The Telegraph’s Michael Deacon gratefully welcomes Sink’s nubile proportions and angelic face as proof that the advertising industry is healing, contrasting it with a 2023 Calvin Klein underwear campaign featuring rather more female body fat and facial hair. Meanwhile, over at the Spectator, novelist Sean Thomas treats Sink’s gyrations on camera — about which he is extremely enthusiastic — as an effective rewilding of male sexual urges after years of attempted domestication. Deliberately inclusive commercial campaigns such as Dove’s, he writes, have pointlessly tried to make men yearn for “women who are older, or fatter, or wrinklier – or black or brown and so on”. But in fact, Thomas insists, finding “young, slender, fair-skinned women” a turn-on is natural for all ages and cultures, and perhaps even hard-wired.

Leaving aside the questionable theory of human sexuality — only slightly mitigated by defining “fair-skinned” as “relatively pale” — Thomas’s argument misunderstands the point of the fashion and beauty businesses. This is not to give men erections, but to get women to buy things. That these two goals are distinct is obvious from the couturier’s catwalk, where dour, hollow-eyed skeletons loiter palely in puffed sleeves and moon boots and so forth, inducing chilly bafflement in straight male onlookers. Some companies promise hotness to customers, and others conjure up images of wealth or worthy politics, but in every case the aim is to sell clothes.

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Even at the height of wokery, advertising was only ever interested in market segmentation, running provocative Mother’s Day ads featuring trans people and racy campaigns with traditional smokebombs at the same time. So the idea that the Sink commercial heralds some sensible new dawn here is daft.  Admittedly, there has been a movement to restructure sexual desire in a more inclusive direction; Thomas is right about that. But it comes — of course — from wildly idealistic academia, not hard-headed commerce.

The idea that there is something potentially oppressive about erotic urges goes back to the aughts. A new kind of missionary position was introduced in the academy: treating orgasms as a good to be distributed fairly, bestowed on conventionally attractive and unattractive people alike. In the 2009 article that kicked things off, Intimate Discrimination, Columbia law professor Elizabeth Emens asked us all to model our intimate partner choices on disability law. People in search of sex or romance should, as a matter of social justice, ask themselves what they think the “essential function” of a partner is, then assess whether non-standard bodies and faces might unexpectedly fulfill that function. She also suggested that those entering the dating pool should consider making “reasonable accommodations” to help otherwise disadvantaged applicants hit the jackpot: “adjustments to one’s home, social activities, or a move to a different building or neighborhood”, so that “a particular disability is less disabling, or another’s race less challenging”.

I don’t know about you, but when I reflect on the essentials in any prospective partner of mine, being able to fancy them without having to move house first is definitely high up on the list. Thankfully, other authors frame the moral improvement of one’s libido as less onerous: a bit like appreciating mushrooms for the first time, after experimenting with different recipes and eating them repeatedly. Strangely unexplored is how the human equivalents of mushrooms feel in this analogy, being sampled experimentally by an initially repulsed lover so that she can get used to that kind of thing — and all in the name of the lover becoming a better person.

But then again, you might ask, if regime change among the appetites is possible, why can’t conventionally unattractive people just alter their own desires, and learn to get a thrill out of counting as charitable objects for patronizing others? Indeed, why can’t they skip all the dating agony altogether, and simply train themselves to stop caring about getting laid? This is one of many confusing features in the discourse around intimate discrimination. Only some discriminations demand moral enhancement, but it is not very clear why.

Same-sex desires are usually treated as unimprovable, and anything else is the dreaded “conversion therapy” — yet it is fine to critique heterosexuals for being too picky. Getting the hots only for people who are the same color as you is acceptable if you belong to a minority, but not if you are white. And though white people should fancy some people from other ethnicities, they must not like any one ethnicity excessively; for that is racial fetishism, which is bad too. It is tempting to conclude that the real game here is to parrot fashionable liberal mores in a new academic setting, without any underlying coherent theory of what makes sexual encounters valuable overall.

One way to approach this muddle is to inquire what is less than ideal about being a fetishist, full stop. If you are one, the pattern of your sexual attention is childishly narrow, directed toward one or two characteristics in a lover and not much else. Huge swathes of information — the precise interplay of their physical features, their character and sense of humor, competences and life history — are rendered irrelevant as far as lust is concerned.

And that, in fact, is also what seems a bit weird about the depersonalized, horizon-focused attitude recommended by the new sex reformers. Ideally, you are supposed to form a carnally approving attitude towards a set of broad-brush physical characteristics, abstractly conceived. Yet this seems to pull away from focused engagement upon the individual’s specialness. In short, the reformers want you to relate to your prospective lovers as generic types; and they want your prospective lovers not to mind.

Some will doubtless object that this is just the nature of (male?) sexual attention: it objectifies a person, turning them into a collection of arousing bits and pieces, amounting to an ultimately swappable whole. I disagree. For most people — though obviously not all, because there are always weirdos — excitement towards a current lover would be killed stone dead, were they to be told that in fact she had been exchanged with an identical twin. Personality and history play into sexual desire, because sex is often a crucial step toward building a lasting relationship with someone, or even a whole life with them. It is that aspect which makes the fact some people can’t access sex so personally unfortunate. Despite its typical rep these days, the joy of sexual intimacy is not just a kind of temporary sugar rush, to be rationed out equally among consumers, but involves the forging of meaningful connections with particular people. That it doesn’t always go this way is beside the point.

In any case, it isn’t healthy for anybody to view their sexual self entirely generically; to objectify the person looking back in the mirror, and reduce its worth to that of slenderness, blondeness, fatness, wrinkles, or whatever. And for that reason, I really like the existence of advertisements and other representations here and there, showing women (and men) in different dimensions. Though unlikely ever to take over the visual landscape, they act as a refreshing counterpoint to mainstream narratives.

For instance, the Dove campaigns that Thomas mocks have been fantastic for encouraging every woman to enjoy her own physical uniqueness — or at least, not to automatically deprecate it, when faced with the vision of a toothsome 20-something dancing around in her pants. When I see women on social media, unselfconsciously parading body fat or body hair or wrinkles, I am impressed. They seem to have managed to escape a truly suffocating paradigm of female perfection that can literally ruin lives.

The primitive logic of a Calvin Klein jeans advert says: men will lust after this delicious nymph; and women will buy the jeans, hoping to resemble the nymph and get the power and status associated with male desire. Adverts that showcase realistic body shapes and faces aren’t instructing men to lust after them too; they are removing male preferences from the conversation altogether. Countercultural ads have little to do with male desire at all, except to remind women not to let it get them down. The soul selects her own society, as Emily Dickinson definitely did say — and impossible sexual ideals don’t always have to be a part of it.

Singal has been a bête noire for transgender activists going back to 2018, when he wrote an essay for The Atlantic suggesting that the medical case for youth gender medicine is weak. Ever since, he has been ruthlessly, relentlessly attacked online. In quieter, more rational circles, his rigor has made him a hero, especially as the evidence mounts that he was right all along.

Democrats and progressives seeking a way to refocus on their party’s strengths — and to walk back the dogmatism that characterized the party during “peak woke” — might learn from him.

Singal and I met in Brooklyn in late April, shortly after the latest round of online drama between him and his critics. In person, he is physically large and unexpectedly striking. And he displays an equally unexpected millennial masculinity — half “my therapist thinks I have ADHD”, half patience and problem-solving. His slight haplessness and disorganization with technology form a running joke on “Blocked and Reported”, the podcast focusing on internet controversies he co-hosts with fellow journalist Katie Herzog. Yet he’s solicitous about my recording and sound quality throughout the interview, perhaps from painful personal experience.

All successful journalists claim integrity and rigor, but few since the journalist-as-activist era began have had the nerve Singal has shown in going against the consensus on their own side. In part as a result, many centrist Democrats who have felt disillusioned with their party’s direction have swung Right. Through it all, Singal has stuck with his bog-standard liberal beliefs, despite the enormous outpouring of hatred against him.

At our meeting, however, he was determined to deflate any grandiose claims about himself or his work, often with the same mild, undramatic rebuttals he has offered before, and that his critics have found unsatisfying. His reporting on trans issues is “a small part of my overall career”, he says. And his unusual ability to be contrarian in his reporting was because “things just worked out in a very lucky way”.

Singal’s early résumé is as normie as it gets for successful male talking heads, including a youthful stand-up comedy phase. He is 41 and grew up in an affluent suburb of Boston. Like many of his generation, he was “politically activated” by the administration of George W. Bush. “I couldn’t believe anyone could be conservative,” he says. “We didn’t think it could get any worse.”

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He spent two years at Brandeis and another two at the University of Michigan as an undergraduate, writing columns for his college papers in what he calls the “true-but-insufferable” category of “very basic liberal stuff”. It was only later, while working at The Boston Globe, that he had the distinguishing insight that he was writing ill-informed hot takes (many of us never learn) and that he instead wanted to better understand how the world works. He enrolled in a public-affairs master’s program at Princeton, which he describes as “aimed at do-gooders” and which stressed quantitative skills, teaching him to read and evaluate research papers.

Princeton set him on the path of debunking phony science that has since made his career. His first job out of grad school, in 2014, was working under Adam Moss at New York, where he edited the magazine’s new social-sciences vertical. In his 2021 book, The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills, he writes that when he started the job, “thanks to a fairly stats heavy master’s program… I knew some of the differences between good and bad research, and some of the ways quantitative claims can mislead.”

Even so, he was surprised by “the fire-hose of overhyped findings that would fill my e-mail inbox daily”. Many deeply penetrating, popular, and influential cultural beliefs, it turns out, are based on really questionable research. In fact, the most grabbed-onto claims might be the most specious, Singal argues, in that they’re convenient to believe, and offer us supposedly easy fixes for complex social ills.

He published the first big, in-depth feature on researcher findings that the implicit-bias test — notorious for proving that everyone is secretly racist — was “weak and unreliable, statistically speaking” and “barely measures anything of real-world import”, as he recounted in The Quick Fix. Many of his New York headlines from this era are surprisingly freewheeling, given the later evolution of the magazine, such as “Is a Professor Getting Railroaded for Questioning Social-Justice Dogma?” (2019) and “Business Insider Retracted a Bad Piece — and Set a Terrible Precedent” (2018).

Singal says he believes that today’s version of the magazine has “hollowed out some of the most interesting thinkers”. Nonetheless, he remained an establishment-friendly voice on the larger issues, and places in The Quick Fix read very 2021. The false implicit-bias information, for example, is important because it might be detrimental to “urgent tasks like police reform”. A quote from a song mentioning “crossdressers” gets the apologetic aside that “it was the 1950s”.

None of this — neither the rigor nor the careful hewing to many liberal values — spared Singal from the outrage on his own side over trans issues. Singal is the most blocked user on Bluesky, the Lefty alternative to X (formerly Twitter). He is listed by the GLAAD Accountability Project as a purveyor of disinformation. And at least one trans activist website has compiled a truly sick biographical dossier on him that also targets his family. This and other websites accuse him, among other things, of “sea-lioning” — apparently the crime of harassing others by persisting in asking reasonable and polite questions.

This persecution has taken a new turn recently, with the re-election of President Trump, as the far Left has singled out dissenters on the center Left for the disaster. In a recent thread on X, the Nation columnist David Klion wrote that Singal’s “many haters warned him for like five years that his work was going to empower the Right’s crackdown on trans people. We were all right and he’ll never erase what he did.” Ross Barkan, an UnHerd contributor, also declared himself a “hater” on the same thread for the same reason, and condemned Singal as having “like replacement level Dem opinions coupled with trans obsession”.

Singal tends to counter these charges with several assertions that can seem myopic to his critics. He’s vociferously anti-Trump, and always has been, he says. And he believes that reporting in elite coastal media outlets doesn’t actually influence public opinion in ways that can swing elections. “People don’t realize how small even the big outlets have gotten,” he told me. And “I’ve always been a skeptic of how much influence the media has.” In other words, youth gender medicine was going to be controversial regardless of what Jesse Singal had to say about it. This may be true but seems like a bit of a dodge. Critics like Barkan have called Singal “obsessed” with a “fringe” issue — yet his reporting implies that he thinks otherwise. So why not say so?

On April 30, Singal and Herzog dropped an episode of “Blocked and Reported” on the criticism from the Left, in which they semi-jokingly explored the topic of who was responsible for the so-called vibe shift to the Right and the perceived horrors of Trump II. Asked the duo: “The question is, is it literally our fault?” The charges against them, Singal and Herzog argued, are a case of the “slippery-slope argument.” Meaning: if you allow a whisper of dissent on a topic, before you know it a crazed dictator is making the whole thing illegal.

“What always gets me about these arguments,” Singal said, “is that it’s a very long, very slippery slope, with like spinny parts and tunnels and loop de loops…. We pointed out there’s weak evidence for youth gender medicine… OK, people are going to jump from that to ‘therefore we should elect Trump’?”

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I am, I fear, a person of the slippery-slope mindset, because I can see the connection between debunked trans science and the election. But the more I try out my theories on Singal, the more persuasive his stubborn precision of thought becomes. It’s never flashy, and it’s often something he’s said before, or else a simple and hard-to-evade question: How does X thing you just said actually cause Y? Talking to him reminds me that Democrats were once very good projecting ownership of superior facts — they were the ones who’d followed the process, focused on the details, and had better research and policy on their side. A return to this kind of authority anywhere in government would be incredibly welcome, and Singal’s narrow focus on the granular truth suggests a direction for his party.

I’m not the only critic he’s disarmed. After the online spat with Barkan, the two men participated in a peacemaking podcast, at which Barkan walked back his online claims that Singal had “reaped what he sowed on anti-trans”, and ended up mostly agreeing with Singal on trans policy. “I think trans people are absolutely entitled to lives of safety and dignity,” Singal told me, “but I have some questions about whether the maximalist form of self-ID is tenable. An intelligent liberalism would understand this as an area where there are conflicting rights claims, depending on whether you view biological sex or gender identity as having primacy, and where those conflicting rights claims need to actually be resolved via discussion and compromise and democratic sense-making.”

His friend Mike Pesca, the journalist and host of the daily podcast “The Gist”, tells me via email that while Singal has been “more directionally right and specifically right on [the youth-gender-medicine] issue than anyone else covering it,” he is “still a pariah among the staffs at the major outlets.” In Pesca’s opinion, “the better editors know he’s good and are willing to work with him. The New York Times has published him, I doubt the New Yorker ever would, for fear of a riot. The Atlantic might. New York magazine probably won’t.”

Pesca also tells an anecdote about having coffee with Singal, and his friend telling him “this is the coffee shop where the barista went on Reddit, told the community I was here, and there was an earnest discussion about whether to poison me.” This, of course, represents the epistemic ditch that liberalism has fallen into — on one side of the counter, people like Singal, making their careful case for a balanced and reasonable system of human rights; on the other, those who have turned the rights into a religion and don’t give a shit what the science says.

It’s significant that Singal hasn’t broken through to the people who should be his allies — on the contrary, they want to poison him. And it suggests that human rights on their own can’t sustain serious politics without deeper claims and higher aspirations. Trump has offered his own incoherent version with American Greatness. Singal isn’t the type, but it almost seems he could do the same with a kind of reasoned excellence. “Make Our Systems Work Again” sure has a nice ring to it.

Unfathomably, Singal hasn’t stopped going to the coffee shop. Stubborn to be sure — or perhaps the science on barista-poisoning is weak.

All the Republican presidents who have followed LBJ, signer of the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act, have complained of Left-wing bias in the system. But with Houdini-like skill, public broadcasting has always managed to evade elimination.

Until now, that is. The old arguments once that staved off termination seem to have dried up, while evidence of five decades of progressive bias has been collected and curated. Then there is Trump and Elon Musk, with their zeal for cutting back the permanent state — precisely that part of the state whose views and desires are platformed by American state media.

The threat that taxpayer-funded journalism represented was clear from the start. A young lawyer in the Nixon White House anticipated the danger and wrote in a 1971 memo that “we are confronted with a long-range problem of significant social consequences — that is, the development of a government-funded broadcast system”.

That young lawyer was none other than Antonin Scalia. The future Supreme Court justice argued that eliminating the creature that the act had created, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, CPB), wouldn’t be easy. It would be “politically difficult in view of the strong educational support and the generally favorable public image which CPB has developed”, he prophetically predicted.

Public broadcasting’s educational component — seen only at PBS; NPR can’t rely on that argument — has repeatedly saved public broadcasting. In 1969, when President Nixon tried to slash funding by half, public-broadcasting executives sent Fred Rogers to a Senate subcommittee hearing to militate against it. That is, Mr. Rogers of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood fame, a children’s show that would become a staple at PBS.

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Rogers tugged at the heartstrings of the lawmakers, speaking earnestly about children’s emotional well-being and how TV programming could help. The chairman of the committee, Sen. John O. Pastore, began the hearing as an open skeptic. But by the hearing’s end, Pastore was telling Rogers, “Looks like you just earned the 20 million dollars”.

In 2025, however, “for the children” appears to have lost much of its luster, and there is good reason for it.

First, PBS licensed its signature children’s show, Sesame Street, to HBO in 2015 for five years. Last year, HBO announced it wouldn’t renew the license, though it would keep episodes from the Sesame archive available on its streaming platform, Max.

The argument used against Mitt Romney in 2012 — that public-broadcasting critics want to murder Big Bird — no longer works. Indeed, when Paula Kerger, PBS’s CEO, testified before the House on 26 March, 2025, she mentioned Sesame Street precisely zero times. Nearly all the Democrats defending PBS funding had arrived at the hearing armed with posters of Big Bird, Elmo, and Bert and Ernie. They seemed unaware of the HBO deal, and the fact that PBS has cut back on children’s programming to attract grownups.

That is one of the reasons public broadcasting has lost the mandate of heaven. Another is that, in our internet age, there is a profusion of media channels, websites, and video channels that not only produce an unending stream of educational content, but also news and entertainment. Today, the United States boasts some 15,000 commercial AM and FM stations, more than 425 satellite-radio channels, and 4 million registered podcasts, with half a billion worldwide listeners.

But what seals the deal is the political bias. On this front, NPR and PBS have violated the public trust and have, therefore, forsaken their claim on the public money.

Uri Berliner, a liberal journalist who worked at NPR for 25 years, admitted as much in a 2024 essay. NPR, he said, had become a place that now offers only “the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the US population. … An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America”.

As with many things, it was Trump’s election in 2016 that sent NPR, liberal from its creation in the Seventies, irreparably off the rails. “His election”, Berliner wrote, “was greeted at NPR with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair”. Tough, “straightforward coverage” of Trump “veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency”.

As Berliner put it, NPR inaugurated the first Trump administration by tying its fortunes to the false claim that Team Trump colluded with the Kremlin. By Berliner’s count, the broadcaster granted no fewer than 26 largely uncritical interviews to Adam Schiff, the top Democrat making this claim. Schiff used this platform to spread another thing we now know was simply not true: that he had evidence of this “collusion”.

But when special counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report concluded that no such collusion took place, NPR refused to admit error. It never went back to Schiff and demanded he account for the disjunction between his claims and reality. What Americans got instead was literal radio silence.

