Then, in the early-morning hours of July 4, masked gunmen allegedly shot Bautista, just off that same park, as he was beginning his shift as an employee of the city’s Department of Public Works. He remained lying on the pavement for more than an hour before a passerby discovered him. By the time emergency services arrived, Bautista was dead.

As if his killing weren’t tragic enough for his family, in the days that followed another dimension of the story unfolded. Just weeks before the shooting, the Cambridge city council had voted to shut off ShotSpotter, the gunshot-detection system that had been used by the city for more than a decade to help the police locate shootings and to more quickly respond to victims in high-crime areas. One of those unutilized sensors was located only feet from where Xavier lay wounded.

Viewed in isolation, Cambridge’s removal of an anti-crime technology could be dismissed as the predictable politics of a college town with an oversupply of highly educated liberal voters. But Cambridge isn’t an isolated case. Across the country, Left-wing activists and progressive elected officials are increasingly targeting law-enforcement technologies they cast as tools of state surveillance, corporate power, and racial inequality. 

ShotSpotter is one such technology. Others include Flock Safety — a license-plate-recognition system that police departments use daily to apprehend suspects fleeing crime scenes, locate abducted children, and recover stolen vehicles. Together, these local campaigns show how opposition to new anti-crime technologies has become fertile ground for Left-wing activists seeking political wins. 

Yet affluent progressives are rarely the ones who pay the price for this kind of anti-policing push. 

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For Bautista’s family and many residents of The Port, the city’s decision was impossible to fathom. Days after his death, more than 200 angry residents packed a meeting with city officials, demanding answers. The central question that emerged in the discussion was: why had the city removed a technology that existed to help first responders reach gunshot victims more quickly?

The answer begins in January, when a 24-year-old Harvard graduate and self-identified democratic socialist named Ayah Al-Zubi — the youngest person ever elected to the city council — was sworn into office and immediately appointed chairwoman of the council’s public-safety committee. Al-Zubi had no background in law enforcement or public safety, nor had she ever lived in a low-income neighborhood, having spent most of her adolescence in a comfortable suburb of Cincinnati, where both of her parents worked as dentists.

Even so, Al-Zubi made ending Cambridge’s ShotSpotter program her first priority in office. It was a cause she’d championed for months alongside other local Left activists, who’d concluded —  rather suddenly, it seemed — that the tried-and-tested technology is an instrument of racialized surveillance.

In the public hearings that followed, activists repeatedly hammered this point: that ShotSpotter was inherently racist because its sensors were disproportionately concentrated in predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods. As one elderly white Cambridge resident told the committee, “ShotSpotter does not make Cambridge a safer community… It makes Cambridge a more oppressive place to live… particularly for its black and brown residents who are already targeted by racism.”

Others repeatedly cited an 82% false-positive rate, a figure drawn from a nearly decade-old Harvard Crimson analysis that the Cambridge Police Department disputes. And still others criticized the technology for failing to deter gun violence, despite the fact that its manufacturer, SoundThinking, has consistently described ShotSpotter as primarily a gunfire-detection-and-response tool, rather than a prevention system.

Yet these present-focused arguments ultimately took up only a small share of the advocacy. Far more common was reasoning focused not on what ShotSpotter actually does, but on what it might someday achieve. Activists warned that the sensors could eventually record private conversations and that ICE agents or a future Republican administration might gain access to the data.

Future speculation thus dominated the discussions. The arguments reflected what has become a defining characteristic of contemporary Left-wing politics: a paranoid style and a paranoid political imagination detached from reality, in which hypothetical future abuses of technology and state authority carry far greater significance than present challenges. Soon, the council voted to remove ShotSpotter, with five votes in favor of the proposal, two opposed, and two abstaining.

The successful effort of a small group of Left-wing activists to remove ShotSpotter in Cambridge reflects a broader transformation in the nature of progressive activism during President Trump’s second administration. Compared to the first Trump presidency, when opposition was organized centrally around resisting a single political figure, today’s activism is more fragmented and directed toward technological objects that have come to symbolize the larger political and economic systems the movement opposes. 

Whether the target is a gunshot-detection system, a license-plate reader, a Tesla car, or a hyperscale data center, the hardware increasingly becomes the site through which broader Left-wing anxieties about surveillance, policing, capitalism, and inequality are expressed. This new focus revises the mission of the historic Left, which welcomed technological advancement, even as it sought to reform or revolutionize the relations of production. Under the new dispensation, the product itself is the target — and advancement is presumed suspect unless proved otherwise.  

The pattern has become unmistakable. Since Trump’s return to office, dozens of predominantly progressive cities, the largest being Los Angeles, have ended or reconsidered their relationships with Flock Safety. In each of these cases, the campaigns shifted the debate away from the technology’s demonstrated uses and toward what it might someday become. Similar campaigns have targeted data centers, turning reasonable land-use disputes into a broader ideological struggle over Big Tech.

This shift coincides with two larger developments. The first is the growing disarray of the liberal institutions that once organized and directed Left-wing political energy. After nearly a decade of defining themselves in opposition to Trump, Democrats and the broader network of DC-based progressive organizations have struggled to produce a comparable national movement capable of channeling the Left’s diverse grievances into a unified political project. The Women’s March, the impeachment campaigns, and the George Floyd protests represented the high-water mark of that form of resistance, yet none produced a durable political movement beyond opposition to Trump himself.

As Trump approaches the end of his presidency, even that organizing center is beginning to dissolve, and the political energy it once contained is dispersing into smaller, localized battles fought in mayor’s offices and city-council meetings over the technologies increasingly shaping everyday life.

The second development is the speed at which computing has embedded itself into the economy. As semiconductors have shrunk and computing power has become cheaper, more industries have adopted technology capable of processing vast amounts of information and automating tasks that once required human judgment or that were simply impossible to perform at scale.

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Public safety and law enforcement have enjoyed the benefits of this computing revolution. Tools like ShotSpotter and Flock Safety are examples of the same more-powerful computing now commonplace across medicine, manufacturing, and finance, filling long-standing operational needs through automation and pattern recognition. The primary difference is that the Left sees these technologies, when used by law enforcement, as proxies for fears about the future of state authority and technological control.

To be sure, new technologies can produce unexpected consequences. Social media promised greater openness and connection but also gave rise to pervasive targeted advertising and worsening mental-health outcomes for adolescents. That history helps explain the public’s current unease with new technologies.

But broad skepticism alone doesn’t explain why anti-crime technology has emerged as a lightning rod for Left-wing ire. The reason lies in the unique character of the technological revolution. Unlike previous waves of technological change, today’s computing revolution has unfolded without a broadly shared national narrative explaining its purpose, benefits, or tradeoffs. That vacuum has given activists an opportunity to frame the debate, and to define these technologies primarily as instruments of surveillance and social control. 

As political commentators search for signs of how the Democratic Party will regain national power in 2028, much of their attention remains fixed on Democrats in Congress. But a quieter political movement is taking shape in local governments across the country. Led by informal networks of Left-leaning activists and citizens, it has become one of the most effective forces of our time, helping to block billions of dollars in government contracts with major technology companies and successfully turning symbolic political campaigns into real policy victories.

Perhaps more important, these campaigns reveal something deeper about the modern Left. Its belief system is now defined by a generalized suspicion of technology, institutions, and the exercise of power itself, mirroring the descent of parts of the Right into conspiracism and what used to be called the paranoid style. As these ideas become more influential within the Democratic Party, it is worth asking whether they provide the foundation for a national campaign capable of persuading ordinary Americans that Democrats are prepared to govern. At stake, after all, are the lives of people like Xavier Bautista, whose death might have been prevented had Cambridge retained the technology it chose to abandon in response to the Left’s anti-tech paranoia.

So said the woman standing next to a squalid tent residence that has sprung up at the corner of 46th Street and 11th Avenue, on the far west side of Manhattan. Skeletally thin, eyes almost popping out of her wan, sunken face, she’s hunched over trying to light something as I approach. “Jane” (not her real name) looks like she could fall over any second. A strong gust would do the job. But she keeps it together, somehow.

We’re across from the Intrepid, the WWII-era carrier that serves as a floating aviation museum, beloved of tourists and younger New Yorkers, like my 9-year-old son, Max.

When I visited this area a fortnight earlier — so Max could watch the action-sci-fi classic Independence Day on the deck of the Intrepid — the homeless camp was much more expansive. It took up a significant span of the block and teemed with people in various states of undress and intoxication. Then the New York Post (where I used to work) got wind of the camp and gave it two days of coverage: “Lawless NYC Homeless Encampment Near Intrepid Grows,” ran one headline.

Pressed at a Monday news conference about the camp, Mamdani gave what the Post fairly described as a “non-answer.” Said Hizzoner: “We are focused on connecting New Yorkers to shelter and on establishing a pipeline to stable housing, not just moving New Yorkers from one place to another place. To this specific encampment that you brought up, we’re going to look into the details of that.”

Well, now we know what “looking into the details” would entail. The camp looked much smaller by Monday evening when I visited. “They” had dispersed the residents, as Jane reported. Who’s they? “Sanitation,” she replies, pointing with her chin at the official notices duct-taped to the wire fencing next to her makeshift home.

“That piece of paper says we have to take our stuff and move on,” she says matter-of-factly. “Otherwise, they’ll come and throw away our stuff, and we can do nothin’ about it.”

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As she says this, I happen to notice a green-and-white Department of Sanitation SUV driving slowly — very slowly — toward the tent (or tents, really, a complex of them conjoined somehow by various boxes and carts and covered over by multiple tarps). But the sanitation boys roll up their windows and tear away before I can ask questions.

And in that set of interactions — Jane’s report of the great dispersal, sanitation preferring to do its work quietly — lies the key to how Mayor Zohran Mamdani is addressing one of the persistent crises of blue-city governance. Across the country, homeless encampments have become hotbeds of open drug use, prostitution, violence, and general human misery. They annoy local residents and businesses and foster a general sense of decay and disorder. 

Mamdani’s response amounts to a careful threading of the needle between doing what’s necessary and keeping the activist, anti-police Left at bay. He doesn’t want a “Mamdani-Ville” mushrooming on his watch, feeding daily horror images to the tabloids. But he’s tackling it with the lowest-intensity and -visibility means possible. 

To wit, Mamdani has apparently resolved to disperse the west-side camp — but crucially, without involving the police or coercively removing its “residents” from the streets. The residents still haunt — I use the verb decidedly — the neighborhood. But they’re no longer as visibly concentrated and thus less likely to attract media attention.

It’s (sort of) working for now — a testament to the mayor’s political agility, not to mention the Post’s power to set the agenda. But in the long term, the strategy risks damaging his credibility and, by extension, that of the wider social-democratic renewal he’s attempting.

One thing Mamdani has going for him is the tight geography of Manhattan. Save for its parks, which have historically avoided the encampment scourge, the city has few wide-open spaces conducive to the permanent in-gathering of the addicted and mentally ill (a substantial majority of those who camp this way abuse substances or have severe mental-health problems — often both).

Manhattan’s situation stands in contrast to more sprawling West Coast cities with plenty of open room for camps to grow into unless the authorities intervene — something they often didn’t do amid the anti-policing mania that swept American progressivism beginning in the mid-2010s. “At least we don’t have the camps” was thus one of the consolations of Gothamites during the era of “peak woke” and #Defund.

If there is one part of Manhattan where camps could take root, however, it’s the sleepy far-west stretch along the Hudson River. With its warehouses, auto-repair shops, and utility facilities, the area has always been surprisingly empty, though more recent development has brought a number of glass high-rises straight out of Doha or Dubai. The area’s relative emptiness has been an invitation to encampment, and it was only a matter of time before one would appear.

Soon, locals and businesses were complaining about the sights, sounds, and smells of the camp. Joggers found themselves hurdling the limp bodies of drug cosmonauts sprawled across the pavement, dodging the paraphernalia and other filthy detritus scattered around them. I saw all this myself on my earlier visit.

By Monday night, though, the scene is more contained.

“Where have the rest gone?” I ask Jane.

“Not far,” she replies. “They’re just down the 40s. Just walk up and down, man, you’ll see.”

Has anyone offered to take them to shelters? She shrugs. “I mean, they come and talk to you. But —” Her voice trails off. My questions are beginning to annoy her.

A security guard on a foldable chair across the street backs up her account. “I see cops come by and sort of chat with ’em. City workers, too. But they don’t do anything.” The Mamdani administration seems to have placed much — perhaps most — of the onus for dealing with the crisis on the shoulders of sanitation workers.

Jane tells me she’s been on the streets for two years, at this corner for two weeks. She’s outlasted the others, but sooner or later she, too, will have to drag her things a few blocks and start again.

Her neighbors aren’t hard to find. Farther north, at 47th Street, a smaller camp: a more alert woman working the corner in a bedraggled mini-dress (“Hey, Daddy!”), two pairs of male eyes staring coldly from inside the tent behind her. On 45th, another makeshift residence, where a couple smokes outside while a third man tries on roller blades. On 44th, a couple lies belly-down in their tent, watching videos on a phone. Farther east (away from the river), clusters of men doze off in various nooks and doorways.

Jane was right. You just have to walk up and down. Mamdani, for now, has “solved” the problem at a surface level, and in the most non-coercive manner imaginable. There will be fewer fentanyl-porn scenes readymade for Post cameras. But the total volume of decay and disorder hasn’t been diminished, only the concentration. 

When it comes to the complex of social crises that gives rise to a Jane, his administration’s philosophy is still largely informed by the Left libertarianism that refuses to coerce people whose illness tells them they’re doing just fine. What this model has to do with social democracy — with the project of subjecting our common life to rational deliberation — is anyone’s guess.

