies.” The essay ends soon after. In fact, it is hard not to finish The Paranoid Style in American Politics without beginning to wonder whether Hofstadter might actually have something to learn from the conspiracy theorist. The conspiracy theorist, at least, has the temerity to ask the big sociological questions: What is behind all this? What does it all mean?

Part of the problem, I suspect, lies in the “debunking” mentality which Hofstadter and his fellow Cold-War liberals forged, and still characterizes much of the American establishment today. For the debunker, the salient fact about the conspiracy theorist is his departure from the truth: conspiracy theorists are disordered, delusional, and need to be corrected by a stern, patrician voice telling them how things actually are. But when you talk to conspiracy theorists, you tend to find that their operative notion of the truth is rather different. There is often a humorousness to people’s adoption of conspiracy theories — or, at least, a kind of perverse pleasure or comfort. In conspiracy theory, in fact, the relationship between “truth” and “belief” seems to land rather closer to what one might find in Pascal, or Nietzsche: a sense that the conspiracy theory is true in an artistic sense, the way a metaphor, or allegory, might be true. They are ways for people to parse or understand complex situations without the conceptual vocabulary to do so in a more literal way. Even if you don’t quite have the time or resources to articulate a full account of all the different ways in which the DNC is corrupt or austerity is misguided, you can still say “Hillary Clinton eats babies” or “David Cameron had sex with a pig”, and everyone, on some level, will understand what you mean.

What dark truths might Hofstadter’s American paranoiacs be articulating? I suspect it might have something to do with the United States’ political system: after all, even Hofstadter notes the fetishistic preoccupation the purveyors of the Paranoid Style have with subverting political institutions — freemasons walking among the Founding Fathers, Jesuits infiltrating the government, Communists taking control of the Senate. And curiously, conspiratorial fantasies of subversion do seem to crop up in post-revolutionary liberal societies like the United States with remarkable frequency. The German historian Reinhart Koselleck has argued that something like Hofstadter’s Paranoid Style can be observed in France, Germany, and Italy in the late-18th and early-19th centuries — often using a lot of the same “secret society” imagery. No sooner does a country declare a liberal constitution that guarantees power to the people, than those same people declare it to be the product of freemasons, or Illuminists, or Jews, or Jesuits — any group, really, so long as it isn’t them.

For Koselleck, in fact, conspiracy panics are simply what you get when you combine liberal societies’ endless rhetoric about “openness” and “transparency” and “mass participation” with the rather more exclusionary and secretive reality of the modern liberal state, with its faceless bureaucracies and standing armies and legions of spies. They are a way of explaining away dissonance, wriggling out of the double bind that comes with being a modern citizen. The applicability to 18th and 19th-century American history is obvious: “I know that America ought to mean liberty and prosperity and a bright future for myself and my family,” thinks the American paranoiac, “and yet all around me I see a decaying oligarchy that seems to hold my abstract freedoms in pretty low esteem. Ergo: America must have fallen victim to a plot, an infiltration.”

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Nor is it particularly hard to see why conspiracy theories might be so popular in America today. Liberal institutions are creaking more loudly than ever before: since the Patriot Act of 2001, the very bodies that are supposed to safeguard abstract freedoms have voted to support mass state surveillance; and all across Congress, the custodians of the “transparent” lawmaking process seem to be writing policy with the sole intention of making money from some mixture of insider trading and Polymarket gambling. Under such conditions, paranoia works as a way out, a psychic salve for the citizen who all his life has believed the state to consist of a bright and noble set of ideas, only to discover that it is in fact run by flawed, greedy people. Its true function, therefore, might well be a good deal less radical than its sufferers would like to admit: the more time you spend looking for government subverters in the local Jesuit mission or masonic lodge, the less time you spend looking in the lobbying industry, or big business, or the institutions of government themselves.

Anthropologists have been making this kind of argument for decades. When an ethnographer glosses, say, vampire panics in Malawi as an example of a culture reckoning with its colonial past, or South African zombie scares as a response to globalization, scarcely anyone raises an eyebrow. But for some reason, the lavishly funded debunking institutions in contemporary media — BBC Verify, the Stanford Internet Observatory, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab — seem incapable of applying the same logic to Western societies. They just keep on checking isolated fact after isolated fact, maintaining the steady burble about “fostering transparency” and “countering disinformation” that is expected of them. They are, in short, just like Hofstadter, spending so much time crowing about the conspiracy theorist’s total lack of epistemic reasons for his beliefs that they fail to mention his abundance of causal ones.

Perhaps the real lesson in all this is that the best political and sociological thinking always has a whiff of conspiracy theory to it. After all, to understand the world, you have to subject it to an immense simplification; you have, like the paranoiac, to come up with totalizing metaphors that you believe capture vast, sprawling processes — whether “capitalism” or “patriarchy” or “modernity” or “globalization”. Indeed, you don’t have to be a sociologist to suspect that part of the reason why a lot of stolid, dependable media institutions are suffering a collapse in trust — despite the millions they have poured into their in-house debunking commissions — is that they have failed to make such leaps of interpretative simplification. There really are deep structural explanations for the latest inner-city stabbing, the latest riot, the latest bomb detonated in a distant, sun-baked part of the world, but you would be hard pressed to find them grappled with satisfactorily on the BBC. And if there is one thing The Paranoid Style in American Politics really does prove beyond all reasonable doubt, it is that the public’s conspiratorial imagination cannot be switched off by complacent talk of “fact-checking” and “debunking”. When an entire media class neglects the biggest issues of its day, some people cannot help but posit something vast and shadowy behind it, nudging the tiller, pulling the strings.

This may, currently, seem counter-intuitive. Donald Trump, the global figure most associated with postliberalism, is alienating electorates across the West and Victor Orbán, the leading European postliberal, has just lost power.

Meanwhile in the UK, Nigel Farage’s insurgency, despite local election success, seems to have hit a ceiling just below 30%, and many mainstream politicians still refuse to accept Reform as a legitimate opponent.

Yet even as Keir Starmer, in his recent last-chance-saloon speech, cast Reform as “dark” and “dangerous”, he was also embracing several postliberal themes: celebrating immigration restriction, regretting the graduate-only route to status and reward, and nationalizing British Steel as an insurance policy in a post-free trade world.

The backdrop to politics for most of my adult life has been metropolitan openness — the market deregulation of the Right plus the moral deregulation of the Left. This combination is now disappearing in the rear-view mirror. Up ahead looms a new postliberal political landscape, one in which centrist liberals and national populists battle it out (with a noisy sub-plot from a green Left).

The neoliberal or hyperliberal era of metropolitan openness, starting in the Eighties, is best summed up in the saying that the Right won the economic argument but the Left won the social argument on equality and rights. There were some differences between center-left and center-right on the size of the state and levels of redistribution and immigration, but also a broad consensus on how to prosper.

Globalism in economics, and legalism in politics, meant a sacrifice of democratic control. But the new consensus brought many benefits. Most people became richer, and society became fairer, especially if you were a woman or a member of a minority group or a clever child from a lower-income family. The expansion of higher education produced a bigger and more permeable elite than in the post-war period. (The 1957 Cabinet was entirely male and public school-educated, and more than half Etonian). The decline of the industrial working class meant many dangerous jobs in heavy industries were replaced with knowledge economy jobs in comfortable offices.

There were also many losers from this consensus, especially outside the greater Southeast, and their number grew after the crash of 2007-8. This was not just about inequality, de-industrialization, and the loss of well-paid jobs for men of average or below average academic ability.

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For three deeper trends, trends that have defined Western liberal modernity, also accelerated in these decades. One of them is the further loss of religion. Strong traces of Christian belief still animate public and private life, but mass secularization has removed a handrail of collective ritual and moral guidance.

The changing relationship between the sexes is another. Women’s financial autonomy and mass entry into paid work and public life represents the biggest increase in Western freedom since 1945. But, as Helen Andrews points out, the female domination of institutions such as education and the law is unprecedented, while many men have lost their provider role and found nothing satisfactory in its place. At the same time, fertility has fallen well below replacement rate.

There is a third big shift. Within the lifetime of today’s young adults, the ethnic majority in many Western countries will fall below half of the population. In Britain, the post-1997 liberalization of immigration means that, today, nearly 20% of the population is foreign-born. The white British core has shrunk from almost 90% in 2000 to around 70% today (lower in England). Just 53% of births in 2025 were to white British mothers. Britain is on track to become majority-minority in the 2060s.

The 2016 Brexit vote, and the Trump vote too, was a raucous and disorganized slap in the face to establishment. They were protests, not only by those who felt they had suffered the economic effects of hyperliberalism, but also those who experienced a sense of loss and disorientation from the big cultural shifts.

Democracy worked: imperfectly, of course. After the Brexit vote, a section of the political class tried to reverse the result. When the impasse was broken by Boris Johnson’s 2019 victory, Brexit was indeed done, but the two further promises, to reduce immigration and to start “leveling up” Britain — a direct response to the Brexit vote — were both dramatically broken.

Nonetheless, in 2026, we have shifted towards a new small-c conservative consensus, much of which even a Labour government is forced to adapt to. The loose coalition behind it comprises older, non-graduates from left-behind, “Somewhere” Britain, combined with the many people of all classes and regions who feel the Blair/Cameron settlement is no longer working economically or culturally.

After nearly 40 years of metropolitan openness, the backdrop is now provincial insecurity and this coalition’s new set of priorities: wanting national interest, and national citizen preference, more vigorously pursued; deep anxiety about free-riding, hence the need for tighter control of both immigration and spiraling public welfare; desire for more orderly neighborhoods; rejection of progressive excess; skepticism about both big business and state capacity, but a strong desire to see the latter repaired.

The new consensus is not just the result of reaching a tipping point in the number of losers. There has also been a loss of momentum in the previous settlement. The growth of the professional and managerial class (PMC), the social base of the metropolitan era consensus, has stalled. It now accounts for about 33% of all jobs (13% higher PMC, 20% lower PMC), but that number has increased only six percentage points since 1991, despite the production of ever more graduates with generalist academic qualifications and unrealizable expectations. And that is even before AI replaces so many professional jobs.

This has been accompanied by a loss of confidence in the system of government that has grown up since the Seventies, when what the academic Michael Moran called light-touch “club governance” was replaced with the “regulatory state”. There were good reasons for more accountability and greater legal regulation, but we have overshot and ended up with the bat tunnel-fish disco Britain in which nothing gets built.

After 20 years of stagnant growth, the political class, Left and Right, is being forced to think harder about the gridlock that results from liberalism’s reflex to disperse more power to courts and regulators.

The emerging cross-party consensus (minus some parts of the Left) echoes the priorities I described above. It now includes: a permanent low level of legal immigration, and a goal of zero illegal immigration; ongoing attempts to hack back the regulatory state; acknowledgment that higher education has over-expanded and technical skills have been neglected; the recognition that the triple lock is unaffordable and welfare spending is out of control with too many dropping out of the labor market (only four-in-10 households are net contributors); the need for a rethink on Net Zero, a regional rebalancing to the economy, an openness towards some degree of re-industrialization, more national control over critical assets, and limits to free trade in the coming bloc-based global economy; more investment in innovation, defense, and the application of AI, including by UK pension funds; greater pushback against the progressive activist war on tradition and authority; more concern about polarization, anomie and loss of meaning, especially among young people, a concern now focused on social media regulation.

This new consensus tilts more towards the Right bloc (Conservative/Reform) than the Left bloc (Labour/Greens/Liberal Democrats); that does not guarantee the Right will prevail. Minus the skepticism about Net Zero and welfarism, plenty of the above could align with the economics of Andy Burnham’s Manchesterism. Nevertheless, in the short term, internal Labour politics, with or without Starmer, is likely to require more old-school, statist, tax-the-rich Leftism (despite the fact that we already have the most progressive tax regime in the developed world).

But is the new consensus postliberal? There are many schools of postliberalism, each defined by their distinct critiques of liberalism. Matt Sleat, in one of several recent books on postliberalism, complains that it is often little more than an immature rage against liberalism. And it is certainly unformed as a distinct ideology by contrast with older rivals like socialism, conservatism or liberalism itself.

Yet there are family resemblances between most of the writers who claim the mantle. Liberalism, in most critiques, is seen as a bloodless ideology focusing too much on individual rights, constraints on power and value neutrality. Postliberal critics argue that it stifles democratic governance and dispatches the human needs for community, belonging and meaning to the private sphere.

The American version, associated with some people in the Trump court, is more militant and religious. Writers like Patrick Deneen regard liberalism as a form of nihilism that encourages our worst selves. The religious postliberals believe that the good society requires virtue to precede freedom and, implicitly, demand a return to faith, usually Catholicism. This is more pre-liberal than postliberal.

More mainstream postliberals prioritize the “common good”, but that begs the question of who defines it. Maurice Glasman’s Blue Labour, the chief UK variant of postliberalism, is more a vibe — Left on economics, Right on culture — than a political philosophy or policy program. Glasman’s last book is subtitled The Politics of the Common Good but provides no clear answer to the question of how we can arrive at a consensus on it in societies with such diverse interests and values.

In today’s Britain, there is no significant appetite for the illiberalism and religious authoritarianism of US postliberalism, nor for Blue Labour’s hardcore socialist economics and the quaint idea that the working class longs to return to the factories.

Another dead end is nostalgia for an overwhelmingly white Britain. This nostalgia is now found on the ethnonationalist fringe of the postliberal universe among people who also toy with extreme forms of remigration.

Of course, English ethnicity should be allowed to breathe. Ethnicity simply means shared ancestry and the shared habits and history connected to that ancestry. The English ethnicity has always been a relatively open one, as befits a once sea-going people. If it can absorb millions of Irish people over two centuries, then it can certainly absorb people of different racial and religious backgrounds if they come in manageable numbers and assimilate into the national culture (people such as Rishi Sunak, who is stereotypically English in the modern, self-deprecating, patrician manner).

The re-emergence of English ethnicity as a normal identity, after centuries of being submerged in a broader British or Imperial identity, is to be welcomed, not feared. And postliberals are right to stress the enduring importance of both ethnic and broader national identities. In more fragmented societies, a critical mass of people sharing a strong fellow-citizen attachment, regardless of race or ethnicity, is essential to navigating future collective action problems.

In any case, no political party will get elected in modern Britain without accepting, at least in spirit, both of the post-war social revolutions: the welfare revolution of the Forties and Fifties and the equalities revolution of the Sixties and Seventies.

It is also true, on the conservative side of the ledger, that a big reason for the appeal of postliberal ideas is widespread regret at the loss of community and national solidarity, and the related reductions in trust and volunteering. People regret, too, the loss of stable family life: nearly half of British children are not living with both their biological parents at the age of 16. The epidemic of mental fragility and the collapse of birth rates speaks to a malaise — it is tempting to label it a spiritual one — that liberalism, by design, has no answer to.

But modern electorates are both liberal and conservative in complex combinations. The weakening of community and family often happens because people place their own individual freedom and desires first. People want community but many of them want wealth, freedom and mobility more. We might regret losing the sense of a single national conversation when there were only three television channels, but few of us want to give up the choice of entertainment we now enjoy. Most of us have been happy, in Yuval Noah Harari’s phrase, to “give up meaning in exchange for power” — or, he might have said, for comfort.

People don’t want to abandon liberalism; they want a better version stripped of its excesses and silences, economic and cultural. Focusing on liberalism itself as the problem — rather than the recent marriage of economic neoliberalism and progressivism — opens the door to reactionary postliberals who think everything went wrong with Luther or Locke.

We don’t need a revolution: we need a course correction, as Adrian Pabst and other moderate postliberal voices have argued, a politics that speaks to the priorities of the Somewheres at least as much as the Anywheres, without jettisoning pluralism and the essentials of historic liberalism.

Adrian Wooldridge makes a similar point in his book Centrists of the World Unite! He frames his argument as a reinvention of liberalism, but it’s one that overlaps with the kind of postliberalism advocated here: a decidedly un-centrist challenge to the bourgeois-bohemian economic and moral deregulation of the past 40 years.

One way of thinking about postliberalism as a course correction is seeing it as an attempt to reinvigorate some of the background factors that helped liberalism to work better in earlier decades. Liberalism, say postliberals, is parasitic on other forces to thrive: freedom and value neutrality work best in a context of individual restraint, shared norms and demographic stability.

Post-1945 liberalism in the West certainly benefited from factors that are now either absent or weakened: a growing population; rapidly rising incomes; the moral constraints provided by residual religious belief and deference to experts and leaders; stable family life; a single, national media-led, public conversation; large ethnic majorities with a pre-political solidarity (reinforced by the last war) creating a strong “imagined community” and common norms across social classes.

Today, by contrast, we live in low-growth, aging societies, with an archipelago of competing value and interest groups consuming individualized media, with weakened families and national attachments, and with faith in politics badly dented. Liberalism is under strain and needs a helping hand from postliberal priorities, even if the term itself remains too obscure for mainstream debate.

My own version of that helping hand, which I categorize as belonging to the Left-conservative school of postliberalism — a synthesis of moderate social democracy and moderate cultural conservatism — has three main elements.

1. Small-c conservative common sense.

• Acceptance of the moral equality of all humans, but rejection of the moral universalism and post-nationalism of the Left.
• Restoring authority to elected politicians.
• An immigration pause, plus the understanding that a society with a shrinking ethnic core needs an attractive, broad-based national identity more than ever.
• A belief in personal responsibility and reciprocity, entailing a shift to a more contributory welfare state.
• Recognition that money alone is not the answer to poverty and social dysfunction; family structure and upbringing matter too.
• More support for stable families, marriage and higher fertility by minimizing the motherhood penalty, but also by making it easier for one parent to remain at home when children are pre-school.

2. Market-friendly, national social democracy.

• A national preference in public procurement.
• Tougher paternalistic regulation of industries with power to poison bodies (food) and minds (tech).
• Less exposure to the market in some key public utilities but more exposure in areas where competition is weak.
• Transition to Dutch-style social insurance model for health and social care.
• An end to current Net Zero plans; ensure the lowest possible energy costs for businesses and households.
• Limited use of subsidies and tariffs to prioritize national industry, reshoring and innovation, and national control over critical infrastructure/utilities.
• Incentivization of a more patriotic business elite, and clearer distinction in the tax system between the productive and unproductive rich.
• Reduction in the tax/regulatory burden on small businesses.
• Promoting higher levels of home ownership and entrepreneurship, especially among young people.

3. A regional settlement for the crisis of demoralization in Somewhere Britain.

• Tackle extreme regional divides by promoting public investment and growth companies in left-behind areas, plus investing in local institutions: sports clubs, youth clubs, pubs.
• Reverse the over-production of people with generalist academic qualifications and under-production of skilled workers and technicians.
• Create more outlets for public-spiritedness. In a more dangerous world, with a more erratic climate, we need an expanded military reserve plus a civic and environmental taskforce. We also need an easy-to-use online national volunteering platform.

This is not a radical manifesto, but it cuts across still-powerful liberal assumptions in key areas: the reluctance to accept discomfort at rapid ethnic change as legitimate; the economism of so much social policy that focuses only on higher welfare payments; the persistent belief that more graduates is good for the economy and society; the reluctance to rethink rights legislation even when it thwarts democratic common sense.

There are policies here borrowed from Right and Left, but the Right bloc would be most comfortable with it. To turn the cultural dominance of the Right bloc into political power requires, as well as an electoral accommodation between Reform and the Conservatives, two things that it currently lacks: an ability to reach out to centrist voters and a coherent political economy.

Both of these failings are especially, perhaps unavoidably, true of the insurgent Reform. As Farage tacks to the center, with Restore Britain nibbling at his Right flank, he may be able to reduce his unpopularity at the local tennis club. A balanced political economy that can combine some of the productive, deregulatory spirit of the Thatcher years while also protecting, and reforming, the social state and reviving the left-behind parts of the country, remains a work in progress.

Liberalism, as Wooldridge points out, has had several course corrections in its history. The course correction of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, via the New Liberals in Britain and Teddy Roosevelt in the US, jettisoned laissez-faire and the sanctity of private property.

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Today’s course correction requires nothing more from liberalism than accepting a new balance between the dispersal of power and the need for an effective democracy. As even the raffishly liberal Financial Times writer, Janan Ganesh, has recognized, liberal democracy needs to be a bit less liberal and a bit more democratic.

Historic liberalism is a sensibility as much as an idea or institution. It is built on reasonableness, open-mindedness, good-faith argument, and a willingness not to see opponents as enemies.

This sensibility can no longer be taken for granted, and some variants of postliberalism have contributed to that. But this is a problem that afflicts all political traditions, exacerbated by identity politics on the Left and ethnonationalism on the Right.

Tribalism is on the rise not just because of social media algorithms, but because it’s harder to find compromises when politics is more about culture, values and emotions than about size of the state and levels of redistribution.

It is therefore all the more important that The Rest is Politics centrists learn to accept this new, more cultural terrain of politics and the legitimacy of “decent populist” parties like Reform that eschew racism and ethnonationalism. Rather than demonizing opponents as bigots or elitists, we need a new generation of politicians, on both the liberal and populist sides, who can speak across the Anywhere/Somewhere divide.

After the relative calm of the second half of the 20th century, huge challenges are now piling up. And the ability of politicians to manage them is made more difficult by an increasingly divided and demanding electorate. This explains Britain’s high turnover of prime ministers. If some strands of postliberalism are part of the problem, then the movement’s broader intuitions are a necessary part of the solution.

***

A longer version of this essay can be found at David Goodhart’s Substack, A Goodhart is Hard to Find.

Even armchair psephologists will know it wasn’t always like this. A swing state since before the Civil War, Ohio was once a presidential coin-flip, the national bellwether. As late as 2008, Barack Obama won Ohio by a comfy 4.5 points, with a strong union vote sweeping him along. Then came Trump, who over the last decade has transformed the Buckeye State into something approaching a personal fief, upending electoral wisdom and wonkish certainties as he went. “I wrote a book called The Bellwether about Ohio in advance of 2016,” laughs Kyle Kondik, a long-time electoral analyst, “and the thing was obsolete within a few months.”

That journey, that realignment, has by now been dissected to death. Yet it still feels wholly appropriate that Ohio, that archetypal MAGA conquest, should be voting the same week as the silver jubilee of Nickel and Dimed, published in May 2001. The author, muckraking journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, saw the Trumpian revolution years before Trump. “Someday,” she said of her working-class subjects, “they are bound to tire of getting so little in return and to demand to be paid what they’re worth.” A Leftie to her core, the author was hoping her reportage would inspire unions and healthcare-for-all. Instead we got Trumpism — and reading Ehrenreich tells us why.

At its root, Nickel and Dimed is a work of hard-hitting journalism. Going undercover, Ehrenreich threw herself into America’s underbelly, working as a waitress in Florida, a housekeeper in Maine, and a Walmart clerk in Minnesota. What she called “old-fashioned reporting” laid bare the exploited lives of those 30% of American workers who in 1998 earned less than $8 an hour (the equivalent of $16.35 today). Low pay was shadowed by other indignities. From janitors to cleaning ladies to ditchdiggers, the writer discovered, “these are the untouchables of a supposedly caste-free and democratic society”.

Through a first-person narrative, Ehrenreich makes these people whole. There’s Holly, the dogged Maine cleaner who scrubs tiles on one foot, and George, the friendly immigrant dishwasher fired for “stealing” saltines from the restaurant storeroom. Divided into three acts, the author narrates her journey across the vastness of America, always on the hunt for low-wage work and a budget-priced hovel. Yet through all this, and as Ehrenreich readily admits, no job, no matter how lowly, is truly “unskilled”. Quite the opposite: whether it’s slinging ham-and-eggs or scouring grout, success requires poise and grit.

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The daughter of a Montana copper miner, Ehrenreich was reared in the postwar working class  — a time when people like her enjoyed real security. In 1975, nearly a quarter of US jobs were in manufacturing, where wages averaged $6.24 an hour. When adjusted for inflation, that’s the equivalent of $80,000, and you didn’t even need a college degree. Post-industrial America changed that equation. Between 1979 and 2005, the wages of those with a bachelor’s or post-graduate degree jumped by nearly 25%; their household wealth leapt by $4 trillion. For their part, the pay of those with mere high-school degrees fell. By 2023, the median weekly wage for a working-class man was, adjusted for inflation, only a smidgen higher than in 1979.

This national story was Ohio’s too. Fifty years ago, the state was the world’s source for rubber, glass, steel. Goodyear, Owens-Corning, and Youngstown Sheet & Tube — these grand Ohio firms employed tens of thousands of people. Justin Gest, an expert on transatlantic working-class despair, tells me that steel in somewhere like Youngstown, a steel center not far from the Pennsylvania border, was the 20th-century equivalent to Silicon Valley. A George Mason University professor and author of a book on the city, he describes how locals used to say that as long as graphite from the mills fell like black snow onto their windshields each morning, they knew times were good. “They would wipe it off with their fingers,” Gest recalls, “and look at each other and say, ‘this is gold dust’.”