Not only did NPR remain unchastened by this error — it kept digging. When the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020, NPR flatly refused to cover it. NPR’s managing editor responded to complaints by saying: “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”

Ah, yes, “pure distraction”: the fact, amply documented in the files and subsequently confirmed by other outlets, that Hunter arranged a 2015 meeting between his father, then the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine, and executives from Burisma, the shady Ukrainian energy firm that was paying Hunter some $80,000 a month to serve on its board.

On March 26, NPR CEO offered lawmakers several answers that strained credulity, as when she told Rep. Jim Jordan, “I’ve never seen any instance of political bias” at NPR. This, even as she conceded that NPR’s decision to suppress the Hunter Files had been a journalistic mistake.

In the pandemic, too, NPR again hitched its wagon firmly to the preferred progressive narrative — that the virus had a natural origin. At the time, the outlet trashed as “racist and xenophobic” the possibility that the virus had leaked from a lab in the Chinese that is home to one of China’s premier virology labs. Today, several US intelligence agencies conclude with varying degrees of confidence that Covid escaped from a lab.

Yet it was in the wake of George Floyd’s death in May 2020 that NPR and PBS did the greatest disservice to their listeners and viewers, let alone taxpayers. Without asking for evidence, they accepted the view that America is an oppressive society gripped by systemic racism, and that this calls for a systemic overhaul of American order.

NPR, or PBS, for that matter, could have acted to save the country from much of the damaging, self-inflicted hysteria that followed — simply by doing their job. Berliner observed: “We happen to have a very powerful tool for answering such questions: journalism. Journalism that lets evidence lead the way. But the message from the top [at NPR] was very different. America’s infestation with systemic racism was declared loud and clear: it was a given. Our mission was to change it.”

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The bias at NPR and PBS is also easy to quantify. The conservative-leaning Media Research Center has been doing tallies of it for years, and the results demonstrate Berliner’s allegations. The PBS NewsHour, for example, routinely books many more liberals than conservatives. Over a four-month period from November 2022 to February 2023, MRC found that liberal Democratic guests outnumbered conservative Republican guests 3.7 to 1. When elected officials and political appointees were removed from the guest count, the disparity was even more striking, reaching 5.7 to 1.

MRC analysts also examined weeknight editions of the NewsHour from January 3, 2023, through May 2, 2023, finding that, by a 5-to-1 margin, NewsHour promoted controversies involving congressional Republicans over those involving Democrats. Congressional Republicans faced 85% negative coverage, compared to 54% positive coverage of congressional Democrats, the analysis showed. NewsHour correspondents branded Republicans as extremists (“far right”, “hard right”, etc.) 20 times during this period. Not once were hard-Left Democrats so identified.

An MRC analysis also found that during last year’s political convention, PBS treated the Republican convention to 72% negative and 28% positive commentary. By contrast, the Democratic convention played with a home field advantage: it received 12% negative coverage, versus 88% positive commentary.

What we have at NPR and PBS is what Juan Williams — another NPR veteran-turned-critic, fired in 2010 — has called “an insulated cadre of people who think they’re right, and they have a hard time with people who are different”. According to Berliner, the NPR Washington bureau has 87 registered Democrats on staff, and zero Republicans. Fast forward a dozen years, and you find that conservatives have voted with their feet. In 2023, pollsters found that only 11% of NPR listeners described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, while a whopping 67% of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal.

The mandate has been lost. The CPB receives some $535 million from taxpayers every year. But this time, Trump has mounted an offensive that attacks that money from different perspectives. There is, for example, his 1 May executive order that President Trump titled “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of the Biased Media”. Trump has also zeroed out any spending on the CPB in this year’s budget, while his Federal Communications Commission is investigating whether these outlets are violating the noncommercial clause in the Communications Act by taking commercial sponsorships.

At least one of these approaches will work. Neither Fred Rogers nor Big Bird can save them now.

In truth, though, their weaknesses were clear four years ago. For while Trump was certainly defeated in 2020, this had little to do with his policy programme, or even his personal ratings. Rather, it is likely that he only lost because of a pandemic no one foresaw, and one that’s unlikely to boost his enemies again soon. This fact has lessons both for Trump himself, and for his opponents.

The strongest evidence that Trump could have won four years ago is the result of the election itself. Between 2016 and 2020, the once-and-future president improved his share of the popular vote from 46.1% to 46.8%. That, to be sure, was well short of the 51.2% that Biden won. But what counts in presidential elections isn’t the popular vote but the electoral college. And here the 2020 race was much closer. Four years ago only 44,000 votes across Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin prevented a tie in the electoral college.

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Quite aside from the historical drama of such an outcome — the electoral college has never been tied in US history — America’s arcane federal constitution means the election would have gone to the House of Representatives. Each state delegation would have cast one vote for president. In 2020, the Democrats had a majority in the House, but Republicans had a 26-23 majority of state delegations, and almost certainly would have voted for a second Trump term.

But without Covid, the 2020 race might not have been that close. On the eve of the pandemic, Trump was in a remarkably strong position. For one thing, the Mueller Commission report had discredited claims that the president owed his 2016 victory to Russian interference. For another, the first of the two partisan impeachments by the Democrats had failed. A decade after the Great Recession, the economy was recovering, and Trump’s popularity ratings rose to 49%.  Then Covid struck. During the pandemic, Trump’s favourability ratings slumped. In hindsight, his handling of the disaster was far from a failure, resulting in the rapid government-backed mass production of vaccines via Operation Warp Speed. But the same alliance of Democratic politicians and establishment journalists that had falsely accused him of being a Putin stooge now hysterically called him a mass murderer, personally responsible for every Covid death in the United States.

No less striking, the pro-Democratic media twisted Trump’s comments to falsely claim that he favoured injecting bleach into Americans, disingenuously suggesting that he supported prescribing “livestock dewormer” to patients. That sounds bad until you realise he meant ivermectin: a drug prescribed across Latin America, as well as by some doctors in the US itself. Sued by some American physicians, who claimed its public pronouncements had hurt their practices, the Food and Drug Administration agreed to pay out in a settlement in March 2024. Among other things, they implicitly apologised for the 2021 tweet that warned people: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all, stop it.”

Whatever less partisan historians finally conclude about Trump’s handling of Covid, in the absence of the pandemic it would obviously not have mattered. History, for its part, points us in the same direction. Before Trump’s failure to secure the Oval Office in 2020, Obama, Bush, and Clinton had all been re-elected and served second terms. Dubya, who like Trump in 2016 had lost the popular vote but narrowly won the electoral college in 2000, went on to win the popular vote in 2004, before the costs of the Iraq and Afghan wars turned the public against his administration. You could say something similar about Obama, who won re-election while pushing his country into two more quagmires in Syria and Libya.

Trump, in contrast, believed the Iraq War to be a mistake, and hadn’t involved his country in any unpopular new wars. At the same time, claims by Democrats that Trump was a dangerous warmonger collapsed when, imitating Nixon, he personally met North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong Un. No less striking, Trump had started the process of disengaging US forces from Afghanistan, a policy that Biden continued but ultimately bungled.

Overall, then, Trump was well-positioned to run for re-election as a president who had presided over both foreign peace and domestic prosperity. Nor do we have to rely on the President-elect alone here: his opponents were distinctly lacking too. Most of the Democrats who sought their party’s presidential nomination in 2020, from Elizabeth Warren to Pete Buttigieg, were well to the Left of the median voter and would likely have struggled outside of big cities and college towns. Unpopular among the party’s base, billionaires like Michael Bloomberg would probably not have done well either.

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What about Biden himself? If the pandemic hadn’t happened, there’s plenty of evidence that he might have lost in a match-up with Trump. For one thing, he didn’t do well in the early Democratic primaries, only winning his party’s nomination when more progressive candidates dropped out. It’s not clear, meanwhile, how advanced Biden’s cognitive problems were four years ago. What is certain is that the pandemic boosted his 2020 campaign in two ways. First, it gave Biden’s handlers an excuse to minimise his public appearances, plausibly allowing them to conceal the extent of his mental decline — problems that finally became clear during his catastrophic debate with Trump in June 2024.

No less important, the pandemic allowed the Democrats to benefit from various mail-in voting systems, adopted in response to Covid lockdowns. To be clear, there is no evidence of systematic cheating here. But the combination of mail-in voting with lockdowns favoured university-educated and politically engaged Democrats at the expense of Trump’s core constituencies. Even with these advantages, at any rate, Biden still only managed to defeat Trump by a few tens of thousands of votes in swing states.

In all, this suggests that the Democrats didn’t lose last week merely because of Joe Biden, or Kamala Harris, or Tim Walz. Rather, they lost because they underestimated the degree to which the pandemic temporarily eclipsed the underlying popularity of Trump in particular and the Republicans in general. As the Democrats reflect on their future, it’s ironic that they were finally felled by a force beyond their control — the inflation that stalked America during Biden’s presidency.

My first impression of Simone and Malcolm is that they have walked straight out of Pattern Recognition. Two slender, voluble, dark-haired, medium-height thirty-somethings, they have slicked-back hair, thick-rimmed spectacles and quirky dark clothing. Their children, Torsten, Octavian, and Titan Invictus, are all IVF-conceived, some gene-selected for traits such as IQ or happiness. Simone is pregnant again, she tells me merrily, with Industry Americus Collins, due in April.

The original “‘elite’ couple breeding to save mankind” of countless memes, I sought them out on a recent London visit in the hope of inducing them to say controversial things about biotech. They’re famous (or notorious if you prefer) for their enthusiastic endorsement of a high-tech Bay Area “pro-natalism” that embraces every available reproductive technology. From IVF, through surrogacy, polygenic embryo screening, to potentially gene-editing future offspring, they are what they call “the most talkative iteration” of a “technophilic” movement dedicated to saving the human species from population crash.

There are plenty of conservatives to whom all such technologies are prima facie off-limits. And I have grave concerns about anything that promises to free us from organismic limits — only to demand, in exchange, new kinds of servitude. I’m far from certain whether technophiles are friends or enemies. But what I heard was a message most relevant to the people currently keenest to dismiss them as “terminally online Redditors” or “hipster eugenicists”, or to link them with the far-Right: that the fertility crash is coming, soonest and hardest and most brutally, for liberals. And the Collinses are, in fact, liberals too: just unusually unfiltered and clear-sighted ones.

The Collinses earn a living in financial services, but their passion is education (they run an Institute for the Gifted) and promoting natalist culture. They use email and WhatsApp accounts seemingly interchangeably, and offer opinions as if they’re two interfaces of the same voluble, intelligent and eccentric hive mind. Malcolm proposed marriage to Simone on Reddit. They plan to have seven children.

In the end, we didn’t discuss gene-editing and fertility tech much at all: we converged, instead, on a deeper and arguably more insoluble fear. That is, that the contours of the fertility crisis mean people like the Collinses — subcultures that value intelligence, openness, and technological sophistication — are a critically endangered species.

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In the Collins worldview, what they call the “global monoculture” is the chief antagonist. They mean the largely homogeneous high-tech norms that have emerged in every major developed city in the modern world: Starbucks, tiny families or solo apartments, long working hours. And everywhere this “monoculture” appears, fertility is falling. Human birth rates are now below replacement almost everywhere in the world.

This global monoculture “believes it has a right to other people’s children, because its fertility rates are so low that the only way it can replenish itself is by just taking the children of nearby healthy cultural groups”. In Simone and Malcolm’s view, this dynamic represents “an existential threat to our species”. And as they see it, the motley coalition of interest groups making up the current “conservative movement” is united by hostility to this urban monoculture, and sometimes little else.

And while the Collinses are meticulously Californian in their aversion to offer explicit moral judgement, it would seem that however existential a threat this monoculture is overall, it’s a clear and present danger to people like them. For it poses a long-term threat to intellectual and cultural openness. Malcolm has, Simone tells me, analysed data on the demographic profiles of people having lots of kids — and it turns out that the deciding factor isn’t religiosity at all. It’s the mirror inverse of the high openness exhibited by “terminally online Redditors” and Silicon Valley rationalists.

According to their own studies, Simone tells me, the high-fertility profile comes with “xenophobia and fascism”. That is: people who have lots of kids are authoritarian, hostile to out-groups, and reluctant to consider other viewpoints as valid. And while they assure me, with the typically extravagant tolerance of difference typical of the Bay Area, that they’re “not even antagonistic” to bigotry “so long as they don’t interfere with their neighbours” tacitly the judgement is clear. After all, a defining characteristic of authoritarian outlooks is precisely interfering with your neighbours. Having evidently considered the prognosis for their own way of life, in a future dominated by such cultures, the Collinses show pragmatism and clear-sightedness in doing whatever they can to avert the prospect.

But it’s not just pluralism and openness on the chopping-block if demographic forces continue to select in favour of bigots. It’s also cognitive ability, cultures that value education, and cultures knowledgeable of and engaged with technologies. All these traits are, the Collinses remind me, correlated with low fertility; not that I need reminding, as a bookish, overeducated, and extremely online mother of only one.

Meanwhile, Malcolm continues, the people still having kids are the ones making less money, and wielding less cultural and economic power in the world. In turn, this makes such groups “less good at defending themselves from aggressive forces and less viable as power players on the world stage”. Rather than embracing marginalisation as a condition for survival, the Collinses want to “find and nourish groups that are able to be global economic and technological players while still being high fertility, because that is so rare”.

What’s left unspoken here is that they think failing to support “global economic and technological players” would have very bad effects overall — for it would mean shrugging while the culture selects against clever, bookish, and technologically adept people. They are, in other words, quietly worried that current civilisation is shrinking the future pool of what a Bay Area rationalist is bound to see as the keystone of our genetic heritage: IQ.

They tread carefully around the topic, no doubt mindful of its radioactive connotations. But Malcolm comes close to spelling out the implications when he tells me that, based on research he’s read, “we may see about a one standard deviation drop in IQ in the developed world in the next 75 years, due to genetic reasons”. That is: the smartest people are deleting themselves from the gene pool.

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The Collinses clearly accept that whatever form of human culture makes it to the other side of the current demographic pinch-point will be a brutal survival of the fittest — where “fit” doesn’t necessarily accord with their preferred values. But though they studiously route round any explicit moral statement that might impose coercive obligations on someone else, it’s clear that the Collinses would prefer at least some of the winning demographic subcultures to be high-IQ people with technological capabilities, and a willingness to tolerate different viewpoints. They emphasise that they are firmly against eugenics, where this represents any top-down value-statement about or intervention in the gene pool. But it’s also clear that, albeit in an opt-in, you-do-you Bay Area way, they think there are better and worse ways that gene pool could develop in the future.

To this end, they’re more than happy to collaborate with any group — even those far more authoritarian or anti-tech than they are — if the common goal is reversing what they perceive as the current negative trend. In their view, it’s not for some time — Malcolm suggests, “in 300 or 400 years” — that this coalition might fall to infighting, as pluralistic and technophilic factions such as theirs battle “religious, fundamentalist, xenophobic groups that believe that there can only be one religious group and one ethnic group in the world”. In such a scenario, they accept, “a lot of the conservative pronatalist groups will come into conflict because some are more pluralistic than others”.

In the meantime, though, they see what they’re doing as salvage work, preserving as much of a dying culture as they can. “We have seen this before in the Roman Empire,” they say, “this collapse scenario. Anyone who doesn’t think that we are entering a dark age right now is delusional. We need to begin to round the wagons, to defend as much of our civilisation as we can, so that we can use it going forwards.”

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It’s possible, I put to them, that the rationalistic, high-tech culture they are trying to preserve is too deeply implicated in the “global monoculture” they deplore to be disaggregated — indeed, that it may be driving the problem. Malcolm shrugs. It’s possible, he tells me. But the Collinses are content nonetheless to pursue their bet, and to see who turns out to be right.

Despite our differences on reproductive technologies, I suspect the Collinses and I are more aligned than not — on, if nothing else, devotion to reading the cultural tea-leaves, and extrapolating from the patterns we recognise. Some who do this, such as William Gibson, set out what they see via the written word to sometimes near-prophetic effect. Others, such as the Collinses, work as hard as they can in the real world, to turn the direction of events toward or away from patterns they see on the horizon.

But whatever the longer-term impact of the Collinses’ interventions will be, they’re right to see their beloved culture of logical, rationalistic, high-openness risk-takers as endangered. And there’s a lesson there for liberals of both Right and Left, even a long way from Silicon Valley. For if the traits most immediately at risk are openness, high cognitive ability, and an appreciation for education: those, in a word, commonest in liberals. If the Collinses’ read is right on the larger patterns, and I think it is, those who value intelligence and openness need to be a great deal more deliberate about “rounding the wagons” to protect the values and cultural practices they cherish – including via efforts to inculcate these traits and cultures in the next generation, or indeed to produce a next generation at all.

If this doesn’t happen, all those clever, tolerant, bookish types, many of whom currently leap to denounce voices like the Collinses as at least “far-right” adjacent, may wake up in a generation or so, to find they missed the chance to hand on their own genetic and cultural legacy. And that instead, in a fit of short-sighted self-righteousness, they gifted the world to the only people still having children: their enemies.

It’s been a while since anyone would believe any ascribed quote on Twitter. In my trembling little bubble at least, people have been saying the site is clinically dead for at least two years — although admittedly I do follow a lot of tired, cynical journalists. And let me tell you, they are mad as hell, and they are not going to take it anymore. In real terms, freelance rates are lower than they were in the last millennium. No wonder so many of them decided the only route to solvency was to monetise themselves. Those of us who remained on the Twitter mothership during and after the pandemic watched an exodus of solo shuttlecraft head into the new media business-model troposphere. There they remain in geo-stationary orbit, a flotilla of atomised Substacks.

Everyone seems sort of resigned now to social media becoming less interesting and to us all spending less time on it. Nothing lasts forever. Twitter went from agreeable agora (c.2008) to brittle umbrage mill (c.2012) to enraged existential mobclash (c.2016) to a colourised trench-warfare horror scene. Then, it was sold.

It felt odd. Twitter always had the illusion of being, not publicly owned exactly, but common land at least. It was just there, like the roads and parks and pavements and internet. Suddenly it was worth $44 billion? Oh, but there was worse to come. The self-acknowledged Coolest White Guy on Earth had bought the site. And, excitingly, there was even worse to come. Artificially Intelligent Caligula was about to implement his Plan:

Phase 1: Sack all non-suck-ups and losers.
Phase 2: Wipe 70% off market value (totally cool, hold your nerve bro).
Phase 3: Invite back all the weird angry people previously banned.
Phase 4: Change name from Twitter (lame) to X (super-cool, mysterious).
Phase 5: Introduce frequent ad hurdles to acclimatise users to revenue grooming.
Phase 6: Introduce blue-tick charge to acclimatise users to subscription fracking.
Phase 7: Kick back. Wait for the world to deal with radical vibe shift.

It’s a far cry from those calm, underpopulated early days. Remember being on Twitter then, when it felt like everybody was in a social media sitcom. Silly puns and harmless banter — on one level, it seemed a shortcut to sophistication. There you were at some psychedelic Algonquin Round Table, wisecracking with preposterously accessible famous people as if you belonged there. Bloody hell, Caitlin Moran just retweeted a gag of mine and I’ve got 500 new followers! Ooh, Stephen Fry liked something I said and now I’ve got people in my timeline saying things like “Ahoy old chap!” Oh good, Piers Morgan’s alerted his adoring fans to some crack I made about Test Match Special and now I’ve got a dickhead with numbers for a name saying something horrible about a photo of my baby granddaughter.