Democratic Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York agree, and they aren’t leaving the matter to state and local governance. They have introduced a bill to impose a moratorium everywhere in the United States. In a press release, Sanders gives four separate reasons — environmental (“a profound impact on land and water use”), economic (“will drive up electricity costs”), occupational (“eliminating tens of millions of blue- and white-collar jobs”), and apocalyptic: “this revolutionary technology could soon become smarter than humans and escape human control — with potentially cataclysmic outcomes.” You might think that the prospect of a Silicon God enslaving or annihilating humanity, if it were a genuine threat, would be the first item in the list of AI data center dangers, not the last.  

Some Republican supporters of data centers assert that China is responsible for the opposition in the US — a claim as ludicrous as the Democrats’ claim a decade ago that Russia swung the 2016 election from Clinton to Trump.

Today’s opposition to data centers is home-grown, but it is more “astroturf” than grass-roots. The anti-data center movement is merely the latest cause seized upon by a pre-existing coalition of anti-growth environmentalists, anti-corporate progressives, small-is-beautiful populists, and preservationists, who for various reasons want their local landscapes frozen forever as they are now.  

Of the parade of horribles listed as reasons to oppose new data centers, concerns about the environment and electricity prices are legitimate. Data centers consume enormous amounts of water for cooling and electricity for operation. It is both reasonable and necessary to prevent these facilities from exhausting local water supplies or shifting energy costs to local utility bill payers.  How this should be done, and at what level of government, deserve to be important subjects of public debate. The tech accelerationists who oppose all regulation of AI are as misguided as the technophobes.

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But most Americans who oppose data centers do so on the basis of practical concerns, not progressive ideology. According to a Gallup survey in May, 50% of those who opposed data centers in their local areas cited “effects on resources”: water usage (18%), energy consumption (18%), and unspecified environmental impact (14%), with only 13% citing other reasons for opposition, including loss of farmland, threats to wildlife, natural resource consumption, or the fear that the data center would be an “eyesore.” Other concerns included apprehension about higher costs to utility rate-payers and citizens (20%) and concern about pollution (16%).

What about the other concerns raised by progressives like Sanders? Only 12% of the opponents polled by Gallup worried that AI would replace jobs and only 4% agreed with “Scared of AI/Don’t trust it/AI will take over.”  

Most data-center construction is in low-population suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas that tend to prefer Republicans to Democrats in elections. If the anti-data-center movement were really about practical local concerns, we would expect opposition to be greater among small-town and rural Republicans than among big-city Democrats who are not affected by the construction.

Instead, we find the reverse. According to the same survey, Democrats are far more likely to “strongly oppose” data-center construction than Republicans, by a huge gap of 56% to 39%. What is more, there is a gender gap: women are more likely than men to strongly oppose data-center construction, 55% to 43%.

In other words, a Republican man who lives in a rural county where a data center is likely to be constructed is less likely to be worried about it than a Democratic woman who lives in a big city far from the nearest data center. The truth is that the urban female Democrat opposes data centers only because that is quickly becoming the progressive party line.  Her concern about the possible effects on the rural Republican families she otherwise dislikes for their religious and political views is just virtue-signaling and play-acting, like the performative outrage of urban liberals at the thought that the Keystone Pipeline might cross sacred indigenous lands they will never visit but heard about on NPR, or the theatrical alarm among progressive city-dwellers on reading in The New York Times about road-building in the Amazon rainforest.

The debate about data center construction, then, would be boring and technical if the questions most local citizens have about their role in water use, electricity consumption, and pollution were the only issues. In this case, to use the phrase of the 1960s Left, the issue is not the issue. The real objection of many progressive opponents of data centers is not to this particular kind of industrial development, but to industrial development as such. Apart from the dystopian prospect of superhuman computers running amok, every one of the objections listed by Sanders and other supporters of a data center moratorium could be raised — and have been raised in the recent past — against major manufacturing and infrastructure projects of different kinds, including new factories that are built as a result of initiatives to reshore industrial supply chains lost to China, Mexico, and other countries.

Many of the same progressive advocacy groups that are uniting to oppose data center construction have come together in the past to oppose nuclear power, fracking, and offshore oil and gas drilling, using multiple arguments calculated to appeal to “the groups” as the allied single-issue factions on the left are known. Consider the Keystone Pipeline, proposed in 2008 and canceled by President Biden in 2021. (An alternate version is being considered today.) The Christmas tree logic of the anti-development Left is illustrated by an article published in 2022, after the Biden administration canceled the Keystone Pipeline: “this article draws upon environmental, utilitarian, rights and justice ethics in order to explain why the Keystone XL Pipeline extension was unethical and why its permit was revoked by the Biden Administration in 2021. It debunks the common claims that the pipeline would increase jobs and encourage economic growth, as well as sheds light upon the negative environmental effects and risks to indigenous populations, offering ethical guidelines for the future, such as consulting with indigenous communities before embarking on construction projects.”

Much of the passionate opposition to data center construction today is merely displaced hostility toward tech oligarchs like Elon Musk. Progressive opponents similarly demonized the Keystone Pipeline as a plot to enrich those important Republican donors, the Koch brothers. In 2011, when a Reuters article reported that the Kochs would profit from Keystone Pipeline construction, two Democratic Representatives, Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), demanded that Congress subpoena documents from Koch Industries about their interests in the project, if any. Yet, if the Keystone Pipeline was bad, it was bad no matter who profited from it, and if it was in the public interest, the identity of its investors was irrelevant. Associating Keystone with the Kochs was pure demagogy, like attempts by contemporary progressives to smear all data centers by association with Elon Musk.

In the view of the anti-development Left, technological civilization is bad and nature is good.  From this Arcadian ideology follows the conclusion that not only should the existing human-built environment not be extended, but also some existing infrastructure, like electricity-generating dams, should be destroyed. 

While New Deal presidents like Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson promoted hydropower dams for their ability to generate cheap electricity, for decades, one of the goals of radical environmentalists in the US has been dismantling these New Deal icons and “rewilding” the rivers they modified. As in the case of the anti-data center movement, today’s anti-dam advocates provide multiple alternate rationales for the policy, each rationale calculated to appeal to a different part of the progressive coalition. A recent headline on the website of nonprofit The Post Carbon Institute seeks to unite conservationists, global warming activists, and those whose virtue-signaling includes performative displays of guilt toward Native Americans: “Removing hydropower dams can restore ecosystems, build climate resilience, and restore tribal lands.”

From the point of view of progressive political coalition-building, that is a good “three-fer” but it it could have been converted into a better “four-fer” by linking dams to sinister Big Business, or by smearing dams by association with the benighted, provincial Republican voters with motorboats and lake houses — who, once re-wilding is complete, will be conveniently punished by the drainage of the dam-created reservoirs they use for recreation.

The same progressive nonprofit-industrial complex and allied politicians who define the ever-changing progressive party line have now decided that data centers are to be demonized as symbols of the evils of corporate capitalism and inequality, as personal automobiles, highways, suburbs, oil and gas drilling, hydropower dams, and nuclear power plants have been demonized by the anti-development Left since the 1970s. If zero-carbon nuclear fusion technology generating cheap electricity were invented tomorrow, this same half-century-old anti-development coalition would immediately mobilize against it. Stop Big Fusion Now!

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The good news is that the anti-development coalition in America is fragile and sometimes breaks down. For example, there is a split between neoliberal boosters of solar power and wind power who back the Green New Deal and more radical deep ecologists and degrowthers. The radical Greens at least are consistent. If Big Data Center is bad for the environment, then so are Big Wind, with its massive windmills spoiling views and killing birds; Big Solar, with its rows of rusting, potentially-toxic solar panels wiping out ground cover and wildlife; and, of course, Big Transmission, with its proposed massive new power lines that are supposed to bring “clean” energy from the bird-killing windmills and the wilderness-killing solar farms.

The progressive coalition against modern industrial and infrastructure development also frequently comes into conflict with organized labor. Construction unions in particular have clashed with environmentalists over their opposition to oil and gas facilities, as well as infrastructure and nuclear power. In the debate about the Keystone Pipeline, for example, the United Association of Plumbers and Pipefitters and the Laborers International Union of North America supported the pipeline’s construction, in the interest of more jobs for their members.  

The anti-development left is also fractured by divisions among Green supporters of industrial-scale renewable energy and the group that might be called “local preservationists” — residents of an area who are not particularly ideological, but oppose construction that would alter a beloved landscape or block a lovely view. In Martha’s Vineyard, a Democratic stronghold, a massive offshore industrial wind project favored by environmentalists has met opposition from citizen groups like Nantucket Residents Against Turbines, citing, in true progressive virtue-signaling fashion, alleged harm to marine life and local fishers. 

In the long run, the non-ideological preservationists may prove to be a greater threat to the future of the US economy than small but noisy minorities like degrowthers and anti-capitalist socialists.  The desire to retain an unobstructed view from your dream house is understandable, and so is the concern about an industrial facility or infrastructure corridor being constructed next door. But all of America’s land is in or adjacent to the “viewscape” or homes of some individuals and families. Giving a few people a veto on further development of the United States on aesthetic or sentimental grounds would be fatal for American prosperity and power.  

A country is not a museum. The occasional quaint historic district is a good idea. Turning an entire nation into a historic district, frozen forever at a particular moment in time and technological evolution, would be national suicide.

We should deal with the practical issues of energy use, water use, and pollution that are raised by data center construction. And we should also deal with the separate issues of excessive wealth concentration and insufficient regulation of numerous industries, of which AI is only one. But a crusade against plutocracy and inequality that takes the crude form of blocking all data center construction is as stupid as a crusade against Gilded Age robber barons would have been if it had taken the form of a moratorium on railroad construction. You don’t have to be a godlike, silicon-based, out-of-control artificial intelligence to understand that.

***

Nearly 60 years ago, Time magazine, then an important publication, posed a discomfiting question on its cover: “Is God Dead?” Yet today, a spiritual hunger grips America, with roughly two-thirds of religiously unaffiliated Americans still believing in God or a universal spirit, according to Pew. Overall, young people are drawing closer to a higher power, and new research reports that most Gen-Z teens are more interested in learning more about Jesus, often using the internet to find new commitments.  

There is even some sign of revival in decidedly secular Europe, with 45% more people being baptized in historically anti-clerical France compared to last year. And, notes The Spectator, there’s a “boom biblique”: a rapid rise in sales of the Bible. More broadly, religious bookstores report a 20% percent increase in purchases since 2024. In Britain, of course, there is the “quiet revival,” with the church-attending share of the population rising to nearly 6 million in 2025, up from 3.7 million in 2018, with much of the energy seen among young men.

In modern sociology, conventional wisdom holds that religious people are generally less curious, less ambitious, and less intelligent than their nonbelieving peers. But this view is out of tune with current realities. On the contrary, a deep dive into the data shows that, over the last 15 years, religiously engaged people have become more likely to be well-educated, while atheists are less so. In the United States, religious groups outperform atheists and agnostics.

Overall, religious enthusiasm is most concentrated among middle-income professionals. An analysis of the 2022-2023 Cooperative Election Study, surveying nearly 85,000 Americans, found a positive correlation between education and weekly religious attendance. The rate of attendance rises from 23% among high school graduates to 30% for those with graduate degrees. This trend is supported by the sociologist Philip Schwadel’s research, which found that each additional year of education increases an American’s likelihood of attending religious services by 15%.

At the same time, the nature of worshipers has changed, and taken on increasingly conservative character. This has much to do with the rise of Gen Z, notes religious commentator Aaron Renn. Today’s young believers have arrived at faith amid a decidedly hostile environment for religion. They have, moreover, embraced political positions on race, immigration, and transgenderism that are vastly different from those held by older liberal Catholics as well as mainline Protestants.

Indeed, progressive ideology has proved catastrophic for houses of worship that embrace it. In 2019, more Protestant churches closed than opened in the United States, as mainstream Protestant denominations lost 5 million members in the past decade. Once dominant mainline Protestant churches now count barely 9% of Americans in their flocks, down from a peak of 50%. Progressive-dominated sects like the Presbyterians, the Episcopalians, and the United Church of Christ are experiencing what one analyst described as “a bloodbath,” with membership down at least 30% since the Nineties.

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In Canada,  the once-dominant Anglicans have lost roughly three-quarters of their worshipers and could go extinct by 2040, according to some church leaders. Even in its ancestral home, the Church of England, fashionably liberal and dismissive of many of the concerns of its congregants about such problems as Islamic militancy or grooming gangs, has been in secular decline and may be surpassed by Islam within a decade. Liberal Catholicism is similarly graying and out of touch.

The progressive hierarchs of all denominations, in short, face the challenge of an increasingly conservative customer base, both in the West and even more so in Africa, the crucible of the Catholic future. Traditionalist faiths, such as Greek Orthodoxy, seem to be doing better. A survey of Orthodox churches around the country found that parishes saw a 78% increase in converts in 2022, compared with pre-pandemic levels in 2019. The average age of attendees is 42, with 62% between 18 and 45. That’s significantly younger than other major traditions.

Among Jews, reform and even conservative synagogues are struggling while those of Orthodox Judaism, particularly the thriving Chabad movement, have gained both members and influence, enjoying the greatest growth in engagement since Oct. 7. Some reform Jews (including yours truly) have been shocked by the turn toward anti-Zionism among leading reform rabbis. Given the overwhelming support among Jews for Israel, these Leftist-oriented clergy can only alienate most congregants and can only survive as useful idiots for those who wish to destroy the Jewish state.