In September 1977, the dust dried up. Youngstown Sheet & Tube shuttered. Automation, globalization, and dated, uncompetitive factories meant that 5,000 workers became jobless overnight. Over the next few years, another 41,000 lost their jobs in Youngstown’s Mahoning Valley, alongside another 1.2 million manufacturing posts across the ex-industrial Midwest. From 2000-2011, a further 5.4 million American manufacturing jobs vanished too. Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed chronicles the world of low-paying, low-status gigs that arose in the aftermath.

Perhaps that timing explains the book’s success. The author of 21 books and a regular contributor to all the “right” publications — The New York Times, Harper’s, The Nation — Ehrenreich was for decades a staple of liberal American life. Yet Nickel and Dimed was without doubt her critical and commercial hit, becoming a cultural sensation basically overnight. Educated literati gobbled up so many copies you’d think a tofu smashburger lay hidden in its pages. A Times bestseller for weeks, it became a staple of college courses right across the country.

Yet if we “anywheres” wallowed in the opportunities for performative empathy that Nickel and Dimed provided, former Ohio giants like Akron and Toledo — and Youngstown — remained what Gest calls “post-traumatic” communities. This isn’t merely a question of lost income. Rather, vanished respectability and self-value spawned a kind of spiritual vertigo. “They seemed unmoored, untethered from their families and communities,” says Andrew Cherlin, a Johns Hopkins sociologist, of America’s white working class. Without purposeful labor and social ties, divorce, alcoholism, and anomie enveloped whole towns. Sure enough, Youngstown became famous not for its black gold, but for drugs and divorce. By the Eighties, it had become the murder capital of the United States.

Nickel and Dimed appeared just as the second wave of deindustrialization crested — leaving millions of Americans stranded in its wake. One of Ehrenreich’s most powerful interviews is with a woman called Colleen, who cleans the homes of rich folk in Cape Cod. “I don’t want what they have… But what I would like is to be able to take a day off now and then… and still be able to buy groceries.” Yet if stories like these inspired millions of Americans to wring their hands in tandem, Ehrenreich’s book did not, as its blurb proclaimed, “change the way America perceives its working poor”. Elections came and candidates went and nothing changed for the working class, except for the slow downward spiral. All the while, many liberals were content with putting “Hope” posters in their front-facing windows, safe in the knowledge that Obama’s post-racial utopia was just around the corner. As for economics, it turned out that neoliberalism had its upsides, especially for that class of nimble, educated workers that gravitated towards Ehrenreich’s book in the first place.

At the tail end of the Great Recession, 60% of college-educated Americans described their personal finances as “excellent” or “good”. Non-college whites, and non-college minorities for that matter, felt very differently. Things were especially tough in Ohio. If its footballing woes weren’t bad enough, Cleveland became known as the “ground zero” for the nation’s foreclosure crisis. Once the calamity ebbed, nearly half of the state’s remaining manufacturing jobs had disappeared. By 2013, Ohio’s median income was a fifth lower than what it had been in 2000.

Voting twice for Obama, Ohio’s working-class voters hardly expected miracles. Yet back in 2009, America’s first black president possessed both a mandate and massive congressional majorities. He could have used that authority to empower labor, not least by repealing the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which significantly restricted union activities. And if that was a bridge too far, a robust form of negative income tax could have offered Americans like Colleen a future. A less ambitious subsidized childcare program would, at least, have made low-wage work pay. But if Obamacare was surely a good start, it finally proved rather weak sauce.

And as Ehrenreich warned us, “they are bound to tire of getting so little in return and to demand to be paid what they’re worth”. So when Donald Trump came to Ohio in 2015, pledging to bring back jobs — so fervently that even he urged the MAGA faithful not to “sell your house” before the good times returned — the state’s economic losers understandably responded. “They’ve tried absolutely everything,” is how Gest puts it. “And they continue to feel like globalization’s losers. And you can’t really blame them.” Outraged that their lives and communities were upended, they voted for the one candidate who spoke most directly to their concerns. And more than once too: in the three presidential elections from 2016, Trump has won Ohio, that erstwhile bellwether, by an average of nine points.

That first triumph in the Rust Belt shocked America’s liberal professional class. And, in another moment of publishing kismet, it was at this point that Gest’s study of transatlantic working-class populism appeared. He recalls the earnest book tours during Trump’s first term. As he puts of white working-class America: “There was this sort of receptivity to better understanding their viewpoint, their perspectives and their life experiences.” Then came 2020, the Capitol riot, and 2024. In the aftermath, Gest observes a sea change in the liberal professional class. “There was a sense,” Gest suggests, “that no one was prepared to make the political compromises required to appeal to them.” Nearly half of liberal voters refuse to even share the same air as a Trump supporter. I’ve seen this transition myself. To quote one of my former grad-school colleagues: “Fuck you, if you voted for [Trump].”

Sure, Democratic elites say the right words. “The majority of Americans,” the party’s National Committee Chair lately conceded, “now believe the Republican Party best represents the interests of the working class and the poor, and the Democratic Party is the party of the wealthy and the elites.” But words, not action, tell the tale. And, in Congress, the number of working-class Democrats is almost nil. The party’s most high-profile “working-class” avatars, Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman and Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, are private-school preppies cosplaying in Carhartt and hoodies. Fetterman, a Harvard grad, famously used his mayorship of hardscrabble Braddock, Pennsylvania as a political launching pad. Other than turning an abandoned car dealership into his groovy loft, his adopted town is still on its back.

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As for Ohio, the Democrats’ best hope — and a faint one at that — is Sherrod Brown. To be fair, the gravel-voiced former senator holds policy positions that jibe with working-class voters. An opponent of free trade, he delights what remains of organized labor. Yet Brown is also married to a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and recently relocated from blue-collar Cleveland to Bexley, a smart Columbus suburb. The party’s frontrunner for Secretary of State, meanwhile, is a self-funding cancer doctor. At least Amy Acton, the likely Democratic candidate for governor, is a working-class kid from Youngstown. It’s just a pity she led Ohio’s Covid response, gaining praise from The New York Times and earning a “Profile in Courage” prize from the Kennedys. Needless to say, many working-class Ohioans weren’t amused, with public pressure ultimately forcing Acton to resign her post as the state’s public health honcho.

Of course, the midterms are guaranteed for MAGA. Gas is up. Trump’s polls are down. And, more fundamentally, the President’s promises of a heartland revival have proved largely illusory. At the end of his first term, manufacturing jobs had slightly declined from 12.4 to 12.2 million. Even a pro-Trump analyst admits that any pre-Covid surge in industrial jobs happened outside the Rust Belt. A year into Trump’s second term, meanwhile, America is down 100,000 factory jobs. In short, the Democrats could easily score a Buckeye State upset come November. In the long-term, though, a party of, by, and for the professional middle class will lose working-class Ohio, the industrial Midwest, and, with it, America. Kyle Kondik is surely right when he says that “the old labor-Left tradition amongst white [working class] ethnics just died out, and Trump was the kill shot to it”.

To Ehrenreich’s credit, she grasped all this. Growing up working class, and then sweating and toiling with her Nickel and Dimed colleagues, she developed real sympathy for social untouchables. As she admitted of blue-collar support for MAGA: “My tradition — the tradition I come from of white working-class people — did not look well on billionaires or bosses or anybody in charge.” The difference between Ehrenreich and my tribe is that we have no problem with bosses and elites so long as it’s us commanding the heights.

Ehrenreich died in 2022, aged 81, her dream of a new America unrealized. All the same, she remains prophetic — just not in the way she hoped. She had longed for a politics that put the dignity of the working man and woman at the center. What she got was Trump, using hollowed-out factories for photo-ops. Even so, her book remains a vivid chronicle of the nation’s largest voting demographic’s fall from economic stability, social respectability, and existential meaning. Until rich liberals take the time to understand that other America, let alone start fixing things, they’ll remain the Cleveland Browns of politics.

Davey, one might conclude, had joined illustrious company, becoming an heir to the venerable tradition of Lloyd George and the young Churchill. Yet few would associate the weighty hand of history with today’s MP for Kingston and Surbiton. Remember, Davey’s most noteworthy moment at the last election wasn’t a striking policy proposal or a clippable statement of principle, but his repeated tumbles off a paddle board. Over the weekend, at his party’s spring conference in York, the Lib Dem leader continued his unique brand of guerrilla marketing. Taking to the stage to “Daddy Cool”, the former Secretary of State was later seen “dad dancing” to Chappell Roan. Forget Keynes and Beveridge; even the hinterland and gravitas of Charlie Kennedy now feels as distant as the Edwardians.

More to the point, and given the meteoric rise of both Reform and the Greens, one might ask: why does Davey persist with the slapstick persona? A decade ago the Lib Dems, past masters of the by-election upset, would have fancied their chances in Gorton and Denton. Last month, by contrast, they lost their deposit. It feels, in short, like almost everything in British politics has changed over the past year and a half — except for the Liberal Democrats.

Advocates for Davey’s brand of leadership might reply that whatever one’s views on his style, the results speak for themselves. Beyond his party’s success at the last election, Nowcast and YouGov predict further gains at the next one, the latter putting them on 85 seats.

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But is that really so impressive given that the Lib Dems have long been Westminster’s third party, and that the big two are in freefall? While it’s true that Davey made hay in 2024, cruising home in Tory strongholds like Chichester, Witney, and Guildford, he has not managed to make comparable inroads into Labour territory. Instead, it seems that everyone but the Lib Dems is ready to feed on the carcass of Keir Starmer’s majority, from the Greens and SNP to Reform and Plaid Cymru. Rather than dancing to Gen Alpha bangers, Davey should be asking why Farage and Polanski are making the political weather instead of him.

One explanation is that such ambition is institutionally off-limits. The Lib Dems have learned the hard way — principally from the doomed SDP-Liberal alliance of the 1980s and Clegg’s disappointment in 2010 — that conservative gradualism is better than radical failure. In 2024, Davey delivered on the former, and then some, with a relentless focus on Tory seats in the south of England, especially those that contain a Gail’s bakery. But given the sudden rise of Zack Polanski, who has taken the Greens to more than 200,000 members and a by-election win for the first time in their history, that now feels like a limited strategy.

Perhaps Davey habitually affects a jocular manner because liberalism itself has become an unserious worldview —  so much so that any Lib Dem leader would struggle embody gravitas. Liberalism is bereft of thick ties across society; nor does it offer a deeper sense of meaning to its devotees, something one certainly can’t say for Reform or the Greens. Today’s liberals, in short, believe in little beyond the dying status quo. Their post-Cold War triumph was so utterly overwhelming that, almost two decades after the Global Financial Crisis, they lack the tools to change course.

Adrian Wooldridge, author of Centrists of the World Unite!, provides an insightful explanation of how liberalism conquered all while losing its mojo. As he wrote for UnHerd, liberals “reaped the benefits of the past 40 years of economic and moral deregulation”, yet are “now incapable of running the world which they have made.” It should therefore be little surprise that, over the last decade, the Liberal Democrats have been perennially negative: stop Brexit, stop Corbyn, stop Boris — and now stop Farage. They can’t stand for anything because this is the world they wanted. And it sucks.

That applies to both pillars of what Wooldridge persuasively labels “double liberalism”. Why double? Because it combines the excesses of economic neoliberalism, increasingly pervasive since the early Eighties, with the dismantling of any conception of a shared moral universe, a change that goes back to the 1960s. It is the combination of these two liberalisms that political and media elites have in mind when they talk about the “center” — an increasingly meaningless concept, not least because it is neither the middle ground of public sentiment nor popular. “The strength of the post-liberal argument,” Wooldridge notes, “is that it recognizes this synthesis is now producing more problems than benefits.” What is presented by elites as a politics of moderation often animates resentment and even hatred. The leadership class of the Long Nineties, Tony Blair more than anyone, appears incapable of grasping that.

Yet, left to itself, post-liberalism also gives rise to wantonly self-destructive pathologies. If Davey is incapable of taking himself seriously, then Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage can, on a range of issues, appear outright deranged. How else do you explain the allure of the MAGA-sphere for so much of the British Right? We can ascribe some of the blame to the demise of an ideologically curious liberalism. As a result of this intellectual seppuku, politics on the extremes have become ever more puerile. I say this as a socialist: a historically literate politics of the actual center only serves to refine my own views.

Consider the economy. For all the fanfare around Elon Musk’s cost-cutting DOGE unit, the Brookings Institute recently suggested that America’s fiscal situation is actually deteriorating. In other words, Trump, for all of his radical, disruptive rhetoric, has retained the default platform of the Republican Party since Reagan: deficit-funded tax cuts and rising public debt. As long as the petrodollar exists, that strategy might remain viable for Washington. But it certainly isn’t for the Europeans and Brits, because we don’t benefit from having the world’s reserve currency. That Reform is still barking about a British DOGE — even now — should terrify us all. The enthusiasm underscores the extent to which we are the backwater franchise for a political operation already discredited across the Atlantic. And because liberals at home are ideologically bankrupt too — or, worse still, don’t actually care about ideas — imitation of the Americans still passes for radical, cutting-edge thinking.

It’s a similar story with foreign policy. The radical Right is becoming progressively unmoored from reality over Iran and the wider region, partly because the center has no credible blueprint of its own. At the end of February, Farage was as eager as anyone to become embroiled in yet another overseas conflict, a position he quickly disavowed. The same was true of Badenoch, who initially demanded strikes in the Middle East. Matt Goodwin, who finished second as the Reform candidate in Gorton and Denton, said he was willing to pay more to fill up his car if that was the cost of depriving Iran of a nuclear weapon. Such opportunism has been exposed only because, on this one occasion, centrists — specifically Keir Starmer — took a position founded on reason rather than complacent liberal interventionism. As a result, and unusually for his time in government, Starmer finds himself aligned with public opinion.

Perhaps a decisive position on the war in Gaza would have achieved something similar — especially had that position been taken earlier on. Yet the Iran response remains instructive. On the one occasion that Labour has broken with the liberal default of recent decades, Labour has Farage on the back foot. It’s strange indeed to see both Richard Tice and Tony Blair knocking a Labour prime minister. This may also be part of a wider pattern, or at least the start of it. Before dancing the Macarena last weekend, Davey argued that the entirety of Britain’s nuclear deterrent should be built at home. It’s important to remember that our Trident missiles are actually from a “shared pool” housed across the Atlantic. Green shoots of pragmatism? Maybe.

Don’t expect a transformation, though. It’s often suggested that contemporary Left-wing politicians aren’t as talented as Tony Benn, and that their Right-wing counterparts are less erudite than Enoch Powell. But why wouldn’t they be, when the ideological school that reigned supreme in recent decades has been so disinterested in ideas? Peter Mandelson is perhaps the most grubby example here, but there’s also Justin Trudeau, who led a country afflicted by a drug epidemic while insisting on the gender-neutral term “peoplekind”, and Kamala Harris — whose presidential bid was a series of meandering speeches and clips of her dancing on social media.

Looking back on his rivals, it is obvious why Trump prevailed not once but twice. While trying to lean into the attention economy, rather than defend politics as a serious vocation, centrists were a handmaid to the very populism they claim to abhor. Trump’s endless, shambling monologues — despite being occasionally funny — were only captivating because what the alternative was a world of clipped soundbites devoid of personality or political substance. Ironically, this also fueled the rise of Barack Obama, whose singular ability to speak capsized the Clinton campaign ahead of 2008. But Obama was the outlier, and Clinton the default for double liberalism. Even then, there was little of substance to what the senator for Illinois actually said.

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All of this helps explain the allure of Mark Carney. The Canadian PM’s recent Davos speech was both brave and intellectually coherent. Notably, Carney acknowledged some of liberalism’s failings over recent decades. But his words were conspicuous precisely because liberalism so rarely produces politicians of substance. For Wooldridge, there is little to read into this shortage of great statesmen. But there’s an argument that it’s structural, emerging from the inherent contradictions of the tradition. Carl Schmitt, a critic of liberalism, claimed it seeks to “dissolve the political into ethics and economics”. Should it really surprise us, then, that given the culmination of the liberal project meant the abolition of politics, competent exponents of the craft would gradually vanish too?

So what might a reanimated liberal politics for the mid-21st century actually look like? First, instinctive complacency would be replaced by an acknowledgment of what has gone wrong. In Europe, particularly, we may be in the foothills of our own Century of Humiliation.

On the level of politics, the priorities should be clear: sovereignty is a tool for solving problems — and national identities matter. People want a state that protects them and that stands as a source of authority; if it fails to be either they view it as a useless, wasteful encumbrance. The national community is real. That doesn’t mean forsaking your fellow man in other parts of the world, but it does mean accepting the nation-state as the primary locus of political action.

The policies of a new liberalism should be an extension of such thinking. The wealthy should do their duty to others and their country by accepting the need for a new economic settlement. Wealth is, essentially, collectively produced — and a liberalism that is indifferent to exploitation deserves to die. A renewed liberal politics, retaining its old aim of allowing individuals to be the authors of their own lives, must also ensure that access to the basics is guaranteed: cheap housing, transport, cheap energy. Nobody is reading the collected works of Jane Austen, or learning Mandarin, when they are living in their overdraft.

A great advantage of democracy, of course, is that systems can self-correct. Yet even here there are warning signs. Some centrist commentators have claimed that the Westminster system should become less, rather than more, democratic. Unconvinced by the merits of party primaries, which keep politicians on their toes, they argue for a political class that is even more insulated from the public. It’s ironic that advocates of a worldview built on reason, public deliberation and Enlightenment values often argue for the kind of decadence you might associate with the Hapsburgs or the late Ottoman Empire.

Fortunately, however, such voices are becoming quieter. Given the benefits that serious-minded liberalism has brought to all of us — from defending the rule of law to upholding freedom of expression — its reinvigoration, in a form fit for the present day, would be a welcome one. Just don’t expect Ed Davey to lead the charge.

Perhaps it’s simpler: we’re just out the other side of the experiment with mass-media democracy, and mass-mobilization warfare. In other words, this is the West’s first fully post-liberal war. And in this new age, politicians have simply stopped feeling they need to give electorates an explanation.

The liberal order was supposed to be a global utopia of rules. Under this optimistic regime, states would avert open conflict by adhering to international norms — and even, latterly, spread the norms at gunpoint in order to globalize their adoption. Starmer’s stubborn adherence to this disintegrating raft of proceduralism has been greeted with Trumpian contempt. And perhaps we might also note that these rules are, themselves, a historical anomaly. Until the 20th century, leaders gave little thought to what ordinary people wanted, when weighing the necessity of conflict. For most of history before mass-casualty munitions, such decisions were seen as the preserve of specially educated elites.

But over the mass-broadcast age that began with radio, and continued until the digital revolution, it came to be accepted that the general public ought to have a say. In his account of the run-up to the Second World War, the historian AJP Taylor describes a dynamic in which “public opinion” became, for the first time, a meaningful factor for politicians in their decision-making, even on war. It’s not a coincidence that over the same era a new type of official communications — more colloquially, mass propaganda — also emerged, to shape “public opinion” in the desired direction.

This was genuinely necessary, for over the same industrial period, war itself also became a mass phenomenon: both mass-mobilization, and mass-casualty. If you’re going to ask all your citizens to mobilize either for combat or the war effort, you do need some form of general public consent. The climax of “total war” in this style came between 1914 and 1945: an orgy of industrialized weapons-manufacture, death, and destruction, that only ended with the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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After this cataclysm, the world lived for decades in the comparative hush of Mutually Assured Destruction. Meanwhile, the broadcast-media legacy of “total war” entrenched a belief that electorates should be involved in any decision to fight. Especially in the USA after Vietnam and Watergate, the “third estate” came increasingly to understand itself as an indispensable component in the democratic settlement: both speaking truth to power, and at times cutting power back down to size.

In time, this also had a reciprocal effect on the way war itself came to be mediated. I vividly recall the considerable effort, after 9/11, to present the invasion of Iraq as legal and democratically mandated. By contrast, what feels strange about the current conflict in Iran is that it is just as real — real deaths, real refugees, real flames, real international economic chaos — but no one seems to have paid any attention to rules, or indeed “public opinion”, before embarking on it. And now here we are.

But perhaps this is fitting. Over the past two decades, both warfare and communications have mutated at warp speed. And one of the key characteristics of this revolution, which has happened through digital innovation, is a paradoxical mix of apparent decentralization covering real centralization. Think of the way social media “disintermediated” local newspapers in theory, in favor of “citizen journalism”, while in practice handing overall control to a handful of platforms and their oligarchs.

The same now seems to go, too, for war. Especially since the frenzy of drone innovation catalyzed by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, combat has been “disintermediated” away from human-manned artillery or soldiers, toward partially or fully autonomous weapons. Since Trump’s “major combat operation” began, for example, the Gulf states surrounding Iran have undergone heavy attack by drones and guided missiles, most of which has been repelled by equally high-tech automated interceptor systems. All of this is controlled by a comparatively small battery of experts, and supplied by a small number of firms.

Meanwhile, the field of domestic war communications also feels increasingly swarm-like, computer-generated — and indifferent to interference by the masses. The White House X account broadcasts grainy explosion footage mixed with high-gloss edits drawn from video gaming, action movies, and (really) Spongebob Squarepants, adding to the sense of high-tech unreality with AI-animated “Founding Fathers” imagery. Blaze Media founder Glenn Beck, too, has trotted out his “George AI”, a CGI rendition of George Washington dressed as a tech bro and trained on data “writings from the founding era”, to explain the importance of what the White House trumpets as “peace through strength”.

This is perhaps also the context in which to understand the recent standoff between Trump and Anthropic. The CEO of the AI firm, Dario Amodei, objected to his system being deployed by the US military to power fully autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance. Trump retaliated by threatening to designate Anthropic as a “supply chain risk”. Negotiations are ongoing; but the clear impression is of a US Department of War leaning full-tilt into the new high-tech arms race, and that will brook no dissent. Online, too, just as Amodei’s objections to the weaponization of Claude have been dismissed, so too have protests from Ben Stiller, over the use of his cinematic work for war propaganda. The White House “Epic Fury” movie edit is still live.

This indifference to older norms, and seeming preference for vibes-based comms over clear messaging, has prompted a cacophony of secondary debate. This now occupies everyone’s newsfeeds; meanwhile, the “major combat operation” rumbles on. And who knows: perhaps there really is a robust national-interest rationale for the attacks, from an American leadership perspective, and those in the know simply aren’t saying. But whatever prompted the attack, it’s clear that the broadcast-media machine is increasingly irrelevant to such decisions.

Much as heavy artillery now takes second place to nimbler, cheaper drone swarms, so has mass media been disintermediated by a maelstrom of CGI edits, AI propagandists, bot-farms, and “citizen journalism”. And perhaps that’s the point: the aim is not clear messaging but a debate so hyperreal that messaging as such is impossible. Above the din, meanwhile, the postwar fiction of “the people” having any kind of democratic say in warmaking has been quietly shelved.

In the premodern era, war was for elites, with ordinary peasants only mobilized in extremis. Of course, the consequences of war were frequently devastating for those peasants; but by and large such decisions were taken over their heads. We seem now to be approaching a post-industrial retread of the same dynamic, in which warmaking is once again an elite choice, and everyone just has to live with it.

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Some reports are now suggesting that Trump expected a quick operation, comparable with Venezuela, and not Iran’s determination to make it a regional war. And yet networked warfare will tend in that direction: the arrest of two self-radicalized “Islamic State” fighters in New York City last Saturday, for trying to detonate a nail-bomb at a Right-wing protest, is a harbinger of the vectors by which high-tech warfare, energized by memes, is likely to metastasize.

For the internet’s other core characteristic, along with centralizing real power, is dissolving physical distance. Social media platforms such as TikTok, Facebook and Instagram have become both advertising channels and organizational tools for the global people-trafficking industry; meanwhile studies suggest that the internet’s power to connect people instantly across distance inhibits migrants’ assimilation in host countries.

Scaled up, the picture this presents is of increasingly diffuse, unassimilated, intermingled, and digitally networked populations across the globe, who hold (putting it mildly) a range of views about any given war, in any given place. In such a world, where communications are instantaneous, and populations linked more by ideology or ethno-religious affinity than geography, every battlefield is also potentially everywhere.

So we’ve exited the age of utopian globalism. But not (as Trump seemed to promise) for a return to moderate nationalism. Even if (as we all now hope) Trump is planning to end the war soon, what’s emerging as the post-liberal new normal is instead a volatile, hypermobile, high-tech and radically post-democratic form of global networked tribalism — but with sleeper cells, and autonomous suicide drones. God help us all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did the spirit of the decade, first liberal and optimistic and later radical and enraged, die with the assassination of JFK in 1963, or of Martin Luther King, Jr in 1968? Did it end with the bloody Democratic convention in Chicago later that year? Or with the disastrous Altamont concert at the very end of the decade? For Joan Didion, it was the Manson murders: “the Sixties,” she wrote, “ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community.”