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At another level, it was an infant-school playground with randoms tearing around making friends in a hurry. I started to follow a very wide spectrum of people interested in comedy and music and politics and beyond. I now look back to 2008 and realise that the overwhelming majority of my current non-professional friends were made then, on Twitter. We’d meet occasionally in Soho pubs, and everyone was exactly like the online version of themselves.

Maybe it was possible to build a social media community, but how would that work? By simply assembling a genial cross-section of liberal-Left Twitter? No. In a real community, you’re not shouting about Daily Mail headlines in the street. You have no idea what Sheila over the road’s views on Self-ID are, or what the builder at number 36 thinks about Just Stop Oil. I mean, you have an inkling. But their precise positions are not articulated in pithy, unequivocal one-liners in block capitals filling their front windows. I don’t know what your street’s like, but the most we’ve had around here was a Not My King sign and a missing tortoise poster.

The golden age of Twitter, like that of the fabled pre-war Edwardian version, was simply a long summer with benevolent weather. 2009 was the turning point for me. We still had a Labour government, just. My carefully curated Twitter circle was a model village of civilised people, insulated from the hateful wrongness of the outside world. Then, as now, the one thing Twitter was really good at was breaking news, which was the usual slurry of national misery and international catastrophe, with little shards of personal tragedy.

And, inevitably, tragedy sometimes happens to people you don’t like. David Cameron’s six-year-old son Ivan, who had severe epilepsy and cerebral palsy, died suddenly. Cameron paid a moving tribute to the NHS staff who had cared for him. Prime Minister Gordon Brown (weird, typing that phrase) had himself lost a child, and spoke on behalf of all of us when he offered heartfelt condolences.

Well, nearly all of us. By then Twitter encouraged people to bark their own brutal truth to power. One of the people I followed tweeted with a shrug that the net result of Ivan Cameron’s death was one fewer potential Tory in the world. I stared and stared at it, trying to discern some reflexive, ironic meta-joke I hadn’t quite understood — but no, that was the whole tweet. Child’s death, silver lining. I told the person that it was a horrible thing to say. They refused to apologise, and explained that they struggled with tone. Who was the real victim here?

Clearly, if I could be shocked, it was because I had been hypnotised by the geniality of my magic circle. Perhaps following a few arseholes would give me some perspective. After all, we don’t like everyone in an actual community, do we? Even people we like wind us up now and then. Maybe mixing a few bad people into my Follows would make this illusory community more “real” somehow. I started with a few easy ones, including the exotically named Iain Martin, my alternative-reality centre-Right counterpart. I was always getting abused for something he’d written; he’d got mistaken for me a few times.

But I wanted to see what it would be like if you followed only terrible people. For a month, I went experimentally dark. I followed Westboro Baptist church members, Holocaust deniers, Islamophobes, homophobes, all the phobes, all personally wounded by the injustice of “these people” just being in their eyeline. Misogynists were everywhere, social media affirming the warning Germaine Greer had sounded half a century earlier — that women have very little idea of just how much men hate them. Now, they had a very keen understanding of exactly how much. There were men, hating them graphically, cruelly, dismissively, in plain sight.

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Sometimes, I tried engaging. A few of the hateful people were perfectly civil. I had several conversations with a cheerful woman from Sarah Palin’s office who had every sympathy for me, living in England under the yoke of Marxism. She told me how the NHS worked (death panels, population control) and how Birmingham was a Sharia state. No guns, that was our problem.

Not many of the other accounts I followed seemed to do light conversation. Confederate Nazis called me the worst thing they could think of (gay) and wished unimaginative ill upon me, with unimaginative swearing. Someone even went to the trouble of opening a Twitter account in my name, simply to post me warnings. The just-for-you revenge Twitter account became a thing. The nastier ones, as always, were targeting women, set up by men obsessed with their former partners. I had my own for a while, bless him. Definitely a him. He followed only me, posted to only me. By the time he sighed his last message, he seemed exhausted by the whole enterprise: “I hope that everyone you ever loved is dead.”

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It’s tempting, of course, to project my own weary old man’s vibe shift — weltschmerz to ennui — onto the blank, threadbare screen. The renamed site may be under new management, but everyone seems to be doing that Unicode “shrug” emoji, expecting not a renewal but a gentle unmooring. Approximately nobody is ever going to call it X. Twitter will remain a vital channel for mutual support groups, for campaigners, for people plugging their work. But honestly, in terms of human interaction, it was always faddish. That was its point. It was born to die.

Twitter and I are losing interest in one another; it can’t even be bothered to pester me with vaguely relevant ads. Like many others, I’m just running down the clock now as it enters its Sunset Boulevard phase. It’s slowly leaving me, not the other way round.

By the time Sacco landed at her destination and regained access to the Internet, her life had been turned upside-down. She had been branded a certified Bad Person by almost the entire Anglo-Twittersphere, including a reality TV star named Donald Trump. She was ultimately dismissed from her job.

Looking back, Sacco’s tweet may be seen as a world-historical pivot, Ground Zero for the cultural developments that characterised the 2010s: the return of Nineties-style “political correctness”; the swift destruction of lives by online mobs; the instantaneous capitulation of employers ; above all, the obscuration of important sociopolitical and material crises by a pathological obsession with language and offence-taking. Sacco, in short, inadvertently called forth the Woke Moment.

Now, nearly a decade later, the Post-Woke Moment is here. It’s a tenuous achievement, to be sure, and the woke still wield enormous political, economic and cultural power. Still, there are unmistakable signs of “a vibe shift”. In Britain, gender ideologues have suffered major setbacks, as authorities crack down on the malpractices of gender clinics. In the United States, the teaching of ahistorical nonsense in schools has run up against a wall of parental outrage. Even Netflix has told its censorious culture-managers to shut up or find another job.

The question is where we go from here. The two most plausible paths are restorationism and radicalism. (Many of the potential “third ways” ultimately collapse back into one of the two.) By restorationism, I mean an effort to turn the cultural clock back to roughly where things stood before Sacco self-destructed her life and career in 52 carelessly typed characters. The fundamental instinct of this path is that the matrix of social, economic, and cultural policy and practice that prevailed roughly a decade ago was sound. Into that happy arcadia of free speech and free markets was suddenly and for no reason injected the virus of Left-identitarianism, which conjured as a reaction the even more dangerous virus of Right-wing populism. The battle, then, is between individualists and “collectivists” of various stripes. Now that wokeism is faltering, restorationists feel, individualism must reign again.

The restorationists are essentially cautious conservatives. They believe that the sex-liberationism and gender-nominalism that have characterised the last 20 years were fine — a healthy and organic development of classical-liberal doctrine — but then suddenly things went too far with the “gender stuff”. Likewise, the liberal censoriousness of that era was fine, but then the far-Left adopted the same methods and went too far with “cancel culture”.

The dividing line between the authentic fruits of modern society and its freakish excesses was always blurry, and remains so to this day. The bigger problem for the restorationists is that, to paraphrase Mitterrand on 1968, the pre-Woke Moment contained in it many of the elements that gave rise to the Woke Moment. Restoring 2013, even if it were possible, would mean restoring the same internal contradictions — not least an obscenely unequal society, in material terms, that desperately needed the fake egalitarianism of wokeness as a legitimating ideology.

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The second path is radicalism. By this, I don’t mean extremism, but a cold appreciation for the fact that the Woke Moment was rooted in, rather than a departure from, the class rivalries and material conditions of modern society. The contradictions that gave rise to wokeness, in other words, won’t be resolved unless we work for a decent and more materially equal society — a process that will require political confrontation and compromise between the three major classes: the asset-rich few, the managers who service their affairs, and the asset-less many.

Both of the post-woke camps — the restorationists and the far less numerous radicals — must contend with a powerful woke remnant. Even more so than the restorationists, the woke are fundamentally conservative. As I have argued before, by changing how we talk about society, and altering its managerial hierarchies, they seek to preserve the existing power structure. Only now, with a backlash brewing, they must change tack.

Anand Giridharadas’s new book, The Persuaders, is representative of this subtle shift in the woke camp. In it, he aims to “reinvigorate the idea of persuasion” at a time when too many Americans view each other as “alien, menacing, and, therefore, unchangeable”. He says he wants to reverse these trends — but mostly ends up replicating their logic, in page after interminable page of saccharine prose that recalls nothing so much as a piece of corporate diversity messaging. Giridharadas is a wokester trying to strike a restorationist-liberal pose.

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The book starts out promising enough, with a discussion of the Russian troll farms that many liberals to this day blame for catapulting Donald Trump to the Oval Office. For Western elites struggling to explain rising populism, it couldn’t be that Trumpers, Brexiteers, and Gilets Jaunes revolted over legitimate grievances with progressive rule. No, it must have been Kremlin mind-control that propelled them. Where once it was chiefly the politically uneducated prole on the street who unreasonably suspected elites of conniving with nefarious foreigners, today it’s as often elites who imagine the common people are foreign agents or automatons.

Observing the workings of the troll farms up-close, Giridharadas draws a different conclusion: that the Kremlin’s influence operations merely exploited existing social discord. “As tempting as it may be to view the Russian operatives as instigators,” he writes, “to witness these moves is to witness a mission of amplification.” Even in 2016, this should have been apparent to anyone with enough faith in Americans to question their susceptibility to St. Petersburg-hatched memes depicting the Lord Jesus hugging Trump. Still, that a former New York Times columnist is now prepared to voice the obvious signifies something.

That something is, in a word, weakness: the yawning sense that despite their conquest of major institutions, progressives are alienated from broad swaths of the public. Big Tech and Hollywood, the HR department and the Central Intelligence Agency — all now speak in their vernacular. Yet comedians have begun to mock their inanities with impunity, the GOP is making electoral hay of the 1619 Project, and suburban moms are mobilising to defend the right of their sons to become merely gay men, rather than eunuchs.

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That’s where Giridharadas comes in, bearing both a warning and a hopeful omen for progressives. The warning is that unless the Left changes rhetorical course, its language and purity-policing will leave it isolated from the masses, its political causes moribund. The good news is that the Left can overcome this obstacle by making accommodations for those less enlightened than themselves. “Persuasion,” in other words, is just a matter of cultural progressives being a little nicer to the benighted many.

That, supposedly, is the great achievement of Linda Sarsour, the Palestinian-American feminist who in the aftermath of Trump’s election helped organise the Women’s March. Viewed through the lens of social class, the Great Pussy-Hat Uprising of 2017 was a movement of gentry wokeism, by gentry wokesters, for gentry wokesters. I would venture to say that it “persuaded” not a single true-believing Trumpian. So why does Giridharadas single her out as an exemplary “persuader”? Well, you see, Sarsour and her Women’s March co-founder Tamika Mallory made “a bet that a lot of their fellow activists and movement allies might not have made”: namely, working with ignorant, all-too-privileged, liberal white women.

Sarsour & Co. had to contend with the fact that it’s “difficult to deal with these white women”. But they did it all the same — a great sacrifice. Trump’s rise had thrust “white supremacy” into the spotlight but, nevertheless, the magnanimous, committed Sarsour was prepared to work with white women. In doing so, says Giridharadas with unspeakable earnestness, she defied Audre Lorde, who had insisted that women of colour shouldn’t seek to “educate white women… as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival”. Doing so, the great intersectional sage taught, “is a diversion of our energies and a tragic repetition of racist, patriarchal thought”. Nevertheless, Sarsour & Co. persisted.

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Likewise, we are supposed to cheer Sarsour for mildly questioning her fellow activists’ ruthless enforcement of gender pronouns. She told them:

“Everyone’s pronouns should be respected. But [for some of the activists] who are here, English is not their first language, and this is a very new concept for them. So I would ask for forgiveness, and I would ask if that would be something that maybe we’ll do next time when we’re together as we get these women through this process.”

Note that the pronouns themselves aren’t up for debate — or even a matter of persuasion. Everyone should adhere to the linguistic demands of gender ideology. It’s just that some people are new to these norms, and Sarsour’s great persuasive act lies in asking “for forgiveness” as she helps the ignorant “through this process” of mastering them.

Everyone is on a “journey” — a word that appears so frequently in Giridharadas’s text, it made me never want to leave home again. The destination is the same for all, but the author and his cast of characters are generous enough to allow that, for some, the “journey” might take longer or more circuitous paths. Giridharadas’s great persuaders are those brave few prepared to guide lesser beings to the higher gnosis of current Left commitments. Yet the rightness of the gnosis itself is never up for questioning. Thus, we meet another Left-wing activist who declares that masks are about keeping “my neighbours safe” (Giridharadas implicitly agrees, since he never introduces the slightest critical distance from his subjects). The activist’s “persuasiveness”, we are made to understand, lies in trying to find common ground with even those who don’t share this (unscientific) view of masking.

Another activist, a proponent of police abolition, encounters a woman of colour who wants more policing in her neighbourhood. She is not unusual: wider polling data shows that very few black and brown Americans want less policing in their neighbourhoods. Our activist, however, is held up as a model of persuasion because, rather than writing off the woman, she badgers her relentlessly, until she comes around to the view that maybe policing is bad.

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Again, persuasiveness lies in “educating” the benighted, rather than genuinely listening to what they might have to say. Setting out to persuade progressives to be more persuasive, Giridharadas merely ends up ratifying the movement’s unbearable smugness. So much of what the author characterises as “persuasiveness” involves Left-liberals offering something like political-cum-psychological therapy to other Left-liberals. There is a camp, for instance — called Transracial Journeys, naturally — which offers guilt-ridden white parents a way to navigate their hang-ups over adopting black children (“I like to tell people that I’m a recovering racist,” confesses one mom).

Giridharadas’s account of persuasiveness reinforces the progressive tendency towards depoliticisation: contests over material conditions give way to therapeutic journeys for those at the top, with working-class people cast as the oafs and bigots in need of being coerced — if gently, as the author would have it — into enlightenment. It all ends up benefitting the culture-war Right and the restorationists, who are equally uninterested in improving the oiks’ material conditions, but at least don’t condescend to the many and call it persuasion.

This leaves it to the radicals to pursue a different politics, one that pays due attention to material reality and breaks through the culture-war deadlock. As one of the proponents of this approach, I admit that it is by far the more arduous alternative to merely restoring the status quo of 2013. Tech bros who think chief restorationist Bari Weiss talks good sense might be alienated and angry, but they’re not going to agitate against their own material interests. The suburban moms who are lacerating their woke school boards will never sign up for economic populism.

At best, the Post-Woke moment will be defined by a messy and unstable admixture of restorationism and radicalism, now countervailed by the regnant woke, now able to return the pressure with the help of pseudo-populist politicians — who would discipline Disney for pushing gender ideology, but not for underpaying its workers. As Justine Sacco no doubt did before her fateful flight, we would all be wise to buckle up.

The Miserable Older White Woman emerges from the same blend of old-school misogyny and ageist ugh-mom-ism that brought us first the Wine Mom and then the Karen, in the summer of 2020. In theory, a Karen was a white woman who called the police on black people who were simply minding their own business. In practice, the term started getting used (and is indeed still used) in reference to any woman over the age of 25 who has spoken up, in any context. In the early pandemic days, I was once called “Karen” after asking some teenagers on public transit to put on masks. But anti-maskers also got labelled Karens too, so we can’t win (unless we stay silent).

Who has it in for these women? A significant number of the Twitter accounts piling hate on middle-aged women seem to be controlled by young men who give off incel vibes. They are also angry at young women for rejecting them, and their mothers for not sending their favourite meal down to them that evening in their proverbial basement. What is clear is that these women are an avatar for complaints that span, or defy, the ideological spectrum. The Miserable Older White Woman inspires an intense, if difficult to pin down, political fury. Both progressives and the Right seem to agree that “Liberal white women on antidepressants will be the end of our civilisation”, but the stereotype allows a range of people to channel a variety of frustrations. She’s the 53% of white women who supposedly (but not actually) voted for Donald Trump in 2016, but also the tear-strewn pussy-hat wearer at the Women’s March protesting that election’s outcome.

For the Left, the privileged lady wrangling a prescription for her non-problems can be blamed for all of society’s woes: racism, imperialism, the housing shortage, the cost of living, climate change, perhaps even monkeypox. Her antidepressant usage can be categorised as yet another indulgence she engages in while other people suffer, akin to a day at the spa: “White women live off of Starbucks and antidepressants.” The Left-produced caricature lives in a large suburban house with a rich husband and resents her perfect life: “Excess red wine, antidepressants, free time and money has truly done wonders to boomer white women.” This is a women whose problem is that she has it too good. If she had to deal with the same adversity as everyone else, this would build character, and she’d stop the whinging.

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The sly sexism of the OK Karen meme

By Sarah Ditum

For the Right, the Miserable Older White Woman is the opposition: “Democratic party supporters are self-hating college-educated white women. Basically if you live in an apartment in LA and own four cats, a massive ‘sex toy’ and consume a lot of antidepressants you are a Democratic party voter.” And she is getting her comeuppance for her decades of liberalism. She foolishly bought into the feminist myth that women have brains and should have high-powered careers and look at her now, all alone with her cats, pining for the life she could have had if she’d settled down when still turning heads. If she’d stayed a virgin until marrying Ward Cleaver at 22, she wouldn’t be popping pills of any kind. She’s sad because she’s alone, but don’t feel sorry for her, it’s a misery of her own making. A lesson for young women: get married before you’re middle-aged — and why not to one of the charming young men who spend their days online mocking older women?

And yet critics from the Right also have it in for the Miserable Older White Women who have settled down, but who fail to have either aged into traditionalist matrons or remained chipper 20-somethings. Pratt, of “Welcome to Hell”, more recently made the rounds for introducing Twitter’s cynical masses to the Peach Mom, a comic about the angst of an apparently well-off stay-at-home mom (albeit with side hustles) who despises her husband for doing less of the housework and childcare. The woman behind these evidently autobiographical comics then got widely ridiculed, in part because it is objectively ridiculous to post comics to the internet that bash your spouse, but also because she was a Miserable Older White Woman, unhappy with her lot, but for no good reason. Why wasn’t she grateful that she had a provider husband who also did some housework? (Much was made of the fact that he apparently does childcare when she goes out in the evening to teach yoga, as though the teaching of yoga is an indulgence and not a part-time job.) She should be grateful, was the gist.

But the common ground of why she’s demonised is that she represents liberal modernity, to people across the political spectrum who object to it. The Miserable Older White Woman is a normie, a Hillary not Bernie supporter. An AWFL (“affluent white female liberal”); a Twitter search for that very-online acronym paints a similar picture. Her reaction to Kamala is an enthusiastic yaaas. She posts milquetoast liberal messaging to her Instagram, about Black Lives Mattering and trans rights and abortion rights, but in a cringe way.

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The cruel world of yoga

By Kat Rosenfield

There’s a perception, among her detractors, that liberal modernity has given women of this demographic too much ground, which has made them (as well as everyone else) worse off: “Affirmative action, war on poverty, and the modern feminist movement empowered white women. This newly empowered group remade society in a way that harmed men that couldn’t adapt. This new society is not so great and white women begin taking massive amounts of antidepressants.” Men’s rights activists agree with far-Left advocates for the true marginalised: white women are spoiled pseudo-victims. They are society’s actual most powerful, but imagine themselves oppressed.