If there’s an epicenter for the new religious revival, it’s Africa, which is the one continent with a growing population and enormous, largely untapped economic potential. Historically, Christian missions were central to establishing formal education on the continent, forging a lasting link between faith and upward mobility. Today, Pentecostalism is a major driver of this trend, offering a version of Christianity that promotes values such as individualism and a strong work ethic, providing followers with the spiritual and social tools to pursue economic advancement and a better future.

Widely ignored by Western interests, Africa is far from a hopeless basket case. It is home to 11 of the world’s 20 fastest growing economies. In the span of a single century, Africa has undergone a religious revolution in tandem with its economic growth. While Islam has expanded its footprint in Africa, doubling its share since 1900, the preponderant growth is among Christians. The Chrisitan faith has won the adherence of nearly 57% of all Africans since 1900, compared to 29% for Islam.

Clearly Africa’s demographic exceptionalism will drive the future of religion. The population of sub-Saharan Africa grew by an extraordinary 31% between 2010 and 2020 alone, reaching 1.1 billion people. UN projections indicate that this population will increase by two-thirds by 2050, a period during which Europe and North America are forecast to remain largely static. By the end of the century, seven of the world’s 15 most populous nations are projected to be in Africa, a stark contrast to 1950, when only one African country made that list.

Ultimately, then, Christianity’s future lies in Africa. As of 2020, there were 697.4 million Christians in sub-Saharan Africa. This growth now accounts for most of the numerical increase in Christians globally. A century ago, two-thirds of the world’s Christians lived in Europe. Today, that figure is roughly a quarter. By 2050, projections indicate that 4 out of every 10 Christians in the world will live in sub-Saharan Africa. The region’s share of the global Christian population is expected to rise to 38% by 2050, up from a quarter in 2010; while Europe’s share is projected to plummet to just 16%. Africa’s Christians are also young, with a median age of 20, compared to a global Christian median of 30.

In Africa, Christianity also tends toward social conservatism and takes traditionalist stances both inside mainstream groups like the Anglicans or the Catholic Church, or in fast-growing  evangelical, charismatic, and Pentecostal denominations.

This tie between religious faith and growth, so visible in Africa, could also shape the West. Education, long dominated by Left-leaning secularists and radicals, will be a crucial inflection point. In the South Bronx or Houston’s heavily immigrant Sharpstown, religious educators are having success with young people from very poor backgrounds where secular education is failing. Inner-city boys who attend religious schools, notes Tulane University sociologist Ilana Horwitz, do far better and are twice as likely to graduate from college than those in public schools. Critical here, she notes, are the attributes of religious engagement, such as respect for elders and learning. Even guilt has its efficacy, helping to restrain the worst impulses that often lead adolescents into dark spaces.

Nationwide, enrollment in private Christian schools has risen in recent years. In New York, as city schools are emptying, Catholic-oriented charters have doubled their enrollments. The K-12 enrollment at the Association of Christian Schools International, described as “one of the country’s largest networks of evangelical schools,” increased 12% between the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 academic years, even as more families migrate out of the public-school systems. The rise of voucher programs, including in such large states as Texas and Florida, has largely benefited religiously oriented schools.

It is becoming increasingly clear that religious faith provides critical social benefits. For instance, just 10% of religiously observant people today say they have no close friends; the share almost doubles for those who have no faith. Participation in church generally also correlates, according to a 2022 study in the American Journal of Epidemiology, with better health outcomes. Equally well-established are the links between religious participation and longer lives, greater financial generosity, and more stable families. 

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Christian talk show host Justin Brierley predicts “the fall of the New Atheism.” Richard Dawkins’s vision of a universe driven by “blind, pitiless indifference” is being challenged by a generation of conservative intellectuals like Jordan Peterson, JD Vance, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who embrace religion’s resurgence as counterweight to the current declines in marriage, family, community, and civil society.      

Even some in the tech elite are having second thoughts. Most scientists tend toward secularism, but there seems to be a trend among scientists to embrace faith. Most notably, the expanding Society of Catholic Scientists counts more than 2,100 members and has 28 regional chapters.  

Even in the technological heartland of secular America, Silicon Valley, there are religious stirrings. The world’s most important innovator, Elon Musk, has recently become more public in his embrace of Christianity, which he described  as “ a religion of curiosity” and “greater enlightenment.” Other executives and investors like Pat Gelsinger, former head of Intel, Gary Tan, CEO of Y Incubator, and Peter Theil have likewise embraced the faith.

In Silicon Valley — where, as one observer notes, religion is “borderline illegal” — the congregation of the Catholic Our Lady of Peace church has burgeoned to more than 3000 families. And, according to Fr. Brian Dinkel, who hears an estimated 50,000 confessions a year, “People who may be doing well also want something more. Our people work at Google and Apple, but there’s a real search for the truth beyond tech.”    

Ultimately, the religious may prevail due to their higher birthrates. The places where Americans have children tend to be in the South, the Plains, and parts of the Intermountain West. These are also centers of conservative Christianity. The presence of children is all the more important in an  era where the population bomb has morphed into the population deficit.  

 It seems likely that more Americans, seeing the benefits of faith and community, will continue to take on a more religious cast of mind in the future. News of the death of God, it turns out, was greatly exaggerated.

There are cultural and religious circumcisions performed on boys. There are also “corrective” surgeries on so-called “intersex” children, and cosmetic procedures on Western girls. There are non-Western cultural practices in which the young female vulva is merely “pricked”; or where the labia are only moderately cut. Why let a few tortured young girls, permanently maimed by more drastic interventions, cast the rich tapestry of genital remodeling into disrepute?

Progressives are notoriously fond of renaming negatively-coded social practices to make them sound more palatable: “assisted dying” for euthanasia, or “sex work” for prostitution, for instance. The usual strategy is to take the most benign example of the practice possible, then make that the central paradigm. And so we get images of affluent middle-class people floating off to consensual oblivion at the hands of a doctor, rather than hungry, homeless depressives. We are told to think of students harmlessly supplementing their degrees with a bit of escort work, not drug-addicted mothers standing on street corners. Perpetually gloomy about human behavior in other areas, when it comes to sex and death the mood becomes positively Pollyanna-ish.

Similarly, the authors of the new FGM article are apparently looking for the silver lining. Some genital modifications enhance group identity, they say, and a sense of community belonging. And as with euthanasia and prostitution, they want us to ignore the inconvenient downsides. But at the same time, there is a philosophical component here mostly absent from parallel campaigns. It’s cultural relativism — which says that strictly speaking, there are no downsides, or indeed upsides, at all.

That is: from the inside of a particular culture, certain practices count as exemplary and others as evil. Yet zoom out to an omniscient, deculturated perspective upon human behavior generally, and there is no objective moral value — or so the story goes. All value is constructed at the local level. Worse: when you zoom back into your own homegrown ethical concerns after taking such a trip, they seem strangely hollow. Like an astronaut returning to Earth after having seen the whole of it from space, everything looks a bit parochial.

I assume that this underlying dynamic is the source of the article’s weird tensions. A staggering 25 authors were involved in writing it, and it shows. Their stated collective aim is to “draw attention to the harms that may be caused by the lack of accuracy, objectivity, fairness and balance in public representations of these diverse practices” of genital modification. Early on in the paper, though, some internal conflicts are professed.

A first set of co-authors — let’s call them the Conservatives — declare themselves “morally opposed” to all genital surgeries except medically necessary and voluntary ones, including for young males. Obviously, this puts them at odds with common Jewish practice. A second — we might say, the Centrists — are fine with religious or cultural circumcision for males but not for females. On the face of it, these two groups do not look like cultural relativists at all. For them, the bid to get rid of the word “mutilation” makes no sense. Why not retain it, and simply narrow its sprawling reference, in order to focus on acts of cutting they specifically condemn?

But then along comes a third group of co-authors — let’s call them the Permissives — who hold that “it is up to parents to decide what is best for their children, and that the state should refrain from interfering with any culturally significant practices unless they can be shown to involve serious harm”. This group also seems to have decided that genital cutting for cultural reasons involves relatively negligible harm, even in apparently severe cases. As is typical in disagreements between academics, it appears the Permissives ultimately took charge of the situation. Out went the term “mutilation”. Anti-FGM laws in Western countries got a similarly dismissive treatment, as did anti-FGM campaigns in non-Western ones.

Again, none of this makes sense on paper. The groups I’m calling Conservative and Centrist should surely still have insisted on laws and campaigns against the particular types of cutting they each opposed. Instead, though, the whole group seems to have got collectively stuck in the demand for “a fair and inclusive consideration” of all forms of genital modification. As if dealing with an unequal distribution of sweets amongst children, it asks: why is male circumcision legally permitted but not female? Why are surgeries on “intersex” children allowed in the West, but not cutting practices done for religious or cultural reasons?

It seems to be assumed that there is no non-arbitrary, meaningful answer to such questions, and that the disparity is therefore unfair. Even so, the article might have concluded that “fairness” requires that all such practices be stamped out. It needn’t have suggested we stop objecting to any of them. The brainworm responsible seems to be, precisely, cultural relativism: that nagging sense that you can’t reasonably single out particular kinds of act for approval or disapproval, when all actions are on the same amoral plane.

But while relativism saps you of faith in your own moral judgments, at the same time old habits die hard. Even the most permissive supporter can’t stop proselytizing in favor of some behaviors and not others. In practice, avowed relativists in the Anglosphere often end up valuing the practices of non-Western people over their own. And so our co-authors — the majority of whom work in Europe, Australasia, and North America — tell us that anti-FGM initiatives in Africa cause material harms. Supposedly, they siphon off money and attention that could be better spent in other health campaigns, and they undermine trust in doctors.

They also cause young women to consider genital cutting as “traumatizing” in retrospect, we are told, where they would not otherwise have done so. Even though some who have been subject to it can experience “unwanted upsetting memories, heightened vigilance, sleep disturbance, recurrent memories or flashbacks during medical consultations”, there is allegedly no actual trauma there, until some foreign aid agency tells them so.

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Meanwhile in the Anglosphere, anti-FGM laws allegedly cause “oversurveillance of ethnic and racialized families and girls” and undermine “social trust, community life and human rights”. All these things, it is implied, are flat wrong. This sounds like old-fashioned morality talk to me. But then again, if old-fashioned morality talk is permissible, may not we also talk explicitly about the wrongs of holding small girls down to tables and slicing off bits of them, or sewing them up so tight that they are in searing agony? These things sound like they might undermine “social trust, community life, and human rights” too.

Rather than be a relativist about morality, it makes more sense to be a pluralist. There are different virtues for humans to aspire to, and they can’t be ranked. Sometimes there are clashes between them, resulting in inevitable trade-offs (honesty vs kindness; loyalty to family vs to one’s community; and so on). There are very few cost-free moral choices in this life. Equally, some virtues will vary according to cultural backdrop. The local environment may partly influence which virtues are paramount. For instance, family obedience and respect for elders will be stronger in places where close kinship ties help people to survive.

But still, there is always a limit on what behaviors might conceivably count as good; and that limit is whether they actively inhibit a person’s flourishing, in the Aristotelian sense. The most drastic and bloody forms of FGM obviously do so. They lead a little girl to feel distrust and fear of female carers; predispose her to infections and limit her sexual function for life; cause her pain, nightmares, and panicky flashbacks for decades.

With minimally invasive genital surgeries involving peripheral body parts, matters are not so clear. But whatever the case about those, you can’t just assume in advance that all genital modifications are equal, so that discriminating between them by different legal and social approaches is somehow “unfair”. If cultural relativism were really true, there would be no such thing as unfairness either. It would just be empty meaninglessness, all the way down. Academics with heroic designs on the English language should be careful not to fall into ethical abysses, even as they tell themselves the landscape around them is objectively flat.

Sims fans are not what laymen would expect gamers to be. The shouty young men who crack rape jokes in Call of Duty lobbies are nowhere to be found in Pleasantview. The fandom, unusually for gaming, skews about 80% female; the gameplay is less about gunning down insurgents than building homes and families, nurturing relationships and customizing interior decor. The game gives players godlike control over their creations, allowing legions of highly skilled “modders” to tinker with bespoke elements. Its limitless customization has attracted a sizable and vocal LGBT constituency; some exclusively program lesbians; others make almost all their Sims parents polygamous. Physicality and clothing is entirely unisex, fitting neatly into transgender philosophy; same-sex marriage was introduced to the game in 2009, six years before it was legalized in the US where the game was created.

The Sims is a Californian export, a strange flower from the hothouse of Silicon Valley in the Nineties. The game’s conceptual power was that it reflected the radical entrepreneurialism of that time, allowing players to pull up the roots of known institutions — the family, the town, life and death itself — and redesign everything to the whims of the individual. The Sims is one big lab experiment for different social and sexual dynamics, and even in marketing EA was careful to court progressive favor with Pride campaigns and tactical brand partnerships. Although the spectrum of gameplay is as varied as that of players themselves — some choose, as above, to simply rehearse traditional family roles by putting a mother through three hours of tedious housework before sunrise — both the format of the game and its ideological foundations are inherently liberal.

It’s hard to imagine a scenario more heartrending than grubby realpolitik clashing with this sunlit cyberworld. Unfortunately for Sims players, that’s exactly what happened: EA, the game’s Californian publisher, founded in 1982 by a former Apple employee called Trip Hawkins, has been acquired for a cool $55 billion by a consortium including none other than the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia (run by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who the US not too long ago determined had personally ordered the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi) and Affinity Partners — the Floridian investment firm founded by Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s husband and an architect of the Gaza peace plan. A Gulf petrostate where homosexuality is punishable with decapitation, and a son of the Trump dynasty; you could not possibly cook up a less desirable cast of buyers for perhaps the most liberal gaming franchise in history.