A common move in this game, one made by François Furet, is to claim that the revolution in question never ended. And one can certainly make such an argument about the legacy of the Sixties in American life and domestic politics — on issues ranging from race to immigration, environmentalism, drugs and the politics of sexuality. Shorn of its radicalism, Sixties liberalism and its descendants have in many ways become a hegemonic governing worldview on issues like gay rights or drug legalization. Moments of conservative retrenchment like the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which forbade gay marriage, or the Reagan-era War on Drugs, have proved temporary (at least within American borders, in the latter case).

Today, even solidly red states such as Ohio and Missouri have legalized marijuana as the old moralizing stigma around the drug has vanished, and the Republican administration is now planning to reclassify the drug under a less restrictive category. Gay marriage is the law of the land, codified in 2022 with 39 Republican votes in the House, and the Trump administration has the most openly gay officials of any Republican administration in history.

A better answer, though, to the question of when the Sixties ended may be — right now.

At one level, the reasons to think so are obvious. Where past Republican administrations have held back, Trump has dealt fierce blows to the liberal factions, clamping down on immigration, targeting minority preferences and tearing up Biden’s green energy and transgender policies. The private sector has gone along with him too, with universities shuttering DEI offices en masse for fear of losing their federal money, Wall Street jettisoning ESG, and trans clinics closing their doors.

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Regarding America’s enduring racial inequalities, there is a sense of a cycle closing. Sixties liberals were too slow to realize that guaranteeing legal rights does not resolve material inequalities, discovering to their confusion and chagrin that neither civil rights nor the massive legal bureaucracy it originated abolished black poverty and discontent. Affirmative action — the awkward concession that took shape in the wake of their too-late realization, still today the centerpiece of liberalism’s remedy for racial inequality — reached new heights in the 2010s and early 2020s, and now has been brought violently to earth by the Supreme Court and the Trump administration.

All these things might be reversible under a future Democratic administration. But at the same time, a bitter split within liberalism has opened up on several fronts, putting a possible restoration in doubt — and, ironically, mirroring some of the events of the Sixties. Like Vietnam before it, Gaza broke liberalism into two, setting young pro-Palestinian Democrats against their pro-Israel seniors across media, academia, activism and politics. For the first time in more than a decade, liberal divisions could not be papered over, and just as before, the resulting acrimony and disaffection helped deliver power into the hands of the Right, which ironically took the lead in tamping down the very conflict that brought the split into the open.

The discontent goes beyond foreign policy — in fact, criticism from liberals has started to weaken consensus on several of the topics where the legacy of the Sixties appears most solid. Drug legalization is a good example. No less weighty a liberal voice than The New York Times editorial board stated a few weeks ago that “It’s Time for America to Admit That It Has a Marijuana Problem”. “More Americans now use marijuana daily than alcohol,” the article states, citing the 2.8 million who suffer annually from a painful vomiting condition caused by smoking marijuana, and the helplessness of the authorities to combat a wave of people driving high. The Atlantic last year struck a similar note when it published an article contending that “Legal Weed Didn’t Deliver on Its Promises”.

This discomfort within the bastions of liberalism comes as marijuana has exploded in popularity and potency. Its users have grown sevenfold since the turn of the millennium, and the American landscape has become dotted with billboards advertising the drug and its derivatives. Weed is suffering from its own success, and no one has any ideas for what to do now. Few advocate a return to the old prohibitionist regime, but there is a growing awareness that haphazard legalization gave rise to a massive vice industry without eradicating illegal dealers, weakening promised tax revenues and putting an ever more powerful drug in the hands of everyone from teenagers to seniors. That bodes ill for the strand of political thought that, since the Sixties, has advocated for the liberalization of drug laws. It is surely true that a more competent rollout of legal weed would have brought better results, but the damage is done.

Deinstitutionalization is another issue where a previously ironclad — and in this case bipartisan — Sixties-ist consensus seems to be breaking down, even if the structural reality seems, at this point, difficult to alter. The reasons for closing down America’s abuse-laden mental institutions from the Sixties onward had seemed obvious. They were cruel and they were expensive to run. New drugs seemed to offer a technological fix for the social problem of mental illness.

In the undeniably grim and often dangerous reality on America’s streets and public spaces — most dangerous for sufferers from mental illnesses left to languish there — lies the bleak harvest of that hope. The killing of Jordan Neely on the New York City subway in 2023 occasioned reflection in The New Yorker on “the system that failed” him: the cash-strapped psychiatric system that discharges patients before their condition can be meaningfully improved and the “alphabet soup” of outreach groups, dedicated yet overwhelmed and uncoordinated, that failed to keep him from making the angry outburst on the subway that prompted Daniel Penny to put him in a deadly chokehold.

“Slipped through the cracks” is the term that is often used for these cases — but who imagines that the archipelago of nonprofits, hospitals, jails and courts offers any substitute for the long-term mental institutions they replaced? As studies on “psychiatric boarding” and rates of mental illness in jails and on the streets indicate, and as any regular rider of the New York City subway can tell you, the system is all cracks.

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In a recent Times opinion article, a psychotherapist describes how the authorities are unable or unwilling to keep her child from risking harm to himself and others on the streets. “We do not need to return to the large, abusive psychiatric asylums of the past,” she writes, “but the law has swung so far toward individual autonomy that the concept of ‘do no harm’ has all but vanished… Being left to die on the street is not freedom.”

The old Sixties-era convictions about the rampant abuse and unnecessary coercion involved in the old mental institutions might still be with us, yet no one believes anymore in the old remedy. Here too, there’s little sense of a way forward: the Right does not want to pay for more psychiatric beds, and the Left does not want to force anyone to stay in them.

On environmental review, on the other hand, liberalism’s break with the Sixties has become decisive and unapologetic. Advocates like Ezra Klein lead the charge for “abundance”, which assails environmental review and aims to cast aside this key plank of Environmentalism 1.0 (as well as the unions that have traditionally been a key element in the Democratic coalition), in an effort to escape the stagnancy in which blue states have been mired. Klein’s California is not alone in finding itself unable to construct ambitious public projects, build adequate quantities of housing for its population or achieve the green energy buildout necessary for Environmentalism 2.0.

Here there is a clearer idea of a remedy for the ills bequeathed to us by the Sixties, though not, at least as of yet, the political constituency to accomplish it. Developers would doubtless be delighted, but a building frenzy would involve casting aside the by-now long-entrenched class compact in blue states, where rich homeowners agree to pay high taxes and receive paltry state services in exchange for the appreciation in home values that is the inevitable consequence of not building. Abrogate that pact, dysfunctional as it clearly is, and wealthy lawyers in blue-state suburbs, faced with high-rises breaking ground across the street, will swallow their pride and move to Florida.

The abundance liberals are right, however, to think that elements of Sixties liberalism (as opposed to Sixties radicalism) deserve to share in the blame for America’s hollowed-out state capacity, for having set up elaborate roadblocks to government action. While they were not anti-statist in the way of the neoliberals who succeeded them, the decade’s liberals went all in on anti-institutional thinking while taking little account of the institutions they created. One of their major themes was that government — at least when it builds nuclear plants, or runs mental institutions, or forbids drugs, or makes war in Vietnam — is bad. The reply articulated in much of the current liberal backlash is that government that does bad things may be preferable to government that is capable of doing nothing at all.

In retrospect, now seems like the most likely time for the Sixties to truly end, as the Baby Boomers who dominated the political, media, academic and business establishment for decades, and whose worldview was deeply shaped by that decade, have grudgingly begun to retire from public office. The best way to move on is not by rejecting the decade wholesale, which would be impossible and morally wrong. Instead, we should reevaluate its legacy, discarding what has served its purpose and reclaiming what has been neglected but shouldn’t have been.

Most importantly, liberals should shed their fear of the state, a feeling that became a dogmatism in the Eighties and Nineties but that had its first stirrings in the Sixties-era anti-system posture, and which exists among both the Left and the center, from “defund the police” to Joe Manchin’s insistent gutting of Biden-era legislation. Doing so will help dispel some of the confusion over what to do about the miscarriage of projects like drug legalization and help Democratic cities reclaim key governance functions from the expensive and incompetent potpourri of nonprofits which often exercise them today. In doing so, liberals can draw from a parallel legacy of the Sixties, one that has had far fewer legatees in subsequent decades: the Great Society program of welfare-state expansion under Lyndon Johnson, which gave the country healthcare for the old and food for the poor. Young Leftists such as New York’s Zohran Mamdani have learned this lesson already, proclaiming that “there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about”. Mamdani has a difficult task in managing a Right ready to blame him for disorder and a Left-wing base deeply skeptical of police. But if challenges like these prove manageable, perhaps a new and less dysfunctional approach to government can rise from the ashes of Sixties liberalism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grant wrote Lament for a Nation in anger at the fall of Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, who was defeated in his re-election bid due to backlash over his refusal to accept US nuclear warheads on Canadian soil. According to Grant, Diefenbaker’s “actions turned the ruling class into a pack howling for his blood.” It was no ordinary political defeat, in Grant’s view. He believed that it signaled the end of Canada as a distinct political and moral project.   

But the lasting significance of Lament for a Nation rests not with its analysis of the forces that orchestrated Diefenbaker’s downfall — “the concentrated wrath of the established classes” — nor even with the author’s prognosis that Canada was fated to disappear, if not formally annexed by its neighbor, then so culturally and economically integrated with the United States as to lose its distinct identity. What has caused it to retain its relevance for more than half a century is what emerges in its later chapters, as it shifts gears from parliamentary drama to political philosophy and Canada’s fate becomes a case study in a much larger story about the modern world’s direction of travel.

Born in Toronto in 1918, Grant was destined to become one of Canada’s best-known philosophers, his reputation built largely on the fame of Lament for a Nation. He was educated at Oxford and served as an air-raid warden during World War II. Reeling from the horrors of war, he was led to Christianity by a profound religious experience in the English countryside. After earning his doctorate, he returned to Canada to begin his academic career as a self-described Christian Platonist, persuaded that it was the task of philosophy to analyze modern civilization from the perspective of the eternal moral order that our modern dynamism obscured.

When the Diefenbaker debacle unfolded in the summer of 1963, Grant was teaching philosophy and religion at McMaster University in Ontario. He was in the midst of research on the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, about whom he planned to write a book. Grant was so incensed by how the “wealthy and clever” Canadian elites had capitulated to American pressure that he put aside that never-completed Weil book to turn his full attention to writing Lament for a Nation. But one of the central themes of Weil’s mature thought became the pivot of his argument.

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For Weil, a clear-eyed view of the world must recognize the distance between necessity and the good. Even if certain historical events are necessary, she argued, that doesn’t make them good. Grant took this to repudiate a crucial tenet of modern progressivism: the belief that the forces driving history — including those forces driving Canada ever more tightly into the orbit of the United States — inevitably carry civilization toward higher stages of development. “If history is the final court of appeal,” Grant wrote, “force is the final argument.”

This point mattered to Grant because he believed the Diefenbaker affair had revealed the necessity of Canada’s disappearance, due to “the impossibility of building a conservative nation in the age of progress, on a continent we share with the most dynamic nation on earth.” Yet widening his gaze beyond the particularities of Canadian politics to examine the deeper currents of Western civilization, Grant concluded that Canada’s fate was sealed by the inner logic of modernity itself.

Around the time of Diefenbaker’s defeat, Grant wrote a major essay on the then-recent debate between the philosophers Leo Strauss and Alexander Kojève on ancient and modern tyranny. Strauss’s argument was another major philosophical influence on Lament for a Nation. Strauss dreaded the advent of what he took to be the ultimate modern tyranny, which he, borrowing Kojève’s language, called the universal and homogeneous state. This term names what Grant took to be the true end of modern politics, in both its Marxist and liberal guises.

This state is universal because it aims at a single, unified global order that renders international conflict impossible. It is homogeneous because all people enjoy formal equality, are essentially interchangeable, and serve a common purpose: the limitless expansion of human power over nature, including human nature. In Lament for a Nation, Grant argued that this state is the highest object of striving for the modern project. The United States occupies a central place in his analysis. As the nation most committed to open-ended progress, it is the “spearhead” of the universal and homogeneous state.

Western capitalism, in Grant’s view, was much more “progressive” than Marxism, since the followers of Marx still assume that human flourishing has a determinate shape that technological progress ought to serve. Liberal capitalism, in contrast, tolerates no checks on technological dynamism, which is why Grant anticipated the eventual victory of the West in the Cold War. Since liberalism holds the human essence to be our freedom to remake both the world and ourselves, any doctrine that imposes limits is rejected.

The universal and homogeneous state promises to deliver us from suffering, scarcity, and grueling toil through technological science. Yet its promise is double-edged, warns Grant, for a civilization whose highest purpose is technological mastery must culminate in global tyranny.

Local communities are among the first casualties. “Liberalism,” he observed, “is the ideological means whereby indigenous cultures are homogenized.” Along with these cultures goes the possibility of genuine excellence. Authentic nobility, he believed, can flourish only in societies shaped by traditions that orient us toward something higher than ourselves, but liberalism recognizes nothing higher than the human will.

Even so, the much-vaunted freedom liberalism promises can be exercised by most of us only in the private sphere. “Nobody minds very much if we prefer women or dogs or boys,” Grant wrote, “as long as we cause no public inconvenience.” But permissiveness in private is coupled with coercive uniformity in public, as politics in the classical sense disappears and debate over competing goods gives way to impersonal administration. Questions that once required political judgment are reclassified as technical problems to be solved by experts.

Grant couldn’t have known the particulars, but the logic is familiar to us from the Covid lockdowns. Genuinely political questions — such as how to weigh the protection of the vulnerable against the harm done to school children, community life, and people’s livelihoods — were displaced by the injunction to “listen to the science.” Disagreement was pathologized, debate was suppressed, and administration triumphed over politics.

Grant also foresaw that the project of mastery would inevitably turn inward, as modern science no longer confines itself to the transformation of non-human nature. It seeks control of heredity, psychology, and social life itself. Advances in biochemistry and the behavioral sciences give administrators a “prodigious power to universalize and homogenize.”

Long before the term “transhumanism” became fashionable, Grant foresaw a world in which human nature becomes raw material, as we “transcend ordinary humanity and produce creatures half flesh and half metal.” His argument dovetails with C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, another work that influenced him: the conquest of nature ends in the conquest of some human beings by others and ultimately in the abolition of the human.

Grant’s conclusion was bleak: conservatism is impossible in the modern age. Conservatism once meant guarding goods not subject to perpetual change — virtue, tradition, and a stable account of human nature. But technological civilization depends on continuous upheaval. Those who call themselves conservatives cannot govern without allying themselves with the very forces that dissolve what they claim to defend. Any hope they may have of political influence requires them to genuflect before a technological project that “produces such a dynamic society that it is impossible to conserve anything for long.”

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Given Grant’s somber pronouncement of the death of Canada, it’s ironic that the publication of Lament for a Nation in 1965 sparked an intense revival of nationalist sentiment. For a while, he became a darling of these new nationalists. Yet Grant disclaimed such a motive for his book. He insisted that it was not a political tract, but a work of philosophy, an attempt to understand the present in the light of truths that our present moment occludes. He later expressed regret that it “was written too much from anger and too little from irony.”

That Lament for a Nation still unsettles readers 60 years on is a measure of Grant’s prescience about the society he saw taking shape even then. The specific quarrels he anatomized have faded from memory, but the logic he uncovered has only intensified. The universal and homogeneous state is no longer merely a philosophical hypothesis. We encounter evidence of its coming to be at every turn.

Grant’s diagnosis is uncannily contemporary. In an era of global platforms, algorithmic governance, transhumanist visions, and a polarized but uniformly liberal political class, his account clarifies why our debates feel increasingly superficial. We conduct our arguments within a horizon that treats technological expansion as destiny, expert administration as neutral, and dissent as irrational. Lament for a Nation endures because the world it diagnosed has only become more fully realized in the intervening decades.

Yet Grant no longer stands quite as alone as he did in 1965. As the modern project he described becomes more fully realized, its costs become harder to ignore. There are signs of a renewed unease with a world that recognizes no goods beyond limitless technological expansion and the libertine possibilities it enables. There are revolts in the name of what has been lost.

Ironically, as the United States grows more nationalistic, Canada has moved the other way, its political identity defined by loyalty to the globalist order that Washington now challenges. Does that mean that the United States has ceased to be, in Grant’s phrase, the “spearhead” of the progressive modern project? Or has that project merely changed its institutional form, as the universal and homogeneous state now advances through the private power of corporate interests, based in the United States but with transnational reach, shaping speech, commerce, and social life with minimal public accountability?

No longer can the questions that Lament for a Nation presses upon us be dismissed as reactionary grumblings from a grumpy philosopher nostalgic for a vanished past. They articulate the disquiet felt by growing numbers of us as we survey the world around us.

 Yet the Islamic Republic declined to participate, with the Iranian foreign ministry justifying its rejection by citing America’s “criminal acts” during the 12-Day War: namely, joining Israel’s bombing raid and thus violating Iran’s sovereignty in contravention of international law. Soon after, Iran’s foreign minister condemned Trump’s decision to resume American nuclear testing as a “blatant violation of international law” and Washington’s obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

On the surface, these gestures appear merely rhetorical — symbolic denunciations intended for foreign media. Yet they reveal a consistent pattern in Iranian discourse: an almost obsessive appeal to international law and the alleged double standards of the Western powers in applying it. Iranian leaders, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, routinely invoke the sanctity of international legal norms to indict Washington and its allies for hypocrisy. This language of legality, justice, and sovereignty has become central to Tehran’s moral posture as a self-declared righteous challenger of what it calls the “hegemonic order.”

We have, then, a curious paradox: a state that defines itself as revolutionary, revisionist, and “anti-Western” is apparently one of the last true believers in a rules-based international order that the Western powers are increasingly abandoning. Leaders in Tehran and other “outlaw” states often believe, with apparent vehemence and sincerity, that if they can just get the United Nations or some other transnational body to view their situation objectively, the world will know, once and for all, that they aren’t outlaws.

In other words, the Islamic Republic (and China and others) still have faith in the institutional and legal architecture of the liberal international order — an order designed to enshrine Western priorities. The invocation of international law by a regime that claims to reject Western liberal modernity isn’t merely incoherent; it is a symptom of an internalized Westernization, a sign that the ideological liturgy of liberal modernity has colonized even its most strident critics.

Iran is not alone in this contradiction. Russia, too, has cloaked its actions in Ukraine in the language of international law. Moscow’s justifications for its “special military operation” have drawn heavily on the doctrines and precedents pioneered by NATO itself — particularly the “responsibility to protect” invoked during the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia. In this case, Moscow claims to be protecting ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine trapped under an ethno-chauvinist Kyiv regime. China, meanwhile, regularly extols the principles of state sovereignty, non-interference, and equality enshrined in the United Nations Charter. In each case, powers positioned as adversaries of the West strive to articulate their worldviews within the normative and legal frameworks that the West itself created.

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On one level, this may indicate a certain pragmatism: none of these states seeks to dismantle the liberal international order outright. Their declared objective isn’t revolution, but reform — an ostensibly fairer and more balanced application of existing rules. Yet such demands betray a fundamental naiveté. To call for the impartial enforcement of international law presupposes that such a law exists independently of power — that international norms can restrain states, and that international institutions can tame the will to power. But this is fiction. From a realist standpoint, international law isn’t an autonomous realm of justice; it is an expression of power, a moral architecture used to clothe domination in legitimacy.

As Carl Schmitt observed, every legal order is ultimately grounded in a concrete spatial and political order: the result is a “pluriverse,” which he identified as the nomos of the Earth: the concrete, culturally-rooted structural reality of the world. The artificial, legalistic world that emerged after 1945 and that deeply entrenched itself after 1991 thus merely reflects the geopolitical ascendancy of the West and the universalization of its parochial values under Pax Americana. To demand that the international legal system be applied fairly and equitably is thus to demand the impossible: the false dream of a neutral, global law, detached from the particular political and material conditions that produced it and that overcomes the biases of those self-charged with enforcing it.

In their appeals to legality, these “anti-Western” powers expose not only their idealism, but also their dependence on the very metaphysical assumptions of liberalism that they purport to oppose.

The paradox runs deeper still. The faith of Iran, Russia, China, and others in legalism, proceduralism, and egalitarianism in international politics points to their thorough entrapment within the globalist paradigm of modernity. Each of these states proclaims its civilizational distinctiveness — Persian, Russian, or Sinic — but all are, in essence, products of the modern state system. Their bureaucratic rationality, meliorism, and moral universalism are hallmarks of the same Enlightenment project that gave rise to liberalism. They are haplessly embedded in the very worldview they claim to want to overthrow.

Modernity’s essence lies in its universalizing impulse — the conviction that history has a direction, that reason can order the world, and that moral progress can be codified into human institutions and norms. Even those regimes that reject the West’s liberal ideology have internalized this mental structure.

The Islamic Republic’s doctrine of “resistance” against America and Zion, for instance, is a sort of liberation theology, premised on a universal moral dichotomy between the oppressed and the oppressors, possessed and dispossessed, echoing the moral Manichaeism of liberal humanitarianism. Despite its broad support for multipolarity, China remains a defender of economic globalization and inclusive global governance based on what it calls the “common values of humanity.” Likewise, Russia’s self-conception as a Katechon — an Orthodox Christian bulwark against terminal liberal decline and a defender of “traditional values” and “civilizational diversity” — echoes the same universal and moralistic tone it attributes to the Global West.

In their current form, the so-called “pariah states” are not civilizational alternatives to the liberal order, but its dialectical mirrors. They contest its dominance not by exiting its sacred moral canopy, but by claiming to embody its true meaning. Just as Marxism arose within and against liberal capitalism, these contemporary challengers articulate their opposition within the same fundamental framework. Their rhetoric of justice, equality, and international legalism reproduces the liberal myth of moral progress, even as it is turned against liberal (political) hegemony.

Realism teaches that in the anarchic realm of international politics, power, not morality, is the final arbiter. Norms, laws, and institutions are mere superstructures built upon the scaffolding of material power: the ability to transport whole infantry divisions across the globe, to parachute special forces behind enemy lines, to deliver strategic weapons that can turn nations and continents into radioactive glass. When Iran denounces US actions as “illegal,” it is not appealing to some transcendent order of justice (even if it professes to do so); it is engaging in the moral theater of power politics. But by doing so, it inadvertently legitimizes the very discourse it seeks to undermine.

Indeed, the liberal international order survives not because of its moral superiority, but because even its critics play by its discursive rules. Every invocation of international law, every appeal to the United Nations, every citation of the NPT or other postwar treaties reinforces the moral authority of the very institutions that entrench Western dominance in the first place. The unwitting tragedy for states like Iran and Russia is that their defiance is conducted in a language that ensures their subordination.

The recent turn toward civilizational discourse — what might be called the “pluralist turn” in global politics — appears at first glance to signal a break from liberal universalism. When leaders from Beijing to Moscow to Tehran speak of cultural particularity, historical continuity, or their unique civilizational spirit, they seem to reject the homogenizing cosmopolitanism of liberal modernity. Yet this, too, may conceal a moral universalism in new garb.

This is because, at present, even civilizational states (like nation-states) are first and foremost modern states, which are systemically prone to totalizing their non-political and sociological basis of power for more central control. As modern Leviathans, they politicize every aspect of human life to become the sole sovereigns of human society, obliterating the traditional guardrails that historically separated and thereby protected the different domains of human societies (familial, cultural, religious, economic, political, and others) from overreach and tyranny. 

By concentrating all authority within itself, the totalistic modern state cannibalizes its own body politic to feed its incessant hunger for power — eating away at the very social fabric that sustains it and that it is supposed to protect, and leaving a hollow shell organized by a draconian bureaucracy and ruled by a professional managerial class whose values and ideals refract those in London or New York.  

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Given the Manichaean backdrop of the postwar order — good versus evil, democracy versus autocracy, human rights versus atrocity — civilizational states could be even more tempted to assert their own exceptionalism or mission, inevitably claiming a universal significance for themselves. They could subvert their own historical cultures by reducing them to an ideology, tout their inherent superiority, and claim for themselves a world-historical role in redeeming mankind from decadence and barbarism. 

Civilizational politics thus risks becoming yet another moral crusade, a dialectic substituting one universalism (the liberal kind) for a new one elevated as its other. In the process, the rhetoric of cultural authenticity may paradoxically deepen, rather than overcome, the moralization of international relations. But its ultimate result remains tragically unchanged: more global convergence, the proliferation and hardening of modern statism, and the cancerous growth of modernity and its metaphysics. 

Significantly, the return of “civilization” does not necessarily herald the return of realpolitik; it may instead inaugurate new forms of moral imperialism, with each civilization seeking to universalize its own particularity as the Civilization fighting global barbarism — in a clash of abstracted civilizations, a Huntingtonian world where civilizations merely mask the global domination of the modern state and all harbor the same force behind their religio-civilizational “veil” (Confucian, Orthodox, Shiite): namely, modernity. 