Does it all come back to Hillary Clinton? Hillary — per her haters — the privileged complainer. Hillary, the embodiment of the dorky, stodgy mom who does not know how to relax. Unlike other ways of medicating away bad moods, antidepressants have exactly zero reputation for being edgy or fun. Much like you know who. Even Hillary’s supporters faulted her, during the 2016 US presidential campaign, for not appearing to have a good time. (Too young, too attractive, and too fun-loving is also a problem, as a certain Finnish prime minister could attest.) The people who wanted to vote Democrat in 2016 but just couldn’t stomach Hillary are, in their rhetoric, very like those who see a stat on older white women’s antidepressant usage and go: “makes sense.”

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Middle-aged women don't want sex

By Mary Harrington

There’s also cross-ideological consensus that older women have committed the crime of having aged out of hotness. A Reddit theorist suggests older white women are upset because “they’re the most protected and coddled class when they’re young. When their looks fade they stop getting preferential treatment which is hard for most to adjust to.” The thing where “when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression”, in other words. So, according to their critics, these women used to have too much and are now bitter over a normal existence.

To appear old is, in a sense, to look miserable. Society values women for youth, a fleeting quality, which is enough to make anyone miserable. But there’s also the specific fact that the changes to facial features that happen naturally with age read, on women, as anger. Women sick of being told they seem angry seek Botox — an anti-aging treatment — to remedy the situation. One wonders whether Miserable Older White Women are as miserable as all that, or just look that way, and are disproportionately prescribed antidepressants because their doctors — fallible humans like the rest of us — interpret their ordinary facial expressions as ones of distress. The medical establishment has made stupider mistakes.

Women, particularly housewives, have long been prescribed drugs at a much higher rate than men. One can look at this as society throwing drugs at women to distract them from their situational misery so that they don’t question the situation itself. But one might just as easily see this as a case of men not having access to proper mental health care, or indeed to the drugs that can be used relatively safely to make them less miserable. Are the men who sneer at antidepressant-using women just repulsed, or are they also, perhaps, envious? Do they wish they could be like the women who face somewhat less stigma for going ahead and making an appointment with their GP? Is the Miserable Older White Woman’s crime being miserable, or is it valuing herself enough to do something sensible about it?

Last week, Breivik appeared before a parole hearing, asking to be released from prison. If you’re unfamiliar with the procedural mechanics of Norway’s criminal justice system, you might think that “Breivik” and “parole” have no business belonging to the same sentence. But in Norway offenders are legally entitled to apply for parole at the halfway point of a maximum prison term.

Breivik, who in 2016 ludicrously filed a complaint that he was being subject to degrading and inhumane treatment in prison and who has now served 10 years of his 21-year sentence, was never going to renounce the opportunity to further ridicule the largesse of his liberal jailors: when he walked in to the courtroom, ponced-up in a black slim-fit suit that was plastered all over him like cheap spray tan, he flashed a Nazi salute. He then gave an hour-long speech, in which he said: “Today, I strongly dissociate myself from violence and terror… I hereby give you my word of honour that this is behind me forever,” straining credulity not least by his invocation of the word “honour”. For some reason, the court allowed this travesty to be filmed and broadcast. It did not, however, allow the travesty of freeing him: Breivik’s parole was denied.

As a criminologist, I am not supposed to say that Breivik is a monster, much less express any vengeful emotions toward him. Rather, I am supposed to place him within a broader context and resist the seductive temptation to “Other” him.

I am supposed to say that he’s a product of society, whose homicidal actions speak to the deep alienation that some young men experience in a spiritually depleted world at the End of History. Or I am supposed to highlight how Breivik had internalised the trauma of a painful childhood — his mother tried to orphan him and his sister when he was a child — and then sought to cancel out that trauma by violently imposing it on the people who inhabited that same desolate society. I am supposed to take all the monstrousness that Breivik unleashed against his multiple victims, most of them teenagers, and causally tie it not to Breivik the person but to other sources of social dysfunction that produced him. I am supposed to say that Breivik is, to annex the title of Åsne Seierstad’s account of his massacre, One of Us.

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Norway confronts its Breivik demons

By Asne Seierstad

As a criminologist who studies terrorism, I’m all too familiar with Hannah Arendt’s thesis that while human cruelty can be monstrous, its perpetrators are often pathetic men (and sometimes women) who are neither demonic nor sadistic, but ordinary people with grubby little motives, like career advancement, pleasing superiors or not wanting to stick one’s neck out for fear of censure.

When I first read Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men, a book about how ordinary Germans, from all walks of life, willingly participated in the open-air slaughter of tens of thousands of Jewish civilians in occupied Poland between 1941 and 1942, I was impressed by its overall Arendtian argument; it seemed profound and radical. According to Browning, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 killed not because they were fanatics motivated by the ideology of murderous anti-Semitism, but because they were psychologically weak.

As Browning puts it: “To break ranks and step out, to adopt overtly nonconformist behaviour, was simply beyond most of the men. It was easier for them to shoot…” A broader argument soon materialises: that there is a line of good and evil that runs through every human being; that we are all, when the circumstances permit it, capable of terrible acts of inhumanity.

I have now come to think of this account of human evil as banal and partial. And I have come to dislike the glibness with which the account is expressed by its defenders, as though they are imparting some deep and unsettling truth about the human condition that is lost on the plebs with all their talk of evil and mythical monsters.

Well, we are not all capable of inhumanity, and while some people fearfully succumb to the weight of group dynamics and kill, others can’t wait to get started with the business of slaughter and need only the flimsiest of pretexts to enter a berserk state. And still others not only refuse to follow orders, but bravely intervene to stop their fellows from killing civilians.

The problem with the Arendtian thesis about ordinary killers, and the broader consensus that has hardened around it, is that it can’t explain ideologically fervent men who revel in the idea of murdering and humiliating scores of their perceived enemies. Men like Breivik.

Granted, Breivik was a pudgy-faced, piggy-eyed loser with blond sweaty hair — all now shaven off. As Seierstad recounts in her book, Breivik’s life was an elaborate catalogue of miserable failures. The problem was his tremendous narcissism and resentful anger, which sabotaged him at every turn.

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The theatre of terror

By Simon Cottee

As a teenager, he reinvented himself as a graffiti artist called “Morg”, claiming to be the top “tagger” in Oslo. But he was shit and annoying and was soon excluded from the “tagger” community. In another reinvention, he tried his hand at selling fake university diplomas on the internet, until he nearly got caught. He then joined the anti-immigration Progress party, intent on becoming a politician. That, too, went nowhere. Women, in particular, seemed to find him radioactive: he ordered a Belarusian mail-order bride who left as swiftly as she came. He would brag to his friends that he was a brothel man; this self-righteous and disgust-prone creep was probably terrified of women.

But for all these squalid and all-too human details, Breivik was a singular individual with a troglodytic interior world that made him stand out. Around 2006, he moved back in with his mother and retreated from the world, living almost entirely in his imagination. He became obsessed with the idea that white European culture was under existential threat from marauding hordes of Muslim migrants, abetted by white cultural Marxists and multiculturalists. And he began nurturing the fantasy that he would lead a secret order of knights to stop this cultural “genocide”.

Yes, Breivik was a chump and a radical loser, but he was no ordinary killer following orders, still less some colourless bureaucrat orchestrating mass-murder from behind the scenes, as was the case with Adolf Eichmann, the apotheosis of Arendt’s banal evil. Far from being banal, Breivik’s motives were related to his sense of worthlessness and lack of virility. Only by violently crushing all those who had made him feel weak and pathetic could he restore his sense of manly “honour”. In short, Breivik was an enthusiastic killer who wanted to kill.

One of the dark ironies exhibited in Breivik’s parole hearing was his appropriation of liberal explanatory motifs to excuse his monstrous behaviour. “I was brainwashed,” Breivik told the court on the first day of the proceedings. He had been radicalised online, he elaborated, embracing the language of victimhood that he so despises in others and that so many progressives employ to rationalise or explain away the crimes of “the oppressed”.

Breivik once had a grudging admiration for al Qaeda, and the courage with which its foot-soldiers embraced death in defence of their beliefs. There was no culture of violent martyrdom among neo-Nazis, and he bitterly lamented that. Now, it seems, Breivik has taken a leaf out of the jihadi apologia playbook, claiming that he was radicalised by dangerous material on the internet. While he hasn’t gone the full Shamima Begum, who has explicitly renounced Isis and its ideology, his displacement of responsibility onto the internet closely resembles hers and many others like her.

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By Simon Cottee

It is hard to know if Breivik’s claim that he was radicalised online is sincere. Given that he continues to hold firm to his to neo-Nazi beliefs, it seems doubtful. In fact, I am inclined to believe that it was some private joke aimed at other neo-Nazis to mock liberals who use the self-same explanatory trope to excuse the radicalisation of jihadists.

I also don’t blame Breivik for flagrantly ridiculing his liberal oppressors, as he sees them. In Breivik’s eyes, they are his enemies, and he is a political prisoner. Perhaps the Norwegian authorities should in turn take him seriously and recognise him as such, which would mean refusing him any public stage on which to propagandise his vile beliefs.

Even in liberal Norway tolerance should have it limits — as should the virtue that professes that even the most fanatical and dangerous of murderers should be given a chance to present a case for their release.

Just like the neocons before them, they are bewitched by the prospect of war with an enemy they believe poses a threat to their way of life. The only difference is that this deadly menace doesn’t live in some far-off land, but right at home. They might even live next door.

As The New York Times put it in an editorial last week, “the Republic faces an existential threat from a movement that is openly contemptuous of democracy and has shown that it is willing to use violence to achieve its ends”. And there is only one way to survive this threat: to “mobilise at every level”. The NYT was, of course, referring to the attack on the Capitol last January: “Jan. 6 is not in the past,” we’re warned. “It is every day”.

It is hard to exaggerate the feverish excitement with which many progressives responded to the Capitol riot. While the spectacle of hundreds of Trump supporters smashing their way into one of the sacrosanct sites of American democracy generated widespread condemnation, for many progressives the dominant emotional register was one of apocalyptic disgust — and arousal.

Here, finally, was irrefutable proof that they had been right all along: that Trump’s hateful rhetoric would finally become a hateful reality. Here, finally, was a war that could give their lives meaning. There were now Right-wing insurrectionists among them, and they would need to be fought. It was almost as if, on some deep level, they had wanted the Capitol siege to happen.

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The liberal fantasy of the Capitol coup

By Edward Luttwak

Every group that spoils for war needs a wound or trauma to mobilise around. For the neocons and the liberal hawks who supported them, it was the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That wound would take a lifetime to heal; but it was also massively generative, filling a spiritual void at the heart of American life at the End of History.

In the half-decade prior to 9/11 one of the biggest political stories in America centred on President Clinton’s marital infidelity with a 22-year-old intern. Was a blowjob really an act that existed outside of the realm of “sexual relations”, as Clinton had sought to claim? And should his receiving them in the Oval Office warrant his resignation? In America, the period leading up to 9/11 was, in other words, one of monumental banality and puerility.

The instant the second plane hit the south tower of the World Trade Centre on 9/11 that period came to an abrupt end. America had entered, in Martin Amis’s expression, “the Age of Vanished Normalcy”: idle talk about illicit blowjobs would no longer cut it. This was a time of war, a clash of civilisations. Such was the level of danger that we could no longer wait for threats to gather, but would need to pre-emptively act to stop them from emerging.

It was all very dramatic and clarifying, as Christopher Hitchens acknowledged from the very start: “I am not particularly a war lover, and on the occasions when I have seen warfare as a travelling writer, I have tended to shudder. But here was a direct, unmistakable confrontation between everything I loved and everything I hated.” Hitchens, who confided that he felt “exhilarated” at the prospect of this confrontation, would soon go on to insist that it was a matter of moral principle for the US to topple the Saddam Hussein regime. He was less rousing and persuasive on whether it was the prudent thing to do, but prudence was never Hitchens’s metier.

The storming of the Capitol was to elite liberals what the destruction of the World Trade Center was to the neocons: a bracing vindication that they had been right all along, and a pretext for engaging in a battle that would give their lives a greater meaning and a chance to prove their virtue. What could be more exhilarating than taking on the historic forces of white supremacy now threatening to destroy the republic? And what could be more virtuous?

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The capturing of the Capitol

By Michael Tracey

None of this is to deny the vast ideological differences between the neocons and modern progressives, the most salient of which is that the latter would never support an American-led occupation of a Muslim-majority country. Nor is it to make a false moral equivalence between the events of 9/11, where more than 3,000 civilians were murdered in carefully coordinated attacks, and the events of January 6, where the only person who was shot and killed was one of the rioters.

Yet the parallels between these two political tribes are striking. So keen were the neocons to invade Iraq that they had to drastically inflate the threat-level of the Saddam Hussein regime. They did so by arguing that the threat was “existential”: that if Saddam were to remain in power, he would not only continue to amass WMDs, but would likely use them to attack America. It later transpired that this argument was based on unreliable evidence: no major stockpiles of WMD were ever found and Saddam’s relationship with al Qaeda was overblown. But such was the war fever that had gripped the neocons that they were apt to ignore any evidence that contradicted their conviction.

Today’s liberals are similarly flushed with ideological fervour, believing that they are in a cosmic struggle of Manichean proportions: they are the elect, the chosen ones, and they believe that their responsibility to purge all traces of white supremacy and hateful extremism is a grave one. Indeed, such is their keenness to root out white supremacy that they are apt to find it everywhere, even where it patently doesn’t exist. They are equally apt to inflate its threat where it does exist, like comparing the storming of the Capitol on January 6 to the terror attacks of 9/11.

Note my use of inflate: no one would deny that there is a white power movement in the US, and there is much evidence to suggest that far-Right terrorism in America has increased markedly over the last few years. It is, however, important to maintain a sense of proportion: America is intensely divided right now, but the idea that the country is in the grip of a perpetual far-Right insurgency is catastrophic to a pathological degree.

In his 1989 article The End of History?, Francis Fukuyama declared that the great ideological battles of the 20th century were over and that Western liberal democracy had triumphed. This, he argued, was a good thing. But, concluding his essay, he lamented: “The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.”

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The hypocrisy of America's terror debate

By Simon Cottee

More than two decades later, people in liberal democratic societies such as America enjoy a level of freedom, opportunity and material wealth unmatched anywhere else. And yet, as the response to the Capitol riot shows, they suffer from a deficit of meaning and spiritual fulfilment. This, as Fukuyama observed, fuels a sense of nostalgia for history and all its dramatic entanglements. “Such nostalgia,” he noted, “will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post-historical world for some time to come.”

So when The New York Times publishes an editorial on how “every day is Jan. 6 now”, it is hard not to see this as a form of nostalgia for the kind of historical drama and contention that is clearly missing from the lives of the comfortable, Ivy-League educated, New-York based journalists who wrote it and who represent the vanguard of what Wesley Yang calls the “successor ideology”. Their hysteria, then, says more about themselves than the events of last year.

In his memoir, the Vietnam War veteran Philip Caputo reflects on his motivations for enlisting in the war. Preeminent among them was the desire “to prove something: my courage, my toughness, my manhood, call it whatever you like”. For those Western liberals who secretly wish for an impending civil war at home, the thing they most want to prove is not their courage, and it certainly isn’t their toughness or manhood, something which they would no doubt contemptuously regard as toxically heteronormative. Rather, what they desperately want to prove is their virtue — even if it means engaging in irresponsible fear-mongering and flagrant exaggeration.

Decades ago I changed my position on the issue of “gun control”. Even though I still believe liberals are correct about the unfortunate predicament created by our founders, I now hold that we must tolerate privately held guns and all that comes with them. That may sound like a paradox, but once you understand the tensions internal to the mind of an armed American liberal, you will understand something fundamental about the American experiment.

Portland, where I live, is an absurdly progressive city on the compulsively liberal Pacific coast. But that isn’t the whole story. Washington, Oregon, and California, the three left-coast states, vote as a Democratic block. But that’s not because we lack for conservatives. We have lots of them. They are just consistently outnumbered and outvoted.

I should probably explain here that, although I believe that liberals are right about the unacceptable cost of our second amendment rights, conservatives are closer to correct, as I see it, about the governing of our cities — a fact that becomes glaringly obvious if you visit Los Angeles, Seattle or San Francisco and compare it to any major city in conservative Texas. American liberals don’t seem to understand that their values cannot simply be implemented locally. That’s partly why I’m armed like a conservative despite my liberal values. But I digress.

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By Mary Harrington

That day at the gun shop, most of the people I stood in line with were conservatives who felt like they could use a bit more firepower. And I couldn’t fault them. So did I, apparently. I imagine they sized me up and read me as a liberal. I’m pretty sure I look like one. But I felt welcome, or at least as welcome as one can in an environment where there is a run on guns and ammo.

And there was indeed a run, as there always is when the population is on edge. When Americans worry, they buy guns. Some of that is irrational, as the guns they bought in previous panics are likely to last a good long time. Some of it is people arming themselves for the first time. And some of it is intuitive — the result of a somewhat vague reassessment of the level of need.

The gun shop was visibly strange in those early pandemic days. It looked like it had been stripped. The wall behind the counter that would normally display perhaps 100 different models of handgun had maybe 20 — guns no one really wanted but would eventually be reluctantly purchased by some Johnny-come-lately. But it was the state of the ammo that was most striking. In the major calibers there wasn’t any, a pattern that everyone in the shop knew was repeated all over town, and indeed across the entire country. Ammunition manufacturers couldn’t keep up. When a crate of ammo was occasionally delivered to the shop, it was target ammo, not ideal for self-defence, and it was rationed to one box per family, per week. Welcome to America.

In the gun shop, no one was troubled by novices, or even liberals. Explanations were patient. It’s a surprisingly courteous, agreeable, and highly technical culture: no one knows more than gun enthusiasts about the hazards that come with firearms, and such people take a very dim view of those who treat guns casually.

I suspect the notable courtesy was at least partly the natural result of the level of armament. The staff were surely all armed. So too, I would guess, were the clientele — it is legal in Oregon to have a concealed handgun given the proper, easily obtained permit. In such an environment heightened tensions are quickly noted, and de-escalation is an ever-present priority. It is, in some sense, the opposite of Twitter, where no one is armed and people are routinely terrible to each other.

There was one woman behind the counter, who had the unenviable task of running background checks for every firearm purchased. In most cases that meant she had to disappoint customers and tell them it would be days or weeks before they will be able to collect their weapons. She had been ringing up and disappointing people, non-stop for weeks. As I neared the front of the line I heard her say to the room: “I don’t get it. Do they think they’re going to shoot a virus?”

“It’s not the virus they’re worried about,” I offered. “It’s their neighbours if the food runs out.”

There was a general murmur of agreement, and I was glad to have brought something useful to the party. But looking back, I don’t think my explanation was complete. In fact, I’m sure it wasn’t.

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Kyle Rittenhouse could still tear America apart

By Park MacDougald

Most of those stocking up on guns and ammo belong to a culture, and like every other culture, it has its beliefs, suppositions and fears. That culture believes that tyranny may descend on us, even here in the freedom-loving United States of America, and that privately held guns are the key to fending it off. I’m not a member of this culture, but I believe they may well be right about this.

In a country where politicians are increasingly prone to withdraw or stand-down the police to curry favour with confused constituents, it is easy to see how things can quickly escalate as they did in Kenosha, Wisconsin the night Kyle Rittenhouse shot three men in self-defence at a riot. To be clear, I do not believe Rittenhouse, then 17-years-old, should have been there with his AR-15. But I also don’t believe the streets of American cities should ever be ceded to violent ideological bullies — a now familiar pattern that set the stage for Rittenhouse’s actions.