Predictably, the players are rattled; a boycott is underway. “It’s always disheartening as a queer woman and a disabled person seeing the places [where] I once found comfort and safety online shrink to a significantly smaller degree,” writes one. Many fret that LGBT content will be phased out of the game, distasteful to the Saudi stakeholders or plain old American conservatives in the Trump orbit. “Even if the Sims stays the same, I don’t want my money to go to those people,” writes another. “The series is very much dead to me after this.”

For some players, this is less about the selling-out of a favorite game than the loss of a better world. One put-out Prometheus, watching the gods snatch back fire, writes: “It’s not just a video game to so many of us; I’ve rebuilt Paris, New York, Barcelona… I can’t just abandon ship and start over, [after] 10 years of world building. I can’t support Saudis or Kushner. I guess I bought my last pack.”

It is difficult to think of a cultural product, game or otherwise, which so precisely captures the spirit of Western hyperprogressivism. The naive political philosophy of Millennials is perfectly mirrored in the dynamics of the simulated world: it is an exclusively digital, infinitely customizable reality which comes into being simply because I say it does. The basic facts of life — one’s intelligence, talents, physicality, even biological sex — are all mercifully tweakable within the game’s cyber utopia. Grinding moral forces like shame and disgust are reduced to minuscule “moodlets” which waft away in a few in-game hours. As in the ethos of Millennial liberalism there is no solid credo, just a shifting and conditional system of values geared towards gratification and experiment. Beyond the arbitrary goals of accruing wealth and building impressive houses each player ruthlessly pursues their own idea of satisfaction, sometimes through outrageous acts of sadism: the classic Sims experience is to put a character who displeases you into a swimming pool before deleting the ladder (I may be speaking from experience). Gamers often alternate between creating “good” and “evil” Sims, where the latter are simply agents of chaos sent to torment and exploit the other residents. The moral bent of gameplay tends to be black and white; it’s a world that suits players who see reality as such too.  The system even shields players from mortality itself if they so choose. “When my first cat died, I brought her back to life”, writes one, who has since chosen to turn off the aging feature altogether.

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The Sims is a tabula rasa for building second, third, fourth lives or recreating reality as you believe it should be. Many players recreate family members; some recreate exes and torture them or simply keep them around for company, fabricating a resolved timeline of their own lives devoid of loss or rejection. The Sims is such a compelling and successful game because it fully actualizes the desire to retreat into a dreamworld — but rather than the magical medieval land of Zelda or the pastoral cuteness of Stardew Valley, this dreamworld is of your own, almost limitless, making.

How strange, then, for this symbol of untethered idealism to come into contact with disturbing political realities. It is not just the idealism of fans thrown into disarray; The Sims is being thrown into confusion along with the American progressive optimism which created it as tech philosophy, and the country more broadly, lurches to the Right.

Like other experiments in tech utopianism, The Sims is still reliant on real-world capital and anchored to decidedly un-rad bad actors. I can sympathize with fans’ misery upon being rudely reminded that their paradise was a shadowplay all along; it must be quite a jolt suddenly to see the puppetmaster’s haggard face, his dirty fingernails. In a game centered around ultimate control, wresting power from the gamer god because of something as earthly as a business buyout exposes the illusion. EA has turned the big lights on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, as the Trumpians consolidate power, the MAGA-sphere is increasingly asserting cultural control; progressives, meanwhile, find themselves in a historically familiar position: that of the underdog. This resetting to an older pattern — the Right policing the culture, the Left in dissent — can be a gift to progressives. That is, provided they pick the right battles and wage them the correct way. 

Consider the Right-wing reaction to the NFL’s announcement that Bad Bunny, a massively popular Puerto Rican rapper, will be headlining the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show. “They [NFL officials] suck, and we’ll win, and God will bless us,” declared Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem with characteristic nuance in a podcast interview. The “X” (formerly Twitter) user known as the Redheaded Libertarian told her nearly 1 million followers that “Bad Bunny is a demonic Marxist who was been [sic] granted the largest stage with the greatest audience in the middle of a Christian revival.” The MAGA influencer Benny Johnson grumbled that the “NFL is self-destructing year after year.” The hard-Right pundit Jack Posobiec mused about staging an alternative halftime show headlined by the Christian rock band Creed.

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Americans who came of age in the post-9/11 era will recognize a replay of l’affaire Dixie Chicks. That was when, amid a different surge of evangelical-tinged jingoism, the country band faced a ferocious backlash, fanned by George W. Bush himself, after one of their number criticized the Iraq War on a London stage. It was an unceremonious cancellation before we had a name for cancel culture, with radio stations nationwide blacklisting the chicks’ music. And it formed part of a broader pattern of early-Aughts conservative repression (remember Attorney General John Ashcroft covering up two nude statues at the Department of Justice?). Such overreach was catnip to liberal comedians like Jon Stewart and fueled the dissent-is-patriotic Left that culminated in the Obama presidency.  

The Trumpians, in their overreach, are creating similar openings for the Left: from revoking green cards for pro-Palestinian students to placing entire academic departments under federal ideological supervision in the name of combating anti-Semitism, the second Trump administration is seemingly going out of its way to alienate many of the young people, especially young men, who rallied to it in backlash to the censoriousness of the Left. But the Bad Bunny episode threatens to take the trend to a much broader public.

Bad Bunny, whose birth name is Benito Ocasio, is an ample target for MAGA pitchforks. He has raised vocal opposition against the Trump administration, and in particular its immigration policies, going so far as to exclude the United States altogether from his upcoming tour due to concerns about ICE raids. Perhaps in retribution for these comments, Noem vowed that ICE would be “all over” his Super Bowl performance, which should only be attended by “law-abiding Americans who love this country.” (Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt walked back this overeager vow in a later news conference, noting that there is “no tangible plan” for an ICE raid at the Super Bowl.)

The ethnic and racial dimensions of the fracas are unmistakable. The easy response by many liberals has been to note that the MAGA haters don’t understand that Bad Bunny is himself American, since Puerto Rico has been part of the United States since the time of the Spanish-American War. Fox News host Tomi Lahren, for example, said that “he’s not an American artist.” 

It’s tempting for liberals to smugly take note of such ignorance. But the Left’s Puerto-Rico-Is-America correctives fail to address the actual reasons why conservatives are fuming. For many, it’s the fact that Ocasio is vocally anti-Trump. For others, it’s that he performs in Spanish. And some others simply don’t see him as American at all, no matter what the geography books say. 

Nativists in the United States have long faced a tough task of drawing the line between “real” and “fake” Americans, compared to nationalists in the rest of the West. Unlike many European countries that have only seen meaningful mass migration in the past few decades, immigration has fundamentally transformed the composition of the American ethnic stock for hundreds of years. The initial overwhelmingly English population was eclipsed — one might even say “replaced” — by successive waves of migrants, first from Ireland and Germany during the 19th century, then by “Ellis Islanders”: Italians, Jews, and other Eastern Europeans who came around the turn of the 20th. This makes it difficult to ascertain what, exactly, an ethnically ideal America would look like.

This is why the phrase “Heritage Americans” has gained ground among many on the online Right in recent months. Unsatisfied with merely drawing the line at the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which abolished the decades-old ethnic quota system and allowed the migration of a vastly greater number of Asians and Africans (mass migration from Latin America was largely driven by other factors, such as the abolition of the Bracero system for importing cheap agricultural labor), they have reached back further in American history to define their in-group and out-group. Ellis Islanders aren’t real Americans, they contend — only those descended from colonial-era stock have a valid claim to American identity. 

Someone like Bad Bunny, whether or not he identifies himself as American, falls outside of this and other definitions of “American” that have been raised in objection to the liberal notion of America as a “propositional nation” based on broadly defined civic commonalities. “America is not just an idea,” said JD Vance in his speech to the 2024 Republican National Convention. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future.” While Vance’s conception of American identity includes “welcoming newcomers,” more hard-line proponents of “Heritage America” make no such concessions to immigration and demographic change. Yet neither is particularly hospitable to a figure like Ocasio.

Ocasio’s strong Puerto Rican and Latino identities conflict with a certain understanding of our national “shared history and common future,” at least in the eyes of MAGA influencers, who see his presence on perhaps the most quintessentially American stage of them all, the Super Bowl field, as not just a partisan offense, but a betrayal of the national identity. 

Some influential voices on the Left believe that this showdown could end up redounding to the advantage of Democrats and their more expansive conception of American identity. “The Democrats need to empower messengers that the establishment is scared of,” Molly Jong-Fast wrote in a New York Times op-ed, arguing that the party must take inspiration from Bad Bunny’s defiance of the Trump administration. “Democrats need to listen to the roar of the crowd.” 

Yet questions of identity, ethnicity, and belonging aren’t the most productive angle of attack here for the Left. Much more promising is focusing on the micromanagement of the country’s cultural life, which few Americans can tolerate in the long term, and many find contrary to their conception of freedom. 

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In the 2010s and 2020s, many Left-of-center institutions couldn’t grasp that they weren’t the underdogs. Progressive ideology is built around the defense of those perceived to be downtrodden, oppressed, and excluded from power — so their dominance of American culture created profound cognitive dissonance among the progressive cognoscenti. How could they have power if they were advocates of the powerless? How could they be cool if they were the establishment? How could they be rebels when the CIA ran recruitment ads in which an agency spy identified herself as “a cisgender millennial, who has been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder.”

Deep down, many progressives continued to think of themselves as akin to the Dixie Chicks. But this self-conception wasn’t shared by many others, who saw them for what they were: hopelessly uncool and central to the “new dialect of power.” Jong-Fast and others believe the Trump administration’s harsh criticism of Bad Bunny will position his progressive politics as both popular and anti-establishment — or, to put it simply, cool. 

Maybe. But it will take more than just a Trumpian crackdown for the Left to restock its currency of cool dissent. After all, Bad Bunny is still performing at the behest of a massive capitalist organization. Any musical act hosted by the NFL can’t be all that subversive. The Trump administration, from another perspective, can present itself as fighting another establishment — just one that happens to be temporarily excluded from the White House. 

A Left that wants to capitalize on the Trumpians’ Bush-like overreach will have to embrace a much more raucous style, learn to think and speak more freely within its own ranks, drop carefully workshopped rhetoric, and leave behind the dour managerial style that came to define it over the past decade. It will have to get uncomfortable once more with corporate America and the surveillance state, as its predecessors of an earlier age were. 

Nearly a year into the second Trump administration, MAGA has fumbled the ball on culture. It remains to be seen if progressives are ready to drive it to the end zone. 

Few recent stories illustrate this better than Zohran Mamdani. A 32-year-old democratic socialist, born in Uganda and raised in Queens, Mamdani last week won the Democratic Party primary for New York’s mayoralty. In doing so, he’s well on his way to validating what astute observers could feel for weeks: the man could become the “real Obama”, even as he dodges the 44th president’s vacuous “nation-of-immigrants” mythos in favor of progressive policies from housing to transport. Yet if Mamdani has the charisma, vision and social media savvy to be the future of American politics, he first needs to prove his Americanness.

That’s proving to be a struggle. Last week, Congressman Andy Ogles of Tennessee drafted a formal letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi demanding that Mamdani — an elected official representing a district over 850 miles away from his own — be denaturalized and deported because he is a potential “terrorist supporter”. Earlier this week, when White House officials were asked about that possibility, none offered a clear denial. All of them, including President Trump himself, seemed quite open to the possibility. And though, of course, they were loath to bring up Mamdani’s background explicitly, The New York Times has proved itself similarly suspicious, its editorial board arguing that the candidate didn’t even “deserve” a spot on the ballot. It all speaks to the struggles politically active Americans outside the Protestant, small-state mainstream continue to face — and how identity and economics conspire to impede alternatives to the status quo.

One of the odder features of American political self-perception is that Americans, both Left and Right, wholly believe the myth that the country is “multicultural”. But multiethnic and multicultural are not the same thing. Even by 1830, more than two centuries after the Puritans landed at Plymouth, roughly 90% of American society remained Anglo-Protestant. This included denominations like Congregationalist, Anglican and Baptist, alongside various Puritan offshoots and an emerging network of black churches. As late as the Civil War, the population was still roughly three-quarters Protestant — over nine-in-10 of whom were some variation of Anglo-Protestant.

The mythology surrounding the country’s post-Sixties embrace of superficial “multiculturalism” has, in many ways, become a conceptual prison. It greatly hampers Americans’ ability to understand the true character of their own nation, so much so that few seemed to notice the actual religious composition of the 118th Congress, elected in 2022: where over 55% of its members identified as Protestant, about a third as Catholic, 6% as Jewish, and just 1.6% as Mormon. Today — over 400 years after the 1619 date The New York Times so loves to reference as our national start date — more than 93% of Congress generally comes from just four religious groups, with Anglo-Protestants still comfortably dominant.

From the vantage point of 4 July, this is unsurprising: Anglo ethnopolitics still greatly define the identity of this former British colony. Yet our demographic story is hardly a relic of history. From a political culture standpoint, the United States is the most ideologically policed nation in the liberal democratic world, and it’s not even close. It is a nation that’s been controlled by a two-party cartel for going on two centuries. This cartel rigorously works in harmony with allied media operations, and the higher-education apparatus, to prevent any ideas outside the Anglo-liberal consensus from ever being understood, much less taking root. Mamdani directly challenges this consensus — particularly its Anglo-liberal deification of markets, individual responsibility, and limited-government concepts that make citizens feel like they must beg for welfare state programs like a street panhandler.

Mamdani’s Muslim faith, Indian ancestry, and Ugandan birth combine to expose what might be called the “LASP” nexus — the “Liberal Anglo-Saxon Protestant” framework that has shaped the American political imagination since the Mayflower. The United Kingdom, of course, has also been heavily influenced by Anglo-liberal and Anglo-Protestant thought. But, unlike its wayward colonial offspring, it at least has a major political party with roots in the labor movement, not to mention the historical influence of the Fabian Society. In contrast, the United States has never had a major political party whose formation can be tied to labor organizing.