The tragic insight here is that the moralistic impulse seems inescapable within the framework of the modern state. Every modern regime — whether liberal, communist, Islamist, or nationalist — claims to possess the formula for human flourishing. Modernity itself is a theological project, animated by the belief that politics can and must redeem humanity. As long as this metaphysical conviction endures, the moralization of international politics will persist and, with it, the illusion that law and justice can transcend power.

In the end, the ideological opposition between the “liberal” West and the collection of renegade, revisionist, non-Western powers is an illusion. The contest between them is not a clash between different worlds, but an internal struggle for primacy within the same modernist paradigm.

Iran, Russia, and their allies self-project as the moral conscience of an unjust world order, yet their very moralism reveals their complicity in the postwar world’s ideological foundations. Their invocation of international law is a testament to its total victory — the triumph of a moralized conception of politics that even its enemies cannot escape, at least until such a time when modernity itself, as a zeitgeist and worldview, disintegrates under the weight of its discontents and contradictions. 

The true alternative to liberal hegemony would require the deliberate renunciation of the political and normative universalism associated with the modern project, rather than multiplying “universalisms” under different national or civilizational disguises and claiming one’s own moral superiority. Meanwhile, practically speaking, the insistence on vindicating sovereign “rights” under international law leads these powers to miss actual opportunities to engage with the West and win real concessions — such as by showing up to meet Trump in Egypt. 

Yet so long as even the global adversaries of liberalism remain enthralled by its moral categories, the world will continue to revolve within modernity’s closed circle—an endless dialectic without transcendence, a tragedy without catharsis. Ironically, Trump, the leader of the power that presides over the liberal imperium, has moved on from rules-based-order cant. It’s time the self-proclaimed enemies of that order did the same.

But what all sides agree on, at least officially, is that they are against what we might call Death-on-Demand. This is the kind of scenario caricatured in the TV series Futurama: in the year 3000 there are “Suicide Booths” on every street, operating under the brand Stop’n’Drop. Customers can exit this mortal realm for a mere 25 cents, opting for either “Quick and painless” or “Slow and horrible”. What Futurama satirizes, of course, is a hyper-liberal attitude to assisted dying, one where suicide becomes just another consumer choice, no different from walking off the street and buying a sandwich. And nobody wants that. Right?

Well for a couple of years, I did.

If we lived in a world of Death-on-Demand, I would not be here to write these words. In August 2023, I had a rock climbing accident that left me paralyzed from the collar bones down. I spent roughly the next two years wanting to finish the job that the mountain had started. In an instant, my life as I knew it was destroyed. Along with my mobility went my sense of identity, purpose, meaning — the lot. In their place I got double incontinence, loss of sexual function, loss of the ability to enjoy exercise, dress myself, feed myself, wash myself; loss of pretty much everything a man in his thirties ordinarily takes for granted.

Instead, I entered a form of living in which merely staying alive meant becoming completely dependent on other people. Typically, those people were low-paid, foreign care workers to whom I had nothing to say — even when they could speak English, which was less often than you’d expect. I went from climbing mountains with friends, to staring at walls by myself. And every day, for two years, I wanted to die.

Maybe not all day, every day. But at least once a day. I just wished that the accident had fucking killed me. Nothing, I thought, could be worth losing everything that I had lost — and certainly not if the price of living meant living like this.

My death urge came awfully close to being more than just thoughts. In the early days, during spinal rehab, I worked out that I could freeze myself to death simply by going out into the garden at night and unplugging the wheelchair. (Trust me, it would have worked.) But the more sensible option seemed to be to join Dignitas. Being unable to access such a service in the UK, I applied for assisted dying in Switzerland.

Dignitas, however, won’t just help anyone to die. Because I was not terminally ill, and my medical records stated that I was suffering from severe depression (which I very much was), Dignitas would not move forward until my application was signed off by a psychiatric professional confirming that I had mental capacity. However, under UK law, no British-based psychiatric professional could legally sign such a letter.

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There was another Swiss clinic with less stringent requirements — but they were no longer taking overseas applications after getting in trouble with the Swiss authorities. Assisted dying is legal in Belgium and the Netherlands, too, but they’re much tougher to travel to for these purposes than Switzerland.

So, I decided to go DIY. One night lying in bed, I decided: that’s it, I’m done. I’ve tried, I really have. I’ve given all that I had to give. There will be no note, no final goodbyes. Just a blessed nothingness.

I made it as far as the footbridge by the station. Not to the platform itself, but looking down to the tracks. I watched a train go by. The next one, then. I didn’t want to go out like that — even if only for the sake of the people who would have to deal with the mess I left behind, both literally and metaphorically. But when you’re paralyzed from the chest down with only minimal use of your hands, there aren’t many options.

I didn’t do it. Obviously. And I’m happy to report that things did eventually get better for me. I turned a corner. It helped a lot that I had a job to go back to — I’m a lecturer in political theory at King’s College London — as well as a network of family and friends who continued to support me throughout the ordeal.

At this point you’re probably expecting me to say something like: “So thank God I wasn’t able to access assisted dying during my darkest hours, or else I wouldn’t be here now!”

Except, it’s not that simple.

For a start, when I was at my lowest, there was just no guarantee that I would indeed make it out of the darkness. It is not a coincidence that suicide is a leading cause of death for people with spinal cord injuries. Some just never come to terms with it, and choose instead to make the misery stop.

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Back then, I was pretty sure I was one of those people — and the truth is, I might still become one again in future. Right now, I’m not gripped by a depressive desire to end it all — but it doesn’t follow that it would have been an obvious mistake if I had shuffled myself off this mortal coil. There remains a real possibility that one day I will recalculate and decide that I do now want to chuck it in. And if I do recalculate in that way, I think it would be good if I could proceed without needing to go abroad and deceiving various domestic agencies about what I was up to. Certainly, without having to throw myself in front of a train, or drown myself in the local canal (my other leading option, though I am terrified of what those final moments might feel like). I would prefer to call it quits in an orderly, legally structured manner, in a hygienic and predesignated location with the assistance of professionals. I would like to be able to say goodbye (or not!) to select people in advance, without having to keep secrets so as to protect loved ones from prosecution. I would like to make as little mess for others to clean up as possible — both literally and metaphorically.

Still, it is important to stress that the proposed change in UK legislation alters nothing for me personally. To be allowed to die under the new Bill, you must be already suffering from a terminal illness; you must have less than six months to live; and you must comply with strict eligibility criteria requiring both medical and judicial oversight. Unless I get diagnosed with a terminal condition leaving me with less than six months to live, I simply won’t be eligible for assisted dying in the UK under the new law.

The situation, of course, is very different for people who are indeed already dying, usually in agonizing pain, whilst becoming ever more dependent on others as their body fails them in myriad shame-inducing ways. (Trust me, losing control of your bowels really is shame-inducing, no matter how often well-meaning people tell you that it “shouldn’t” be. It just is. If you don’t believe me, try it.) For these people, there simply is no prospect of their getting better the way that I did. What the change in UK law is offering to them is the option of bringing the inevitable about more quickly, with less pain and less torment. And not just for them, but for their families too.

So while I will be unaffected by the legalization of assisted dying, if nothing else, my peculiar vantage point has led to me having no patience for some of the more commonly heard arguments against it. The first is a worry that vulnerable people, particularly the elderly, will feel pressured into committing suicide so as “not to be a burden” on remaining family.

Well, yes. For a long time, I wanted to die precisely because I had become a burden on other people. Now to be clear, they all assured me that I wasn’t a burden; that they cared about me; that they didn’t want me to feel like I was any such thing. And I’m sure they meant it. But the facts were plain, or so they seemed to me. Instead of being an independent man in my thirties, forging my own path, I was forcing my parents to once again manage my life. I became, in my mind, little more than a baby — but now faced with the prospect of never growing up. And I couldn’t stand it. Being forced into such dependence was a leading factor in why I wanted it all to stop.

That I have gradually become somewhat less of a burden is a significant factor in why I decided to keep on going. But for people who have no prospect of things getting better, it is crucial to understand that being so utterly dependent on others really is one of the things they want delivery from — along with all the other horrors.

A second argument is that assisted dying will “cheapen” life. That by making it something people can opt for, it will become akin to a consumer choice, thus undermining the sanctity of life — which we must absolutely not allow to happen. This sometimes gets bundled up with a suspicion about overly permissive liberal attitudes — about how we mistakenly prioritize the supposedly rational autonomy of sovereign individuals over the bonds of community.

But while this is good material for a Futurama caricature, it’s an unrealistic depiction of how actual human beings face their own deaths. Take it from somebody who has gazed hard into the abyss.

Our complex ape brains, hardwired to prioritize survival by millions of years of evolution, do not destroy themselves on a whim. To go through all the rigors of legal and medical oversight required to access state-sanctioned assisted dying, you really have to want to go through with it. There will be nothing cheap, nor cheapening, about people exercising such an option in an appropriately structured institutional framework, as is proposed by the change in UK law. Assisted dying is not a sandwich — and the last people who will need to be reminded of this are those who seek it out.

Where opponents of assisted dying have a stronger case is focusing on how large-scale institutions inevitably get things wrong. The NHS is already underfunded and overstrained. Doctors make mistakes. The frequency of these mistakes is exacerbated by the high-stress situations that have become routine in a struggling healthcare system. Meanwhile, an aging population means there is even more pressure to free up NHS resources. Is now really the time to ask doctors to make literal life and death decisions? Shouldn’t we be trying to relieve people’s suffering rather than simply eliminating them?

These are important arguments, but on balance I don’t find them convincing. For one thing, doctors already make life and death decisions in hospitals on a daily basis. We would really just be formalizing a process that happens anyway, just in a haphazard and delayed manner. But regardless, what defenders of the Bill should properly do is admit that, yes, mistakes will be made.

In a vast bureaucracy like the NHS, it is practically inevitable that not everything will work perfectly. There will be tragic cases where it appears the system has failed. There will be heartbreaking stories and we can expect to read all about them in the media. Of course, you won’t read about the hundreds of cases where everything worked as it should — but that’s just how the media works.

However, it is an error here to think that because mistakes will be made, the most appropriate thing to do is maintain the status quo. This trades on the fallacy that the status quo is somehow morally neutral — and that we will be exchanging it for something morally bad if we support assisted dying.

In fact, what we have is a choice between two deeply imperfect scenarios. The first is the one we have now: people in agonizing pain, with no prospect of physical recovery, enduring psychological torment in a personal hell which intensifies every day, being told that they must continue until nature takes its course. A world where even the most perfect provision of palliative care would barely soften the edge. A world where we use the power of the state to deny them and their loved ones the option of making the horror stop sooner rather than later.

The second scenario is the one that the Assisted Dying Bill proposes to try and bring about. It will offer relief to the people currently trapped in the scenario above. Its supporters will have to admit that things will go wrong in practice, and that changing the institutional machinery of the NHS will inadvertently harm some future people — how many, we do not yet know. And we will have to acknowledge that this will take place against the backdrop of an aging population, a crumbling health service, sclerotic public finances, and unforeseen future challenges.

Trying to exchange the first scenario for the second is, in my estimation, a gamble worth taking. But it is a gamble, not some straightforward exchange of the morally bad for the morally good. It is about weighing up which bad outcomes we are going to tolerate in the hope of reducing others; the price we are prepared to pay. It is about how much agony and torment we are honestly going to face up to as a society, publicly acknowledging what is already a fact of life for thousands of people.

With honest reflection and dialogue, we stand a chance of getting things, if not finally right — then a bit better than they presently are.

Some years ago, I was reading Philippa Perry’s agony-aunt column in The Guardian. That week, a woman in her sixties had written in, riven with disgust because she’d walked in on her husband watching porn. Perry drew on the woman’s “teenage trauma” as a possible reason for what she patently believed to be an overreaction. She ended her response with this sentence on porn which has played in my mind ever since, and which I for a long time used to settle my own discomfort about some guy or other I dated compulsively watching it: “Porn is what the genitals enjoy in private. This might be very different to who we each are with each other.” I even remember repeating this line to a pal with similar worries. It’s not who he is, I told her. It’s just what men do. They all do, and they can’t help it. 

I no longer think this. If my peers are anything to go by, I am not alone. Porn destroys sex and nukes relationships. It makes ordinary men strange, twitchy, impotent losers, and it endangers and repels women, leaving us unsatisfied. Watching it, or being with someone who is addled by it, is an active choice. I finally accepted this when I dumped a boyfriend who, as a result of his porn addiction, was both violent and absolutely abysmal in bed.  I know so many women who have been through the same thing. Many are learning to leave at the first sign of pornsickness. Either that, or squander your youth on someone who would attempt to conjure manipulative justifications (“you’re just a prude!”) as a way never to have to even try to stop.

That pornography is a growing social ill is somehow still controversial, but anyone who reads Jo Bartosch and Robert Jessel’s new compendium of horror Pornocracy cannot fail to be convinced. In it, one interviewee remarks how “extraordinary” it is that “women are expected to love, sexually service and live with men who are excited by images of their degradation and violation”. The book proposes that straight women would do better to “swear off men” rather than put up, shut up and put out. It also tells us that married men who started watching porn during their marriage doubled their chances of divorce — and that, in the words of one “porn widow”, the habit is “a staggering waste of connection, a waste of humanity”. Feminists have long been blamed for the so-called male loneliness epidemic; in light of the horrifying escalation in the volume and extremity of porn the men we’re supposed to save from loneliness are gobbling up, it might well be time for a name change. The “male consequences epidemic”, perhaps?

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The cheerful prospect of having sex with a porn-addicted partner is laid bare in Pornocracy, which describes what many an ex-girlfriend knows to be true: “These men no longer have mutual sex; they masturbate inside their partner; and sometimes, as porn teaches, onto them. She becomes little more than a flesh pocket; a dehumanized sex doll into which he thrusts while replaying porn scenes in his mind’s eye.” And that’s when they can get things going: another deflating fact is the hidden epidemic of erectile dysfunction, in one study affecting 60% of men who watch porn. Before blaming women with careers, those wringing hands over birth rates should first take account of these miserable developments.

Clearly, defenders of porn do not listen to feminists; the Seventies activism of women including Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon has never cut through to those who had long ago sacrificed serious adult lives and arguments for compulsive masturbation. But these same men may be starting to realize that it is not just feminists whom they disgust; it is the women who block them on Hinge for asking if “it’s pink”, the ones who decline second dates after you spend hours wanging on about your rarefied and special fetish, the ones who avoid eye contact at work when gooner slang slips into your daily verbiage. Repulsing feminists has never been the porn guy’s concern (the feeling is mutual), but at a time when throbbing flesh on screens has not yet eclipsed the appeal of a real girlfriend, repulsing women in general might be.

Why do so many women put up with partners stupefied by pornography? One very forceful reason is that the language of progressive toleration is, like other areas of feminism in 2025, baldly used to intimidate women out of saying no to men. To paraphrase one of the most prominent and courageous victims of porn-powered rape culture, Gisèle Pelicot, shame has changed sides — from the red-faced chap scuttling to the adult section of the video rental store to the woman who now finds herself opposite him at a bar, trying in earnest not to laugh or recoil in horror when he brags about his predilection for cross-eyed, writhing e-girls lest she be called a bigot. It is now shameful to shame a man for his venerable kink — but what counts as “shaming” in this case? Rejecting him? Refusing to do what repulses her?

In the gender debacle, the other major feminist bunfight of recent decades, we have seen how refusing to roleplay objective falsehoods, to maintain the fantasy, is cancellable in itself. In both transgenderism and the kink community, the influence of porn is manifest: Bartosch and Jessel inevitably quote Andrea Long Chu, the transgender Pulitzer Prize winner who wrote that “the essence of femaleness” is “an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes” — laying bare porn’s grip on male-to-female transitioners. It is difficult not to see the weaponized shame of gender ideology playing out in the bedrooms of coercive “cis” men too, where partners who decline to do certain sexual acts are reprimanded for being intolerant, narrow-minded or, inevitably, “unkind”.

Sod that. If you ever need permission: it is OK to find things disgusting. It is OK, on a date, to sneak out the back, leave him staring into his cider. You don’t need to tolerate his weird desires; you don’t even need to see him again. It’s OK, in a drought of nice and normal men, not to date anyone at all. Nothing is worse than having to comfort a boyfriend who can only get aroused by the pyrotechnics of porn. There, the humiliation is total.The porn lobby may have duped credulous queer theorists into enveloping socially malignant interests into identity politics (“I’m into consensual non-consent”; “I’m into age play”; “I’m a choker”) but being proud of your desire to hurt women or children won’t improve your chances of having a good relationship. Hentai addicts, feet guys and furries are smirking themselves into solitude, and the partners they compel to fulfill pornographic fantasies do so with a grimace at best, however well they hide it. At worst, they’re out the door, consigning you to a growing dossier of dinner-party stories. Them’s the breaks, fellas.

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Porn is a vengeful Reaper, a pestilence growing more visible as the sexes grow apart and young men disappear into moaning, grunting vortices on their phone screens. Porn is in a death spiral; the accelerating superstimuli of “gooner” material — the subject of a recent viral Harper’s article — can no longer be ignored. Things are getting worse — they can only ever do that, because the more extreme the content, the more hooked the users, the more likely they are to stay on the site, to pay, to return.

Porn feels good until it doesn’t — until the afterglow is gone, until you see the bruises on your girlfriend’s neck, the rings under your eyes from another night’s sleep lost to watching strangers on all fours, the news reports of industry darlings who killed themselves. There’s nothing liberated about this. Once, self-discipline was a virtue. Once, shame provided guidance about how much we could expect others to tolerate or participate in our fantasies. Now, gratification is the means and the end: it flattens all moral values, tramples on women and deflates your dick. Top-down legislation can only do so much — this week’s announcement of a ban on choking porn is a start, and anything that stops 12-year-old girls being strangled during their first kiss is a good thing. Ultimately, though, it’s up to men to pack it in. So stop, for all our sakes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For all its purely domestic malignities, British politics is, like that of the European Union, merely a provincial outpost of those of America’s imperial center. A large part of Europe’s current woes is attributable to our leaders reshaping our societies according to the model both inspired and imposed by American hegemony in the Nineties, before being left in the lurch as our masters change course. Believing that, under the Pax Americana, globalization would dominate the future, our leaders entirely reshaped our economies and societies for the world they saw coming into view. Industry was allowed to wither in the certainty that cheap Chinese goods would sustain our lifestyles; international human rights law, in reality a fig leaf for American military intervention against geopolitical rivals, was elevated above national interests in a way the hegemon never once countenanced for itself; destructive energy policies were written into law in the illusory belief of a shared global mission to ameliorate climate change. Through a misreading of America’s early 20th century experience, mass immigration was actively encouraged, in the genuine belief, still intoned as a mantra by Labour at its conference, that ethnic and cultural diversity, contrary to historical precedent, would soon become an inherent strength.

But now the hegemon has radically changed course, leaving its regional middle managers in Britain and Europe stranded in their Nineties fantasy world, and the political parties which adopted this worldview facing collapse. Globalization was always just a superficial Americanization, from which America itself has now withdrawn. Trump’s UN speech, in which he declared that the “entire globalist concept of asking successful, industrialized nations to inflict pain on themselves and radically disrupt their entire societies must be rejected completely and totally, and immediately” is a direct attack on the worldview of our leaders. So too his criticism of “uncontrolled mass migration” — which, he says, is an “assault on Western countries”.

It is difficult to think of an arc of client states surviving for long in direct ideological opposition to their imperial patron: rightly, Reform’s new signing Danny Kruger has characterized the insurgent party’s domestic foe as simply “late-stage liberalism”. In Britain, at least, the result is likely to be the diminution of Labour and the Conservatives to minor regional parties centered on London, the last ideological stronghold of the old regime. A year ago Keir Starmer delivered the Conservative Party a historic defeat; today he is the most detested prime minister in modern British history. There is no prospect of Starmer winning the next election, and little prospect of him leading the Labour Party into it.

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Yet Starmer, devoid of an individual personality, ought not take any of this personally: he is simply a stand-in for the collapsing Nineties System, of which he is the robotic final avatar. Everything that Starmer represents, even if presented in human form, would be just as roundly detested. Blair himself has transitioned from the fantasy vision he imposed on British politics to the technocratic, enlightened despotism of his proposed Gaza Mandate, in which a combination of economic growth and digital surveillance will contain the volatile nationalism of the Palestinian people: in his plans for digital ID, it is not hard to see Starmer following suit, albeit without the growth.

Trapped between loyalty to a collapsing imperial ideology, and the upsurge in nationalist sentiment its implementation produced, the Labour front bench, disconsolately waving the various flags of the United Kingdom for the cameras, finds itself forced to spout incoherent slogans. The country is not broken, and to claim that it is is dangerous rhetoric: but the country also requires total renewal, indeed reforging into a “New Britain”. Reform stokes division, and yet the country is also at a “fork in the road”, from which Labour will conjure up unity from diversity. The Boriswave was a terrible mistake, but to undo it would be fascism; nativist sentiment is the preserve of a tiny internet minority, but also of the country’s most popular party; Reform is racist but its voters are not. The Home Secretary declares that “ethnonationalism” is a societal evil to be defeated, while Starmer endorses its basic principle in asserting that Israel and Palestine require two separate nation states to prevent their two peoples from slaughtering each other. If only they could have bonded over slicing half-time Jaffa oranges together, perhaps things would have been different.

The party’s messaging, as it enters full election mode just one year into its term, is entirely incoherent because it must triangulate between the roundly despised, and entirely illusory worldview of its leadership on the one hand, and the newly aggrieved mood of the country on the other. The central axis of British politics is now the basic, essential stuff of national identity, which is not a battleground favorable to Labour. Indeed, there is something late-stage Soviet in Wes Streeting vowing to defeat the combined forces of English, Scottish and Welsh nationalism through a “return to the spirit of 1945”, even as he waits to lose his seat to a “Gaza independent”. But then all British politics in 2025 has become the fantasy pronouncements of those waiting to lose their seats, in what is now merely a series of rearguard delaying actions before a Reform government.

Through having implemented its worldview, and forcing the nation to live with the results, the Labour Party is doomed. But for the Conservative Party, the immediate outlook is just as grim. Having rid his party of conservatives, that self-described “Heir to Blair”, David Cameron, condemned the Tories to share Labour’s fate: the collapse of the two parties, viewed in narrow partisan terms by the Westminster lobby, is more accurately the collapse of the shared ideology they undertook, between them, to impose on Britain.

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Starmer’s assertion that the Conservatives are the less threatening rival is based on the perception that they are, if not technically the same party as Labour, the product of a shared worldview. There is no threat, for Blairism’s last disciple, of them rolling back New Labour’s constitutional and demographic vandalism. Indeed, considering the party’s governing record in deepening and accelerating New Labour’s cultural revolution, Starmer’s backhand compliment to the Tories could just as easily be a withering broadside by Farage. Such is the shifting popular mood, Labour now even feels free to attack the party’s governing record of excessive liberalism. In disparagingly deploying the online-Right term “Boriswave” to critique Tory governance, no doubt to the despair of his remaining supporters on Bluesky, Starmer has at least put paid to any lingering ideas of a Johnson comeback.

Like a nation, a party can survive many setbacks: but enough of them together and the result is fatal. While Kemi Badenoch was evidently the wrong choice for leader — as I warned at the time of her election — it is far from clear that a belated Jenrick coronation can now do much for the party’s near-term fortunes. A counterintuitive case, though not a strong one, could perhaps be made that Badenoch’s laissez-faire attitude to management has at least allowed the Jenrick wing to experiment with forging a harder-edged, more Right-wing faction within the party. The modernizing, developmentalist, even self-proclaimed Anglofuturist faction around him, now calling themselves the “New Centre Right”, present a compelling vision for 2020s Conservativism. Their greatest appeal is that they can present the same offer of radical reform as Reform itself, but with more competent implementation: but it is a difficult task to campaign on renouncing your own party’s record, and in any case Reform can now convincingly argue that a vote for the Conservatives will be a vote for continued Labour rule. Besides, whatever its strengths, on current polling trends many of the New Centre Right’s brightest stars cannot expect to keep their seats.