To understand why private guns may be decisive in a fight against tyranny, let’s take a moment to revisit what is assuredly the most inscrutable section of the United States Constitution, the Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

It’s almost like a deliberate non-sequitur. In fact, after decades of pondering the question, I’m now fairly convinced that that is exactly what the founders gave us: an intentionally vague pronouncement designed to force the question into the future, to ensure it would be repeatedly reevaluated to keep up with changing weaponry and circumstances. Near as I can tell, it’s a place holder for a principle they could not tailor in advance.

They clearly didn’t want to give the legislature or the courts complete latitude. They tied our hands; our representatives are not allowed to disarm the public, even if a majority desires it. And the founders gave us a strong hint about why — something about the need to protect a “free state” from, you know… stuff. But they didn’t tell us how much firepower citizens should be allowed to have. And thank goodness they didn’t, because muzzle-loaded weapons are no better a model of modern weapons than a movable-type printing press is for an algorithmically personalised infinite scroll.

The second amendment contains two conundrums, one novel and one original. The modern trouble is relatively straightforward: What does it mean not to “infringe” on the right to bear arms? In the 18^th century that was far simpler because, although guns have always been a force multiplier for an individual, the factor by which an individual’s force was multiplied was so much lower. Back then, within reason, a person could be trusted to buy the guns they wanted to own.

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On first glance, the original puzzle also seems uncomplicated: The state is going to need a fighting force if it is to remain free. But the longer one stares, the stranger this pronouncement seems. What militia, regulations and state were they even referring to? Is it a reference to the Army? No, the Army already existed and could have been referenced if that was their intent, having arisen first as the Continental Army that fought and won the revolution after it was formed in 1775, later to be re-founded as the United States Army in 1784 — seven years prior to the 1791 ratification of the Bill of Rights with its “well-regulated militia” riddle embedded in its second amendment. So if it wasn’t the Army protecting the “free state” they meant to invoke, then it must really have been the people — but against whom? And what is “a well-regulated militia” and where is it going to come from and in what way is it to be regulated other than “well”?

As a young man I regarded the second amendment as the founders’ biggest blunder. As we head into 2022, my position has flipped — I now believe history may well come to regard it as the most far-sighted thing the founders did, not in spite of its vagueness, but because of it. It’s like a mysterious passage from a sacred text that forces living people to interpret it in a modern context. The founders believed the people needed to be able to defend their free state — with deadly force — whether that refers to a geographical state, or a state of being, or both.

It’s not that I don’t see the terrible carnage which comes from ubiquitous guns. I do see it, and I detest it just like every other decent American. I know that a single deranged or careless person can rob us of anyone, at any time. No American is exempt. Not our families, nor our leaders. It is a terrifying realisation. With modern weapons an individual can kill dozens. It has happened many times, and it will happen again.

I find none of this remotely acceptable as a human, or an American. Remember, I said at the beginning that I believe that the liberals are basically right about the staggering cost of ubiquitous guns. Further, I don’t believe the net effect of ubiquitous guns during an average year, or decade, or century is a reduction in harm. It’s a complex picture, but many Western nations have managed crime as well or better than the US without the population being armed. On long timescales, however, I suspect this trend reverses. A nation’s descent into tyranny can kill millions, and it can drag continents, or the world as a whole, into war.

The terrifying carnage that derives from the right to bear arms must, in the end, be compared to the cost of not having that right, not only for the individual, but for the republic and its neighbours at a minimum. If you imagine that tyranny cannot happen in America due to some safeguard built into our system, or by virtue of some immunity residing in the population itself, then perhaps there is nothing left to discuss.

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By Bret Weinstein

For my part, I don’t believe it. In fact, I believe I know better, both as a scholar and as someone who was falsely accused of racism and hunted in my own neighbourhood — with the police withdrawn in a foolish attempt to appease the mob. And I suspect that if we put the question to a vote, the fraction of the citizenry who believes tyranny could happen here is rising rapidly, even if we don’t necessarily agree on its most likely source. Of course, the fact that tyranny may happen anywhere is not sufficient counterweight to the unacceptable cost of ubiquitous modern firearms. To imagine that cost is outweighed, one must also believe that an armed population is in a position to fend off tyrants.

This, I admit, is by no means clear. Many will correctly point out that no matter how many semi-automatic weapons are in private hands, it will never be a match for the firepower of the guns — including fully automatic guns — in the publicly funded arsenals that, the argument goes, are in danger of finding themselves at the disposal of tyrants. When you add to that the incredible range of weapons and weapon-systems for which the public has no answer, it’s a slam dunk: in a head-to-head conflict between a treasonous, tyrant-led US military on the one hand, and freedom-loving Americans on the other, the military would trounce any number of militias, no matter how “well-regulated”.

But that isn’t really a persuasive argument, for two reasons. First, who decided this would be a fair fight? How many times will the US military have to find itself stalemated by inferior forces before we incorporate the lesson of asymmetric warfare into our national consciousness?

When our family lived in Olympia, Washington, we frequently saw foxes in our backyard. We learned not to worry about our cats because the foxes seemed to simply ignore them. Here in Portland, we have coyotes instead of foxes and neighbourhood cats are constantly disappearing. Does this imply that a wild fox can’t beat a housecat while a coyote can? As a mammalogist I’m sure that’s not it. A fox would almost always win a fight to the death with a domestic cat. But a house cat is capable of doing enough damage on the way out to dissuade anything but a desperate fox from trying it. An armed populace might not be able to defeat a tyrant’s army, but they could well punish it into retreat.

The second reason an armed population might succeed against the military-gone-rogue is that it is exceedingly unlikely the entire military would accept immoral orders. Either they would divide over the question, and the armed populace would end up fighting alongside the hopefully large portion of the military who remained loyal to the Constitution and their fellow citizens. Or those who would naturally resist immoral orders would have been purged from the uniformed ranks under some pretext that discovers and discharges those with independent minds, returning these non-compliant souls home to their well-armed families and neighbourhoods. Either way, private gun ownership might well prove decisive in a periodic contest between “patriots and tyrants”.

I expect this argument will prove unpopular. Are we really that near the brink of tyranny in America? I don’t know. I think it’s plausible enough that it would be irresponsible not to discuss what might happen.

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I also think it is worth taking a brief look at Australia to discern whether it has any lessons for us. Australia is, after all, a nation with many similarities to the US: it had its own permissive gun ownership laws and culture until the 1996 massacre in Port Arthur, Tasmania, in which 35 people were killed. The alterations in Australia’s gun laws and the gun buyback programme that followed are frequently held up as a possible model for American gun reform. And they make a strong case that massacres and other gun violence can indeed be greatly reduced by such a programme. But at what price?

I have to tell you, I’m finding it very difficult to make full sense of events in Australia at the moment. I see things that look a lot like tyranny reported from there. I have friends — people I know personally and trust — fleeing Australia due to what looks to them and sounds to me like tyranny. And I have interviewed Australians who describe absolutely tyrannical encounters they are having with governmental authorities.

But I also see respected people assuring me the picture we are getting is distorted. Whatever the truth, as the ideals of the liberal West spread like wildfire during the 20^th century, I fear we Americans were lulled into a false sense of complacency as freedom caught on in region after region and appeared to become permanent. I don’t know if we will ever fully discern our founder’s intent with respect to the second amendment. But I strongly suspect their understanding of freedom, freshly won, was much more realistic than ours.

This is what gun ownership comes down to, whether you’re a liberal or a conservative. If there is a way to protect liberty from spasms of tyranny that does not condemn us to the spectacular cost of regular gun violence, I’d love to know it. But if the dynamism of the West, the productivity, the ingenuity, and the quest for fairness can only be protected from tyrants at the point of a gun, then so be it.

And that’s why people worry about Prince Charles. Our future king threatens to be a politically active monarch. “I simply can’t see what I see and do nothing about it. I could not live with myself,” he told his biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby. The Black Spider Memos were the most worrying of his interventions to date; they revealed him successfully pestering ministers for changes in policy and spending. It is impossible to imagine the Queen sending 27 notes to ministers in just over a year asking for, among other things, specific items of defence expenditure. Perhaps Dimbleby is right to say, “a quiet constitutional revolution is afoot.”

And maybe that’s no bad thing. The last monarch to have a major influence over modern politics staged a few vital interventions. As Jane Ridley, author of a new biography of George V, told me: “George’s role was not to change things politically, but to react to events and crises, which he did with aplomb. He enabled the appointment of prime ministers at times when, through war or through political realignment, the party system was not functioning to produce agreed candidates.”

The political system has matured and stabilised since then. But it’s certainly showing its age now. It’s not unreasonable to imagine that, in the coming years, it will become so dysfunctional that a monarch must stick his nose in. And if he is obliged to be a more political monarch than his mother — long may she live — Charles ought to read Ridley’s account of his great-grandfather’s life, which provides a blueprint for how a monarch might effectively and acceptably involve himself in politics.

But it could also help Charles learn from his great-grandfather’s mistakes. For one thing, he needs to keep his voice down. George was notorious for blurting out his country-squire opinions. (“Of course you said it, George,” his wife, Queen Mary, admonishes him at one point, “we all heard you.”) Neutrality did not come naturally. He was so obviously a Tory. Just after he became king, when the Liberal Party was in power, he told the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, “I don’t know how you can go on serving that damned fellow Lloyd George.” These ministers weren’t exactly thrilled to be working with a rude, reactionary king who they thought was “a dunderhead”. Especially because the nation was in the middle of a constitutional crisis.

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The House of Lords had voted down a budget for the first time in centuries, and the Liberal government was threatening to neuter their lordships with the Parliament Bill, which would abolish the Lords’ veto of legislation. The Liberals prevailed — by manipulating the naïve new king. The PM, Asquith, bounced George V into a promise to create hundreds of new peers to vote through the Parliament Bill, if it didn’t get through the first time, by threatening a “King and Peers vs The People election”. George’s private secretary, Knollys, advised the king to make the promise — having not told him that if the Liberals resigned, the Tories would take over, avoiding the threatened election. (Knollys was rightly sacked for this low-grade duplicity.)

When the bill went to the Lords, it looked like Tory peers would defeat it. George couldn’t let that happen. If the Tory peers voted the Bill down, he would have to make good on his promise. And a supposedly neutral constitutional monarch would be in terrible trouble if he created hundreds of peers to favour one party over another. Talk about interfering.

His other private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, sprang to action. Ridley has been much praised for rescuing George from his reputation as a dullard. She ought to be celebrated, too, as a political historian: she has discovered that Stamfordham asked the Archbishop of Canterbury to get the bishops in the Lords to vote for the bill. A former Viceroy of India was summoned from Scotland to do the same. Lord St Aldwyn was “encouraged” to vote the right way, while Lord Rosebery was outright asked to do so. He did — and took 20 others into the lobby with him. The bill passed by 17 votes. There we have it: the palace’s interventions were decisive in a parliamentary vote.

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This is, supposedly, unthinkable. So strict is the non-interference principle, the monarch isn’t even allowed to go into the House of Commons, let alone have their flunkies tip the balance in a legislative vote. Imagine the uproar if it was revealed that Charles had persuaded enough of his aristocratic friends to squeeze a bill through Parliament. But George was dragged into politics by Asquith, and if the palace hadn’t interfered in the vote, he’d have ended up doing something even worse: making a load of new lords. Charles’s second lesson, then, is to keep out of things unless strictly necessary.

This was sharp work, especially from Stamfordham, one of the many supporting characters expertly handled by Ridley, who makes the page fizz, bristle, and shuffle with figures like the fantastically waspish Lady Geraldine Somerset, the heart-breaking Prince John, and the blinking but quietly effective Royal Librarian, Owen Morshead (you can practically hear him cough politely). Stamfordham is the best of them though: the king’s loyal retainer, darting around London, corralling politicians and producing clear, effective memos that kept the king better informed than his ministers. Like Jeeves, he always appears at the right moment with a solution to George’s woes.

Stamfordham’s advice kept George on the right side of the constitution. During the Irish Home Rule crisis, George drafted a crude letter threatening to veto a bill unless it was put to the electorate — something no monarch has done since 1708. The accepted wisdom is that the royal veto no longer exists. But Vernon Bogdanor, the constitutional expert, has said that the use of the veto in similar situations remains an open question. Imagine Parliament sent Charles III a bill to abolish civil liberties. We might well prefer him to copy his great-grandfather’s threatened intervention than his mother’s scrupulous impartiality.

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It was the very real threat of civil war in Ireland — a threat the complacent Asquith met with endless rounds of champagne and bridge — that drove George to meddle. Sounding a lot like Charles in conversation with Dimbleby, he wrote to Asquith in 1914, “I cannot help feeling that the government is drifting and taking me with it.” And without George, Ulster might have been bloodier: he organised a non-partisan conference, for instance, and told Bonar Law, the Tory leader, to restrain his practically seditious rhetoric — which is more than we expect of the Queen, but less than we might get from Charles.

Although he liked to flex his fading prerogative — like when he outrageously tried to refuse Lloyd George an election in 1918 — George turned his role into an enabling one. When he was asked to open the new Parliament in Belfast, he insisted on giving a speech in favour of peace. The speech opened the way for talks, proposed by that quiet hero Lord Stamfordham, leading to the Anglo-Irish treaty. The palace were arbitrators, not partisans.

It took the same role when Bonar Law resigned as prime minister in 1923, he was too ill to nominate a successor. Commotion ensued. The choice was between the unknown Stanley Baldwin and the experienced Lord Curzon. Curzon was the obvious choice to almost everyone, especially himself. But he was a peer. And it was increasingly obvious that having a lord for PM was unacceptable in the new age of democracy. The Conservative party chairman was inundated with letters for Baldwin, but it took a royal intervention to sort out the kerfuffle. George, in consultation with the party’s biggest actors — including Balfour and Salisbury — picked Stanley.

Nowadays, the Queen waits for the party to appoint a leader, taking a purely ceremonial role (imagine if she’d weighed in on the choice between Boris and Hunt). But the systems we use for selecting leaders will be challenged on day. Charles might have to do what George did and make a neutral intervention to keep the system running. We might be grateful.

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But Charles will have to learn to moderate himself. Ridley’s portrait is a of a deeply Tory, reactionary man, who learned from experience to rise above politics and intervene without prejudice. The same king who bellowed at a footman who dropped a tray, “That’s right, break up the bloody palace!”, sharply admonished a coal rich aristocrat who was bad mouthing the unions to “try living on their wages before judging the strikes.” When the government wanted to stop banks paying Russian money to unions during the General Strike, George intervened, furious at this attempt to “touch the pockets” of strikers. He had come a long way since the 1911 railway strike, when he wrote to Asquith proposing legislation to stop strikes spreading. At that point, he and Mary were worried about “encouraging socialism… and pandering to the Labour party”. Like our Queen, he moved with the times.

Unlike previous biographers, Ridley takes no superior pleasure in painting George as a philistine. She combines a historian’s rigour with even-handed admiration for George’s gruff and prickly character. He wasn’t cultured or metropolitan, but he well understood the way the country was changing and how politics needed to follow, despite the fact that he didn’t appreciate Cezanne.

It’s not uncommon for people to mock Charles, either. He’s no philistine, but he is a crank. There may be more acceptance of his views, but like George he seems to belong to another world. While the Queen is timeless, Charles is old-fashioned. Where she is restrained, he is amateurishly enthusiastic, passionately gathering causes. He isn’t known for his temper (George was almost constantly in a foul mood), but he has the air of being high maintenance. Let’s hope he finds himself a courtier as good Lord Stamfordham.

What might be more important, though, is Camilla. George’s Queen, the redoubtable Mary, has, until now, been undervalued as an effective consort; but Ridley shows her at George’s side, an essential part of the process. “George always used to tell me everything first”, Mary said as a dowager. If Charles has to be a politically active monarch, his success may well rely on his famously enduring bond with Camilla.

Rilke’s poem “Die Aschanti,” about his visit to the exhibition, is characterised by sadness. In the exhibition, he writes, there are “no brown girls who stretched out / velvety in tropical exhaustion,” “no eyes which blaze like weapons” and no mouths “broad with laughter”. What a bummer. Rilke has to settle for ordinary, human and fundamentally inauthentic Africans: “O how much truer are the animals / that pace up and down in steel grids”.

The Nigerian-American novelist Teju Cole studies Rilke’s attitude to human zoos in his essay “The Blackness of Panther.” Its title is partly annexed from a more famous Rilke poem, “The Panther”, about big cats behind bars in Paris. Cole draws a parallel between the panther, or the captured African in a human zoo, and the way the African is perceived more generally amongst a segment of Western society. Like the new collection it is part of, Black Paper (released last week), it examines what it means to be an African person in a world shaped by white people’s cultural norms.

Cole finds the codes associated with it to be restrictive. “Was I African?” he asks in one passage, about growing up in Nigeria, because “I didn’t feel it. What I felt was that I was a Lagos boy, a speaker of Yoruba, a citizen of Nigeria”.

“The Africans were those other people,” he writes, “some of whom I read about in books, or had seen wearing tribal costumes in magazines, or encountered in weird fictional form in movies”. He does not see his reflection in them. The label, then, is a fiction imposed on him by western culture.

Cole is more sympathetic to the general term “Black”, but even here he acknowledges how rooted it is in one singular definition. The label “Black” was not “about every Black person in the world”, he writes, but “it was localized to the American situation. To be Black in America, that localized tenor of ‘Black’ had to be learned”. Having a “Black skin (sometimes just a shade or two off-white) was the admission to the classroom, but Black American cultural codes were the lesson”. Cole writes that he has learned to love the codes, since moving to America over twenty years ago, while acknowledging that “it wasn’t the only Black” that he knew.

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These are quandaries that have recently been explored by another, perhaps less well-known, novelist who grew up in Nigeria and later studied in America. Timothy Ogene’s new novel Seesaw (out next week), set in the very recent past, is a playful and lacerating satire on the codes the black immigrant needs to satisfy in order to curry favour with a self-styled progressive institution in America.

Frank Jasper, the protagonist and narrator, is a failed novelist from the fictional southern Nigerian city of Port Jumbo, based on Ogene’s home town Port Harcourt. Ogene’s first novel, The Day Ends Like Any Day, has a similar title with Jasper’s first novel The Day They Came for Dan. But unlike Ogene’s novel, which won the Book of the Year award with the African Literary Association, Jasper’s novel does so badly that he decides to write a review of it under a pseudonym for an obscure website entitled The Ganges Review of Books. Very soon after this appreciative review goes up, the website completely disappears in favour of a screen selling viagra.

Jasper’s big break comes in the form of the William Blake Program for Emerging Writers, which allows him to travel to a New England college town and get mentored by other writers. When he arrives, he is bemused by protests he encounters on campus. They don’t fit with his conception of American radicalism. “My idea of an American radical protest,” he writes, “was ossified and romantic, involving pictures of people in long hair smoking marijuanna, playing drums and banjos”. What he witnesses instead are protestors that “might as well have been business executives, clear-eyed with state-of-the-art digital equipment”. In other words, the self-styled revolutionary vanguard of progressive institutions have become much like the old-school establishment of old.