The Democratic Party, after all, dates back to the founding of the republic, when it was still called the “Democratic-Republican Party”— the party of Thomas Jefferson and, later, Andrew Jackson. It reflected their love affair with the “yeoman farmer”, and a democracy of smallholders. This ideal was totally incapable of reconciling itself with industrialization, as evidenced by the fact that the Democrats fought a civil war clinging to slavery long after much of the rest of the world, including Britain itself, recognized its abomination.

Due to the legacy of slavery, colorist concepts of ethnicity — along with the enduring “nation of immigrants” folklore — have so thoroughly dominated our historical narrative that modern Americans operate with almost no awareness of the cultural homogeneity that defined their country for the first 300 years of its existence. The reality is that non-British immigrants did not begin arriving in numbers that threatened the country’s Anglo supremacy until the second quarter of the 19th century. By then, the so-called American “experiment” was already two centuries old, and well on its way to congealing into a rigidly Anglo-Protestant and Anglo-liberal nation. Yet when waves of Irish and German Catholics — as well as proto-socialists and abolitionists fleeing the failed revolutions of 1848 — began arriving by the hundreds of thousands, the Anglo-Protestant majority swiftly rejected them as fundamentally un-American, just as today’s establishment routinely recoils in horror at people like Mamdani.

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All across the US, nativist mobs formed to prevent Irish and German immigrants from voting or holding office, meeting them at polling stations with bats and brass knuckles. They assaulted nuns and clergy, torched Catholic churches, and vandalized immigrant schools and meeting halls. What was happening was simple: white Protestants threatening non-Protestant whites, demanding they assimilate politically and morally into the country’s dominant LASP worldview — or face severe violence. These now-infamous but poorly understood “Know Nothings” operated as the shock troops of the American Party. Initially known as the “Native American Party”, at its peak it controlled nearly a third of Congress, either openly or covertly, as well as six governorships, all at a time when the union included only 31 states.

When this white-on-white violence is acknowledged in modern scholarship, it’s often framed as a racial problem — based on the now-common claim that the Irish weren’t yet considered “white”. As it is, though, that’s the assessment of the blinkered modern mind. So consumed with colorist conceptions of ethnicity — and ignorant of comparative political ideals, not to mention the history of intra-Christian prejudices — that it completely misses the Anglo supremacism that 19th-century nativists sought to protect religiously, politically, and culturally. After all, Irish and German immigrants were initially deemed unfit for office for the same reasons Mamdani is now: not just because they were foreign, but because their ethnopolitical ideals threatened an entrenched framework elites openly claimed as exclusively American.

Historically, indeed, politicians outside the LASP mold have only gained acceptance by first affirming the cultural dominance of Anglo-liberalism and Anglo-Protestantism — as Obama himself did, early in his career, by fighting to establish his bonafides in the mainline Protestant United Church of Christ in Chicago. Even then, suspicion and coded nativism remained thorns in the side of this decidedly conformist (and careerist) former Harvard Law Review president. Obama’s lengthy efforts to prove his Protestantism were still not enough to prevent him from having to fend off the “secret Muslim” label that dogged him for much of his first term.

Despite the paranoia of “Birther” nativism, which Trump helped lead, no openly Muslim candidate has ever been elected to the Senate. The same goes for Buddhists and Hindus. The lower chamber has been only marginally more inclusive. Just three Muslims have ever entered the House, all in the last 20 years: Keith Ellison, André Carson, and Ilhan Omar. The latter, in particular, has faced relentless xenophobia, with members of the GOP regularly smearing her as “un-American” and “terrorist sympathizer” — very similar to the alienating labels Mamdani has faced today.

Muslims and non-Western religions aren’t the only groups that have been met with prejudice by the country’s Anglo-Protestant majority either. Even the Mormons, arguably the whitest — and most Middle American — of heterodox religious groups had to abandon its practice of polygamy and dismantle their vast communal economic system before the Utah territory could be admitted as a state. Yes, Catholics, Jews, and Mormons were eventually welcomed into the American mainstream during the 20th century. But that only happened after a full century of cultural, and political, Anglo-centric assimilation. Each group had to prove they embraced Republican versions of democracy, Anglo-liberal “free” market economics and, no less important, Anglo-Americans’ unique take on the Protestant work ethic, which equates state support with personal failure.

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Mamdani, though, is clearly cut from a different cloth, and is about as far from the Wall Street-friendly Obama as you can imagine. Even so, would Mamdani be considered “radical” outside the rigid Anglo-liberal boundaries that still define American politics in the 21st century? Whether it’s his proposals for rent control, his plan for free public transit, or even the idea of state-owned grocery stores — nearly all of these proposals would be politically unremarkable in much of the developed world and, increasingly, many parts of the global south too.

In American political culture, however, the establishment has eagerly worshipped “wealth creators” while demeaning wage workers as lazy or entitled. This occurs regularly despite the fact that the US has, by far, the weakest labor protections and stingiest welfare state among wealthy industrialized nations. This mentality emerged early in the industrial era, as elites embraced a Robber Baron-style capitalist triumphalism, intertwined with the survival-of-the-fittest ethos promoted by Social Darwinists like William Graham Sumner. The only serious resistance ever mounted against this ideology was the New Deal coalition, built on Franklin Roosevelt’s political genius and relentless popular appeal. The American establishment hysterically condemns Mamdani because they can sense he might have that same potential.

Despite Roosevelt’s unparalleled four-term popularity, when the New Deal coalition collapsed in the Seventies, the role of labor unions and the state in building up middle-class stability began to disappear from the national narrative. In its place, identity politics rose up to become the face of American “Leftism”. As the language of identity replaced the language of class, the establishment’s long-standing worship of wealth and material success became stronger still. That ultimately paved the way for Wall Street plunder and modern Silicon Valley hyper-feudalism where, since 1975, approximately $79 trillion has been redistributed from the bottom 90% of American workers to the top 1%.

This astoundingly regressive wealth redistribution must, of course, be justified by ideology. That’s where the Social Darwinism of thinkers like Sumner come in, offering a uniquely American cauldron of disdain for the needy and indigent, what Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra once dubbed our “kill the poor” mentality. To put it differently, New Yorkers can’t have the free childcare that much of Europe takes for granted — not because the city lacks resources but because, as Sumner would argue, they don’t “deserve” it.

Many Americans, especially among the poor and working class, have internalized these low expectations. Mamdani, as some have noted, performed the worst among voters with little or no college education. So yes, his recent electoral success might be due primarily to an influx of college-educated groups. Yet that hardly explains why Donald Trump received 30% of the Big Apple’s presidential vote in 2024 — nearly double what he received in 2016.

Even in New York, then, wokeness seems to have crested. It may still dominate faculty rosters in America and many parts of the media landscape, but it doesn’t explain Mamdani’s rise. Despite the bemoaning of Mamdani as nothing more than a spoiled woke socialist, his surprising political success derives from his rejection of identity-victimhood fixations and — like FDR before him — his refusal to accept the elite dogma that the state is powerless to improve the economic conditions of everyday people.

Mamdani is routinely portrayed as a demonic immigrant antichrist for the same reason the German 48ers were declared an existential threat, despite their small numbers and political irrelevance. These early rebels openly challenged America’s LASP norms and dared to advocate for a different — multicultural and multi-ideological — vision of the country. Mamdani seems set to do the same. Whether or not you support his policies, the intensity of the reaction from the national media and Right-wing influencers toward a mayor’s race, in a place most of them openly hate, reveals something deeper, almost unconscious.

Rather, the ritualistic scapegoating of Mamdani across the US press arises because everything about the man stands outside America’s now-entrenched LASP boundaries: he’s not Anglicized morally and doesn’t pretend otherwise; he’s not Anglo-liberal in the “classical” free market sense; nor is he “Protestantized” in terms of the moral economy. Instead, he’s an open critic of Anglo-liberal politics, unapologetically pro-statist in his economic vision and a Muslim — a westernized one, yes, but a Muslim nonetheless.

Taken together, Mamdani is an avowed non-LASP — or indeed an anti-LASP. That doesn’t just make him a “radical”, it makes him an outsider, a contaminant, and a threat to the body politic. Should he ultimately win the mayor’s office of the nation’s largest city, it will be seen by many as a breach in the national fortress, a challenge not merely to our latently Anglo vision of multiculturalism, but also to the Anglo supremacist nexus that still dominates the American mind — nearly 250 years after declaring independence from Britain.

This is one of the most memorable scenes in Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, a rollicking action comedy which premiered 100 years ago this week. To mark the occasion, the silent film is returning to cinemas worldwide in a 4K restoration. And it hasn’t aged a day.

The Gold Rush is set in the 1890s, when chancers flocked to the Klondike region of Canada, near Alaska. Rumor had it that the world’s largest gold reserves were buried there. Most returned home empty-handed; an unlucky few never came back at all. Causes of death included avalanches, typhoid fever, alcoholism, murder and starvation.

Into this perilous world Chaplin drops his most famous character: the Tramp, played by Chaplin himself, in his trademark bowler hat, cane and ragged suit. The Tramp, ever the optimist, fancies his chances of hitting it big.

A century on, The Gold Rush still packs a wallop. Chaplin — who not only starred in the film, but also wrote, directed, produced and edited it — has lost none of his genius. If anything, the film’s snappy gags and raffish sense of play makes it well suited to our TikTok age. In today’s world, the moment Chaplin picks up two loaves of bread, sticks forks into them and makes them dance like little feet would almost certainly go viral.

But The Gold Rush is far more than just good entertainment. It always is with Chaplin. The film is a biting critique of free-market capitalism. It lampoons an ideology — influential in the Twenties — in which everyone was expected to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Chaplin shows what happens when that doesn’t work: you end up eating your own boots.

The film’s political commentary rings as true today as it did in 1925. Faith in unfettered markets lives on. Since the neoliberal reforms of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the Eighties, governments have preached individual responsibility while dismantling the welfare state and removing checks on corporate power.

The results are plain to see: Western societies are marked by wealth disparity and precarity. Take the United States, where Chaplin spent most of his career. The richest are getting richer at record speed. Meanwhile, nearly half of Americans have less than $500 in savings. And only one in five has more than $5,000. Any emergency could put them on the streets. “I don’t want the old rugged individualism,” Chaplin once said. “Rugged for a few, ragged for many.”

Work hard, we’re told these days, and you’ll succeed. But in The Gold Rush, Chaplin tells us the opposite: fortune doesn’t favor the industrious, it favors the lucky. At the end of the film, the Tramp becomes a millionaire. But his success has nothing to do with merit. One night, his cabin is caught up in a snowstorm and carried right next to a gold deposit. The Tramp literally struck gold in his sleep. It’s the ultimate send-up of the American Dream. As George Carlin, another comedian, quipped decades later: “It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

Ultimately, The Gold Rush argues that the rich and powerful aren’t all that special. They owe their status more to quirks of fate — or accidents of birth — than to any intrinsic worth. It’s no wonder, then, that it was Chaplin who told this story. He always identified with outcasts — a habit which stemmed from his Dickensian childhood in London at the tail end of the 19th century. His father was out of the picture. His mother suffered from severe mental health issues, and was in and out of asylums. When she was institutionalized, a young Chaplin was sent to the workhouse. There, like Oliver Twist, he was berated for his plight. “To me it was a prison and a house of shame,” he said later. “We had gone through extreme poverty, and poverty was a crime. Even at the early age of seven I realized this.”

No matter how rich he became, Chaplin never forgot what it was like to be down and out. “My memory is so clear of the days when meat once a week was a luxury,” he told a colleague. Chaplin was certain that if only a few things had turned out differently, he’d have spent his life as a member of the underclass. “I might have become a thief in the London streets. I might have been buried in a pauper’s grave,” he said.

Instead, Chaplin became one of the most illustrious men of the 20th century. He got his start in vaudeville in the West End of London. By 24, he was in Los Angeles starring in a new art form called moving pictures. By 28, he was a global star making more money than almost anyone else on earth.

Chaplin’s extraordinary rise personified the American Dream: the penniless immigrant who became a legend in sun-drenched California. He was supremely talented — as inventive in front of the camera as behind it — but he worked damn hard too. The irony is that he did pull himself up by his own bootstraps. His creative process was simple: “sheer perseverance to the point of madness.”

It would have been easy for Chaplin to portray himself as a self-made man. That he chose instead to make the Tramp his on-screen double is a testament to his powers of empathy. No matter what, he was always Charlie from the workhouse. A shrink at the time looked into his case. “He always plays only himself as he was in his dismal youth,” wrote Dr Sigmund Freud. “He cannot get away from those impressions and humiliations of that past period of his life.”

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With the Tramp, Chaplin set out to lessen those humiliations not just for himself, but also for the huddled masses. His goal was to give the poor and downtrodden their dignity back. Humor was his weapon: “We must laugh in the face of our helplessness against the forces of nature — or go insane,” he said.

Chaplin was a rare kind of artist: a megastar who was also genuinely subversive. They don’t make ’em like that anymore. You know subversion is dead when Barbie is called subversive, or when Kneecap, a band that projects “fuck Israel” at gigs and chants “up Hamas, up Hezbollah”, is treated as brave.