The options available to the party last year are no longer on the menu, and those that remain are unappetizing. A gamble could be made that Reform will rest British politics onto a plane more amenable to future Right-wing governance, and that the losses of the next election may in time be recouped by the rump party that survives. One plausible future, at least for Jenrick’s wing, by far the most energetic and convincing Conservative faction, is playing a similar role in relation to Farage to the one Farage himself once performed against the Tories: as a purist pressure group, punishing any deviation from Rightist principles from the luxury of the sidelines. Another is as a more successful SDP, a predominantly internet-based party, with more support from commentators than voters, producing high-quality policy documents to be plagiarized by their electorally successful rivals. Yet if it wishes to remain in Parliament, the New Centre Right faction also presents, for Reform, the only attractive set of potential Tory defectors, in a path already smoothed by their erstwhile ally Danny Kruger. Extinction or co-option? Neither prospect is attractive, yet both now seem more probable than renewal. Outpaced by history, the politics of the ancien régime has another four years to further discredit itself, with every grim daily headline passing verdict on its failure. Gathering in a city that, this week, bloodily displays the UK’s very worst dysfunctions, the Conservative Party’s only chance is that our current path of extreme political volatility may still, against all the odds, extract the party from the grave it so eagerly dug itself. The old UK regime is dead in office: the time is running out to shape the Britain that will replace it, in anything other than Farage’s image.

The Guardian merch is made by New York brand Lingua Franca, best known for putting what it calls “thought-provoking and culturally resonant phrases” on expensive sweaters in cursive script, and getting celebrities to wear them on the red carpet. And — a bit like the newspaper — the fashion label’s current political messaging seems somewhat chastened compared to former cocksure progressive hectoring. Indeed, the semantic trajectory of the company’s sweaters would make for a fascinating modern history project: from the uncompromising “time’s up”, “we say gay”, and “Dr Fauci fan club” messages of yesteryear to the sullen “exhausted American”, “I didn’t vote for him”, and “I read banned books” of the current collection. Even the writing on women’s chests seems to have got smaller — or maybe the breasts got bigger. Either way, things have definitely changed.

During the first Trump presidency, company founder Rachelle Hruska McPherson was apparently able to claim with a straight face that luxury goods activism might change the world. “This is not a time to be silent,” she told Fortune magazine in 2020 “Virtue signaling to our communities on where we stand on issues is literally how change has happened historically, and it’s how it will continue to happen today”. This year, though, there are signs of adjustment to new political and commercial realities, and not merely in those defeated-sounding new mottos. According to a recent interview in Elle magazine, McPherson now “considers herself just as much of an activist… but she wants to fight that fight in a different, more measured way than she did the first time around”. She says she sometimes looks back and thinks: “‘Oh, that’s a little cringeworthy.’ And then I’m like, ‘Is it? We all were doing it.’”

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Many fashionistas were, indeed, doing cringeworthy things in the heady days of woke, spurred on by their bottom line. “The future is female”; “transwomen are women”, and “I can’t breathe” were just three of the sartorial shortcuts to canonization in a cotton-polyester blend. The makers of such garments didn’t seek to persuade by appealing to reason: t-shirt slogans are not exactly Aristotelian syllogisms. And nor did they even try to invoke much emotion — you can’t tug on heartstrings when limited to four words per line. Instead, they sought to appeal to the self-interested desire of the consumer. If you wear this, people will think you are a good person; and being a good person is very in right now.

Thankfully, things have moved on, and the cool kids these days wouldn’t be seen dead in a Guardian-Lingua Franca collab, assuming they could afford one. I know this because I read it in a Guardian article two years ago, and — as we now know — the paper treats facts as sacred. As the story explained, Gen Z hates “peppy but shallow” slogan tees: including “painfully tone-deaf” jumpers from, er, Lingua Franca.

But it’s not that the hipsters and taste-makers have gone off words on t-shirts per se. It’s just that they now prefer jokey, amoral, gnomic ones. For while Lingua Franca has stuck to the moralizing high ground — “history has its eyes on you” etc. — a brief perusal of what the kids are into gives us slogans like “hardcore” or “I’m gonna win” or “follow me, I’m a cult leader”. You might even say that there’s been a Trumpian turn.

Perhaps the new generation is just more clear-eyed than its elders about the fact that wearing words on your clothes to bring about meaningful political change was always bogus. Unless you design your own, the words in question are nicked from someone else. In that sense, wearing a slogan tee is barely a genuine communicative act at all. And as soon as you are photographed wearing the item to put on your socials — essential for the pretense that you are making any kind of political difference — whatever independent meaning faintly resided in the slogan to begin with is now subsumed into the meaning of the person wearing it, as just one more visual aspect for the viewer to interrogate. Onlookers are asked to consider, not whether black lives really matter, or whether this is indeed what a feminist looks like, but rather the question: “what kind of person would wear a slogan like this?”.

As such, sloganwear fit seamlessly into a post-literate internet culture. Context collapse is a thing: the simultaneous exposure of your words to different kinds of audiences, with alternative ways of reading the same sentences; so that your in-joke or political point, meant for one group, can cause accidental outrage in another one. The desire to say as little as possible that might be challenged or misunderstood — while still saying something that gets you attention — means that the sort of vaguely ironic exclamation or sanctimonious tautology you might put on a t-shirt (or jumper) starts looking irresistible to many.

In face-to-face communication with a person you know, understanding what the other is saying depends on at least a rough understanding of the sort of person you are talking to. There’s a reciprocal relationship between interpreting the words — is what she just said meant to be sincere? funny? kind? patronizing? — and assumptions about the deeper personal characteristics of the speaker. Very occasionally, a person’s saying something in isolation can radically change your view of who they are; most of the time, your prior view of who they are modulates your understanding of their individual statements. A benevolent and a malevolent person can say the very same thing, but you will hear it in very different ways.

This is also true of understanding great novels: the deep reader tries to build a picture of the sort of creative mind that wrote the text, at the same time as building a picture of what the text actually means. Is this a mind capable of irony? Of rich symbolism? Is it cynical or optimistic about human nature? Judgments about the author affect how the book is read, and vice versa. Despite the “death of the author” nonsense in Sixties French literary theory, great artists remained alive and kicking, way past their actual deaths. But on the internet of strangers, such subtleties break down. In this domain, at least, Barthes and Foucault were right.

Here there are lots of orphaned phrases, dislocated from concrete facts about the identity of the speaker and her accompanying thoughts. You publish or post something; I have no real idea of your character or history, which means I have no well-defined idea of what you, personally, mean by those words. Texts become detached from the intentions of their producers, floating about the internet like ghosts. This creates interpretive perils, but also opportunities in the marketplace of mass communication: I can write down stereotypically righteous, funny, or clever-sounding things, in a compressed way, and naïve observers will just assume I am righteous, funny, clever. Getting reposted by a big X account is a bit like persuading a red-carpet celebrity to wear your words, and so promote your brand.

At least the untrustworthy communicative dynamics are more obvious when the words are on someone’s chest, right there in front of you. No matter the thread count, sloganwear in the wild is usually easy to see through: the disconnect between desired effect, and the perceptible reality of the wearer, is often too great. The owner of the sweater wants you to believe she is the sort of person who holds facts sacred; but what you see instead is someone who wants you to believe she is the sort of person who holds facts sacred — and that is completely different. It’s a lesson in the complexities of human interpretation we would do well to hold on to elsewhere. You might even say that — for once, at least — thanks to the Guardian, we get close to the whole picture.

Reform’s emergence as a government-in-waiting has stirred an out-of-sorts patriotism in Britain’s pallid center-left as it attempts to present a vision of Britain and Britishness to compete with Nigel Farage’s insurgent one. “The battle in the next election is between us and Reform,” their leader Ed Davey told the conference. And indeed, the whole event was colored by the idea that there is no more Left and Right, only Liberal and Reform. If “the Nationalists” intended on hoisting flags on A-roads, then the Lib Dems would jolly well get theirs out too.

For four chilly days in the Bournemouth International Center, the Lib Dems spoke of little but the threat the “Nationalists” — that incongruous troop of Reform voters, Tommy Robinson supporters and the occasional stray Tory — posed to “British values”. But they struggled to conjure a positive and distinct vision of Britishness in response.

Instead, in a clownish attempt at middle-class populism, Davey invoked a Britain of “Lionesses”, “cricket pavilions”, and “Male Voice choirs” — a post-twee, reactionary, commuter-belt idyll. And Farage is at the gate. In an attempt to frighten the Lib Dems into action, their leader painted an alternative picture of the country where Reform has the whip hand. Where Reform would roll back gun laws until “schools have to teach our children what to do in case of a mass shooting”. They’ll let Elon Musk expose your kids to porn. They’ll turn your son into Andrew Tate. They’ll denigrate the countryside with fracking and untrammeled development. And, worst of all, they’ll privatize the NHS. “That is Trump’s America,” Davey said. “Don’t let it become Farage’s Britain.”

“Reform is the most serious threat liberalism has ever faced, and we have to put all our effort into beating that,” Davey said. Yet the irony is that the Lib Dems need Nigel Farage if they hope to have a shot a power. In shattering the old duopoly, Reform has offered the Lib Dems a route to electoral success: mopping up the Tory moderates and Labour progressives, as both parties stagger in a futile pursuit of the Reform vote. In 2024, the Lib Dems won more seats (72) than any third party since the collapse of the Liberal Party more than a century ago, and in May’s local elections, Lib Dems finished second to Reform. But so far it has failed to articulate an alternative vision for government. The latest poll from More in Common has the Lib Dems in fourth place with a meager 13% of the vote.

Davey has expended much of his mental capacity on Reform’s success. “Here’s the intellectual bit,” he said in a Q&A. “They make people laugh.” And so that is what the Lib Dems must do too. Davey marched through Bournemouth Gardens pursued by a band playing “Sweet Caroline”, he dressed up as a beekeeper, and he had “a blooming good time” planting flowers. And as usual, he didn’t quite pull it off. Farage’s humor isn’t affected in the way that, say, waving a scepter buffoonishly whilst leading a marching band is. Boris Johnson is, perhaps, the model, but he did that all naturally: no one ever wondered why he was acting like a buffoon.

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Davey thinks that “making people smile is the way to win them over”, but the polling disagrees: a majority of voters think his clowning makes the party look unserious and tin-eared. At a time when the electorate has never been so disaffected, when they have a “moral duty” to defeat Reform, and when they’ve never had a better shot at becoming a serious force in British politics, goofing around doesn’t make good policy. It’s just “bullshit”, one MP was reported to have said last week. Besides, it isn’t cutting through. Only a third of Britons can identify Davey’s face, with “Ed Balls” being the most common wrong answer. Those who do know him tend to think he’s just nice. But can “just nice” win an election?

That’s the unavoidable question, especially when it comes to the Lib Dems’ approach to immigration. Not everyone at Tommy Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom” march was a nationalist or racist, Davey said; some just “felt like no one was listening to them”. But are the Lib Dems? Their home affairs spokesperson Lisa Smart seemed flippant at best. She spoke breezily about how migrant hotels are places “where people had their wedding reception… and, of course, [the hotels are] rubbish for the taxpayer”. Elsewhere, for all the Lib Dems’ suggestion that they’d combat Reform with a positive argument for immigration, that petered into some brief mumbling about the economy and the popularity of integration. “There is no harder brief for a liberal [than home affairs],” Smart said, and the Lib Dems seem determined to prove this.

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By Aris Roussinos

But the delegates need only look outside the conference center to gauge the problem. Of late, Bournemouth has become one of the most hotly-discussed epicenters of British decline, as photographs of litter-strewn beaches, antisocial behavior, and Muslims praying circulate amongst the online Right. Local hotels have said that bookings are down as a result of this attention, and a volunteer Safeguard Force has been established in response to a perceived increase in crime. “All towns change,” a taxi driver told me wistfully. “It’s more vibrant than it was. Just, well, different.” As the delegates arrived for the conference, 300 locals joined the “Bournemouth Patriots” to protest against the town’s three migrant hotels. And yet, last month, the Lib Dems beat Reform in a local council ward by-election. Surely if the Lib Dems could win here, one overly confident party member reasoned, they could win anywhere.

“We could certainly see a Lib Dem government,” Kamran Hussain, who was canvassing to be the party’s vice-president, told me. “If we keep on spreading our message, moderate people will come to the Lib Dems in droves.” But how? “Operation Leapfrog” is one means to ensure this: they will target Blue-Wall Tory seats, where they finished third in 2024, such as Central Devon, and Fareham and Waterlooville. And yet all the pollsters seemed to caution against this: “They’ve virtually picked up all the seats they could pick up from the Tories,” said John Curtice, while Luke Tryl, the director of More in Common, said that they’re more likely to attract “Progressive Activists” than One-Nation Tories. But are there any moderates left?

An even greater existential problem for the Lib Dems, if they really are serious about fighting Reform, is that only 24% of voters think they represent change, compared with 51% for Reform. And change is what voters want. But Farage’s Britain is the only future that Davey sees: there was no sense that the Liberal Democrats could change Britain, or especially wanted to. Beyond their dismissal of the “turquoise Tories”, the policies they unveiled could have been implemented by any government since 1997. An energy security bank to offer £10 billion in affordable loans to homeowners and small businesses. Solar panels in supermarket car parks. Health warnings on smartphones. All that was followed by sclerotic debates over ID cards and nuclear energy, and the late-woke silencing of a trans debate via trenchantly polite reference to procedure and “namecalling”. One quiffy-haired Young Liberal told me his party was a “party of fucking nerds”, known for their obsession with forensic policy analysis. And so they were as angry as Liberals can get when, on Monday, the BBC led with Reform’s decision to scrap Indefinite Leave to Remain, because, of course, their overnight policy release — a two-hour “doomscrolling cap” for under-18s — was so much more radical.

The trouble is, centrism is a hard sell these days. One evening in the Branksome Suite, the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) hosted a fringe event on “disruptive delivery”, where the Lib Dems were urged to assume the mantle of radical centrism. This, they said, is how to beat Farage. Sam Sharps, an ageless technocrat from the TBI, told the party’s deputy-leader Daisy Cooper that “there is no reason why you can’t be radical and sensible… There is no reason why you can’t have a transformational, thought-through, nicely-packaged, costed, implementable policy programme.” That, of course, is what the TBI’s other pet project — the Labour Party — offered with their “fully funded and fully costed” 2024 manifesto: this way lies madness, spending-cuts, tax rises, and an ever-accreting fiscal blackhole.

One disgruntled crowd-member asked them why nobody was speaking about the economy at this conference, and later three other questioners broke into tears: one had lost their seat on a parish council; another’s pub had been bought by the Chinese; another was scared of being a minority in today’s Britain. This is what Britain does to you: it grinds you down until you’re crying in a gray conference room as a think-tanker explains the benefits of bloodless technocracy.

The Liberal Democrats spent four days saying that they would address such griefs, but never did. They can criticize Farage, but they can’t combat him. And try as Davey might to put fire in their bellies, they can only see themselves as an opposition-in-waiting, not a government; they are the new reactionaries who’ll meekly defend the institutions as the Reform party blazes through them. The orders were clear: sharpen your best Farage insults, and prepare yourselves for opposition.

A nation’s true moral commitments are not revealed in how it treats allies, but in how it treats enemies. Few things better expose the gulf between America’s lofty liberal ideals and its actual state practices than the continued existence of the quasi-legal detention facility at Guantánamo Bay. A prison camp 500 miles off the coast of Florida, Guantánamo still houses “enemy combatants”, many of whom suffer from the long-term psychological effects of what the government once proudly called “enhanced interrogation techniques” — its euphemism for torture.

Before these techniques were officially banned by Congress in 2009, detainees at Guantánamo faced stress positions held for hours, alongside forced nudity and exposure to extreme temperatures. Security officers blasted loud music for hours on end, deployed bright lights, and used sensory deprivation to disorient prisoners. Some inmates were threatened with dogs, or else subjected to staged desecrations designed to degrade their Muslim identity.

Many detainees were moved repeatedly between cells in what was cynically dubbed the “frequent flyer program”, a practice aimed at preventing sleep entirely. The International Committee of the Red Cross, FBI officials, and Pentagon personnel all began raising alarms as early as 2003. Reports documented that the cumulative effect of these techniques led to severe physical deterioration, hallucinations, and long-term trauma. Though the Military Commissions Act of 2009 explicitly barred the use of statements obtained through torture or cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment, Guantánamo remains open. At least 15 detainees remain in custody, and who knows exactly what’s happening with the conditions of their stays.

Next week, in what could mark a morally clarifying moment, one long-detained terror suspect, Encep Nurjaman, is finally scheduled to receive his first pretrial hearing — more than two decades after his capture. First arrested in Thailand in August 2003, Nurjaman, better known by his nom de guerre, “Riduan Isamuddin”, or simply “Hambali”, has been held without trial at Guantánamo Bay since 2006. This first hearing is set to begin in two months. Before his transfer to Guantánamo, Hambali spent more than three years in undisclosed CIA black sites. It wasn’t until 2019 — 16 years after his capture — that Hambali was formally charged with a range of terror-related offenses under the Military Commissions Act.

At first glance, Hambali may appear to be a soft-spoken man from West Java. But his calm demeanor is misleading. He has been described by geopolitical analysts as the “Osama bin Laden of Southeast Asia,” and is widely believed to have been the operational mastermind of Jemaah Islamiyah — a network blamed for the 2002 Bali bombings that killed more than 200 people, as well as a separate attack a year later on a hotel in Jakarta that took a dozen more.

Is Hambali a terrorist responsible for hundreds of deaths? Probably, and the same is likely true for many of the 700-800 detainees Guantánamo has held since its creation more than two decades ago. But the presumed guilt of individual detainees, even in the case of heinous crimes, doesn’t justify the existence of Guantánamo itself. Nor does it excuse the fact that, despite President Obama’s public efforts to close the facility, Guantánamo Bay remains open in 2025, still housing non-citizens designated as “enemies of the nation”.

The flexibility of that label has proven convenient. Once deemed an “enemy” — regardless of evidence, trial or charge — a detainee can remain locked in limbo for decades. It’s important to note that, unlike the infamous Alcatraz prison off the coast of San Francisco, Guantánamo Bay was not created to keep dangerous men from escaping. Rather, it was built to help America’s security agencies escape the rights-based legal framework they are supposedly sworn to uphold.

By placing the prison offshore, Guantánamo effectively sidesteps the constitutional guarantees afforded by the American legal system. Since none of the long-term detainees held there are US citizens, the logic goes, they are not entitled to the protections of the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a speedy trial, or even Article I’s privilege of habeas corpus.

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The war on America’s radicals

By B. Duncan Moench

After the shock of the World Trade Center towers collapsing on 9/11, a general consensus formed within US security forces that the old liberal framework of rights and due process had outlived its applicability to contemporary problems. Building off that perception, Guantánamo Bay, and the regime of coercion it came to represent, emerged as both a camp and a symbol. American intelligence agencies and the Pentagon top brass were not embarrassed when accounts of torture leaked to the public. On the contrary, it’s highly likely they intended for those details to become known — a deliberate move to signal that captured enemies would receive neither rights nor mercy.

For a country with hundreds of foreign military interventions under its belt since 1789, the spread of a dark warrior mentality among its security forces is hardly surprising. Under the Bush administration, though, the theater of cruelty became a feature, not a bug, of American foreign policy in the post-9/11 world. What had once scandalized the military — the “search and destroy” excesses of Vietnam, made infamous by My Lai — slowly began to lose its taboo in the 21st century.

Bush’s uncaring cowboy posturing found its natural heir in Donald Trump. A carnival barker who urged rally-goers to rough-up protestors, he once lamented that the only true failure of the Iraq War was that the US didn’t “take the oil”. In one of his more repugnant moments, Trump casually dismissed former POW John McCain with the line that, “I like the war heroes who weren’t captured.”

As crass and cruel as Trump can be, though, his brand of unreconstructed masculinity has struck a chord across Middle America. Fittingly for a man with a decades-long history of dabbling in professional wrestling, Trump’s approach to war, punishment and diplomacy always signaled something beyond mere vulgarity. Like the Guantánamo torture facility that preceded it, Trump’s embrace of violence and unlawfulness marked the end of post-Second World War kayfabe.

A term derived from the professional wrestling circuit, “kayfabe” refers to the suspension of disbelief required to pretend that the pageantry and violence in the ring is real — that the characters really hate each other, that the outcomes aren’t scripted, and that justice will ultimately prevail. For much of the 20th century, this illusion was carefully maintained. “Babyface” heroes like Hulk Hogan battled villainous “heels” like the Iron Sheik in the name of truth, justice, and the American way. The audiences, however knowingly, played along.

It seems totally absurd in retrospect, but for decades on end, the idea that wrestling was a real sport was rigorously guarded by both wrestlers and promoters, hardly surprising when it raked in hundreds of millions of dollars. But by the mid-Nineties, the audience had grown restless. Hulk Hogan’s saccharine approach — telling kids to “say your prayers and eat your vitamins” — began to feel cartoonish, even to the audience it was designed for. After the fall of the Soviet Union, and Gen X’s discovery of irony, younger Americans simply couldn’t play along anymore.

In the age of goth and grunge, earnestness was no longer cool even in the low-brow world of professional wrestling. And so too in politics: whether on TV or their ballot papers, Americans wanted something “real”. Donald Trump, for all his orange-tinted fakery and comb-over theatrics, somehow managed to capture that yearning for authenticity. But it’s important to remember that it was George W. Bush, with his born-again frat-boy swagger, who paved the way.

Bush’s unapologetic good-versus-evil rhetoric acted as a bridge between the postwar kayfabe of solemn democratic ideals — and the bare-knuckled ruthlessness that Trump would later embody. Whether discussing the invasion of Iraq or waterboarding detainees at Guantánamo, Bush, like all his predecessors, stuck to the Wilsonian script, insisting that America’s intentions were pure. America merely felt compelled to protect weaker nations. The goal was to “make the world safe for democracy”, as Wilson put it at the start of America’s imperial era.

In practice, of course, Bush made no bones about the fact that America didn’t mind going it alone if the world “failed” to support his strategic aims. All the same, his administration made some effort to patch together a Potemkin coalition for the Iraq War, if only so the American public wouldn’t have to confront how little global legitimacy their “preemptive” campaign of aggression truly had abroad. Eventually, though, the bill came due. When Hurricane Katrina hit, all Bush’s institutional failures — at home and abroad — suddenly became impossible to deny.

Then, almost overnight, Barack Obama emerged as a redemptive hero for Americans desperate to restore the decorum of postwar liberal internationalism. The cowpoke-as-president act was over. Guantánamo would be closed and America would return to multilateralism. More to the point, the military-industrial complex’s insatiable desire for violence abroad could be dismissed as an aberration of the Bush years. Anglo-American liberalism, in short, was “back”, with Obama’s professorial cadence reassuring the establishment that politics-as-theatre could again be conducted in full sentences, and that kayfabe for people with college degrees was once more safe to enjoy.

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Trump’s crackdown is only just beginning

By Lee Siegel

Yet the moment Obama met America’s security machinery, the machinery won. After spending a year trying to shutter Guantánamo, he surrendered to institutional inertia, characteristically throwing up his hands and claiming he was powerless to do anything, even as he became an enthusiastic supporter of drone-striking America’s foes. After eight years of these contradictions, many voters were unsurprisingly ready to return to the unvarnished, self-interested “realness” that President Bush had teased during his doomed administration. Enter Trump, a town crier of a man who promised early and often during his 2016 run to restock the camp. Several times during his political ascent, Trump declared he’d “load Guantánamo up with lots of bad dudes — believe me.” Supremely untroubled by the precedent set by its rights-free detainees, Trump joyfully embraced the barbarism. And if most American voters opposed Guantanamo Bay, a majority of Republicans were in favor of keeping it open forever. And, ever since Trump began his venture into politics 10 years ago, he has embraced Guantanamo’s no-holds-barred approach, leaning into the schoolyard bully persona many GOP voters want. Never mind that it’s a deliberate performance — wrestling heel for the weak-kneed “libs”.

As part of that heel performance, Trump has taken Bush’s go-it-alone instincts several steps further. As a juvenile show of strength, Trump has never shown any real concern for America’s reputation abroad; he’s more WWE than UN. Shove your enemies, humiliate your allies, and welcome the boos. Trump openly mocks Nato allies, calling the alliance “obsolete,” while cosying up to autocrats like Kim Jong-un. International agreements, meanwhile, mean nothing to him. In one of his more recent displays of schoolyard bully duplicity, Trump dangled the prospect of a peace deal with Iran, floating photo-op summits and whispering sweet nothings about negotiation — all while greenlighting a pressure campaign designed to humiliate them to the highest degree possible.

All the while, Trump has brought the logic of War on Terror violence back home — deploying masked ICE agents to round up undocumented immigrants. As at Guantánamo, detainees are frequently stripped of habeas corpus and other standard liberal protections. Even more shocking, Trump has deported hundreds of immigrants to El Salvador’s CECOT prison, a horror show operating well outside liberal democratic norms. And, last month, Trump and his allies unironically started promoting the idea of an “Alligator Alcatraz”. A Florida detention site, surrounded by giant snakes and carnivorous reptiles, its fate is ultimately being hashed out in the courts. But whatever happens there, it feels grimly appropriate that Guantánamo is just a few hundred miles across the Straits of Florida.