On campus, Jasper also meets a fellow African writer Barongo Akello Kabumba, who is from Uganda. And a British-Indian academic called Sara Chakraborty, who grew “up in Surrey as the grandchild of Afro-Asian immigrants”. He takes a strong dislike to the pair:

“partly because I didn’t understand the depth of their moral authority, the immutable authority with which they said things about the world and people and identity and the ‘post-colonial world’ in a few days than in all the years I lived in it”.

Their conception of the “post-colonial” world, and the position of Africans within it, is sterile and monolithic: Jasper’s post-colonial world “was nothing like the fully formed and footnoted gunfire sentences I heard from Sara Chakraborty, nothing like the costumed performers of the Ugandan writer”. Instead, it “was just another tired world of complicated people trudging along, like anywhere else, mostly oblivious of life beyond their neighbourhood, full of pain or courting happiness, vile or honest”.

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Underpinning that passage is a plea for moral universalism: for seeing that, despite their differences, the post-colonial world is fundamentally as emotionally rich and also as boring as the Western world. And Ogene demonstrates this very combination in the novel itself. Apart from the zestful humour in the narrative, there is also tedium. In the passages set in Nigeria, for instance, Jasper is a slacker par excellence, who spends much of his recreational time taking drugs and watching pornography. The novel reminds me not only of post-colonial novels, or campus novels, but also of the decadent novels of Michel Houellebecq, in which a buoyantly satirical attitude to twentieth-century Western society is combined with hardened cynicism.   

And Jasper is a thoroughly cynical character. While acknowledging the silliness of race experts, those who tell guilt-ridden white people what they want to hear, he occupies the position of black expert to his advantage. He was “still in the US when” his agent

“sold me to the Montana-based group as an ‘understanding expert on all matters black and ethnic’. He had played up my background as a ‘son of the black Atlantic whose maternal ancestors were descendants of slaves who came back to West Africa’”.

He adds with acidic scorn: “if Americans were going to devour themselves, he said to me afterwards, someone might as well hide under the table for crumbs”. This cheerfully parasitic attitude is not one that Cole explicitly argues for in his essays, which are scrupulously analytical. But it does demonstrate that the analogy of the human zoo, while powerful, fails to capture the symbiotic relationship between the patronising white person and the African. To put it bluntly: it’s a grift that seems to satisfy both parties. The Africans at the zoo were forcibly captured; the African novelist freely moves to the West.

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Jasper’s relationship to his status as a race expert is, however, ambivalent: while it materially enriches him, it also deforms his humanity. “I wasn’t advancing any single ideology,” he considers, “or worldview or notion of progress, and wasn’t trying to attack anyone”. Rather,

“I just wanted to exist and cry and laugh and fuck and live and die without prefixing or suffixing my actions with any universal idea of blackness or Africaness or whatever thing out there I was supposedly tied to as a POC or BAME or warped extension of someone else’s imagination”.

This warped tendency doesn’t just apply to black people. Other ethnicities feel it too. In an interview with Lauren Oyler, the Argentinian novelist Pola Oloixarac talks about the inspiration for her latest novel, Mona, which is out in the UK next year. “I was a person of colour when I was in the US,” she says, but “if I took a plane and went anywhere else, or if I crossed the border I wasn’t a person of colour anymore. So it wasn’t an essential trait. It was more of a particular fiction that was imposed on me”.

The titular protagonist of the novel is Peruvian and, like Jasper, is already the author of one novel and living in an American college campus:

“Mona had arrived at Stanford not long after the waves she made with her debut novel tossed her onto the beach of a certain impetuous prestige — and at a time when being a ‘woman of colour’” began to “confer a chic sort of cultural capital”.

The narrator of Oloixarac’s deliciously acerbic novel adds that, again invoking our opening analogy, “American universities shared certain essential values with historic zoos, where diversity was a mark of attraction and distinction”.

When Mona is nominated for a prestigious literary prize in Europe, she travels to Sweden, where she meets a diverse range of writers, whose background she anatomises like a modern-day Carl Linnaeus (the pioneering Swedish taxonomist). There is the obnoxious French male writer, the pious Israeli female author, the sexy Scandinavian writers. There is a sense that she is trapped by the instinct to perceive these characters solely through the prism of their identity. And a part of the narrative tension is this tendency against a countervailing emphasis on a person’s particular experiences. She chafes at being seen as the “Latin writer”: “The phony solidarity of having a ‘Latin’ culture in common with other writers was something that always repulsed her”.

She recognises, like Jasper and Cole, that such labels do not reflect the humanity of an individual. While they can breed important forms of solidarity, and can be useful in analysing prejudice and discrimination, we shouldn’t cling to them too tightly. It is ironic that many self-styled progressives, many of them well-intentioned, do so. It illustrates the comfort, under a progressive guise, that comes with being attached to racial essentialism: the comfort of expecting people from other racial or ethnic backgrounds to fulfil a role.

Labels should be used, if they are to be used, as the start of someone’s identity, not the full definition of it. They should be used to open the doors to a deeper understanding of who that person is, rather than perceived as the only thing that matters. The alternative is race representatives, people who are exhibited, or exhibit themselves, to a white audience, to be gawked at and cuddled, and are expected to possess a morality befitting a child.

What was a few short years ago the preserve of marginal discontents is now the hegemonic discourse: it is the liberals who are on the back foot, dreaming up ever-more elaborate conspiracy theories to explain the collapse of their ideology.  

Yet Britain’s most prominent post-liberal theorists are not claiming victory, and are instead mourning their defeat. In a plaintive recent essay, Blue Labour’s Jonathan Rutherford has claimed that “we imagined Blue Labour was about renewal, but, in hindsight, it was already too late. One thinks of the Owl of Minerva taking flight ‘only with the falling of dusk.’” For Rutherford, “Labour no longer possesses the intellectual and philosophical resources for a political renaissance and it does not look beyond itself to acquire them”.

Instead of seizing this historic moment, the Labour Party has lost itself in the abstruse theological disputes of a liberalism increasingly unmoored from reality, and become ever more feverish in policing its ideological purity as its voter base vanishes into history.

To understand the sense of gloom pervading British post-liberalism, we must return to its diagnosis of the West’s political crisis. The argument is this: liberalism contains within its essential nature the seeds of its own destruction. By dividing communities, social and economic classes and nations into a constellation of individuals warring among each other in search of self-advantage, liberalism negates any possibility of collective action or solidarity. Essentially a northwest European secular heresy derived from the Protestant Reformation, liberalism seeks to remake the world in its own image, projecting its own ideal form onto utterly different societies in a mission as doomed to failure as America’s wars in the Islamic world. 

In its purest economic form, liberalism, the ideological nursemaid of capitalism, destroys its social and fiscal base in pursuit of an idealist model, with disastrous results. It is increasingly rejected by voters across most of the Western world. And yet it hangs on to tenuous political power through its capture of the economic elites. Aware of their slipping grasp on power, encircled by enemies, liberals have retreated into fundamentalist fervour, fighting a rearguard battle against democracy while enforcing purity within their own ranks. This is why we are mired in the culture wars; this is why we are trapped in an increasingly heated political interregnum; and this is why political crisis has become endemic across the West. The rulers have lost the consent of the ruled; even when the insurgents win elections, they have no control over the actually-existing levers of power.

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It is in this context that the Blue Labour theorist Adrian Pabst has published Postliberal Politics: The Coming Era of Renewal, which functions as an excellent introductory guide to post-liberal thought for wavering liberals, and a warning to current post-liberals to shun the temptations of authoritarianism. 

For Pabst too, the Covid era transpired to be a “false dawn” for post-liberalism, as “the winners of the shutdown were tech oligarchs such as Amazon, Google or China’s Alibaba while family-owned businesses folded and inner-city shops were boarded up.” Instead of ushering in the post-liberal moment, then, “the ‘new normal’ is largely an intensification of the forces that dominated the old status quo: capitalism, nationalism and technocracy. Instead of resolving the interregnum, politics seems caught in an impasse.”

In setting out his stall, Pabst outlines the failings of a zombie liberalism still holding onto power, in which a dominant class “prefers a world of individual atomized exchange underwritten by an ideology of globalism”, and where  democracy and citizenship are “debased and become merely functional arrangements to advance the interests of a new cosmopolitan class”. 

Yet the most striking aspect of Pabst’s book is not his rejection of liberalism but rather his rejection of existing Rightist strands of post-liberalism, most notably their American incarnation. The dominant theme of Pabst’s book is one of preserving post-liberalism’s position as a strand of Left-wing thought which upholds the genuine achievements of liberalism, a socially conservative branch of socialism rather than an economically interventionist faction of conservatism. 

For Pabst, it is the Rightist “self-styled post-liberals” who are the enemy within: “behind their version of ‘Left on the economy’ and ‘Right on culture,”’ he argues, “lurk forms of statism and moralism that will do nothing to secure shared prosperity or plural societies.” Pabst warns that post-liberalism is too often “associated with a politics that is anti-liberal and anti-modern, animated by a reactionary desire to roll back the new rights of minorities and to return to social and political exclusion along the axes of race, sex or class”.

Taking aim at the idealised Mitteleuropa of prominent American conservative intellectuals, Pabst argues that while Hungary and Poland are superficially attractive for managing to “combine a protectionist state with pro-family welfare and education policies”, in reality they are largely reliant on fiscal dumping and deregulation to attract foreign capital while sliding into authoritarian nationalism that undermines constitutional freedoms.” 

“What may look post-liberal turns out to be mostly anti-liberal,” warns Pabst, arguing that “behind the simplistic slogan ‘left on the economy and right on culture’ lurks an admiration for a politics of state control and the rule of strongmen,” an “authoritarianism sliding into novel forms of fascism” in which “authoritarian systems extend state surveillance into all spheres of societal and personal life, co-opting any independent movement and persecuting non-conformist groups.” 

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Yet the obvious retort is, of course, that this system of surveillance and enforced conformity is a perfect description of actually-existing liberalism, at least in its deranged 21st-century incarnation. For the unfortunate reality for a viable Left-wing post-liberalism is that, as Rutherford laments, it is an entirely marginal force on the political Left. Even Blue Labour’s relatively anodyne platform of worker-led cooperatives, state support for family formation, reshoring vital industries and enforcing currently-existing immigration laws sees them consistently called fascists or even Nazis by their own party’s activist base. 

A wild and paranoid recent review of Pabst’s book illustrates the problem. “The truth is,” writes the reviewer, “that he has hitched his wagon to the post-liberal narrative of the national-populist right assiduously promoted by the UnHerd website,” whose “editors and contributors formed the core participants at the Windsor Castle symposium acknowledged in Pabst’s preface as the inspiration for his book.” 

I should probably add here that I attended this conference, and while membership of some secretive reactionary cabal under royal patronage would be a gratifying experience, it is as divorced from reality as the rest of the review, which is a classic example of the conspiratorial hysteria with which ageing liberals console themselves for the collapse of their ideological dreamworld.

Despite Pabst taking great pains to demarcate a Left-wing post-liberal space from that of the national populist right, the reviewer goes on — and on, and on — to claim that he “can’t resist the temptation to promote national-populist — and alt-right — conspiracy theories about ‘the fusion of woke capitalism with extreme identity politics’” that “Post-liberalism is a right-wing, nationalist project seeking to incorporate and hegemonise sections of the left by splitting it from its social liberal base.” 

If this is the Left among which Blue Labour aims to carve out a post-liberal movement, then the project surely has little chance of success. With Labour so internally divided, and further from power than they have been in decades, the chances of guiding the party towards a humane post-liberal ethos and then leading it to electoral victory seem impossibly remote. So why waste time on a failing political party whose activists hate you and everything you stand for? 

This is the essential conundrum of Blue Labour, and the reason for its perpetual marginalisation. Post-liberals should leave political tribalism to Americans: politics is simply the means to reshape the state in your image, and parties are merely useful vessels to do so. Logically, the conclusion is that the only current means of shaping British politics is as a faction within the ruling Conservative party, whose dominance of British politics is unchallenged; it is already making post-liberal noises to anchor its new hold on the post-industrial north, without any serious intellectual direction or engagement. 

Whether we like it or not, post-liberalism’s greatest opportunity to sway the course of politics is on the centre-right — and the road to doing so is through ideological capture of the state’s institutions, just as the neoliberals did forty years ago. 

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The key to victory is surely to utilise the power of the state through democratic means to break the anti-democratic liberal hold on the political system and advance post-liberalism from a matter of debate among a tiny handful of academics and writers to a functioning political programme. Yet Pabst, with a watchful eye on the authoritarian statism of China and Russia, and on the illiberal democracy of Hungary and Poland, views the untapped power of Leviathan with alarm. “Unmediated state sovereignty on the model of Machiavelli’s Prince or Hobbes’ Leviathan risks authoritarian control at home and anarchy abroad,” he warns,  so “the challenge before us is to turn the existing platforms into public utilities owned by the people, not the state, and to run them as mutuals – with private providers competing on the provision of services.” 

These are noble goals and a vast improvement on the alternatives, yet there is an avoidance of the practical path towards implementing them. How do you break the power of global corporations and the tech oligarchs? How do you unprise the grasp of what Pabst terms the “sham clerisy who dominate much of the media, education and the civil service” on the national institutions they have commandeered for themselves? 

Little platoons, however right and just their cause, can function only within a broader army structure to nurture and guide them. The only viable means to victory, then, is surely by employing the power of the state just as the neoliberals did, and the most realistic means of doing so is through the nascent statist centre-right. The managerial-technocratic Labour Party, which has junked the economic radicalism of the Corbyn manifesto while doubling down on liberal identity politics, certainly doesn’t intend to. 

If post-liberals do not do this, authoritarians will, as we see in China’s crackdown on oligarchs like Ali Baba’s Jack Ma and on tech platforms. Paradoxical though it may seem, the path to a radical localism surely lies through a resurgent state which must then give away the power it has reluctantly assumed to bring about necessary reform. It is as if post-liberals have adopted the teleological assumptions of liberals, that the arc of history will drop power into their laps, without also adopting their hunger for power, and their willingness to use the state to achieve it.

Pabst is correct to state that both the Conservative party and the Republicans remain beholden to capital, and superficially adopt post-liberal language to win popular support while continuing disastrous liberal policies. Yet there are reasons for hope. As the Marxist Italian sociologist Paolo Gerbado observes in his new book The Great Recoil, the new statism is a distinct phenomenon from the crude populisms of the decade’s first half and is still a malleable force, waiting to be shaped. 

The task of doing so can be taken up by either Right or Left, or by a post-liberal synthesis of the two. Younger conservatives in America, as defined in Park McDougald’s incisive survey of the New Millennial Right as the conservative analogue of “millennial socialism”, are “frustrated with the politics of their elders”, and want “a more solidaristic conservatism that is less libertarian, both culturally and economically, and in some ways less liberal”. In time, they will capture the institutions of conservatism, just as in time the millennial socialists will capture those of the Democrats. 

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In Britain too, much of the energy on the younger Right is towards forging a confident, developmentalist conservative state that corrects the most harmful errors of liberalism, and spreads economic growth and social solidarity across every corner of the nation. Time may be on the post-liberals’ side, in the long term, but only if they do not waste today’s narrow window of opportunity on either preaching to the unconvertible or shrinking from their most viable path to power.

Throughout his book, Pabst diagnoses the problems with unerring accuracy yet avoids the obvious conclusion. There is a missing element, the how, by which post-liberalism triumphs. A war only ends when one side wins decisively: post-liberals are unwilling to deliver the final blow, instead mourning their ostracisation from a rump political left which despises them as existential enemies. 

Without a Constantine to convert, without the power of a Rome behind them, post-liberals will find themselves trapped in the political catacombs forever, meekly hiding from a savaging in the amphitheatre. They cannot convert the liberal clerisy from within: they will be forced to defeat them from without, before authoritarians do. The gap between conservative and socialist post-liberals has always been largely cosmetic: perhaps the future of Blue Labour now lies in shaping a dirigiste, paternalist and communitarian Red Toryism.

Kathryn Paige Harden’s The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality is therefore likely to be many readers’ first introduction to a new field of inquiry that synthesises the age-old insights of behaviour genetics and the new technology of genomics. Harden is a scientist who ventures where few academics dare to tread. Indeed, the book was written because so many people remain ignorant of behaviour genetics, and suspicious of any attempt to introduce biologically based variables into sociological matters.

By this measure, The Genetic Lottery is a success. Harden concisely reduces a century of research into a digestible and comprehensible form. Alas, if you do not come to this work with Harden’s commitment to social justice, much of the non-scientific content will strike you as misguided, gratuitous and at times even unfair.

To a large extent, I expected this, as I know the author personally. We both live in Austin, where she is a professor at the University of Texas. I became acquainted with Harden in 2016 following a massive social media conflagration triggered by her sensible contention that liberals needed to acknowledge the insights of behaviour genetics, and that the field was not necessarily racist.

A committed band of online “social justice warriors” have continued to hound her; a population geneticist told me several years ago that another scientist at a seminar dismissed Harden as “Charles Murray in a skirt”. This was somewhat ironic given that she once wrote a piece titled “Charles Murray is once again peddling junk science about race and IQ”. Harden’s disagreements with conservatives also elicit outrage from the online Right, but that is of little impact. As an academic, the only serious reputational risk comes from the baying of her own ideological tribe.

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It’s unfortunate, then, that though Harden provides a potted history of eugenics, much of her historical interpretation is tendentious, and seems geared to reassuring the intended audience that they are on the right side of history. She observes, for instance, that the statistician and eugenicist Karl Pearson “argued that progressive-era social reforms, like the expansion of education, were useless”. What the reader may fail to glean from this is that Pearson was a committed socialist and freethinker, who was also engaged with feminism and suffrage.

Where the narrative shines is when Harden explores fields that have long been taboo. For example, the notion that genetics can cause patterns in social phenomena is ignored by whole fields of scholarship, but it’s no coincidence that adopted individuals are much more likely to engage in crime as adults if their biological parents were convicted of offences.

Harden further illustrates this with her own research on abstinence from sex. The State of Texas promotes abstinence policies because it believes there is a strong correlation between early sexual activity and negative life outcomes such as crime. To test this assumption, Harden’s team tracked down identical twins, who share both genes and environment, and first had sex at different stages in life. They found that there was no difference in life outcomes.

The Genetic Lottery comes alive whenever Harden writes about her own research. At one point, she reports that “executive function” — your cognitive behaviour, ranging from memory to self-control — is nearly 100% heritable in children, meaning that all the variation in the population can be attributed to variation in genes. The correlation in executive function between identical twins is 1.0, while between full siblings it is 0.5. Since twins share 100% of their genes and full-siblings just 50%, this is exactly the pattern you would expect in a fully heritable characteristic, whether executive function or eye-colour. This research has no straightforward immediate political implications, so the exposition is freed from a need to gauge the impact on the audience.

But statistical correlations remain unconvincing to many. A specific criticism of twin-studies centres on the likelihood that parents treat twins more similarly than full-siblings. That’s partly why the late population geneticist Richard Lewontin thought behaviour genetics was a useless field with deep methodological problems. His views are not unusual for geneticists who work in molecular or evolutionary (rather than behavioural) fields today.

It is at this point that Harden illustrates why her book could only be written in 2021. Whereas past geneticists had to assume that full-siblings were exactly 50% related, today genomics allows a precise quantification of the level of relatedness. I know, for instance, that I share 52.49% of my DNA with one brother, 50.26% with another, and 4.57% with my first-cousin once-removed (the expectation in the last case is 6.25%).