But Chaplin never missed his target. In Modern Times (1936), he went after industry. In The Great Dictator (1940), he went after Adolf Hitler. Next, at the dawn of the Cold War, Chaplin came out with Monsieur Verdoux (1947), a dark comedy that condemned the capitalist system. It was also his first film without the Tramp. Chaplin plays Henri Verdoux, a man who loses his job of 30 years during the Great Depression. To support his disabled wife and son, Verdoux turns to crime. He uses his considerable charm to marry wealthy women, then murders them to get their money. Verdoux is the mirror image of the Tramp. Where the latter takes misfortune on the chin, the former goes for the jugular. As Verdoux himself puts it: “This is a ruthless world, and one must be ruthless to cope with it.”

Monsieur Verdoux was satire, but it revealed the ugly toll that exclusion takes on people. “One thing I know is that poverty taught me nothing,” Chaplin said, “but on the contrary distorted and twisted my sense of values, gave me a wrong concept of life.”

Chaplin paid a high price for his subversion, as the historian Scott Eyman recounts in Charlie Chaplin vs. America. In 1922, the FBI had opened a file on him on account of possible “socialist beliefs”. Over the next 30 years, the Bureau accumulated nearly 2,000 documents on the filmmaker. By the early Fifties, Chaplin had become public enemy number one. The Cold War was in full swing, and the red threat was everywhere. Criticizing capitalism was now anti-American. The FBI, never one for nuance, denounced Monsieur Verdoux as “anti-capitalist propaganda”. The House Un-American Activities Committee, the Congressional body that investigated Soviet influence in Hollywood, suspected Chaplin of being a communist.

To make matters worse, Chaplin’s private life also shocked Puritan America. He’d been married four times and had a penchant for younger women. His fourth wife, Oona O’Neill, who would remain with him until his death, was 18 when they tied the knot. Chaplin was 54.

Before he met O’Neill, Chaplin had been romantically involved with a 21-year-old named Joan Barry. After they broke up, she became pregnant and claimed Chaplin was the father. He denied it, and Barry took him to court.

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The US Department of Justice seized the opportunity to smear Chaplin, prosecuting him for transporting Barry across state lines “for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose”. He faced 23 years behind bars. But the case was flimsy — all Chaplin had done was take Barry on a trip to New York. In the end, he was acquitted.

Nor was Chaplin the father of Barry’s child. A blood test made that indisputable. However, back then, blood tests weren’t admitted in Californian courts. Chaplin was therefore ordered to pay alimony for a child that wasn’t his.

Although Chaplin was ultimately vindicated, the trials bruised his public image. In the court of public opinion, he was not only a communist but also a pervert. For many, the two went hand in hand anyway.

And so in 1952, when Chaplin traveled abroad, the Department of Justice barred him from re-entering America, revoking his visa, even though Chaplin had lived in the country for 40 years. The Attorney General called him “a menace to womanhood”; Congress blasted him as “left-wing and radical”. Chaplin didn’t try to go back. “Whether I re-entered that unhappy country was of little consequence to me,” he said later. “I was fed up with America’s insults and moral pomposity.”

Chaplin settled in Switzerland with O’Neill and their children. He made two more films — neither one good — and only returned to the US in 1972 to pick up an honorary Oscar. He died five years later at 88.

One question remains: was there ever any truth to the charge that Chaplin was a communist? The answer is a resounding no. How could anyone believe that the maker of The Great Dictator could support any totalitarian system?

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Clearly, Chaplin was a critic of capitalism. But that didn’t make him a communist. Rather, the filmmaker believed that the market should be subservient to a democratically elected government. Power should lie with the people. And a government of the people, by the people, for the people should look out for the common welfare. The reason: there can never be true freedom while some struggle to get by.

Chaplin’s politics were in the vein of the economist John Maynard Keynes and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The New Deal of the Thirties, which was based on Keynesian principles and carried out by FDR, was perhaps the most successful experiment in reclaiming power from the market. It delivered prosperity and social justice. FDR dedicated it to “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid”, or, if you will, to the Tramp.

Throughout his life, Chaplin never wavered in his commitment to the Tramp and his ilk. He supported shorter hours for the working man, and a generous minimum wage for both skilled and unskilled labor. He also supported a “national dividend”, or what we would call today universal basic income.

Chaplin’s vision has lost none of its relevance. Precarity is on the rise. Governments look more impotent than ever. And AI threatens to kick millions out of the job market. In this context, we would do well to remember what Chaplin stood for. “Naturally, I am progressive,” he said. “I just want to see everybody pretty well happy, and satisfied.” In his view, no one should ever be so hungry they have to eat their shoe.

The answer is that they have all been shortlisted for Islamophobe of the Year awards by the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC), a British campaign and advocacy group with close links to the Iranian government.

It all sounds like a bit of a joke. The “Commission” used to promote the Awards in a semi-comedic style: as an irreverent swipe at those who have shown hatred to Muslims in public life. But there was always a bad smell about all this: having a laugh, about hatred. The apparently light-hearted format enabled fierce denunciations of others for the same reasons that are getting people killed. In 2015, the IHRC gave another of its Islamophobia Awards to the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo — just two months after jihadis slaughtered 12 people at the magazine’s offices in Paris.

The origins of this unsavoriness are no secret. In his 2023 review of the Prevent anti-extremism program, William Shawcross described the organization as “an Islamist group ideologically aligned with the Iranian regime”, with a history of “extremist links and terrorist sympathies”. Until recently, the IHRC’s director was Saied Reza Ameli, also secretary of Iran’s Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution.

Nevertheless, thanks to its campaigning on Islamophobia, the IHRC has had a notable influence on British public life. And Islamophobia is now a pressing concern of the British state and Labour government.

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How can we best understand this concept of Islamophobia? One of its problems is how it seems to mean whatever the likes of the IHRC dislike at any given moment. The literal meaning, though, is implicit in the word: Islam-phobia. It suggests an irrational fear of Islam, prompting questions of whether fear of Islam is itself irrational (a view that would match Islamic doctrine) or whether versions of that fear can be rational.

From the Islamist scene in Britain, a group called Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND) has placed itself at the forefront of efforts to identify and combat Islamophobia. It provided significant support for a landmark report in 2018 by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims, co-chaired by current Health Secretary West Streeting MP.

MEND stated that Islamophobia was:

“…a prejudice, aversion, hostility, or hatred towards Muslims and encompasses any distinction, exclusion, restriction, discrimination, or preference against Muslims that has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.”

This, you might say, is a maximalist position. In a cutting response to the APPG report for Policy Exchange in 2019, Trevor Phillips, John Jenkins and Martyn Frampton noted that “the comprehensiveness of the behavior that MEND seeks to place beyond the pale is striking”. A whole smorgasbord of other potential definitions can be found in the APPG publication. Some of these definitions came from academics. One came from the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC), a grouping of Muslim governments from around the world. The OIC described Islamophobia in 2007 as “the worst form of terrorism”. In a follow-up report, it said:

“Islamophobia signifies the contemporary proliferation of discrimination against Muslims and distortion of Islam and is partly due to the ignorance and lack of understanding of Islam in the West. It would be an unfortunate error of judgment in believing that Islam is linked to terror; that it is intolerant of other religious beliefs, that its values and practices are not democratic; that it favors repression of freedom of expression and undermining human rights.”

The APPG report makes similarly bold claims, the core one being that “Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.” The behaviors it deemed Islamophobic include those which are already illegal, such as threats of violence, and discrimination at work. But the report also claims that Islamophobia encompasses Muslim students failing to win places at top-level universities, and the schools inspectorate Ofsted questioning whether young girls should be wearing the hijab. And if you think these definitions are overly expansive, then you might already be an Islamophobe. Another example of Islamophobia, the report says, is “accusing Muslims… of exaggerating Islamophobia.”

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Islamophobia is a total wrong, it appears: blasphemous but also irrational and immoral; rooted in Western racism and ignorance. And from it arises the error of thinking there is any link between Islam and young Muslim men yelling “Allahu-Akbar” (“God is Great”) as they plunge knives into passers-by on European streets. As the OIC points out, this would be unfortunate. Not wrong, inaccurate or unfactual, but unfortunate and an error of judgment.

These claims are worth unpacking, not least for how they demonstrate the characteristic Islamist fusing of a so-called “mediaeval” religion with the techniques and styles of Western secular modernity, particularly progressive social science.

From the Islamic perspective, Islam cannot be associated with bad things because it represents submission to a perfect God. All problems associated with Islam and Muslims therefore must originate outside Islam. For the more ideological sociologists and historians meanwhile, bad things in society necessarily have their root cause in Western culture, capitalism, Whiteness, colonialism, Englishness and the rest.

These two perspectives come together in what we might call Islamist sociology, which treats Islam as a force of progress in the world. Progressive ideology is particularly amenable to Islamists, for it conveys the ideas that believers are on the right side of history. History is on their side. The world is moving in their direction. If you do not accept their version of truth, you will eventually lose.

The West’s ignorance of this perspective matches the Islamic notion of “jahiliyya”, which describes the age of ignorance before the Prophet Mohammed received the word of God. Applied to Western countries, it supposes that we are in a pre-Islamic state of ignorance. Mainstream Left-wing history and social science see things in a similar way. In this view, Muslims and other immigrants serve as a motor of change, bringing us to a higher historical state.

In this way, the notion of Islamophobia helps to bring together Islamic and Western intellectual traditions. It converts Islamic law — or merely the desire of Islamists to punish those who displease them — into secular rationalist and moral language, helping to mobilize both Muslims and non-Muslims in support. In effect, it works as a form of linguistic laundering: converting religious authority into a general, all-consuming rationality and morality. This makes it an effective tool. Critics of Islamophobia often speak of how it gets “weaponized”. This assessment is accurate, for the concept is consistently used as a prop to punish, but also to deter and bring others onboard via the appearance of strength. At the very least it is a form of social technology, working to advance the group’s aims, to build the size and strength of the group, and to weaken its opponents.

In this regard, the lack of an agreed definition can be a strength. The nebulousness of “Islamophobia” grants maximum flexibility to those who deploy this weapon. It is a weapon that can be used freely to denounce anyone who displeases Islamists and their allies. It can be invoked against the authorities, to intimidate and win concessions. And it can be used against fellow Muslims, as a more ecumenical version of takfir. (Takfir is excommunication from Islam, or society, potentially meriting death).

If we are not to be Islamophobic, it seems we must defer to Islamists, to their interests and their interpretation of their religion as perfect. We must bow to Islamists’ authority to decide the boundary between right and wrong in relation to Islam. This fits into the Islamic distinction between the “dar-al-harb” (the House of War) and the “dar-al-Islam” (the House of Islam): assigning all bad things in the world outside Islam, to a state of war. Through this framing, Islamists can bypass inconvenient issues like the “grooming’”(or “rape”) gangs and Islamic terrorist attacks. The culprits are not the individuals involved, but external forces: lax morals in Western society, colonialism, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine and discrimination against Muslims in the West.

This distinction between the House of War and the House of Islam helps explain another of the Islamists’ tendencies: that of inveigling themselves with the authorities one minute and denouncing them in the strongest terms the next. There is a tension here. Islamists see the West as a place which, while not of Islam at the moment, at least has or might have arrangements with its representatives. At the same time, the House of War is implacably hostile to Muslims and must be fought against. The APPG report points towards the latter in describing Britain as an “Islamophobic environment”: it is another way of describing a House of War.

In this framing, like the closely related idea of systemic racism, everything is touched by Islamophobia and so everything will have to be changed to defeat it. From the track record of advocates, their maximalist approach and their intolerance of differing views, they will likely never be satisfied.

Nevertheless, the British state is trying to satisfy them. Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister, recently set up a group “to deliver a definition of Anti-Muslim Hatred/Islamophobia within six months”. Explaining the creation of this group, the government said that “incidents of anti-Muslim hatred reached the highest number on record in 2024.” The group’s chair, the former Conservative minister Dominic Grieve KC, said the group’s task was to balance the pressing need to impose a definition on behalf of British Muslims “with the unwavering requirement to maintain freedom of thought and expression under law for all.”

Eventually the Government will have to decide: between censorship and freedom. If a definition is indeed agreed and, as activists demand, operationalized, the effects will be significant. Media reporting will become even more fraught with risk, leading to a more aggressive culture of self-censorship. Academic work likewise: further undermining the culture of truth-seeking in universities. To resist the demands of Muslim activists in the workplace will become perilous for both bosses and employees, clearing the way for Islamic practices to be embedded in daily routines while others are blocked for being discriminatory. At Michaela School, for example, the activists have been temporarily set back, but will eventually win.

It seems that Western traditions of free speech and inquiry, already straining under repeated attacks, will no longer apply in relation to Islam and Muslims in British public and institutional life. And so gradually, seemingly inexorably, Britain will continue its weary progress into becoming an Islamic state in all but name. Islamophobia is a crucial tool in the battle to make that happen: a startlingly effective social weapon.

By the turn of the century, the New Jersey native had already established himself as a rock and roll legend. But his artistic reaction to 9/11 enhanced his importance. Less than a year after the attack, he recorded The Rising, his first album with the E Street Band since the Eighties. Despite the centrality of politics to those frantic days, the collection was strikingly unideological. Instead of protest, Springsteen opted to explore grief and mourning, and how to find hope in the immediate aftermath of a devastating loss.

Among its most effective and moving moments is “Into the Fire”, an overt tribute to the first responders who ascended the stairs of a burning, crumbling building in the desperate hope to save the lives of strangers. “Love and duty called you someplace higher,” Springsteen sings in a tender voice. “Somewhere up the stairs / Into the fire…” The chorus functions as a prayer to the heroic firefighters, police officers, and paramedics: “May your strength give us strength… May your love bring us love…”

In other words, then, Springsteen understood that the rescue workers represented and exercised the best of humanity. They were, and are, worthy of praise and remembrance that transcends narrow political strife. It’s a pride, a heartfelt patriotism, you can still spot today. At a recent rally in Georgia, in support of Kamala Harris, Springsteen emphasised the need for presidential candidates to understand the US, its history, and “what it means to be deeply American”.