Outside of, say, Viktor Orbán, it’s hard to imagine any other leader of a wealthy democratic country embracing something as juvenile and bloodthirsty as an alligator-ringed prison island. Not just because alligators and pythons aren’t present in the waterways of Berlin or Brussels, but because most other Western democracies, even in their most aggressive elements, long ago abandoned such macho displays.

Still, that “civilized” restraint comes with its own blind spots. For its part, the European establishment is currently doing everything in its power to hubristically pave the way for the eventual triumph of their own Trump-like strongmen. Earlier this month, virtually every mainstream German party in Cologne publicly committed to avoid linking immigration to “negative social developments such as unemployment or threats to domestic security”. That leaves only the AfD willing to address the rising concerns of German citizens, with the political consequences predictable and forthcoming.

To what lengths should a country go to preserve its way of life — and, with it, its political culture? What happens when terrorists seek to destroy that culture, or when large numbers of newcomers arrive with little intention of conforming to its established norms? Donald Trump, while certainly no intellect, instinctively understands that every regime, liberal or not, is ultimately just another system of rule. Yes, the Anglo-American tradition offers some humane values and democratic ideals. But without borders, hierarchies and limits there’s no sustaining it.

“Alligator Alcatraz” might be a grotesque caricature of national security. And, no matter what happens to Hambali and his fellow inmates, Guantánamo will remain a permanent stain on the American political tradition. But the motivations behind these excesses reflect the same impatience that saw the American public both re-elect Bush and see-saw back to Trump — an impatience with political kayfabe and the fiction that liberal democracies only ever rule through consent, not coercion.

Trump’s break from this postwar tradition is essential to understanding his appeal. He and his supporters no longer feel the need to lie about the nature of the liberal project, which helps explain why yesterday Trump signed an executive order to change the name of the Department of Defense to the far more accurate — but infinitely less polite — “Department of War”, as it was previously called in the first half of the 20th century.

Reflectively, in 1947, at the dawn of America’s world dominance, the name was changed because it no longer reflected how the military wished to portray itself to the world. But now that the sun is setting on American hegemony, Trump and his acolytes wish to nostalgically revisit the glory days of the nation’s unabashed — and unashamed — power. To put it bluntly, they want to reveal the liberal state in its truest light. Not as a utopia, but as an empire, one that in the final analysis mainly protects and enriches its own citizens. That it’s currently failing at both, except for the wealthiest tenth of the population, is, in a way, beside the point. The performance has changed, and the liberal myths Guantánamo laid bare have now also been all but abandoned rhetorically.

As for the Cuban camp itself, its continued existence, after two presidential promises to close it, reveals just how unaccountable the American security state has now become. Despite Trump’s promise to take on the deep state, indeed, it now works with him to abandon all pretense of upholding the old liberal myths of procedural justice and universal rights. The War on Terror long ago faded from the headlines, but its institutional architecture endures — executive secrecy, legal improvisation and extrajudicial killings.

Earlier this week, Trump boasted that US forces had destroyed a “narco-terrorist” vessel off the coast of Venezuela. The administration quickly framed the strike, which killed 11 people, as a counterterrorism operation, invoking the same playbook that justified the indefinite detention of “unlawful enemy combatants” at Guantánamo. A drone video, shared triumphantly by the President himself, shows a small boat framed in a military targeting scope before being blasted by a missile strike.

To make the moment even more dystopian, Venezuela’s government immediately denounced the footage as “AI-generated propaganda”. Perhaps the images were AI-altered to make the appearance of the strike look even more devastating, but that’s more or less irrelevant. Because the deeper truth is that the President of the United States is proudly deploying lethal force in legal gray zones, somewhere between war and policing, without congressional oversight, much less public approval.

Just like Guantánamo, bombing the Venezuelan boat was an act designed not only to punish, but to perform. The difference is that what was once hidden is now blasted on social media for likes and shares. If, in short, Guantánamo started as a loophole, 20 years on we must now understand it as a laboratory — for testing the bounds of the liberal project, and for showing up the brutal calculations that underpin all politics, no matter their ostensible ideology.

“Notice how muted the reaction has been to the new Hubs,” wrote the anonymous X memelord Drukpa Kunley shortly after Starmer announced his third-party deportation scheme. Indeed, there was no “return hub” discourse. But perhaps that was the point. The suspiciously twee euphemism suggests Labour has discovered a quietly revolutionary way of doing its dirty work.

On the surface the “hub” is a bastion of technocratic benevolence, an embodiment of a British state that wants to be your bestie. The word conjures images of Technicolor beanbag chairs and gel pen-wielding lanyard-wearers. Yet, scrape a little and the hub reveals itself as a formless, fickle, and malleable euphemism — it bends to the whims of whoever wields it.

Before it became a term of civic optimism, the hub had a rougher beginning. Once upon a time, the hub was a “hobbe”. From the proto-German hubbel, meaning “hill” or “bump”, the early hobbe was an unappetizing prospect. Geoffrey Chaucer used “hobbe” to describe something wretched, while a medieval English-to-Latin dictionary defined it as a tumorous swelling, a synonym for a “bube” — of bubonic plague fame. These hubs signaled sickness, not progress.

Around two centuries later, in a 1570 farming manual, English poet and country gent Barnaby Googe gave the term a new meaning. He described the hub as “the midst of the Wheele, called the Naue or Hobbe of the wheele”. Reincarnated as the bump at the center of a wheel, it became a mechanism of both physical and moral progress.

As English standardized, the hobbe became the hub, and went transatlantic. In 1858, Boston grandee Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. declared the city’s State-House to be “the hub of the solar system”, and you couldn’t “carry off a hub without taking the spokes with it, or you would damage the wheel”. Boston soon became widely known as “The Hub of the Universe” or simply “the Hub”. Holmes asserted that this progress was driven by an intellectual and moral WASP elite he termed the “Boston Brahmins”, positioning them and Boston at the forefront of American prosperity.

Yet it was in the second half of the 20th century that the hub’s galactic potential began to emerge. Following the war, the Western imagination underwent a profound shift, rejecting a world of essentialism and rootedness in favor of motion and interconnection.

As N.S. Lyons observes, before 1945 nations were moored in soil, faith, and kin — what Karl Popper derided as the “closed society”. After the catastrophe, those bonds began to be seen as a gateway to fascism. Theodor Adorno’s theory of the “authoritarian personality” diagnosed loyalty to family or nation as pathology. Popper went further, branding the national community itself “anti-humanitarian propaganda”. The postwar settlement determined that the “strong gods” of belonging and faith were to be dismantled, replaced with the “weak gods” of openness, tolerance, doubt, and consumer comfort. This cultural transformation set the stage for the rise of the hub.

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Bringing this dream to reality would require three consecutive revolutions — in politics, commerce, and technology. First, a postwar political reconstruction to engineer openness and interdependence. Second, a global managerial and commercial revolution to facilitate this ever-deeper integration. And third, a tech revolution to eliminate friction from the system entirely.

Western leaders embedded the new postwar values into the emerging supra-national institutions. By sharing coal, steel, law, and standards, the founding fathers of the European Union, Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman, argued that war would be “not only unthinkable but materially impossible”. In this new era, centralization and technocracy would become the overarching political theology.

Then, to manage the emerging sprawl of global interconnection, the hub was unleashed. Amid the postwar manufacturing and consumption booms, the hub became the weapon of choice for the new managerial class tasked with holding the new system together. First, in 1955, Delta Airlines pioneered the “hub-and-spoke” system at Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport to consolidate flights through a central location. The idea was simple: concentrate routes, reduce operating costs, and increase connectivity. The aviation hub model quickly became industry standard, and a model for managing all complex systems.

Logistics followed suit. Inspired by the Delta Airlines model, a young Yale student named Fred Smith wrote a thesis proposing that a hub system could enable overnight deliveries. Years later, he put the idea into action, founding FedEx and revolutionizing logistics by routing all deliveries through the company’s global SuperHub in Memphis, launched in 1981.

Finally, the Internet arrived. It would streamline not only physical infrastructure (think Ethernet hubs), but societal infrastructure too. “Technology hubs”, explained Y-Combinator founder Paul Graham, were where “rich people and nerds” clustered to build the future. And so Silicon Valley became a mythic ecosystem that could change the world. By 2000, Wired magazine was documenting a global outbreak of “Silicon envy”, observing that “high-tech hubs now dot the globe” all seeking to unlock the wealth, productivity, and magic that the hub could conjure.

Enter, Tony Blair. Despite lacking a phone and an email address, Blair wanted to emulate Silicon Valley’s boundless techno-optimism in British government. And so he waged a hub revolution of his own: launching the Policy Hub website in March 2002. This online tool was designed to centralize policymaking through shared initiatives, tools, and case studies, bringing the spirit of the hub to government. Awestruck by American productivity and desperate to modernize the state, Britain became hub obsessed. Prior to Blair, the term “hub” appeared in Parliament only 613 times in 200 years, mostly in reference to transport. In just 13 years under New Labour, it was used 885 times.

If Blair was a hub emissary, then David Cameron was a hub zealot. Amid austerity, he sought to rewire the state with a series of efficient hubs that combined services. Growth Hubs attempted to reshape local enterprise. Family Hubs provided womb-to-tomb family support. Launched in 2012, GOV.UK was the hub of hubs. It was a digital paragon of efficiency: soothing sans-serif GDS Transport font, paternalistic “nudges” drawn from supposedly cutting-edge psychological insights. All of it designed to dissolve the sprawling machinery of government into a single, frictionless one-stop shop. In just six years, hub discourse in parliament exploded to 2,067 references — doubling Labour’s efforts in half the time.

The Cameron years were defined by the mythos of the hub. If we all come together — individuals, communities, ideas and technology — there’s nothing we cannot solve. From GOV.UK and the London Olympics, to legalization of same-sex marriage, Cameron unwaveringly believed in the open society, benevolently ruled by hubs.

But Brexit was a devastating blow. In search of sovereignty and border control, the spirit of the closed society returned. Voters had rejected the hub ideology of frictionless integration. In the years that followed, successive Tory Prime Ministers attempted to invoke “strong god” rhetoric. Theresa May scorned “citizens of nowhere”; the Rwanda policy aimed to shatter the postwar consensus.

However, in practice things were different. The open society continued to prosper through none other than the hub. Theresa May doubled down on tech hubs. Boris Johnson followed with green energy, nuclear fusion, and hydrogen. Rishi Sunak sought to establish the UK as a global center for AI safety and launched the Quantum Computing Innovation Hub.

This tension reveals a burning psychodrama at the heart of the British state’s self-conception. It wants to be a high-tech superpower without the pain of rebuilding its Victorian bureaucracy. It wants to make cuts to state services while sounding friendly and benign. And it wants to project global openness while addressing the concerns of an increasingly reactionary electorate. Rather than confront these paradoxes, Britain reaches for the soothing Potemkin policy of the hub. Time and again, leaders choose cuddly vagueness over the hard work of politics.

It’s now Starmer’s turn to take up the mantle. In the brand-new Modern Industrial Strategy, published in June, the Government announced its intention to invest in no less than 19 different genres of hub. Some are mere updates of existing hubs, but others are entirely new: commercial innovation, AI skills, life sciences, defense, professional and business services, and robotics.

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By Fred Sculthorp

In just one year since Starmer entered Downing Street, “hub” has appeared 966 times in parliamentary debates. In June 2025 alone, it popped up 166 times — the highest month since records began. At this pace, the term may feature over 4,000 times before the next election. So inundated by hubs, we are numb to them. Ubiquitous and bland, they’re an instant eyeball glazer.

Which brings us back to the return hubs. The policy embodies the central paradox of the Starmer project. “Return” gestures toward something more reactionary — not just deportation, but a broader RETVRN to an imagined orderly past. Meanwhile, “hub”, of course, is the open society incarnate.

Amid the metaphysical civil war bubbling between voters, Starmer must tread a tightrope. To keep the favor of metropolitan progressives, he must demonstrate technocratic competence. To hold off Reform, he must cut immigration. If he can wield the return hub, flexing toughness while preserving a progressive surface, he might just keep hold of power. The result could be a distinctively British settlement: quietly hardcore with a cuddly demeanor. It would represent yet another evolutionary leap for the hub.

But if Starmer falls, the hub could go down with him. A leader more hostile to the hallowed open society, perhaps a Nigel Farage or Robert Jenrick, may choose to kill this symbol of the ancien régime. What might come next? The answer may already be here: look no further than the meme-powered “Skullcrushing” remigration subsuming America. The hub’s wheel will turn — or it will break. Its fate is in Starmer’s hands.

Both will press their claims to mastery of the land, citing historical precedents both real and fictive, both will rely on demography to strengthen their sword-hand, and the stronger of the two will either subjugate, expel or destroy the weaker. After just over a century, from the emergence of the modern Palestine conflict during the British Mandate, this process is drawing towards its conclusion, with the total reduction of the Palestinian population of Gaza through bombing, starvation, military occupation and forced exile.

Against the public opposition of the IDF’s chief of staff, General Eyal Zamir, Netanyahu’s cabinet has now settled on the full occupation of Gaza. As Western states now slowly turn against Israel’s ever-expanding war aims, and conservative outlets, previously supportive of Israel’s war, belatedly discover the horrors the war has wrought on Gaza’s civilian population, the only wonder is how long it took them to perceive what was always inevitable. Writing in UnHerd at the beginning of the war, two years ago, I observed that “when Israel eventually conquers the ruins of Gaza, it has no exit plan for how to extract itself.” Therefore, I suggested, the “logic of the war” would ultimately ensure the final expulsion of the Palestinians from Gaza.

And now we are here. For all the domestic drama over “hate marches”, radicalised students and media bias, nothing has changed. What was always going to happen, and what those protesting always said would happen, is now happening. The IDF itself does not think that its new-found mission of ruling Gaza is possible. Nor does the current Israeli government, eager to expand Israel’s borders in every direction, see the presence, or even existence, of the territory’s population as desirable. The war is ending as it was always going to end, in the ruin of Gaza’s population, even if Netanyahu continues to insist that Israel’s occupation will only be temporary.

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Britain has learned nothing from Palestine

By Aris Roussinos

Yet for no benefit at all, Western conservatives squandered domestic political capital on a foreign war that was always going to result in their shocked protestations of horror, too late, at the results of the actions they for years supported. After two years of discussing Palestinians as something akin to the marauding bugs in Starship Troopers, some have lately discovered they are humans after all. Others are yet to reach this conclusion, and perhaps never will. Clouded by a combination of domestic anxieties and tribal loyalties, the magic spell cast by Israel over the Western center-right has scrambled both its sense of morality and of self-interest.

Instead of fleeing to the West, the Palestinians, in the most brutal circumstances imaginable, are making every effort to stay in their ancestral homeland. They are doing precisely what critics of mass immigration demand of refugee populations, in a situation far worse than that faced by most who reach Britain’s shores. Western Leftists, mocked by conservative commentators for their reworking of the Palestine catastrophe into the “omnicause”, have throughout this period shown clearer moral and political judgment than our own tribe. Of what value was it hitching ourselves to this slow-motion atrocity? Unable, due to our place in America’s imperial system, to prevent the carnage, it would have been better to have washed our hands of its blood entirely.

Simply, Gaza displays the vast gulf between the self-aggrandizing myths underlying our current political regime, and the harder, eternal truths of human nature. The founding myth of what adherents of the post-1991 liberal order like to call the “1945 order” is that the dynamics of ethnic rivalry, taken to their very extremes in Gaza, are not, in fact, inherent to human societies: that tribal passions are whipped up in otherwise sensible populations by cynical politicians acting as provocateurs, and that rival populations, in Bosnia, Kosovo and elsewhere, can be compelled by muscular liberal governance to live together when they would prefer not to.

This can be termed the governing ideology of the Western world between the rise of American hegemony and the Right-wing populist revolt across the West in the 2010s. Indeed, in its counterintuitive and unevidenced belief that cultural diversity would dampen rather than provoke such conflicts, this quasi-religious dogma, often under American tutelage, is responsible for much of the dysfunction and political volatility of present-day Europe, which had already answered these questions, through bloody experience, time and time again over the preceding centuries — before then exporting them to Palestine.

Yet what is most galling, perhaps, is that the advocates of this dogma routinely cite the horrors of the Second World War as justification for their millenarian scheme, in which every Right-wing adversary is a second Hitler barring the road to the cosmopolitan paradise. When it comes to Gaza, however, where a civilian population has been herded into ghettos, bombed and shelled to oblivion, starved as a matter of policy, and now await a military occupation, administered by local puppets, geared at their expulsion — only now have the champions of the liberal order deigned to notice wrongdoing. While the politics of ethnic self-interest is forbidden in the West, Israel is permitted to carry it to its murderous extremes: this is the incoherence at the heart of the liberal order, and it is not only Leftists who notice it.

Adherents of the liberal order, which is to say the American empire, must now own the catastrophe in Gaza as their own, just as the bloody conquests, massacres and expulsions of Nazi Germany have been laid for decades at the door of the political Right by liberals in defense of their millenarian visions. Without Israel’s unequivocal backing over decades by the liberal hegemon, none of what has transpired in Gaza over the past two years could have occurred. It does not matter which party sits on Washington’s throne: the alliance with Israel is a more foundational pillar of American politics than its ring of NATO client states, to the chagrin of America’s European satraps, torn between their professed values and the realities of their subordinate imperial position.

Equally, Netanyahu may be a self-interested demagogue, but the war in Gaza has taken place with the firm backing of the majority of the population of what is undeniably a democracy, and which loudly flaunts this status, wrapped in rainbow flags and all the other accoutrements of the liberal West, in advance of its own ends. It is Israel’s security elites currently appealing to Trump’s conscience, urging the emperor towards mercy on the conquered, and not its voters. If Gaza is a genocide, it is a firmly democratic one, for which liberal democracy must shoulder the blame.

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As even the august journal of Washington diplomacy, Foreign Affairs notes, “What is truly shocking about events in Gaza is both the scale of the devastation and that the government of Israel can genuinely say that its policies reflect the will of most Israelis.” How can America condemn Russia for its drone and missile strikes on Ukraine, compared to the far vaster destruction wrought by American armaments and diplomatic cover in Gaza? How can Washington condemn the revision of borders by force and the expulsion of whole populations, when at its terminus its own empire has abandoned the moral rationale it chose, for some decades, to justify its existence?

For a quarter-century, and with much moral grandstanding, advocates of America’s right to global domination, from DC thinktanks down to Washington’s global constellation of proxy NGOs, cited the Holocaust as its justification for global empire. “Never Again” would be written across the global skies in the contrails of Washington’s F16s. What evolved into the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, through which the United States declared the right and duty to intervene in foreign wars — though only when the governments committing atrocities were foes of its imperial system — has now been shown for what it always was.

The war in Gaza is not an affront to liberal democracy: it is the logical outcome of its actually-existing power structures, directly affected by the donated weapons and munitions of the liberal hegemon. The end-state of all this moralizing rhetoric is the destruction of an entire people in their own land: the moral grandstanding of the liberal hawks now lies buried, rotting with them, in the rubble of Gaza. The rest of the world will hear no more of America’s guiding moral purpose. In a world guided by naked self-interest, and the malign workings of our imperial overlord, us Europeans would do well to follow our own path too.

If the Democrats want to vanquish MAGA, then they need to win back the 11%. Even garnering the support of half of them could deliver the party from the political wilderness. Doing so isn’t that complicated. It requires crafting a program that speaks to workers’ economic interests and social attitudes. Of course, that might be easier said than done.

The CWCP analyzed 128 public-opinion questions from three comprehensive surveys: the American National Election Studies survey, the General Social Survey, and the Cooperative Election Study. We looked at questions concerning immigration, civil rights, social norms, environmental policy, and two types of economic policy: predistribution (altering the division of the social income through bargaining power and higher wages) and redistribution (doing the same through taxes and welfare).

We sorted the responses by social class, so that we could compare the attitudes of working-class Americans — those with less than a college education and who fall in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution — with those of people above those education and income thresholds. We also looked at responses dating back to 1960 and through 2022, allowing us to compare attitudes across the decades. Then we isolated working-class Trump voters to compare their attitudes with those of the rest.

The resulting report confirms that working-class voters, even blue-collar Trump voters, aren’t a “basket of deplorables,” as Hillary Clinton once described them. They aren’t in thrall to a demagogue or hopelessly lost in the fog of MAGA conspiracies. Rather, working-class voters largely support a range of progressive economic policies and hold more progressive views than middle- and upper-class voters on a number of bread-and-butter questions (especially those concerning jobs).

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For instance, a majority of working-class voters support raising the minimum wage, boosting spending on Social Security and Medicare, limiting imports to protect domestic jobs, cutting the cost of prescription drugs, increasing federal investments in infrastructure and public schools, making it easier to join a union, putting workers on company boards, implementing a millionaires’ tax, and even the notion of a job guarantee.

Even more remarkable: working-class views on civil and LGBT rights and immigration have shifted to the Left over the past two decades — a fact easily missed by those in the liberal media who assume that anyone who works with his hands is a frothing reactionary. For instance, a whopping 61% of working-class respondents favor a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, and 74% oppose family-separating deportations. Similarly, more than 80% of working-class respondents support legal protections against discrimination for gays and lesbians and favor background checks for gun owners.

Put another way: working-class voters are largely economic egalitarians, worried about inequality and in favor of the government leveling the playing field between capital and labor, the asset-rich and the asset-less. These voters have also steadily drifted to the Left on a range of cultural issues. So what accounts for the fact that these voters have abandoned the Democratic Party? Our research provides some clues.

First, while working-class voters are populists and egalitarians, they aren’t liberal welfarists. That is, while they favor a policy mix aimed at improving wages and bargaining power and protecting them against the effects of globalization, they are quite skeptical of new government regulations, welfare spending, and expensive social proposals. They prefer combating inequality at the level of wages and workplace power over cash transfers.

Democrats have long assumed that all progressive economic policy is roughly the same, thus straying from the kind of economic populism that appeals to blue-collar voters. Today, the Democratic brand is much more closely associated with redistributive cash transfers and social services than with a program focused squarely on work, wages, jobs, pensions, and trade. The reputation is well earned, given that only 18% of Democratic congressional candidates in 2022 prioritized jobs-focused rhetoric, as previous research by the CWCP found.

Second, although working-class voters have indeed shifted to the Left on many cultural issues, they’ve been far outpaced in that direction by the educated, professional-class voters who now form the party’s base. The latter, it’s fair to say, have become ultra-liberal in recent years. As a result, a wide attitude gap has opened up between the two camps. This has generated a significant amount of class tension. And overcoming it won’t be easy. But the challenge is surmountable.

In broad strokes, what’s needed is a fairly simple formula. If Democrats want to win back workers, they can start by loudly advocating for a worker-focused program — more moderate on cultural issues but decidedly populist on economic ones. They ought to promise to raise the minimum wage, protect industrial jobs from free trade, increase infrastructure spending, better fund public schooling, expand Social Security, strengthen Medicare, and guarantee full employment.

Partly, this will require some redistributive taxation of the richest Americans, and Democrats shouldn’t be shy about saying so; the working class would be with them. But the predistributive element must remain at the forefront.

On social and cultural questions, meanwhile, Democrats have no need to chase the Trumpian Right. But they ought to pull back from social commitments that put them starkly at odds with working-class voters. For example, progressives don’t need to ape Trump’s cruel deportation policies, nor should they drop their commitment to finding a genuine path to citizenship. But they do need to recognize the need for greater border security and a more restrictive immigration regime.

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Which brings us back to the 11%. We found that in 2020, that percentage of working-class Trump supporters fit in this populist sweet spot: economically egalitarian and culturally tolerant but moderate. With the right approach and candidate, they are persuadable. But are the Democrats amenable? That’s the big question.

As the party’s core support has climbed a few rungs up the class ladder, the interests, values, and attitudes of Democratic Party mouthpieces increasingly reflect this group. Not only do many top Democrats have no clue what working-class voters actually want, but they have fewer of them in their districts, and almost none in their offices, whom they might ask. Worse, even when the occasional liberal turns to the working class, there are strong headwinds preventing the message from becoming dominant in the party. Consider that so much of the Democratic Party’s image is not shaped by party communiqués, but through the institutions where liberals reign supreme: the media, the arts, the academy, think tanks, nonprofits, and philanthropic foundations. In these places, cultural liberalism is the currency of the realm, and liberal elites aren’t prepared to cashier their power.

What incentive do culturally progressive but economically inegalitarian liberals have to give up their seats in favor of working-class representatives? Not many. But if party elites have any desire of regaining a majority and pursuing a progressive policy agenda, they had better start listening to blue-collar voters. The quickest path back to power for the Democrats is to embrace a genuine social populism, against their donors wishes, and against the inclinations of many of their professionals. Indeed, doing so is the only shot they have of winning a working-class majority.