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In 2006, geneticists applied the new technology to the study of heritability, generating relatedness scores from genomics for thousands of sibling pairs. They discovered that very heritable traits did indeed show more similarity in those siblings who were genomically more related. Heritability was more than a statistical construct, it was a biophysical reality.

One of the most striking figures in The Genetic Lottery shows that “polygenic risk scores”, a statistic used to predict your position along a distribution of values, such as from shortest to tallest, are already as powerful as parental income at predicting the rate of college completion. Those students in the bottom 25% of parental income have a 15% chance of completing college. Those in the bottom 25% of the polygenic risk score also have a 15% chance of doing so.

This task in explaining the state of behaviour genetics today is helped by bodies such as the UK Biobank, which offers researchers 500,000 individuals with 820,000 genetic markers per individual. It has resulted in papers which are generated in an almost turnkey fashion. Consider “Genetic correlates of social stratification in Great Britain”, which concludes that “Alleles associated with educational attainment (EA) showed the most clustering, with EA-decreasing alleles clustering in lower SES areas such as coal mining areas”. In plainer English, smarter people migrated south, leaving those remaining in the north of England on average less intelligent due to their genes. Needless to say, this was a controversial result.

Harden spends a great deal of time exploring population structure because of its relevance to possible variation in human psychology and behaviour. She reports on survey data that liberals in particular are suspicious of — results which indicate variation in intelligence due to genes — and she argues that this is due to its connection with the history of racism and classism in the United States. Harden asserts that intelligence is heritable within a group, but does not necessarily imply that it explains differences between groups in outcome.

The targeted readership for The Genetic Lottery will almost certainly dismiss the case for behaviour genetics if that requires them to connect it to potentially racist implications. Yet Harden’s book is actually rooted in social justice, and her belief that “people’s moral commitments to racial equality are on shaky ground if they depend on exact genetic sameness across human populations”. Nevertheless, much of the narrative gets bogged down in race and particularities of American politics.

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Harden is a white liberal who is deeply committed to the cause of racial justice in the historical context of black and white Americans. Presumably her audience is as well. But her ultimate goal is to talk more about John Rawls than Ibram X. Kendi. For The Genetic Lottery is a theory of justice informed by unearned genetic advantages and undeserved genetic disadvantages.

Harden personalises this by contrasting herself with her brother. Though siblings are 50% similar, she explains, they are also 50% different. Raised in the same household, she asks who was dealt the better hand — she did better at standardised tests but also has ADHD — between the two siblings. Do these differences speak at all to the moral value of the siblings? Of course not. We know this intuitively. It is self-evident.

In A Theory of Justice, Rawls introduced the “difference principle”. This argues that inequality in outcomes is permissible if those inequalities benefit the least-advantaged members of society. Similarly, towards the end of her book, Harden considers three scenarios conditioned on Rawls’ “veil of ignorance”, where you don’t know what endowments you’ll randomly be allotted. First, a society where the “biologically superior are entitled to greater freedoms and resources”. Second, a society “structured as if everyone is exactly the same in their biology”. Finally, a society “structured to work to the advantage of people who were least advantaged in the genetic lottery”.

Science does not tell you which choice to select. Harden points out that in the US, both conservatives and liberals often behave as if we live in the second scenario. But what if we consider the reality that outcomes are to some extent caused by varying genes? Though these facts do not necessarily change one’s values, they do change the prescription for how one can achieve the just outcomes we might have in mind.

Of course, biology is not everything, but The Genetic Lottery reminds us that it is a factor we ignore at our own peril when we craft social policy. In 2021, we now have the technology to plumb the depths of our human nature. The results may not always be to our liking, but the facts are ultimately unchangeable.

“This is not a drill. The Reichstag is burning,” blared a five-alarm-fire warning in the Washington Post by Dana Milbank, who may want to consider a title change from “columnist” to “in-house hysteric”. Not to be outdone, establishment weather-vane Thomas Friedman joined the fray in the New York Times with an equally shocking exhortation: “I can’t say this any more clearly,” he hyperventilated. “Our democracy is in terrible danger — more danger than it has been since the Civil War, more danger than after Pearl Harbor, more danger than during the Cuban missile crisis […]”.

If these fevered prognostications even bore the faintest resemblance to political conditions in the United States, it might seem a bit odd that the pundits in question have since moved on to other subjects. Or to put it this way: if they really believed their own fantastical rhetoric, shouldn’t they have spent the past few weeks taking action more tangible than rattling off a few throwaway columns and browsing Twitter? Not that any “resistance” brigade composed of pallid middle-aged journalists would be especially formidable on the battlefield, but the point is that their conduct doesn’t come anywhere close to matching the incredible alarmism of their words.

More destruction could be in store next month than was wrought in World War II, the most devastating global military conflict in human history? All of civilisation was nearly wiped out in the Cuban Missile Crisis, but we’re supposed to believe that whatever harm is brought about by the election aftermath will exceed that? If so, why aren’t these people stockpiling canned food and training for hand-to-hand combat?

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They’re not doing anything of the sort because this latest round of histrionics is just a continuation of a theme that has characterised the Trump era: political and cultural elites, whose psyches have been profoundly damaged, will churn out nonstop waves of hysteria rarely noting afterwards if their frenzied forecasts ever panned out. As a largely accountability-free profession, there is no penalty in the opinion-making world if the catastrophising ultimately proves to be just a bizarre projection of their own angst.

The logic of these latest prophecies, to the extent that any can be discerned amid the haze of paranoia, is that Trump will refuse to abide a “peaceful transition of power” after the election. Instead, he’ll throw the country into some sort of protracted armed insurgency by calling upon white supremacist militias to do his genocidal bidding in the streets. Hugely viral tweets, including one by a credentialed member of the White House press corps, helped foster this belief by alleging (without caveat) that Trump had explicitly incited a Civil War.

This is the most frightening answer I have ever received to any question I have ever asked. I’ve interviewed convicted killers with more empathy. @realDonaldTrump is advocating Civil War. https://t.co/8eMY9Csuhp

— Brian J. Karem (@BrianKarem) September 23, 2020

Of course, the basis for the allegation was a typically garbled comment by Trump at a press conference. But there had already been an atmosphere of unfounded dread in the air, thanks in part to long disquisitions in The Atlantic — the leading clearinghouse for the neurotic elite speculation — playing out with utmost seriousness various as-yet-fictitious scenarios whereby Trump refuses to concede the election and the American constitutional order summarily crumbles.

Once you accept that this doomsaying is less about Trump himself, and more about an elite media class that has overdosed on five years of Trump-related dopamine rush, a darkly comical aspect emerges. The foot soldiers of Trump’s supposed post-election coup were declared to be the “Proud Boys,” a group of glorified performance artists and trolls who’d barely even register as a political force were it not for all the manufactured coverage intended to elevate them as frightening foils. If it truly falls on them to wage Trump’s Civil War, then this will be the goofiest and least daunting Civil War on record.

And as for the “peaceful transition of power”, it’s possible that Trump will dispute the election results in some fashion. The lawyers are gearing up in both parties, given the country’s wide-scale transition to mail-in-voting.

Irony must be lost on these prophesiers, however, because while Trump did not encounter any overtly violent coup upon assuming office in January 2017, his own transition to power was anything but ordinary. The country’s security state apparatus had launched an unprecedented brazen intervention into electoral politics, and hobbled his administration in a morass of investigation and quasi-scandal before it even began. Trump’s erratic communications style might in some sense violate customary “norms” of American political comity, but the behaviour of the FBI and CIA in 2016-2017 will have a far more long-lasting impact on what’s regarded as “normal” power-transfers.

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One wonders how these media organs could ever hope to adapt to post-Trump life, with all the painful withdrawals and lingering psychological damage that will undoubtedly entail. One option is to simply keep going back over and over again for a fix, even with Trump out of office. Chris Hayes of MSNBC recently suggested one potential option: “Some kind of truth and reconciliation commission.” Interesting thought, because if this theoretical “commission” is tasked with uncovering the reasons for Trump’s rise to power, it will find that perhaps the chief culprit is NBC Universal, which provided Trump with a 14-year perch as one of the country’s most well-known network TV personalities.

Either way, the elite-peddled angst about some forthcoming Civil War is made all the more absurd because it almost gives Trump more credit than it deserves. His re-election campaign is flailing, and it has nothing to do with white supremacist militias readying for armed conflict. Compared to his successful 2016 campaign messaging, the current iteration is a hopeless wreck. Much of Trump’s time is spent impotently fuming about the “radical Left”, and he repeatedly brought up the phrase during the depressing first “debate” with Joe Biden.

Review the transcripts from his debate encounters with Hillary Clinton four years ago, however, and you’ll see not one instance of Trump making reference to anything like the “radical Left,” or any of the other heavily-ideologised attack lines that his advisors and handlers this time around have so relentlessly imparted on him to emphasise. Trump’s downfall, should it arrive next month, will be explicable by a variety of factors, ineffectual and incoherent pandemic response paramount among them. But they’ll all be far more banal, and therefore less emotionally satisfying, than those currently engrossing the elite commentariat.

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How US journalism lost its spine

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Of course, one can always easily find examples of comparably grandiose doomsaying among pro-Trump partisans scattered throughout the Right-wing media ecosystem. But when the “youth activist” Charlie Kirk pronounced in an address at the Republican convention that Trump is nothing less than the “the bodyguard of Western Civilisation,” this was understood to represent a foolish, deluded Right-wing sensibility. Yet when similarly ridiculous claims are made by respectable elite outlets, the expectation is that all right-minded, well-educated citizens will nod in solemn, knowing agreement.

All of these insane proclamations have to be understood as fulfilling some depraved psychological purpose. This purpose is to elevate combatants in America’s pantomimed Culture War to the status of world-historic combatants, on whose shoulders the fate of the country rests. Many of the purveyors are pure cynical charlatans, but others probably have come to believe their own preposterous rhetoric, which is an indication of how deep the delusion runs.

Among the prophesiers, there is clearly a kind of perverse psychic need for the Trump saga to end with a salaciously climatic conclusion. If you are so inclined — that is, if you are so blinkered by four years of mostly self-inflicted psychological turmoil — then Trump is always going to provide a daily deluge of material that could justify your angst. But a tempered and public-spirited media would have developed strategies by now, five years into the theatrical trolling, to avoid withering into a shrieking stupor every time Trump makes a purposefully-provocative offhand remark. If anything, this emotional fragility has only burnished Trump with an unearned mystique. Because by now, what he’s working with is mostly just schtick.

If Trump goes down to the defeat, it will be largely because of his own incompetence, and one manifestation of that incompetence is that his (admittedly unorthodox) communications style has been only that: a communications style. PR. And for the US intelligentsia to have been so addled and demented by a PR shtick couldn’t be a better demonstration of how vapid and untrustworthy they are.

That is certainly plausible. In which case, it would presumably be important to document how ordinary Americans, especially those most directly affected, perceive the “movement” in question.

Scan almost any of the popular media coverage over the past six weeks and you’ll find that journalists have been steadfast in their depiction of “protesters” as unassailably “peaceful.” While the vast majority of those who attended a state-backed demonstration or some other event spurred by the ‘movement’ are unlikely to have committed any acts of physical destruction, the term “peaceful protest” doesn’t seem to quite capture the impact of a society-wide upheaval that included, as a key component, mass riots — the magnitude of which have not been seen in the U.S. since at least the 1960s.

From large metro areas like Chicago and Minneapolis/St. Paul, to small and mid-sized cities like Fort Wayne, Indiana and Green Bay, Wisconsin, the number of boarded up, damaged or destroyed buildings I have personally observed — commercial, civic, and residential — is staggering. Keeping exact count is impossible. One might think that a major media organisation such as the New York Times would use some of their galactic journalistic resources to tally up the wreckage for posterity. But roughly six weeks later, and such a tally is still nowhere to be found.

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A standard retort one often hears is that “the riots” must not be conflated with “the protests,” which is technically accurate in certain contexts. But the distinction is not as obvious as the media like to make out. In many locations, police and fire services were diverted to accommodate these massive protests, which in turn created a vacuum that enabled the outbreak of riotous activity. As one resident of Minneapolis explained to me, emergency services told him that they would simply be unavailable during the weekend of 29-31 May, while other locals recounted with amazement that police were totally absent as their neighbourhoods burned.

In Milwaukee, a man described being chased down by rioters after getting off the bus on his way home from work. He saw no difference between protesters and rioters; the flippant idea that these groups can be so neatly disentangled is wrong.

This view is just as likely to be espoused by black people and other minorities as anyone else (the Milwaukee man was black), which renders the media’s strident insistence to depict the ‘movement’ as entirely peaceful incongruous with the perceptions of working-class Americans (of all races). So many of them experienced what transpired more as a painful tragedy than any kind of wondrous harmony.

Indeed, the resulting destruction may have set their majority-minority neighbourhoods back economically for months or years, if not longer. Most had already been struggling due to the pandemic, with the riots interrupting fragile reopening plans. To exclude the perspectives of these people from popular media narratives amounts to a kind of purposefully obfuscatory, moralising snobbery. Talk about ‘erasure’.

So why, exactly, has the scope of these riots been so assiduously downplayed, and the opinions of those who experienced them first-hand been largely ignored? A number of potential explanations ring true. For one, media elites desperately do not want to undermine the moral legitimacy of a ‘movement’ that they have cast as presumptively righteous. And highlighting that urban minority populations are generally less enthusiastic about a movement whose mantra is “Black Lives Matter” would be embarrassing for obvious reasons.

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The white liberals and Leftists who claim to be so sensitively attuned to the feelings of minorities clearly spend very little time actually talking to working class non-white people — or at least those who happen to fall outside their activist cohort. If they did, they would be saddened to discover that, unlike them, working class non-whites frequently express “small-c” conservative cultural attitudes.

For instance, black Americans whom I’ve spoken to on the street across America in randomly-selected encounters were almost unanimous in their approval of the National Guard deployments to their neighborhood during the riots. If anything, their main criticism was that these deployments came too late to prevent the destruction.

This certainly makes the emotional meltdown of coddled 20 and 30-something journalists, who seriously claimed that they were “endangered” by a U.S. Senator’s NYT column advocating for a military presence to maintain order in cities, look especially disconnected and bizarre. So one could understand why the media would be reluctant to feature the “voices” of minorities who take an alternate view.

There’s also the barely-hidden fear that properly depicting the after-effects of these riots would somehow “help Trump” during an election year. Even if it could be established as true that reporting on a historically significant event would “help” the incumbent president, refraining from such reportage on that ground would obviously be wildly improper from a journalistic perspective.

But even from a raw political standpoint, it’s almost certainly not even true. Trump’s inability to convert this post-riot political environment into some kind of electoral advantage is an irony unto itself, given the theme of his inaugural address — which ominously (but not entirely unjustifiably) invoked the specter of “American carnage”. For all the non-stop hysteria painting Trump as some kind of maniacal fascist, it truly is a lousy fascist who fails to leverage widespread social unrest and instability to consolidate power.

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Needless to say, Trump is also currently presiding over a disastrous federal pandemic response, and rapidly shedding support among elderly voters. So if one insists on behaving purely as a partisan actor — which many contemporary journalists certainly are — any fatuous “would it help Trump?” calculation ought to be irrelevant.

Trump or no Trump, the lack of adequate coverage is the true affront. It should be more widely known that large swathes of a major American metropolis, Minneapolis/St. Paul, still lies in rubble over a month after the riots. And the main perpetrators of this destruction — namely those who committed the most incendiary arson attacks — were, by many accounts relayed to me directly, white Left-wing activists. Refusing to seek out and accurately present this information reflects the mainstream media’s propensity to operate under predetermined, politicised assumptions that are antithetical to any rightly-understood conception of journalism.

Travelling around Minneapolis, one frequently sees the anarchist “A” symbol scrawled on charred and/or boarded-up buildings, as well as catchphrases like “Viva La Revolucion” — expressions typical of Left-wing activists. Indeed, it’s abundantly clear that there was a strong ideological component to these riots, one that’s also been under-emphasised by the media, again likely because of the belief that it could in some vague sense “help Trump.” I spoke to numerous residents who are convinced that white out-of-towners were the ones who instigated the most severe chaos, after which locals latched on opportunistically. Marianne Robinson, a black woman who has resided in Chicago’s South Side for decades, asked me if I was familiar with “antifa” and blamed them for the riots.

Flora Westbrooks of Minneapolis, whose hair salon was burned down, was likewise convinced that the perpetrators could not have possibly been familiar with the neighbourhood given her longstanding community ties there. The theory might be a tad over-simplistic, but it does seem at least partially accurate. A (white) rioter I interviewed, who was present when the Third Police Precinct building in Minneapolis burned, remarked to me that he found himself in jail alongside people who came from as far as Missouri, Florida, Colorado, California and other distant states. He said they ventured to Minnesota out of a mixture of thrill-seeking and inchoate political grievance.

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A police officer on foot patrol in Chicago’s heavily-black West Side remarked to me how perplexed she was by the lack of coverage of the damage in these neighbourhoods. Indeed, a simple drive around such parts of Chicago reveals a stunning number of boarded-up establishments, many of which appear like they will never return. The officer mused that she enjoyed the social-work aspects of the job — I watched her greeting various street-dwellers by name — and so, far from seeing the “Defund the Police” slogan and other expressions of animosity as an existential threat to the Chicago Police Department, regarded it as so detached from her everyday experience that she wasn’t even bothered. Over the course of my ten days in Minneapolis, I didn’t see a single officer on foot patrol, which is highly unusual for a major American city.

In Chicago, at the peak of the riots during the last weekend in May, there were a record-breaking 18 homicides in a single 24-hour period — the most since such data started being collected in 1961. I mention this not to make a knee-jerk “what about black-on-black crime” point, but simply to ask in general terms: why wasn’t this historic occurrence featured more prominently in the coverage of these protests?

Something extreme just happened in America. I could give dozens of additional examples of reportorial tidbits which don’t align with the prevailing media narrative that has flourished in the wake of this “movement”. And if you hadn’t seen it directly, would you ever know?

Daytime television has been a largely unexamined part of our cultural life for many decades. Now it’s being examined, and that’s bringing all kinds of interesting tensions and divides to the surface.

The ITV afternoon quiz Tipping Point has even been trending on Twitter recently, in a tone of irony and amusement that an only slightly higher tech version of a seaside arcade Shove Ha’penny machine has somehow become a nail-biting highlight of the day.

As long-time shut-ins such as freelance writers (ahem) have known for long years, daytime television obeys completely different rules to the TV seen by normal people, either before or after their working day. Let me, an old hand, guide you through the surprisingly deep waters of the mainstream.

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The first thing you’ll notice is that TV in the daytime is far more civil, and civic-minded. Occasionally at night a kindly announcer will follow up a challenging drama or a sensitive documentary with contact details to help anyone that’s been affected by the issues raised in that programme, but that happens now and again, as and when. The viewer notes it as unusual.

Daytime TV, however, is the land of helplines, factsheets and links to online advice. You’re never more than 10 minutes away from one of these, sometimes all three. Health advice, money advice, relationship advice — it never stops. Overdrafts, divorces, breasts, testicles — all are regularly brought out, checked, and then checked again. Cervixes and prostates are smeared and probed like there’s no tomorrow.