Such gentle flag-waving is rare on the progressive Left, placing it at odds with the heavyweights of the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, the Republican Party adores a presidential nominee who recently referred to the United States as a “garbage can”.

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This angry new world was arguably forged as far back as 2015. That year, Ta-Nehisi Coates published a memoir, Between the World and Me. Framed as a letter to his teenage son, Coates examined racism in the United States, focusing mainly on police brutality.

Like Springsteen, Coates offered a reaction to 9/11. But this time, the writer is shorn of all sympathy, all grace. “Looking out upon the ruins of America, my heart was cold,” he confesses. Referring to the firefighters and cops, he writes, “They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were the menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.”

It is difficult to find a more contemptible passage in the past two decades of American letters. Yet despite such a chilling lack of empathy, Coates has won nearly every literary prize imaginable, including a National Book Award for Between the World and Me. From the American press, he receives the pious reverence typically reserved for the Pope at Sunday mass.

A rare heretic, Tony Dokoupil of CBS News, recently asked Coates a series of challenging questions about his indifference to Israeli history or suffering. In his latest book, The Message, which has a large section on the Israel-Palestine conflict and attacks Israel as an “apartheid” state, Coates never once mentions October 7. Two intifadas, or indeed any loss of Israeli life, are notable by their absence too. For exercising the mundane obligation of his profession, Dokoupil was reprimanded by the network. Many influential pundits on the progressive Left, notably Mehdi Hasan, screamed about the interview for days on social media. The digital herd stampeded toward Dokoupil’s characterisation of The Message as not out of place in the “backpack of an extremist”. The language is strong, but hardly unfair.

One wonders if to Coates, Israelis, like the firefighters rushing up the stairs of the World Trade Center, aren’t really human. Is that why they are unworthy of inclusion in his one-sided book? Certainly, the contrast with Bruce Springsteen is only heightened when you recall that, on 13 October, he performed a benefit concert for the USC Shoah Foundation, an organisation that preserves the testimony of Holocaust survivors, and raises awareness to the ongoing threat of antisemitism.

As unlikely as it might seem, then, Springsteen and Coates personify a crossroads for the American Left. Liberals and “progressives” can choose a humanistic, big-hearted liberalism, one that seeks common ground in the pursuit of personal freedom and social progress for minority groups. Or they can crawl into a sewer of a narrow delusion, one that pits “oppressors” versus “victims” and “colonisers” against “the colonised” — and where some people, no matter how much they’ve suffered or the grace that they’ve shown despite their suffering, are hardly human at all.

The deification of Coates, and the contempt for the lone journalist who challenged him, is an ill omen. And it’s far from alone.

While the American Right has morphed into an autocratic personality cult, assembled around an increasingly deranged Donald Trump, the Left is fighting its own internal battle. So far, the Democratic Party has managed to contain the Leftist revolt against reason to a small number of congressional representatives and city officials. Recently, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman lost their seats in Missouri and New York, during Democratic primaries, after mouthing antisemitic bromides against Israel, and articulating extreme positions against law enforcement and the free market.

One still must wonder how long sanity will prevail. To put it differently, it’s possible that American culture no longer has the infrastructure necessary to maintain political movements of humanistic liberalism. Algorithmic social media is an easy scapegoat here, but it is undoubtedly true that fewer Americans obtain their news and commentary from reading, instead opting for TikTok videos and Twitter soundbites that reduce complicated issues to slogans, and simultaneously squash complicated people into cartoonish enemies. To that point, Ta-Nehisi Coates has declared that the Israel-Palestine conflict, one of the most intractable problems of modern times — a collision of politics, religion, and territorial claims — is “simple”.

Likewise, criminal justice is “simple” if you believe that diverse police forces in modern cities, like New York and Chicago, are nothing more than heirs to slavery patrols. During the 2020 primary, meanwhile, Joe Biden displayed bold honesty when he told a voter demanding a prohibition of fossil fuels in the first term of a Biden presidency to “vote for someone else”. Then again, climate change and environmental science are simple if it’s feasible to “ban” oil and gas over just four years, or anyway to do without causing immeasurable human suffering along the way. Springsteen himself seems to understand the need for pragmatism. When he took the stage in Atlanta, after all, he didn’t talk about those things that divided Americans. Rather, he underscored the importance of civil rights, and looked forward to a middle-class economy that served “all our citizens” equally.

I think it’s clear, then, that there’s a linear relationship between rejection of nuance and negation of human beings. In the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attack, anti-Israel protestors ripped posters and flyers showing the faces of Jewish hostages off walls and telephone poles in London, New York, and other cities. Students and faculty at prestigious universities in the United States, including Columbia and Georgetown, praised the Hamas “resistance” and defaced campus property with red triangles, the Nazi symbol for political enemies. In May, a spreadsheet went viral identifying popular authors, some of whose work is apolitical, as “Zionists”. The point, anyway, was to encourage the blackballing of authors from book festivals and other events.

Literary agents, many speaking anonymously, have claimed that it has become difficult to earn publishing contracts for authors who support Israel or write about overtly Jewish topics. Matisyahu, a Jewish American singer/songwriter who favours Israel and addresses antisemitism in song, had three performances cancelled after several venues were spooked by the risk of protest.

At the American university where I teach, the only acknowledgement of the first anniversary of the October 7 massacre came from a student group denouncing Israel’s “genocide” against Gaza. There was not a single reference to Jews murdered, raped or abducted by Hamas. That’s unsurprising. Israel, according to prevailing wisdom on the far-Left, is something of a headquarters of evil — a colonialist project and an apartheid state. Its citizens, in turn, alongside anyone who expresses solidarity with them, are readymade villains. “Zionist” now functions as little more than an antisemitic slur.

A popular theory of psychology posits that the way a person reacts to one thing is the way that they’ll react to everything. The ignorant and antisemitic reaction to October 7 portends that American Leftists may well react with similar revulsion toward knowledge, nuance, and compassion to future crises, both foreign and domestic. With the Republican Party already tolerant of death threats against everyone from librarians to hurricane relief workers, American politics could yet transform into a high volume, kinetic duel in which conversation is impossible, and the threat of violence always poisons the air.

Recent philosophers of liberalism now read like letters from an ancient age. In his 1998 book Achieving Our Country, Richard Rorty argued that the Left should return to “piecemeal reform within the framework of a market economy” as opposed to obsessing over “systems” and “power”. The measured use of government to improve people’s lives — echoing the great liberal achievements of the 20th century, from the Civil Rights Act to Medicare — would not only create a fairer and freer society. It would also allow liberals to tie their aspirations to hope, rather than the bitterness of the perpetually morose cultural Left.

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During Covid, for instance, extending the child tax credit succeeded in reducing child poverty, even as its expiry provoked little protest. In the same vein, Leftist activists on social media love to demand “Medicare for All” — yet never seize the opportunity to advocate for a public option as part of the Affordable Care Act, or push to lower the entry age to Medicare, as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden suggested during their respective presidential campaigns. They may not offer the same online thrill, in short, but aiming for realistic achievements could significantly improve the welfare of millions.

Robert Putnam, author of the sociological classic Bowling Alone, believed that the practical method to achieve Rorty’s ambition was to reverse the decline of community, and cultivate a nation of joiners. As Putnam argued, the more people associate, in civic clubs, religious institutions, and indeed bowling clubs, the likelier they are to build empathy and solidarity, engineering healthy democratic politics in the process.

With both Left and Right so embittered and self-righteous, it’s difficult to imagine anyone replicating the legislative successes of previous decades. Civic virtues themselves — from civility and humility to logic and empathy — now feel like the relics of a bygone era.

The image of smoke billowing out of the World Trade Center, and Bruce Springsteen’s soulful artistic response, also feel like long lost history. The singer/songwriter connected the liberal values of pluralism, individual rights, and communal improvement to the heroism of the first responders. Coates, conversely, wrote that the first responders were not human. In political culture, the latter view is winning.

Given that the principles of liberalism were essential to the construction of a free and prosperous society, one with the capacity to correct injustice, an increasingly cynical and angry America may want to borrow Springsteen’s optimism. “Blow away the dreams that tear you apart / Blow away the dreams that break your heart,” he belted out in Atlanta over the weekend. “And I believe in a promised land.”

Democrats, particularly in deep blue California and even bluer cities like Los Angeles, can clearly win elections. But what they can’t do is govern effectively. Virtually every Democratic city in the land is now in decline. Crime, especially of the violent variety, is rising. That’s shadowed by continued out-migration to less dense, more conservative areas, a trend that’s seeing the country’s biggest cities lose out economically.

But if signs of progressive failure are clear from New York to San Francisco, it’s Los Angeles where I feel it most keenly. I’ve lived here since 1975. Back then, the idea that this diamond in the sands could tarnish was unimaginable. But it has. Once a middle-class haven with a broad industrial base, LA now suffers the highest poverty rates in the state, and among the worst in the country. Dovetailed by failing schools and parks, and an exodus of residents and businesses, long-term prospects of this great American city look bleak — a future that could yet be translated right across the country. 

Beyond making life miserable for residents and visitors alike, the chaos on the southside has clear demographic consequences. When I arrived, almost 50 years ago, LA was the undisputed king of urban growth in America. From a population of barely 100,000 in 1900, the city grew to nearly four million. Now, though, the trend has reversed. Today, the city and county of Los Angeles, together home to 10 million people, has fewer residents than in 2010. Even worse, the state department of finance now projects that the county’s population will drop by over one million by 2060.

This is not an exodus, as some assert, of the poor, nor of blubbering Trumpistas. Rather, many  emigres now come from the city’s once-vibrant, multi-racial middle class. According to an analysis of IRS data, many are middle-income families in their childbearing years. LA is also losing the minorities and foreign-born residents who for decades sustained the city’s economic and demographic vitality. These days, African-Americans and Latinos instead flock to places like Houston or Miami in search of opportunity. “We are becoming more dystopian,” says John Heath, a lawyer and south LA native. “We can’t house people affordably and only build luxury, and there’s no place for a middle class.”

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There’s a vicious circle here. As ambitious Angelinos leave, so too do the jobs that might have induced them to stay. That’s clear enough in entertainment, the city’s signature industry and a key funder of progressive politicians such as Harris. Consider Disney’s fabled Pixar studio, with production moving to other states or overseas. The once-promising space industry is in danger of being kneecapped too: just look at the departure of SpaceX. 

For the past five years, LA has lagged behind the national average for creating advanced industry jobs and, no less damning, Michael Kelly of the Drucker Institute at the Claremont-Mckenna Colleges, suggests that virtually every basic industry in LA, from manufacturing to finance and business services, has lost jobs or at best stagnated since 2019. Only the government-funded education and health sector showed significant growth. If the city had grown as quickly as the national average, Kelly calculates, it would have created 300,000 more jobs.

All this has happened in a city that once boasted a powerful business class. But now that so many firms have left, the city’s remaining “leaders” — increasingly inheritors of wealth and well-placed middlemen — seem remarkably relaxed about what’s happening. Many, Kelly suggests, prefer instead to focus on what’ll gain them cultural kudos. “They don’t care about fixing MacArthur Park or helping the southside,” is how he puts it. “All they care about is the Olympics.”

If, moreover, this was the story of one failing metropolis, that’d be bad enough. But LA’s decline reflects a similar trajectory experienced across the country. According to recent analysis, Texas and Florida are now the country’s high-growth hotspots. Just as striking, income growth in these mostly red states is about 40% higher than New York and New Jersey, as well as other liberal laggards like Oregon or Illinois. 

But how did it happen? How was it that Los Angeles, alongside other titans of the last century, weaken so dramatically. Certainly, a plausible answer presents itself when you examine the electoral map. Like other urban centres, after all, politics have headed relentlessly Left for a quarter century in LA. The last Republican elected citywide, Richard Riordan, left office in 2001. Nor does a reversal seem likely anytime soon: Democrats in LA currently outnumber Republicans by over four to one.

The city’s shift to a one-party system has exacerbated corruption, with several council members and commissioners accused of bribery. Yet amid scandal, Los Angeles voters last year elected Karen Bass as their mayor by a considerable margin. A career Leftist, she travelled to Fidel Castro’s Cuba as a member of the so-called Venceremos brigade. In 2016, to mark the dictator’s death, she issued a praise-filled obituary to the man she called the “Comandante”. 

Like her idol in Havana, she issues pronunciamentos and talks grandly about confronting homelessness and boosting the housing supply, the latter pledge now part of Harris’ campaign. Yet with the middle classes fleeing, and local Republicans nowhere, City Hall has little incentive to fix LA’s underlying problems. Despite all the claims about tackling vagrancy — LA is the second-worst homeless capital of America — the City of Angels builds far fewer new homes per capita than almost every other large US metro. Unable to address the root causes of homelessness, Bass has instead fallen back on raising taxes and boosting government spending.

Given the city’s deepening budgetary hole, that’s perhaps inevitable, particularly when the tax base has fallen so precipitously. It hardly helps, moreover, that the mayor’s mild-mannered progressivism is making a bad situation even worse. Ultimately it’s about incentives in a one-party town. The plebs and the remaining middle class simply don’t matter compared to the key backers of progressive governance: the non-profit “blob” and public sector employees. This in part explains Bass’ reluctance to clean up the homeless camps, which are now legal, and her support for higher taxes, the source of wealth for those government workers who fund Democratic campaigns and specialise in “ballot harvesting” from voters in nursing homes. 