More than the film’s heroes, though, Inherit the Wind matters most for its villains: especially “Matthew Harrison Brady”, the film’s anti-science prosecutor, a character clearly modeled on three-time Democratic Party presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. While brilliantly written on a line level, playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee used the Scopes trial as a vehicle to portray the future of the American nation as a fight between rural religious dogma and urban “free thought.” In doing so, it recasts William Jennings Bryan as a blustering, ignorant fundamentalist whose religious zeal borders on madness.

While Inherit the Wind acknowledges the critical importance of a church-state separation in public education, the lack of historical nuance in its portrayal of Bryan is, in retrospect, breathtaking. A deeply thoughtful man, Bryan helped prosecute the Scopes trial in large part because he opposed the eugenics then popular across evolutionary thought. Not that this is simply about the posthumous reputation of a long-forgotten politician. In his radical ambitions to transform America, Bryan’s mistreatment has had grave consequences for the nation, not just in its seemingly endless culture war, but also for those hoping to again lead populist economic reforms.

Perhaps Inherit the Wind’s biggest disservice to Bryan happens in the film’s third act. It climaxes with his surrogate blathering like a fool, trying to give one last speech that no one’s interested in, and seeking Biblical verse as the answer for everything. And that’s not the worst of it. In terms of historical narrative, the greatest lies are those of omission. The fact is that, a century ago, many of America’s most prominent evolutionists were also Social Darwinists who, in the name of “progress”, advocated for the sterilization of the poor, indigent, and disabled under the auspices of improving the “fitness” of humanity.

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All this Bryan viewed as deeply immoral and anti-Christian, not to mention scientifically dubious. Certainly, that feels like an important detail to include about the man portrayed in cinema merely as a doctrinaire zealot of “Old-Time Religion”. Far from being a one-dimensional conservative fanatic, then, Bryan was an early champion of economic fairness. Long before the New Deal, he advocated for the use of the power of the state to level the playing field for ordinary Americans — especially workers and farmers — against the growing dominance of big business. His platform laid much of the ideological groundwork that Franklin Roosevelt would later use to build the New Deal coalition. While Bryan never won the presidency, his ideas didn’t disappear. They became the backbone of modern American “liberalism” — at least as that term applies to economics.

This is important in a broader sense, too. Without the New Deal — which Herbert Hoover once bitterly called “Bryanism under new words and methods” — many historians believe the country would have ended in some sort of revolution, as the Great Depression ground the Republic to dust. With many states suffering through unemployment levels as high as 25%, and the pre-FDR government proving completely unwilling to do anything to provide financial relief, tensions surely would have reached a boiling point. Certainly, that’s what happened everywhere from China to Spain during this same period. In that case, of course, there would have been no mass military intervention helping halt the Nazis, nor the heroic dismantling of Imperial Japan in the Pacific. And the Fifties golden era, which the Boomer Left wholly took for granted, would have never transpired without Bryan serving as the perfect mid-point of American reform and Christian tradition.

And if that explains Bryan’s role in the broad sweep of America’s 20th century, the man whose supporters affectionately called “The Great Commoner” matters in other ways too. Almost alone among his nation’s leaders, he helped America’s Anglo-Protestant majority to understand social support not as incompatible with America’s emphasis on individual liberty, as the Social Darwinists claimed — but rather as an indelibly Christian moral imperative. This is clear from Bryan’s program. He argued that the state should counter the overweening power of the banks and industrial corporations by legalizing strikes, subsidizing farmers and taxing the rich. Well ahead of his time, Bryan also wanted to ban private campaign spending.

Watching or reading Inherit the Wind, one would never realize the essential contribution of Bryan to liberal reform. The message, especially in the film adaptation, is almost unmistakable. For the states to avoid regressing into Klan-like dictatorship, secular urban elites must band together to stop religious populism. In many ways, Bryan is treated less like himself and more like Strom Thurmond and Billy Graham — a manifestation of the Dixiecrat version of the Democratic Party.

Bryan, of course, was anything but a Dixiecrat. At his core, rather, he was what’s known as a producerist, believing that a healthy democracy depends on a strong base of economically independent citizens who own their labor and aren’t beholden to corporate bosses or government bureaucrats. Rather than concentrating power in massive corporations or distant state agencies, producerists envisioned an economy built around self-reliant individuals and families, whose livelihoods give them both dignity and political autonomy. The idea was simple but radically democratic. When most people have control over what they produce, no elite — financial or political — can easily coerce or silence them.

Producerism has deep roots. For Thomas Jefferson, it wasn’t just an economic preference, but a moral ideal. A nation of “hirelings”, as one late 19th century producerist put it, “can never be free.” Without economic independence, workers and consumers will inevitably be intimidated — if not blackmailed — by wealthy businessmen and elites. Bryan sympathized with these producerist notions, which is why he was chosen to head not just the Democratic Party’s presidential ticket, but also that of the then-surging People’s Party in the 1896 election, which explicitly attacked big monied interests.

Though his percentage of the vote went down slightly with every presidential election cycle, Bryan’s Christian-centered populism proved its appeal to a vast swathe of the American voting public. Had he not also been required to fight against the distortions of the press during the heyday of yellow journalism, he might have been president several times over. Of course, that’s not what Inherit the Wind and its condescending urban playwrights cared about. Read the play, or especially watch the film, and it’s clear the writers imagine Bryan and his supporters as a bunch of ignorant and vulgar fools, utterly resistant to thinking of anyone other than themselves. As “H.K. Hornbek” — the story’s avatar for H.L. Mencken — puts it: “These are the boobs making the laws in our democracy!” The writers of Inherit the Wind seemed to believe, as many now do on the progressive Left, that only the professional managerial class is fit to lead.

As if that wasn’t clear enough from the film’s premise, the protagonists of Inherit the Wind story are an alliance of urban lawyers, journalists, and educators, who openly act in cahoots with one another. They not only live in the same hotel suites, but pool their funds and strategize how to survive the confederacy of dunces they’re stuck sharing a nation with. The writers portray this as not only laudatory but self-sacrificing. As Inherit the Wind recounts, these elite urban protagonists work to deploy the full power of the federal legal system to override local democratic decision-making. What should come in its place? The answer, once more, is clear: democracy, yes, but with rigid safeguards, designed to protect the educated elite from the knuckle-dragging plebs.

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If, in other words, Inherit the Wind unfairly assails Bryan for his obscurantism, even as it ignores his unassailable backing by the working classes, the film is ultimately an elitist assault on the very idea of representative democracy. And if that obviously has echoes today — just think of Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” framing — Inherit the Wind has an even starker legacy. After all, the snide condescension it evokes ultimately ensured the collapse of the New Deal coalition Bryan helped birth, allowing the pretentious college youngsters to take over the Democratic Party in 1972. The result then was George McGovern’s nomination and the worst electoral defeat in US history. Yet it’s also a thrashing that multiple generations have learnt the wrong lessons from — blaming McGovern’s loss on his economic policies rather than the social radicalism and class condescension of those who hijacked the party.

The opposite, it goes without saying, is true too. If Bryan had won any of his three presidential bids — or had his legacy not been tarnished by popular fiction — he might have given the American Left something it still lacks: a coherent identity rooted in the country’s own religious and producerist traditions. But as with Bernie Sanders, Eugene Debs, and other charismatic champions of economic justice, the American political establishment worked overtime to deny him office. First, they misled the public about his ideals and his goals. Then, with the help of progressive urban elites, they turned him into an object of ridicule — a George Wallace-like figure of backward rural resentment to “progress”.

There’s plenty of evidence, through all this, that Inherit the Wind had a real impact in practice. Other than perhaps To Kill a Mockingbird — which also boasts a similarly condescending regionalist framing — few works of 20th century US culture have had a greater influence on how progressives understand their own political culture. Widely assigned in mid-to-late 20th-century high school curricula across not only theater, but also history and English courses, Inherit the Wind transformed Bryan from the Gilded Age’s most essential liberal reformer, a tireless advocate for labor and working-class economic fairness, into a one-dimensional “Bible-thumper”.

Yet behind this caricature of Middle Americans is a more consequential truth: Bryan was the American Left’s bridge — between Jeffersonian producerism and New Deal liberalism, between evangelical moralism and economic fairness, and between the nation’s deep-seated spiritual yearning and its often-contradictory democratic ambitions. For the American Left to recover a truly majoritarian project, one capable of appealing beyond the confines of graduate school seminars and NPR pledge drives, it must stop looking to turn the United States into a Western European-style social democracy and instead recover its own intellectual genealogy. That genealogy runs straight through the Great Commoner, an unrepentant Christian and an economic radical both.

In ancient Athens, democracy meant government by the people, but the word demos had a resonance of the common people, what some might see as the rabble or riff-raff. In a similar way, the term “the people” might include William Hague and Lady Gaga, but it has a more specific reference to people who don’t usually count, the extras or background artists of human life, individuals who fall outside the official social framework. Mick Lynch is more authentically part of the people than Stephen Fry, but not because he’s “uneducated”. Jeremy Corbyn is “educated” but part of the people. (In the 19th century, “uneducated” meant often enough “didn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge”.) In the New Testament narrative of the birth of Jesus, the angels are countless, the people are counted (there’s a census under way), and the shepherds don’t count. [1. Sticklers for historical accuracy might be interested to know that there wasn’t actually a census going on when Jesus was born, since if there was we would have heard about it from other sources. It’s simply a narrative device for getting the Messiah born in Bethlehem, the royal city, as opposed to Nazareth, a scruffy little rural backwater.]

Things are defined partly by what they exclude. All the individuals, or a nation taken together, constitute the population, but you arrive at the idea of the people by subtracting from this unwieldy mass. Some of them — slaves or “aliens” for example — may live in the country but not be citizens. What other people don’t belong to the people? Intellectuals, for a start. The intelligentsia has no loyalty to any particular place or set of national institutions. Because the mind can roam restlessly over the globe without local constraints, these cosmopolitan figures are thought to constitute a threat to both piety and patriotism. They represent what has been called “the view from nowhere”, and such bloodless abstractions are far removed from the living, breathing reality of the common folk.

This is why the phrase “conservative intellectual” has a mildly oxymoronic ring to it. Conservatives are enamoured of the local and parochial, of family, region and nation, whereas intellectuals are supposed to subject all that to a critique governed by reason rather than affection, logic rather than partisanship, universal principles rather than local allegiances. People who seem to come from nowhere in particular have a sinister, slightly alien quality about them, which accounts for the spooky music of the TV programme Mastermind. The music of University Challenge, by contrast, is a jolly little jingle, but this is because students aren’t exactly intellectuals, in fact sometimes not even intellectuals in the making, and in any case nobody finds them creepy.

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The stereotypical intellectual, then, is really a Jacobin: cerebral, emotionally anaemic, eager to impose his abstract schemes on the messiness of human reality. Both Swift and Shakespeare were aware that ideas which have come unstuck from reality have a touch of madness and violence about them, and the great “English” antagonist of this deranged condition was Edmund Burke (he was of course Irish). In the English empiricist tradition, ideas must be rooted in the senses in order to be real. This is one reason why the novelist Anthony Trollope has always been popular among the British middle classes (Harold Macmillan once remarked that every man should go to bed with a Trollope), yet hasn’t an idea in his head. Once the Jacobins had passed into history, the stereotypical intellectual became the Marxist. The emotional anaemia of these outlandish creatures, not least their lack of humor, is clear enough to everyone who reads them.

Can aristocrats be part of the people? In one sense obviously not, since populism is nothing if not anti-elitist. In this respect, an essentially Right-wing ideology overlaps with a Left-wing one. Yet, successful elites aren’t those which maintain an aloof distance from ordinary people, but those which seek to sink their roots into the common soil and draw their energy from this source. The cultivated landowner admires the honest-to-goodness peasant. Hence the Wooster/Jeeves syndrome so central to English culture. Master and man must keep a certain respectful distance, to be sure, but beneath this they maintain a bond almost as intimate as that between man and wife. My Cambridge tutor had a civilized distaste for clichés but referred to his gardener as “the salt of the earth”. In The Idea of a Christian Society, T.S. Eliot tries to reconcile the minority culture of patricians like himself with the broader life of the nation. The poet W.B. Yeats saw shrewdly that if the Anglo-Irish landowning class to which he pledged his allegiance had managed to assume political leadership of the people, they might not have ended up having their grand houses burnt to the ground or being wheeled around Bournemouth in bath chairs.

Populism, then, can trade on the little man’s admiration for the great man. In the case of Nazi populism, the great man in question was of course Adolf Hitler. But Hitler was also a little man, morally as well as physically. No more commonplace incarnation of the destiny of the nation smirches the pages of history. The Spirit of the people shouldn’t have floppy hair and speak in a hoarse rasp. It was as though Jesus Christ had appeared on earth with a badly fitting wig and a wooden leg. As far as size goes, Nigel Farage has a similar advantage to the Führer. So the little man — the thrifty, industrious, aspiring member of the petty bourgeoisie, to whom both populism and fascism make their appeal — could look up to the Leader while at the same time finding in him a reflection of his own banality.

By pitting the people against the elite, populism aims to achieve an important political goal; but it does so only at the price of running into self-contradiction. It hopes to homogenize the people, and in doing so to suppress a number of vital conflicts within this supposedly unified body. Grotesque disparities of wealth, power, respect and recognition are brazenly papered over. Merchant bankers and garbage collectors share a common front against conventional liberal politics. The contradiction is that denouncing the elite also involves denouncing the faceless corporations on which populism ultimately depends. Despite their much-flaunted radicalism, populist politicians are no more eager to challenge the material interests underpinning the Western way of life than is the liberal metropolitan establishment they despise. The CEO of Tesco is part of the elite, but populists show a marked reluctance to send him packing. Deporting George Monbiot strikes them as a more attractive proposition.

In populist eyes, the people is self-identical — a single organism free of divisions or potentially subversive differences. Individuals may squabble over this or that, but the people itself is never wrong. The voice of the people is the voice of God, as Jacob Rees-Mogg remarked (in Latin, no less). His tongue was, of course, lodged firmly in his cheek: populists believe in the people, but this isn’t the same as having faith in what actual men and women do and believe, such as chucking Rees-Mogg out in a general election.

Far from being self-identical, however, the people is always incomplete. In order to be itself, it needs an Other, whether you call it Jews, immigrants, Arabs, illegals or some other theatrically demonized bunch of aliens. You need to be reminded of who you are by contemplating the fearful sight of who you are not. Where would Farage and his cronies be without a regular supply of small boats?

Sometime towards the end of the 18th century, Europe was gripped by a peculiarly bad idea. The idea was that every ethnic group had a right to its own political state, a notion which lies at the heart of Romantic nationalism. One nation, one Reich. For democrats, people have the right of self-determination; for populist nationalists, the people, ethnically defined, have this right. The distinction turns on the definite article. Ethnicity had been introduced into the argument about whether we should be ruled by ourselves or others. People, in all their conflicts of ideas and clashes of interests, had been transformed into a homogenous entity by virtue of being Poles or Slovenes. This proved from time to time an effective way of shaking off colonial oppression, but in some circles it also made being a Pole or a Slovene more important than anything else about you.

And this proved highly convenient for those governing powers who didn’t want men and women to go around describing themselves as socialists or feminists, Christians or Hindus, traditionalists or modernists. The problem was that if you looked far back enough, ethnic identities tended to disappear. Everyone turned out to be an outsider, interloper, carpetbagger, migrant or blow-in. Exile seemed natural to the human condition. No piece of land was the intrinsic possession of a specific tribe. Like Robinson Crusoe, what you find when you land on an apparently unoccupied island is a human footprint.

Taken together, in fact, I think that the ideas animating Magaworld, though contradicting each other on the surface, represent a distinct societal force — one that divorces the republic from reality, and though years in the making represents a bewildering new retreat from empirical truth. A few years back, Kurt Anderson wrote a book exploring how America has become, to use his eponymous term, a “fantasyland.” I’d go further: it’s clear that the Trump presidency is a fantasyland administration for a fantasyland people, and one with depressing implications for the future of American democracy.

Perhaps the clearest example of Trump’s loony politics is Pete Hegseth. The Secretary of Defense, as the latest case study for America’s obsession with boring redemption-conversion stories, has morphed from a binge-drinking lothario into a fire and brimstone Christian fundamentalist. Forget his toe-curling leaks to journalists: in a series of podcast interviews last year, Hegseth spoke warmly of “sphere sovereignty” — which posits that civil law should defer to the Old Testament, even on matters of women’s rights and homosexuality.

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Such theocratic ambitions are central to the dogma of “Christian Reconstructionism” — the same theology that guides Hegseth’s church in Tennessee. Part of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, its founder Douglas Wilson has argued that, in the war for Christian supremacy, women, children, and other civilians are legitimate targets, stating that “the word of God tells Christian soldiers what to do.” Wilson’s rabid form of faith prompts questions as to whether or not Hegseth, a member of his flock, believes that the Geneva Conventions and the US Constitution should dictate military policy — or the ravings of an Idaho preacher.

Certainly, Hegseth extends his apocalyptic worldview to domestic affairs, writing that the Christian Right is in a “holy war” against the “Leftist spectre”. Nor is that the only spot where the far-Right fringe is now at the very heart of government. That’s clear enough around the so-called “unitary executive” theory. Developed by Russell Vought, Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, it posits that, contrary to centuries of Supreme Court rulings and scholarly interpretation, the US Constitution gives the president complete and exclusive control over anything that falls within the purview of the executive branch of government.

The “unitary executive theory” resides in the same cul-de-sac as the dreams of techno-monarchy that Curtis Yarvin promotes in books and interviews. His belief that democracy is bloated and ineffective, and therefore, in need of replacement from a governing elite, has inspired Peter Thiel — mentor to none other than JD Vance.

Yet amid this unsurprising fear of far-Right influence, the far Left, too, has made its mark. To understand what I mean, look no further RFK Jr. He may have a name and history that many Americans associate with liberalism, but the Secretary of Health and Human Services’s lineage is deceiving. Unlike his father and uncles, he’s a promoter of deranged conspiracy theories, including that HIV does not cause AIDS; that the Covid-19 vaccine was a medical experiment on blacks and Latinos; that Covid itself was engineered to spare Jews and Chinese; and that African Americans have different immune systems than whites, resulting in reduced need for vaccination.

Commentators of the Left typically wonder “what happened” to Kennedy — once a respected environmental lawyer — while those on the Right parade him as a prop for the power of MAGA ideology. The reality is that Kennedy simply represents a faction of the Left that looks at the “medical-industrial complex” with contempt.

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Bruce Springsteen is the last American liberal

By David Masciotra

Tulsi Gabbard, for her part, has followed a similar trajectory. Once the co-chairperson of the Bernie Sanders campaign, the former Democratic member of Congress and presidential candidate advocates for Trump policies with a convert’s zeal. Yet if she’s dumped her support for universal health care, and abandoned the eradication of fossil fuels in the Honolulu surf, her foreign policy positions have remained consistent. In 2017, Gabbard introduced legislation in Congress to “end our country’s illegal war to overthrow the Syrian government” — and shortly after the bill failed to reach a floor vote flew to Damascus to meet President Assad.

These sympathies extend to the leader who helped Assad drop bombs on the people of Aleppo: Vladimir Putin. In this, Gabbard retains support among the so-called “anti-imperialist” Left, people like Max Blumenthal and Matt Taibbi who blame every geopolitical problem on the United States.

I could go on here — but beyond these varied examples, what does this frantic blend of Left and Right actually signify? I think that vivid phrase “fantasyland” can start to offer an answer. As America’s democracy weakens, it becomes aggressive and epistemologically reckless. There’s no longer any belief that the leading institutions of American society — from major political parties to the mainstream media — refuse to accommodate. Accusations of “elitism,” “snobbery,” or “disrespect” of religious faith await anyone who utters a complaint about hallucinatory fantasies that now pollute every conversation of political importance.

The bipartisan phantasm of the Trump administration signifies the completion of a national transformation, one resulting from this misguided accommodation. And it isn’t as if the former gatekeepers of discourse, especially in the legacy media, didn’t, at least in part, invite their own destruction. The leading newspapers, journals, and television networks, with few exceptions, were wrong about the disastrous war on Iraq. They ignored the warning signs of the 2008 financial crash — even as, long before that, they offered shortsighted reporting on the Vietnam War and the AIDS crisis.

Noam Chomsky famously lambasted the mainstream media for “manufacturing consent”. Yet if it’s clear that elite opinion-making is in desperate need of an overhaul, the anything goes, anything is possible blend of cynicism and gullibility that’s replaced it is even worse.

Consider, if nothing else, how quick mad-as-a-hatter conspiracy theories now spread online. There was the “plandemic” documentary asserting that a cabal of international elites planned the Covid-19 pandemic, even as millions of Republicans believed that Joe Biden “rigged” the election in his favor. All the while, large numbers of Leftists reflexively assumed that the first assassination attempt on Donald Trump’s life was fake. The mentality that propelled Trump to power is, in other words, bipartisan and deeply cultural — rather than merely political. Nearly half of Americans believe in demonic possession, while almost a third believe in astrology, and 57% think that ancient advanced civilizations like Atlantis actually existed.

None of this is totally new. Religious fundamentalism, con artistry, and hateful manias have always troubled the American psyche. The Know-Nothing nativists of the 19th century; McCarthyism and the Lavender Scare of the 20th; and the evergreen quality of End Times preachers all show that there is a bottomless appetite for American absurdity. But what made the inauguration of Donald Trump different was that it marked the first time that the forces of absurdity became the country’s governing force. Discontent with the decadent status quo led not to thoughtful reforms — but a rejection of reality itself.

To be fair, not everyone is happy at Trump’s carnival mix of extremism. Many of his policies, especially his assault of vital social services, have already provoked outrage. Opposition will only grow if the Republicans proceed with their plans to make massive cuts to Medicaid. Yet even if his policies ruin Trump’s presidency, the mindset they represent is here to stay, not least given the poisonous effects of social media. Expect America’s fantasyland to remain open for many years to come.

In this respect, at least, I was a class traitor: I didn’t much like The White Lotus. Despite some deft observations, it wore its moralizing too heavily and seemed a little hackneyed: rich white people behaving like monsters once again, blind to the ways in which they were instrumentalizing underpaid ethnic servants. Or maybe it was just too close to the bone — what else was lockdown for the better-off among us but a kind of holiday from real life, being waited upon by harried immigrants? Either way, in my work life there were already lots of white people telling me about the problematic toxicity of other white people, and I felt in no mood to be hectored on my nights off.

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Midnight panty raids on Mumsnet

By Kathleen Stock

Five years on, those days are well behind us. The wave of white-on-white verbal knife crime seems to be in abeyance too, though the delivery drivers are still around. White Lotus 2, a sex farce set in a Sicilian hotel, has been and gone, and the third series is onscreen. Now five episodes in, creator Mike White has dropped both the cruder farcical elements and the facile takeaways, and given us something more subtle and intriguing. And his vacation reading in between shows seems to have included a lot of Michel Houellebecq.

The most obvious connection between White Lotus 3 and France’s famous post-liberal Cassandra figure is Platform, his satirical take on Western tourism of various toxic kinds. Like the novel, the series focuses on the holiday industry in Thailand, and both stories contain a gun attack on cowering guests at a luxury resort. There are lots of other suggestive references: bald, pot-bellied men wanly predating on cheerful, young Thai women; parodically docile, beatifically smiling hotel workers, throwing the miserable moral dissolution of visiting tourists into even starker relief; the tourist world merging with a criminal one at the edges; and even a lubricious Québécois prostitute who is quite possibly a tribute to Platform’s most memorably sex-positive character, Valerie, mown down by Islamic terrorists at the end of the book.

As in Houellebecq’s world, having destroyed nearly every form of unsought association with other people, rich visitors nominally in search of “wellness” at the White Lotus pay for simulacra: paid massages instead of loving caresses; fake religion through reiki, yoga, and dabbling in Buddhism; a veneer of sociability managed by drinking constantly and swallowing pills. But equally, there is little overt judgment, and the consumer in search of entertainment gets to vicariously enjoy the fruits of hyperliberalism as well as its poisons. In Platform, readers can get cheap thrills from the prolonged descriptions of transactional sex. In White Lotus 3, endorphins are similarly stimulated by all the lingering shots of luxurious interiors and glittering beaches. When the action shifts to more poverty-stricken locations, the pain of transition is visceral.

And of course, as on holiday, the greatest pleasure is eavesdropping on other people’s dysfunctional relationships. One particularly delicious dramatic grouping involves three “close” female friends on a trip of a lifetime, nimbly shifting patterns of allegiance and attack depending on whoever has just left the room. But the most compelling parallel storylines involve a rich Southern family called the Ratliffs, and a very Houellebecqian couple: Rick, a seedy, aging drifter, and Chelsea, the upbeat, young, hippy girlfriend from whom Rick is constantly trying to escape.

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By Ann Manov

So far in the series, each of these subplots has produced a dramatic moment much discussed on social media (I therefore disclaim any responsibility for the spoilers). In the first, there is an incestuous kiss between two male members of the Ratliff family. In the second, we witness a monologue from a friend of Rick’s about autogynephilia. In their own way these scenes suggest that, once social dislocation gets a grip for good, basic human urges for love and connection are bound to run anarchically amok.