A word of warning to daytime newbies — while maintaining a commonsense awareness of these things, you must learn to shut out most of this. If you don’t, you will start to become neurotic (and then you’ll need the helpline for that too). Every twinge means you have an obscure and deadly medical condition, every unrecognised call to your mobile means your bank account is imminently to be cleaned out, any slight change in your partner’s behaviour means they’re having it away with your best friend and you’re going to have to get on the sofa to tell Holly and Phil the heart wrenching tale of this sordid betrayal.

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That’s because normal people are the bread and butter of daytime, and particularly so when something freakishly terrible has befallen them. These events will start to seem routine, even expected. Beware the availability heuristic!

Despite their reputation, the daytime magazine shows are anything but bland. They are hotbeds of sex and violence, but unlike the dramas and salacious reality shows of the evening they come in a gentler, more compassionate frame. Judgment, particularly moral judgment, is mostly withheld. No matter what someone’s concealed, or even blatantly lied about, they are empathised with, reassured, and often told they are ‘strong’, even when the exact opposite is the case.

The recent recursive spectacle of Philip Schofield himself being pushed front-and-centre onto the confessional couch is an object lesson in this. There were hugs, tears, encomiums to bravery, and not one single drop of doubt or cynicism. We all know a Philip is ‘nice’, so how could there be?

Of course, such revelations and ghastly tales wouldn’t have an impact if daytime didn’t work off a baseline of ordinary life as it ‘should’ be, what you need all this advice to get back to — the life of the ordinary woman (men take a definite back seat) in the street. This person is older, more conservative, more likely to have a nest-egg or to be accumulating one (hence the preponderance of shows about antiques and moving or renovating property, such as Homes Under the Hammer and Escape to the Country). They may not be retired yet but it’s something they’re thinking about. They are much more likely to be Somewheres than Anywheres — in fact, Anywhereism is often regarded with ‘and who do they think they are’ open suspicion.

Even the overtly contentious and political Jeremy Vine phone-in/panel show on Channel 5 has an affability and even-handedness that would be unthinkable at the dark heart of Question Time.

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Daytime dramas are similarly gentle and community-centred. Doctors has a large regular cast whose function is to cure the guest cast of each individual episode, who present at the Letherbridge NHS surgery with symptoms including Issues, Emotions and Acting. The remedy for a complaint more often than not is listening, understanding and dispensing advice rather than medicine.

Surreal juxtaposition is another feature of daytime that amuses the beginner. Erectile dysfunction crashes into granny makeovers, which crashes into putting your life back together after your husband was murdered, which crashes into a round-up of all the gossip from the soaps.

Over the years I’ve worked out that the ‘rules’ of television change very abruptly to daytime at 8.55am and revert back at about 7.30pm. There’s an intriguing twilight zone on BBC One as Pointless gives way to the news and you think the gears have shifted, only for daytime to rally back for a final gasp ahead of The One Show, before the rubicon is firmly crossed. The ghost of youth TV haunts the axis point on Channel 4, which follows 4 In A Bed or Coach Trip with a serving of The Simpsons and Hollyoaks before Jon Snow very firmly kills any trace of afterglow geniality at 7pm.

Suggested reading

Binge-watching in the time of Covid-19

By Various contributors

In an era where most of the television that’s talked about is niche-targeted, curated and demarcated by demographics, daytime remains resolutely mainstream. It still has the “here one moment, gone the next” ethos that all television used to have in the distant days before domestic video recorders. Very few people are streaming Loose Women on catch-up. These programmes are like buses. There’ll be another one along in a minute.

So it’s interesting to see the reaction of blue-ticked liberal Twitter, forced by the lockdown to face this wider realm, the unschooled culture of the Untermenschen who voted for Brexit and the Tory landslide. It’s no longer possible, for the duration, to mistake the counterculture for the culture, Twitter trends for real people’s opinions, ‘lived experience’ for life.

Even the BBC has been shocked out of its headbanging for race-baiting ‘inclusivity’, and is shortly to begin a lockdown season of Ealing comedies in the afternoon. It seems it’s taken an international emergency for them to acknowledge, after years of disparagement and open scolding, that we have a common heritage that bonds all of us.

For the first time since the 1940s we’re really all in this together. Whether we like it or not we’re all daytime viewers now.

If we are reluctant to dwell on the reality of human vulnerability at either end of life, we are unwilling to give much thought to its corollary: that (somewhere safely hidden from the more exciting business of being healthy, youthful and autonomous) there must be people caring for those who are unable to do it themselves. Someone is wiping those bottoms.

Traditionally, this job of caring for the very old and the very young has been “women’s work”. To a great extent, it still is: the OECD reports that, worldwide, women do between two and ten times as much caring work as men.

In the UK, this tends in statistics to be framed as “unpaid work”, a sort of poor relation of the economically productive type that happens in workplaces and contributes to GDP.

Carers UK suggests there are around 9 million people caring for others in the UK part or full-time, of whom up to 2.4 million are caring for both adults and their own children. Women carry out the lion’s share of this work: 60% according to the ONS. Full-time students do the least and, unsurprisingly, mothers with babies do the most. Older working women carry the heaviest load of people in employment, with those in the 50-60 bracket being twice as likely as their male counterparts to be carers whether of a vulnerable adult, a partner or a child or grandchild.

By the same author

How motherhood put an end to my liberalism

By Mary Harrington

Second-wave feminism pushed hard against the pressure women experience to take on this work of caring. Within this variant of liberalism, caring work is routinely framed as a burden that imposes an economic “penalty” while harming the economy by keeping skilled women away from the workplace. The OECD report cited above states: “The gender gap in unpaid care work has significant implications for women’s ability to actively take part in the labour market and the type/quality of employment opportunities available to them.”

The implication is that, once freed of this obligation, women can then pursue more fulfilling activities in the workplace.

So what does this liberation look like in practice? According to a 2017 report by the Social Market Foundation, women in managerial and professional occupations are the least likely to provide care, as are people with degree qualifications. The number working in routine occupations who also donate more than 20 hours a week of care in their own homes is far higher than those in intermediate or professional occupation.

In other words, higher-earning women are to a far greater extent able to outsource the wiping of bottoms to less well-off people, who are themselves typically women: 90% of nurses and care workers are female.

These women are then too busy to wipe the bottoms of their own old and young, who are sent into institutional care. Such institutions are typically staffed by women, often on zero hours contracts, paid minimum wage to care for others all day before going home to do so for their own babies and elderly. The liberation of women from caring is in effect a kind of Ponzi scheme.

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Has Hungary conceived a baby boom?

By Paul Morland

This is a problem for our liberal society, for two interlocking reasons. Firstly, the replacement of informal family-based care with a paid, institutional variety renders caring impersonal, in a way that invites cruelty. Indeed, cases of care home abuse are well documented – see here, here or here – and the number is rising: the CQC received more than 67,500 in 2018, an increase of 82 per cent over the already too high 2014 figure of 37,060.

It is difficult to see how this could be otherwise. Caring for those who are physically or mentally incapacitated is emotionally testing even when we love those we care for. An exhausted worker on a zero-hours contract, paid the minimum wage to perform more home visits than she can manage in the allotted day, is unlikely to have a great store of patience to begin with, let alone when faced with a refractory “client”. The entire system militates against kindness.

Secondly, and relatedly, it turns out that the informal, traditionally female networks in which caring for the young and old once took place were actually quite important. Those networks also ran church groups, village fetes, children’s play mornings – all the voluntary institutions that form the foundation of civil society.

When caring is treated as “unpaid work” and we are encouraged to outsource it in favour of employment, no one of adult working age has time for voluntary civil society activities any more. If the number of people caring informally for relatives is waning, replaced by institutional care, so is voluntarism: between 2005 and 2015 alone there was a 15% drop in the number of hours donated (ONS).

The result is loneliness. Almost 2.5m people aged between 45 and 64 now live alone in the UK, almost a million more than two decades ago. Around 2.2 million people over 75 live alone, some 430,000 more than in 1996. In 2017, the Cox Commission on loneliness described it as “a giant evil of our time”, stating that a profound weakening of social connections across society has triggered an “epidemic” of loneliness that is having a direct impact on our health.

Several generations into our great experiment in reframing caring as a burden, we are beginning to count the cost of replacing mutual societal obligations with individual self-fulfilment: an epidemic of loneliness, abuse of the elderly and disabled in care homes, substandard childcare. A society liberated from caring obligations is, with hindsight, a society liberated from much that was critically under-valued.

What is the alternative? Some would prefer a more communitarian approach to caring for the old and the young. Giles Fraser recently wrote on this site that caring for the elderly should be the responsibility of their offspring:

“Children have a responsibility to look after their parents. Even better, care should be embedded within the context of the wider family and community. […] Ideally, then, people should live close to their parents and also have some time availability to care for them. But instead, many have cast off their care to the state or to carers who may have themselves left their own families in another country to come and care for those that we won’t.”

These are strong words and there is much to agree with, but the barest glance at the statistics shows that in practice what that means is “women have a responsibility to look after their parents”.

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How to make Britain One Nation again

By David Skelton

If we are to count the costs of liberating society from mutual caring obligations, we must also count the benefits, as well as who enjoyed them. Society once encouraged men to seek worldly success, underpinned by the imposition of an often-suffocating domestic servitude on women.

Liberalism blew this out of the water by declaring that in fact both sexes were entitled to seek some form of worldly activity and fulfilment. It is not enough to point to negative side effects of this change and say: “Someone needs to be resuming these mutual caring obligations or society will disintegrate.”

To women well-accustomed to the widespread tacit assumption that it is they who will pick up those underpants, wash up that saucepan, pack that schoolbag and so on, this sounds a lot like a stalking-horse for reversal of societal changes that, on balance, most of us greatly appreciate. In truth no one, whether liberal or post-liberal, wants to confront the enormous elephant that liberal feminism left in society’s sitting room: the question of who cares. Who, now that we are all self-actualising, is going to wipe those bottoms? There are no easy answers.

So in recent years those of us who cut what teeth we possess in the humanities and social sciences have grown used to the intellectual degradation of everything. We have known for more than a generation that everything is to be considered “relative”. We have been instructed by the “studies” movement that the identity traits of an author and reader matter more than whether or not they have anything much to say.

We’ve learned that every and all text should be “interrogated”; that we should try to work out the relative “power” dynamics at play (who might be oppressed and who might be an oppressor). And we have noticed that there is nothing that the educational establishment does not wish to “deconstruct”. Apart from itself, obviously.

Yet throughout all this we know-nothing humanities types have tended to presume that other disciplines are immune to such convulsions. Surely the pure realm of the sciences and other real disciplines could not succumb to the tyranny of identity politics? In particular they surely could not fall into the zero-sum interpretation of existence through the game of understanding and stratifying “privilege”?

Surely, we naively assumed, engineers would not find any utility in constructing a bridge along relativist lines. Scientists would find no purpose in “problematising” their studies, and mathematicians wouldn’t be concerned whether their equation answers enforce some “hierarchy”.

More from this author

The truth about hate speech

By Douglas Murray

So those of us still optimistic about the water-tightness of serious studies look with especial dismay on the developing contamination of the social sciences seeping into the sciences. And our optimism will be somewhat dented by the recent news that maths in Seattle is going the way of everything else.

As readers of my latest book will know, I regard the whole Northwestern United States to be among the global hubs of our present derangements. Oregon is the source of the “food wars” in which people are only meant to cook or consume the produce cooked and consumed by their racial antecedents, and its largest city Portland is the hub of a fascist movement that presents itself as only having to do fascistic things because it is trying to defeat an otherwise non-present fascism. So the only thing less surprising than the State of Oregon deciding to do something inconceivable is when its neighbour Washington agrees to do something equally crazed. And on this occasion Seattle has beaten even Portland in the local derangement Olympics.

This week it emerged that the city’s school board has decided even maths must be subjected to the same numbing and unthinking orthodoxy of our time. In particular that mathematics must – like everything else – be seen through the prism of racism and oppression. Thus as the Seattle Public Schools guidelines for maths education show, students in Seattle schools will be invited to consider questions such as the following: “Where does Power and Oppression show up in our math experience?” Note, incidentally, the fact that “Power” and “Oppression” get the full upper-case first letter treatment. Like The Queen or The President. A real, living, major presence – unlike “math” of course.

Further reading

Liberalism: the other God that failed

By John Gray

Other questions demonstrate an equal intellectual deficit. “How is math manipulated to allow inequality and oppression to exist?” and “How has math been used to resist and liberate people and communities of color from oppression?” Just one of the sub-questions that students will be invited to consider here is “How can we use math to measure the impact of activism?” Because, of course, what matters most in this world is engaging in impactful activism. Elsewhere students will be invited to consider the following question, “Can you suggest resolutions to oppressive mathematical practices?”

It brings to mind the experience that a doctor friend of mine had some years ago. A new layer of bureaucracy had been brought into the National Health Service and all NHS doctors were having to answer a new range of questions about a range of matters, one of which was “Have you everywhere and at all times behaved in an ethical manner?”

My friend pointed out that he would only answer the question if the questioner answered two questions in turn. The first was “Who would honestly ask such a question?” and the second was “Who would honestly answer such a question?” Eventually, after some back and forth, the questioner said “Could you just say ‘yes’, so that we can move on”. Thus, of course, inviting a lie in response to a question on ethical behaviour.

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Is woke culture totalitarian?

By Eric Kaufmann

The Seattle school board’s questions have a similar dynamic at play. The cleverer students will realise that there is a “correct” answer to the questions, whether or not those answers are true – as there is to every other question of our age. They’ll work out that the answer to every question posed by the Seattle authorities will always and everywhere be the same: “more diversity”.

But the problem is not with the smarter students, who like most smart people will always find a way to navigate around the lies and dogmas of their age, but the less intelligent applicants, whose one shot at education the Seattle authorities are meant to be overseeing. A rather basic knowledge of maths would help such people and come in very handy in their lives: in ordering their finances, and working out their day-to-day interactions with others. If they do not pick up these basics at school, then it is highly unlikely that they will pick them up at some later stage, the education system offering the best chance anyone ever has to surpass their forebears.

It should, in theory, also offer them the chance to escape the ideological straitjackets of their time. How disturbing it is to learn that instead, even in a discipline like maths, students will be cocooned and imprisoned in the lies of their age rather than being given the chance to escape them.

It was a real badge, back in the day. No word on how many were printed or what funds it raised, but, hey: different times. The campaign swag of the Sixties and Seventies has an innocence about it, an innocence that Donald J Trump’s campaign was never going to follow.

No sireee, as the pretty girls might have said. The Trump campaign, bored with the bright red Make America Great Again hats, has hit on a new piece of kit. Its genius is that it offends not only with its message but with its very presence on earth.

It’s a plastic straw. Or, to be more precise: 200,000 straws, followed as soon as possible by 100s of thousands more. The idea was hatched when a man named Brad Parscale couldn’t drink his iced tea. Mr Parscale is the campaign manager for the 2020 re-election bid. He was, according to RealClearPolitics, “eating a quick meal when his paper straw, an environmentally-friendly and government-mandated drinking instrument, became soggy, crimped, and useless”.

“I’m so over paper straws,” Parscale tweeted along with a picture and the hashtag “#LiberalProgress”.

I’m so over paper straws. #LiberalProgress

This is exactly what they would do to the economy as well. Squeeze it until it doesn’t work. pic.twitter.com/zKfiZiSHV5

— Brad Parscale (@parscale) July 18, 2019

Others followed and the Trump straw was born. Each comes embossed with “Trump” on the side, and at a price of $15 for 10 straws they make a tidy sum for the re-election campaign of the 45th president of the United States (almost half a million dollars at last count).

But, of course, the straws do so much more. They are instruments of culture war. They are weapons. They can raise the blood pressure of an enemy to dangerous levels without having to be removed from the cup. In this way, they are recyclable.

They are the perfect V sign to flick at the busybodies on the east and west coasts of America who tell folks how to live. The city of Washington, D.C., where Brad Parscale was failing to suck his tea satisfactorily, is rumoured to have a special squad of ‘straw police’ making sure plastic is never used.

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What hope for America's Deplorables?

By Justin Webb

As one of the Trump team told Realclearpolitics, “It is a great marketing stroke which coincides very much with the President’s disdain for political correctness and dictating how people live their daily lives. These straws are a perfect marriage of the Trump approach to things and of Trump-marketing. It just works.”

Take that, weak paper suckers!

And as with so many Trump initiatives, something that seems like a random act of political aggression, unwedded to anything you could call a strategy, actually turns out to have an impact beyond what could possibly have been planned.

The Trump straw has come onto the scene at the very moment that recycling in America is collapsing. And this is not a Trump myth. Across the nation the huge surge in interest in recycling of recent years has been turned on its head. Who says? Well, the impeccably liberal reporters at National Public Radio devoted some considerable effort to investigating the industry this summer and what they found is that the cause of the change is pretty simple.

As NPR explained: recycling in America started with organised crime. In the Eighties, the mafia controlled garbage in New York. An Alabama businessman named Lowell Harrelson wanted to turn trash into energy, so he found a mob boss, he bought 3,186 tons of garbage, put it on a big ship, and set sail to find a landfill. It was messy. No-one wanted to take the rubbish. Authorities in Mexico and Cuba threatened to fire artillery shells at the barge if it tried to dock.

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When did victimhood culture trump truth?

By Justin Webb

In the end, the waste was returned to and incinerated in Brooklyn. But the garbage barge gave birth to an interest in rubbish and getting rid of it: eventually an interest in recycling. For the best part of two decades, the Chinese stepped in where the Mexicans and Cubans and others had failed: desperate for cash and employment, they took America’s recyclable rubbish.

But now the Chinese economy is in a different place. A cleaner place. Last March, they banned the import of rubbish from around the world – including plastic.

The impact in America has been dramatic. Some municipalities across the nation are now insisting that rubbish is sorted and cleaned – it needs to be washed three times to be recyclable – in order to keep it pure and economic, or they are just giving up on it and are putting all their rubbish back into landfills in the old-fashioned way.

There are some experts who think that landfill is the best place for garbage anyway. Thomas Kinnamen from Bucknell University told NPR that the Chinese had let a good deal of plastic end up in the sea, and said that moving waste around the world elicits a greater environmental cost than burying it.

So, the whole business of recycling is now being questioned for its environmental bona fides while becoming steadily more impractical. As ever, on the one hand the Trump message is clear: You do not have to feel bad about yourself. You do not need to change what you do. You can carry on as your parents did.

And on the other side:

“Errr, maybe spend more time going through your rubbish and sorting it. Then get rid of only some of it. And we might bury it in any case. And you need to pay more for the privilege.”

This is how culture wars are won and lost. And the Trump straws underline the biggest challenge facing the Democratic candidate who eventually emerges to fight Trump. This person is going to have to be a communicator of genuine Reagan or Clinton like abilities.

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The betrayal of Paul Embery

By Kate Hoey

He or she is almost always going to be on the more complicated side of any argument with this President and not just because he simplifies (and lies) but because the cases the Democrats want to make often depend on evidence that is relatively unclear, or subject to change or scientific re-thinking. There is nothing wrong with this of course: life is complicated.

But the communication of complexity requires, in an age where the jejune is king, some real mastery of messaging.

The Trump straws and the death of American recycling can be addressed. But that sucking sound is the President guzzling all the attention and the political fizz once again. The paper straw crowd are going to have to work hard to guard against the sogginess that leads to drinking disappointment.