The proximate cause of the incestuous kiss between the teenage Ratliff boys is drugs and the excitement of a Thai festival, at which they are getting high along with Chelsea and the Québécois sexpot. The distal cause, however, is that the family patriarch has decided they should all put their phones away and connect properly with each other on vacation. (Even more hilariously, this is just an excuse — he’s really trying to avoid his family seeing some shameful news about him on the internet.) Shorn of the usual crutches of internet porn and scrolling, the bored older brother makes it his mission to get his younger sibling laid, feeding him protein shakes to buff up his puny body and render him more attractive to women. All the unexpected mental attention backfires, and the younger brother starts lusting after his newfound mentor instead — all in all, a terrifying warning for any parent considering reducing their offspring’s screentime.

The conversation about autogynephilia, meanwhile, happens at a Bangkok bar. Rick has met up with an old friend from back home, who explains to him he is now off the booze after a midlife crisis. In Thailand with “money, no attachments, and nothing to do”, he claims to have become “insatiable” for “Asian girls”. “After about a thousand nights like that, I started wondering, where am I going with this? Why do I feel the need to fuck all these women? What is desire? … Maybe … maybe what I really want is to be one of these Asian girls… you know?” Rick doesn’t. The friend specifies: “I got it into my head that what I really wanted was to be one of these Asian girls, getting fucked … by me, and to feel that”. Adventures wearing lingerie and perfume followed, as did being “railed” by guys that looked a bit like him. “Then I got addicted to that … and at the same time I’d hire an Asian girl to just sit there and watch the whole thing, and I’d look in her eyes while some guy was fucking me, and I’d think ‘I am her, and I’m fucking me’.”

In recent years, some of us have become more familiar with the narcissistic spiral that is a man becoming aroused at the idea of himself as a woman, and especially since it often requires the nearby presence of actual women as props to keep the fantasy going. But rarely have we seen the libidinal hall of mirrors described so boldly and accurately on camera; and nor perhaps the yearning for spiritual transformation around which it skirts, so to speak. “Sex is a poetic act, it’s a metaphor … am I a middle-aged white guy on the inside too? Or inside, could I be an Asian girl?” the friend asks. Eventually, he says, he gave up on such deep metaphysical questions and “got into Buddhism” instead.

Writing Platform in 2001, and describing scenes of Islamic terrorism in tourist spots known for hedonism, Houellebecq foresaw a hyperliberal future and yet few believed him. The Bali bombings happened only a year later. Watching White Lotus 3, you sometimes also get a disturbing premonition of imminent, barely suspected social hazards lurking under present habits and especially those supercharged during lockdown: adolescents with “no attachments and nothing to do”, left to their own devices, quite literally; an increasingly warped cultural sensibility that reduces whole people to collections of breasts, genitals, and protein-amped biceps; and the dilution of intra-familial bonds, until people living in the same house barely know what love is supposed to look like anymore.

Traditionally when on vacation, you get a chance to step out of the quotidian and see things more clearly — or so the platitude goes. The characters in White Lotus 3 tend to suggest otherwise. Still, we viewers in the real world can keep our eyes open to the unfolding effects of hyperliberalism, though it remains unclear whether we can do anything other than helplessly watch.

An obdurate Leadbeater seemed to think her bill’s wording excluded this disturbing outcome in principle. Assisted suicide on the NHS, she insisted, will be reserved for the terminally ill, with a stipulation that “a person is not to be considered to be terminally ill only because they are a person with a… mental disorder”. But as Chelsea Roff, the lead author of the anorexia evidence pointed out, the disease is — by definition — a mental disorder with devastating physical effects. In particularly severe and prolonged cases, a doctor might well diagnose the case as hopelessly terminal with recovery impossible, in which case eligibility for an early exit would be nearly assured.

This would be a mistake, though an understandable one. In fact, with anorexia, you can only say with confidence that recovery genuinely was impossible and further treatment futile, if and when the sufferer actually dies from the disease. Until then — doctors’ illusions of omniscience aside — you don’t know for sure. Some will seem to be at this point and then later recover; for occasionally, even entrenched anorexia can loosen its grip, and fuel-starved minds start to change. If a sufferer opts for assisted dying, then, we will never know for sure whether the same could have been true of them.

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There's no dignity in assisted dying

By Kathleen Stock

Indeed, it is potentially worse than this; for it seems that a diagnosis of terminal illness in the case of anorexia might have a rigidifying effect on a sufferer’s intention to give up on life. This is one between-the-lines reading of a case history offered by US medic Jennifer Gaudiani concerning Alyssa, an anorexic who was eventually euthanized at her request. In an email to Gaudiani four days before her death, Alyssa insisted that her course of action was not being “pursued in isolation, but rather in the context of being in Hospice care following a terminal [diagnosis] of anorexia (i.e., estimated six months or left to live)… In my individual case, death was inevitable. I clearly understood my prognosis and accepted this. I saw [medically-assisted dying] as an opportunity to select a specified time and circumstances for my death.”

Gaudiani is herself supportive of assisted dying for so-called “terminal” anorexics; but relatively few general campaigners for assisted dying positively want this sort of outcome, as such. Still, the logic of their own position inexorably corners them into it. For, though it is often unnoticed, the assisted dying movement is a collaboration between two radically different ethical ideals, whose goals have only surface compatibility. The state-enabled deaths of willing anorexics is just one side effect of the underlying tensions.

First, we have the Freedom Lovers. These are campaigners whose buzzwords are “my choice”, “my right to die”, and the like. Freedom Lovers are steeped, whether knowingly or not, in a liberal tradition which emphasizes freedom from interference from others in various personal domains. Their pronouns of choice are usually I/me/mine. They tend to think of death-seeking as a wholly private matter.

The vision of the Freedom Lover can be seen most clearly when away from the morally murky domain of assisted dying, considering suicides of the unassisted kind instead. Possibly the most hardcore Freedom Lover there ever was, was anti-psychiatry psychiatrist Dr Thomas Szasz. A Hungarian-American, he wrote many books railing against the coercive nature of the medical establishment. He thought that if you decide to kill yourself, you have a right to noninterference from everyone else, even in the case of severe mental illness. Any reason to end your life is a good one as long as it is yours, and any attempt to stop you is an infringement on personal autonomy. Inspired by the pejorative “Big Pharma”, he once coined the concept “Big Suicide Prohibition” — though for some reason it didn’t catch on.

Alongside Freedom Lovers, another archetype is also heavily involved in pro-assisted dying campaigns. I’ll call her the Altruistic Helper. Whereas the Freedom Lover is, at base, a suicide permitter, the Altruistic Helper is a suicide enabler: not so much interested in leaving people alone to do their thing, as positively helping them do it. Her preferred language mentions “compassion”, “humanity”, “mercy”, and “quality of life”. Her preferred pronouns are not first- but third-personal.

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Unlike the Freedom Lover, she does not think of the value of a life as subjective, or that any reason to go is a good one, as long as it is yours. Some circumstances are more deserving of death than others. Though sometimes reticent to spell this out, it seems clear that Altruistic Helpers have firm views about what should happen, objectively, when a life contains so much suffering that it is not worth living. In that case, they think, its owner should be helped to die; it’s the morally correct thing to do.

While she pays due deference to the presence of consent to the assisted dying process, unlike the Freedom Lover the Altruistic Helper is not massively interested in it for its own sake. Rather, she simply takes consent as good proxy evidence for the presence of unbearable suffering in a person’s life. Her background thinking seems to go: if you have a terminal diagnosis, and you are deliberately seeking an early exit, the only possible reason for which you could be doing this is that you are suffering unbearably. (Indeed, Kim Leadbeater seems so sure of this fact that in her proposed process, the candidate won’t be asked about her personal reasons for seeking death at all.)

To say that the Freedom Lover and the Altruistic Helper are strange bedfellows is an understatement. Strictly speaking, what should interest the Freedom Lover according to the logic of his ideal is decriminalizing private voluntary acts of suicide assistance, organized contractually between individuals. You want to die, for whatever reason; I want to help. It’s all voluntary, and nobody else’s business to interfere.

Yet thanks to the Altruistic Helper’s input, they tend to get something else entirely: a huge state-sponsored machine, involving thousands of healthcare employees, policies, and supposed safeguarding constraints upon who can access the service. Uber-Freedom Lover Szasz knew this, and was critical in his writing of assisted dying procedures, viewing them as constraining of personal autonomy. When he broke his back, aged 92, he killed himself alone a few days later.

Another weird feature of the awkward collaboration between these ethical archetypes is that the Freedom Lover can’t really justify why terminally ill people already able to kill themselves on their own, if wished, are deserving of state-sponsored medical assistance to help them do it. Though unpleasant to dwell on, many already have this freedom, as the example of Szasz demonstrates. It is perhaps why Freedom Lovers tend to focus so heavily on paralyzed or otherwise incapacitated people in their motivating examples. In contrast, the Altruistic Helper has no trouble explaining why terminally ill people who ask for death are deserving of state assistance, however mobile they are. Namely: they are clearly suffering too much, and so it is the right thing to do.

The anorexic with suicidal intentions — for all we know temporarily — ends up as collateral, falling between the two stools of these ways of thinking. Anorexia is a relatively anomalous condition, hard to fit into familiar binaries of active cause versus passive effect. The mind produces a willed behavior with devastating effects on the body. The physical effects of anorexia are not exactly voluntary, given the role of persistent, near-automatic habits of approaching food; but not exactly involuntary either, and certainly not involuntary like those of cancer or arthritis.

Effectively, anorexia acts as a Rorschach test for assisted dying campaigners. To a committed Freedom Lover, the behaviors associated with anorexia, including accompanying suicidal intentions, look active enough to count as an expression of free will — at least, assuming mental capacity has first been established, as was the case for Alyssa. (Purists like Szasz may not even require this.) Those who are Freedom Lovers by instinct are not particularly inclined to go out to bat for the exclusion of people from assisted suicide provision who appear to have rationally decided it is their time to go. To say otherwise would look like a kind of interference in personal autonomy, and Freedom Lovers can’t have that.

Meanwhile, the Altruistic Helper is likely to frame the terrible physical suffering produced by severe and prolonged anorexia as something that happens to a sufferer, rather than something she has any part in actively causing; an irrevocable, settled fact that merits a compassionate release into peaceful oblivion. As intimated earlier, Altruistic Helpers tend to see a person’s firm desire to die, accompanied by physical affliction, as an indirect indication that the amount of suffering present is objectively too hard to bear. This is supposed to be what justifies helping him to end his life. If Helpers were to admit that the physical torment of a severe anorexic, as awful as it is, is not enough to make an assisted death justified, they might just have to rethink their whole model.

And so, like the Freedom Lovers but for different reasons, Altruistic Helpers are also unlikely to argue forcefully for the exclusion of suicidal anorexics from an assisted dying service. Depending on who is looking, these troubled women and the occasional man will be seen as captains of their own ships or helpless victims of the storm. And either way, an artificially hastened exit from a sea of troubles will be theirs for the asking.

The symbolism of a burning book is, therefore, the repudiation of the very notion of freedom. And yet this same freedom means that we must be able to burn books if we so desire. The Nazis, of course, were destroying the property of others, an authoritarian act designed to eliminate whole branches of thought. This is not to be conflated with an individual who chooses to vandalize his or her own property. The trans activists who burn J.K. Rowling’s books and post the footage online are making fools of themselves, but they are also exercising their right to do so in a free society.

This is a distinction worth bearing in mind when we consider the murder of anti-Islam campaigner Salwan Momika, an Iraqi man who had been awaiting a verdict in Sweden for the crime of “agitation against an ethnic or national group”. Momika had publicly burned a number of copies of the Quran during the summer of 2023. He was shot dead during or just before a live stream on TikTok at his home in Södertälje on Wednesday. The details are as of yet unclear, but there are suggestions that the assassination may have involved a foreign power.

Momika had been granted temporary residence in Sweden in 2018, although his frustration with his adopted country’s lackluster commitment to freedom of speech led him to seek asylum in Norway in March 2024. After just a few weeks, the Norwegian authorities had him deported back to Sweden. According to Momika, the prosecutor in his trial had been seeking his extradition back to Iraq because of his criticisms of Islam. Back in August, he had posted the following on X: “Sweden and Norway have identified me as a threat to their security. Yes, I am a threat to the Islamization project of the West, which is being pursued by your Leftist communist government that is deceiving the citizens and making the country Islamic. So I have come to awaken the people and thwart the Islamization project of the West, and I will not be afraid of you.”

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Why I'm leaving the UK

By Andrew Doyle

In cases of this kind, it has become depressingly inevitable that commentators will seek to blame the victim. After the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses in 1988, the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa calling for the author’s murder. Instead of taking a united stance against a foreign regime threatening the life of a British citizen, pundits and politicians engaged in endless debates about whether Rushdie had brought this on himself. Crime novelist John Le Carré stated that “there is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity”, and that “there is no absolute standard of free speech in any society”. It should go without saying that powerful theocrats do not require protection from the hurtful words of novelists.

Last month was the 10th anniversary of the massacre at the offices of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo. Initially, world leaders were united in their condemnation of terrorists who had butchered cartoonists for drawing satirical caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed. Thousands gathered at vigils and held placards bearing the words “Je Suis Charlie”. PEN America — an organization devoted to the principle of free expression — created a “courage award” for Charlie Hebdo. That was until dozens of members of PEN, including writers such as Joyce Carol Oates and Junot Díaz, signed an open letter in protest. Charlie Hebdo, they claimed, had mocked a “section of the French population that is already marginalized, embattled and victimized”. This was, of course, to misidentify the target. The cartoonists weren’t “punching down” at the Muslim minority, but rather “punching up” at the authoritarianism of institutionalized religion.

We never seem to learn that appeasement of religious extremists only makes them stronger. Our collective failure to take a firm stance for artistic liberty in the Rushdie affair has made it more difficult to uphold the principle today. That Momika was on trial in the first place suggests that Sweden’s commitment to freedom of expression has been subordinated to the creed of multiculturalism. According to the BBC, following Momika’s campaigns in 2023 the Swedish government had “pledged to explore legal means of abolishing protests that involve burning texts in certain circumstances”. Yet Momika’s copies of the Quran were his own property, and he was free to dispose of them as he wished. We might take the view that his method of protest is insensitive or provocative, but in a free society such behavior is a matter of individual conscience.

The victim-blamers have been predictably vocal. Within hours of the news of Momika’s murder, television personality Bushra Shaikh posted the following on X: “Some of you may disagree but the public desecration of any holy book should be viewed as a hate crime and the offender should face consequences”. She later clarified that by “face consequences” she was not supporting murder, but rather the principle that the “government decides on the punishment”. And yet Shaikh’s logic defeats itself. Her post has been widely interpreted as hate-filled and authoritarian. Does this mean that, if the government were to designate the public advocacy of blasphemy laws a “hate crime”, she would be content to be prosecuted?

Those who endorse authoritarianism, in other words, are laying a trap for themselves. If we look to the state to punish our detractors, where does that leave us when the values of those in power no longer align with our own? Momika has been blamed for the riots and the international diplomatic rows that ensued following his campaigns, but the peaceful protester is not responsible for those who break the law in response. Last summer, the Guardian published a piece that presented his Quran-burning as evidence of a “racism crisis”. One of the Swedish Muslim interviewees was quoted as saying: “I understand you are allowed to think and feel what you want, this is a free country, but there must be boundaries. It’s such a pity that it has happened so many times and Sweden doesn’t seem to learn from its mistakes.”

Those of us who still believe in liberal values will balk at the suggestion — and the implied threat — in claiming that we are mistaken to support freedom of expression. Moreover, there is nothing racist about burning a copy of the Quran. Islam is a belief-system, not a race. The criminalization of “Islamophobia” makes about as much sense as prosecuting citizens for “Marxistophobia” or “Freemarketcapitalismophobia”. Had Momika burned a copy of The Communist Manifesto, would there be calls to modify the law to see him incarcerated?

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Increasingly, Western societies are pandering to religious zealots who are willing to resort to violence to achieve their aims. Members of the ruling class are undeniably afraid. During Prime Minister’s Questions in November 2024, the Labour MP for Birmingham Hall Green and Moseley, Tahir Ali, asked Keir Starmer whether he would establish “measures to prohibit the desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions”. Starmer replied: “I agree that desecration is awful and should be condemned across the House. We are, as I said before, committed to tackling all forms of hatred and division, including Islamophobia in all its forms.” A better response would have been: “Blasphemy laws are incompatible with the values of a free country.”

It is undeniably the case that Islamic theocracies are intolerant to dissent, but we have only ourselves to blame if we capitulate to pressure from foreign powers to undermine our commitment to secularism. Pakistan’s prime minister Imran Khan, for instance, blamed the radicalization of Islamic terrorists on the French president Emmanuel Macron’s tolerance for the right of citizens to blaspheme against Islam. In October 2020, he tweeted: “President Macron has chosen to deliberately provoke Muslims, incl his own citizens, through encouraging the display of blasphemous cartoons targeting Islam & our Prophet PBUH.” President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey even cited Momika’s Quran-burning in an attempt to scupper Sweden’s bid to join Nato in 2023.

But blasphemy only makes sense to the faithful. Stéphane Charbonnier (known as “Charb”), the cartoonist and editor-in-chief of Charlie Hebdo who was among the victims of the 2015 atrocity, addressed this point in an “open letter” completed just two days before his death. “God is only sacred to those who believe in him,” he wrote. “If you wish to insult or offend God, you have to be sure that he exists… In France, a religion is nothing more than a collection of texts, traditions, and customs that it is perfectly legitimate to criticize. Sticking a clown nose on Marx is no more offensive or scandalous than popping the same schnoz on Muhammad.”=

This is the spirit of secularism — the French tradition of laïcité — that other countries in the western world should emulate. The problem is not the complaints from those who seek the implementation of sharia in democratic nations, but those in power who fail to reject such demands unequivocally. The murder of Salwan Momika should be a wake-up call for the West. Continued appeasement will only guarantee further bloodshed. For all the short-term risks of defending free speech, our long-term security depends upon it.

But how could such a figure — whose ultimate mediocrity has been laid bare — have risen so far? And how is it he came to define a whole decade in the nation’s history? Justin Trudeau had always been Canada’s Dauphin, “the Prince” — indeed, it is the title of a popular biography. But another title from the ancien régime better illustrates what he really was: “the Sun King”, who ruled through spectacle, artifice and celebrity, and who by these means was able to cover up the dire mounting contradictions not just of Canada’s Liberal Party, but of liberalism itself.

The once hegemonic ideology of the West was in the elder Trudeau’s words “not a programme… but an approach to politics”, and it arguably found its fullest expression in his son’s Canada. Humbled in the US and Europe after 2016, liberalism seemed, at least for a time, not just to be alive but thriving in the north. This was for the transatlantic establishment a necessary illusion: Canada as their “Hall of Mirrors”, a consolation and reassurance that their creed still had a fighting chance in a hostile world turned against them. Yet as with the Bourbons and their gilded splendour, Trudeau fell under his own spell, and Canadians paid the price. The story of his reign is thus that of the collision between appearance and substance — and myths, no matter how lofty and intoxicating, can never subdue reality.

Trudeau’s political journey began in October 2000, when he delivered the eulogy at his father’s funeral, a moving speech that caused many to see “the first manifestation of a dynasty”. After an aimless youth spent camping and cavorting, and stints as a drama teacher and ski instructor, he entered parliament in 2008. When the Liberals imploded in the 2011 election, under the academic Michael Ignatieff, the party seemed to overcorrect by finding a replacement who wouldn’t be too bothered by such things as policy ideas or governing philosophies: so, they turned to their one MP who had a pleasing face, great hair, and above all, a storied name.

As Britain and the United States were hurtling toward Brexit and Donald Trump, Trudeau’s ascent in 2015 provided the progressive counterpoint. Such was the frenzied adoration, dubbed “Trudeaumania 2.0”, that the newly elected Prime Minister could cause a global stir just by uttering breezy, feel-good phrases like “Because it’s 2015!” The Economist claimed that “Liberty moved north” while Rolling Stone asked “Why can’t he be our president?”

Yet underneath the glitz, Trudeau did at first assemble a promising team of ministers, including the woman who would be his most loyal advisor Chrystia Freeland, a Rhodes Scholar who wrote a bestselling book on inequality. Trudeau’s government sought to tackle the erosion of middle-class economic security after decades of globalisation. It would do this through an unorthodox programme of moderate stimulus spending and industrial policy, a course that could demonstrate how a renewed liberalism might respond to populist grievances about a hollowed-out economy through domestic reinvestment. At least this was an approximation of the plan in theory.

This incarnation of Trudeau — in stark contrast with what would come up later — had also been conscious of how mass low-skill immigration was affecting Canadian workers, as evidenced by a remarkable 2014 Toronto Star op-ed in which he made the case for far-reaching controls on temporary workers (a warning that he himself would ignore).

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Trudeau’s first term saw modest successes, such as the Canada Child Benefit, which sent child support payments to families and lowered the child poverty rate, and Canada’s part in the renegotiation of NAFTA, in which Freeland’s trade delegation narrowly avoided the threat of economic “ruination” promised by Trump.

But the seeds of his impending collapse in popularity were already being planted at this time by the callous inattention he paid to Canada’s youth, who more than anyone elevated him to victory. Though the PM seemed to say all the right things about the need to build affordable housing, his actual policies amounted to tacit affirmations of the Nimby-ist status quo, which favoured home-owning older Canadians, reliant on the ever-appreciating value of their real estate.

In the past, the partisans of liberalism had always been able to present themselves and their ideas as the wave of the future, as heralds of growth and abundance: yet here was the liberal tribune Trudeau doing the opposite, taking the side of the elderly over the young, of virtual stagnation over material progress. Furthermore, his government proved incapable of carrying out its own ambitious industrial policy, producing an infrastructure bank and “innovation cluster programme” whose projects no one can still identify. He also hamstrung Canada’s vast energy wealth, needed to power any future industrial revival, with excessive environmental regulations.

A series of damaging ethical scandals and ugly political reprisals led to a reduced minority government in the 2019 election (the infamous “blackface campaign”), a setback from which the Trudeau Liberals would never recover. “At least he legalised pot!” as Canadians who now regret voting for him like to say — in reference to the one pledge that they can remember him keeping.

Then, in early 2020, came Covid-19, which threw into relief the tensions between individual liberty and collective security. And though the Trudeau government’s handling of the pandemic has since become a subject of heated polemic, the fact is that the first year and a half of the lockdown era proved to be largely uneventful. In fact, Ottawa’s relatively rapid acquisition and distribution of vaccines boosted the government’s popularity enough that the PM felt bold enough to call an early election in September 2021.

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After this would come a grave challenge to his rule: the anti-mandate “Freedom Convoy” was not widely popular, when all was said and done. Canadians are, after all, an anti-revolutionary people (“peace, order, and good government” is the national motto). The convoy’s strength, however, was in playing the same elaborate game of spectacle that Trudeau excelled at and then throwing the gauntlet back at his feet. Despite shaky national support for their cause at best, convoy leaders managed to present the impression of a people’s uprising by swarming the capital so dramatically with trucks and inviting supporters to join them, gaining the attention of the wider world and focusing attention on Trudeau’s faltering early response. In any event, even some of those who disagreed with the convoy’s actions and tactics also disagreed with his invocation of the Emergencies Act to disperse the convoy, seen as heavy-handed, if not outright tyrannical. This touchy-feely image, which had been a cornerstone of his initial celebrity, and his claim to leadership of the liberal world had been greatly diminished.

The convoy was defeated but its lasting impact was in toppling the Conservative Party leadership and replacing it with Pierre Poilievre, a man diametrically opposed to everything Trudeau stands for and who now intends to roll back nearly all of his policy legacy.

The rest of Trudeau’s rule from that point on was one long, drawn-out process of unravelling which can be described as “a political slow heat death”. In his final three years, Trudeau managed to annihilate the integrity of Canada’s immigration system, which had previously been a point of pride and consensus while presiding over a housing crisis without end, and to leave his party and country in tatters, as it emerges from this crisis woefully unprepared to meet the existential challenge of the Trump Administration’s tariffs. But perhaps most tragically of all, he had betrayed the trust once reposed in him by Canada’s youth, whose very ability to hope for a brighter future has been seriously damaged.

In the end, it was his own lieutenant Freeland who decided to throw the Sun King from his throne, ending the reign of liberal illusion and setting the stage for the post-Trudeau era. It was said that Louis XIV danced in radiant golden shoes as he seized power from the nobles: Canada’s monarch, too, managed to distract the world with colourful footwear. If only we, the citizens of Canada, had been courageous enough to say to him sooner and with a stronger voice, as the Australian Prime Minister once did: “Justin, we’re not here to talk about your socks.”