Factor in that burgeoning reputation for graft, and it’s no wonder some critics suggest that Bass has enriched non-profits and friendly developers — while doing very little to improve life for everyday people. To give one example, LA parks are often in disrepair, particularly compared with nearby suburbs. The Los Angeles Unified School District, for its part, consistently underperforms compared to state and national averages, notably failing its mostly Latino student body. Since 2019, over 80,000 have dropped out of the district, which also suffers from chronic absenteeism and high levels of violence. Almost half of LA’s workforce is unsurprisingly low-skilled. 

 “The city can’t do much, they can’t fix the streets, the schools or the parks,” says Jack Humphreville, a retired investment banker who writes for City Watch, an online media outfit that actually covers what is happening in the city. “They just take care of their allies.”  

Beyond this litany of failure, meanwhile, the truly frustrating thing is that it doesn’t have to be like this. Southern California, after all, is blessed with superb weather, a legacy of technological innovation and a robust, minority-rich entrepreneurial class. Nor is every California town like Los Angeles. In many smaller cities, controlled by moderate Democrats and even some Republicans, the California dream is alive and kicking. Drive just ten miles from downtown Los Angeles, towards predominantly Latino cities like Southgate, and you’ll quickly find that the streets are paved, businesses are thriving, and homelessness is virtually nonexistent. Compare that with downtown LA, where the office vacancy rate is almost three times that of the independent cities nearby.

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No less important, the fiasco in Los Angeles could yet impact the entire country. Though she speaks about poverty and racial discrimination, after all, Kamala Harris is ultimately the product of the same system as Bass: one that puts progressive rhetoric and ethnic voting blocs ahead of improving society as a whole. Abandoning the approach of old-school progressives such as Fiorello LaGuardia — one predicated on investment and practical successes from bridge-building to education — Harris seems happier putting day-to-day governance aside in favour of abstract crusades around climate change. 

All the while, LA’s population continues to fall, with younger Angelenos apparently even more dissatisfied than their parents. Residents of other blue cities feel similarly: barely 30% of New Yorkers think conditions in the Big Apple are excellent or good, down from 50% just six years ago. For their part, around half of New Jerseyites would rather live elsewhere. And as bad as all this is for the urban fabric, it could soon have a dire electoral impact for liberals everywhere. For while the exodus from places like LA doubtless benefit even incompetent Democratic mayors, the influx of voters into conservative areas equally bolsters the Republicans in Congress. Since 1990, for example, Texas has gained eight seats, Florida five and Arizona three. In contrast, New York has lost five and Pennsylvania four. California, which now suffers higher out-migration than many rustbelt states, recently lost a Congressional seat for the first time ever.

To put it differently, then, the Democrats have political as well as ethical reasons to up their game — but the resistance from progressives will be formidable. For while non-progressive Democrats have scored some victories in local elections, even in deep blue strongholds such as San Francisco and Seattle, and appear positioned to unseat Soros-backed District Attorney George Gascon, the pressures to change course fade as companies and the middle classes flee. In urban regions dominated by mobilised government workers, and a dependent population, Peron-style welfarism is all you need. Even with California’s sunny climate, that doesn’t sound like an appealing future.

For this reason — and also because my own books feature murder, mayhem, and severed body parts in kitchen sinks — I make it a rule never to assume that the views expressed by a fictional character also belong to that character’s creator. But I have made an exception for Stephen King’s latest novel, Holly, because it includes a note from King himself, at the end of the book, stating that the novel’s politics are also his own.

The novel is set in 2021, in the thick of the Covid pandemic and addresses the country’s pandemic policies directly. King writes: “A considerable portion of the American population — not a majority, I’m relieved to say — are anti-vaccination” — but those people, he says, will probably find his heroine’s Covid takes “preachy”. After her own unvaccinated, Trump-supporting mother dies of the virus, the eponymous protagonist, Holly Gibney, spends a good portion of 450 pages obsessively masking, inquiring after other people’s vaccination status, and bemoaning the selfishness of the unwashed, unvaxxed Right-wingers without whom the virus would surely have been tamed by now.

King admits: “It’s true that my opinions match hers on the subject.”

Other critics have lamented King’s lack of subtlety, but to me, what’s more striking is the lack of craft. I’ve read — and in many cases, re-read — virtually everything the man has ever written; this is the first book of his I’ve ever struggled to finish. A hallmark of King’s oeuvre is how human the horror is, how rooted in a world that is familiar and recognisable. Holly, on the other hand, feels like it was written by someone who’d been locked down for so long that he no longer remembers the basic rhythms of normal in-person conversation. Insofar as the world it depicts is recognisable, it’s only because it’s the world as it appeared online during the pandemic, filtered through the lenses of social media and cable news. Holly is nominally a detective novel, but the mystery is like a whisper-thin web that strings together one trendy Covid narrative after another, the kind of stories that went viral on Twitter because they confirmed the biases of its highly educated, politically progressive user base.

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The irony is that a number of these viral narratives were themselves fiction, fed to us by a media that had gone all in on the pandemic as a politicised spectator sport and didn’t particularly care if the stories they aired were true. It’s a bit grotesque, to see how fake news becomes repurposed, and legitimised, in fiction: when Holly’s mother catches Covid at an anti-mask rally and dies gasping to her last that the virus is a hoax, one assumes that King must have caught the relevant segment on CNN — but not the later reporting that revealed it to be a fabrication.

And while Stephen King has never shied away from addressing political topics in his work, the pro-lockdown, pro-mask, pro-vax messaging of Holly is different — not in degree, but in kind. If there’s such a thing as a unifying political principle in King’s books, it’s anti-authoritarianism. Look at who his heroes are: bullied teens, rogue gunslingers, plucky outsiders who follow their principles instead of just doing what they’re told. And his villains? They’re the corrupt bureaucrats, the officious rule followers, the control freaks-in-chief who must insist you take your medicine — for your own good, and for the greater good.

Consider The Institute, his 2019 novel in which children with supernatural abilities are kidnapped, tortured, and weaponised by a shadowy government organisation that believes itself to be the keeper of a precarious world peace. Consider Firestarter, featuring a young family on the run from the state agents who want to imprison and experiment on them. Consider Carrie, whose protagonist is failed by every authority figure in her life until the story ends in a literal bloodbath — or The Running Man and The Long Walk, both set in dystopian futures where human suffering doubles as state-sponsored entertainment. Even Annie Wilkes, the iconic villain of Misery, is terrifying not because she’s an agent of chaos but because she’s a stickler for the rules, and as such, capable of perpetuating astonishing cruelty under the guise of giving care. If Wilkes had been around during Covid, she would have loved kicking people out of their dying loved one’s hospital room in the name of social distancing protocols.

The critical consensus in certain corners is that this is the result of King having gone woke — perhaps in an attempt to stave off cancellation for work that hasn’t aged well. There may be something to this — King’s pre-Y2K oeuvre makes heavy use of the Magical Negro trope, not to mention the n-word, which white authors are no longer allowed to put in the mouths of their characters. And some of his more recent books do carry a whiff of attempted atonement for past political incorrectness. Sleeping Beauties, co-written with son Owen, is an enjoyable thriller that nevertheless also reads like a 700-page plea for membership in the Good Male Feminist club (as do many of King’s tweets). Billy Summers, published in 2021, features a protagonist whose inner monologue is deeply disdainful of Donald Trump, and King himself has said that The Institute is intended as an allegory for the Trump administration’s border policies.

Pandemic aside, Holly definitely has the fingerprints of 2020 political Twitter all over it. The book’s female villain, one half of a pair of cannibal murderers who think they’ve found the proverbial fountain of youth in the form of human brain parfaits, is basically Karen incarnate, written to embody the stereotype of the older white woman who became a national object of fear and loathing during the pandemic. She’s not only anti-vax and anti-mask, but also anti-black and anti-gay. In one particularly on-the-nose scene from the book’s denouement, the female villain’s diaries are discovered: they contain a detailed record of her crimes interspersed with page upon page of all-caps racial slurs, in keeping with the contemporary belief that people do not contain multitudes, that any person who is one kind of bad thing must be every kind of bad thing.

But there’s something different, and tragic, about how this plays out for Holly — not the book, but the character. Holly Gibney had all the makings of a classic Stephen King heroine, an eccentric and iconoclastic outsider who has become an increasingly complex and confident character over the course of several books. Yet here, in this novel with her name on it, she’s practically unrecognisable: a model of pandemic paranoia, the personification of dull and dutiful compliance. King’s author’s note suggests that Holly just happens to share his views on the topic of Covid, but reading the book, she seems more like a mouthpiece for them, a character being used by her creator to send a message rather than tell a story. If you had any fondness for Holly Gibney, this hollowed-out version of her is dismaying to see.

Still more dismaying is to see an author who has written so poignantly about the triumph of the human spirit, of heroic free will, tweeting his earnest belief that unvaccinated people should be fired from their jobs and unpersoned by their government: “We are in a war here. Thousands of Americans die each week.” This sudden enthusiasm for empowering the state to strong-arm people into compliance is quite a change, coming from a guy who used to have nothing but contempt for such meddlesome overreach into ordinary people’s lives. As the narrator of Firestarter observes, “No one likes to see a government folder with his name on it.”

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There’s something decidedly Boomer about King’s political and creative evolution. His was a generation that fancied themselves revolutionaries, that fetishised youthful irreverence and made “Never trust anyone over 30” into a catechism; imagine their horror at waking up one day to discover that they had become the ones with all the wealth, all the power, all the butts in all the seats of our nation’s elected offices. For some, this identity crisis expresses itself in the form of frantic current thing-ism, as aging members of the protest generation glom onto LGBT pride, or the war in Ukraine, or anti-racist book clubs, all for the sake of aligning themselves with whatever passes for a movement these days; for others, it’s all about white-knuckling those last few years pre-retirement, praying to make it through without being cancelled by their 23-year-old assistants.

But if the boomers were set off balance by culture’s great awokening, the pandemic awakened something else: the terrifying and unavoidable awareness of their own mortality. The virus, as it turns out, does not care how young you feel.

Which brings us back to Holly, and more particularly to its villains. This couple, these cannibals, are terrified of aging, deteriorating, dying; consuming the flesh of younger, fitter people is how they buy themselves more time. It’s a perverse inversion, to sacrifice those at the beginning of their lives for the sake of those who’ve already lived full ones. But it’s one that we might recognise: what did so many of our pandemic policies accomplish, if not to prioritise the safety of vulnerable octogenarians over the health and happiness of kids?

There was a time, not long ago, when Stephen King might have objected. “Sane people don’t sacrifice children on the altar of probability. That’s not science, it’s superstition,” he wrote in The Institute. But of course, that was before the Science, and its self-appointed interpreters, decided that children were nasty little vectors for disease, and that maybe a little sacrifice on the altar of probability — just the education of an entire generation or so — was in order.

When you’re old, and scared, and vulnerable, maybe a government folder with your name on it suddenly doesn’t seem so bad. Someone has to protect you, after all, from all those irresponsible youths who don’t understand that it’s more important to be safe than free.

The new Serial podcast, The Retrievals, tells the story of patients attending a Yale fertility clinic. All of them experience extreme pain during an egg retrieval procedure, and all of them see their pain trivialised and dismissed. It later transpires that a nurse at the clinic has been replacing the Fentanyl that should have been used for the procedure with saline. What comes through most powerfully in the first episode, which tells the patients’ stories, is these women’s impulse to blame themselves. Having been told they received the maximum dose of pain relief, they reach for stories to explain their responses: “I’m immune to Fentanyl. It’s my fault. It’s supposed to be painful”. “There’s nothing like feeling shame,” says one patient, describing her distress at hearing women who’d experienced egg retrieval at other clinics refer to their experiences as relatively painless. “I started shutting down after hearing those stories, like this was on me. Something wasn’t right with my tolerance and my ability to handle this.”

There has been a flurry of recent books, including Elinor Cleghorn’s Unwell Women and Pragya Agarwal’s Hysterical, which explore the way in which female experiences of pain are minimised and dismissed. This is true in general terms; as podcast presenter Sarah Burton comments, “there’s a balance you have to strike as a woman patient. You have to complain just the right amount to be taken seriously, but not so much that you seem shrill. Still, your pain is more likely to be underestimated than men’s.” In this instance, however, there’s an additional level of judgement. The women attending the Yale clinic compare themselves, but not to men, and not just, as in the example above, to other women undergoing fertility treatment. They compare themselves to women who do not need to access the treatment at all.

One patient, Leah, is described as having “internalised the narrative that her body was to blame. Her body was inadequate, deficient. Her body had had miscarriages. Her body didn’t make enough eggs. Her body couldn’t cooperate long enough to get through a critical procedure”: “Oh God, my body was like, here it goes again. Not only can I not have a baby, I also can’t even just lay still with the right amount of Fentanyl.” This is not just about gendered perceptions of pain tolerance. It’s about the censure that surrounds the whole issue of female fertility: which women can get pregnant, which can’t, which women can stay pregnant, which can’t.

Much of the time, infertility and recurrent miscarriage are unexplained, but like the women who cannot understand why their maximum dose of opiates is not working, we invent reasons for then, and whatever reasons we invent tend to make women themselves the culprit. A toxic combination of ignorance and misplaced guilt then makes it easier for the fertility industry to mistreat women. Patients arrive in an already weakened state, weighed down by the fear that they have “let down” both themselves and those around them: their partners, potential grandparents, any future babies, maybe even feminism itself.

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Like cosmetics, fertility is a multi-billion pound industry that capitalises on female shame. It can be an intense, multi-levelled shame — particularly for the kind of liberated, professional woman who visit clinics such as that at Yale. On the one hand, you have failed to do what is, according to the traditionalist, a woman’s main purpose; on the other, you have failed to prove the traditionalist wrong by having a baby on your own terms, in your own time. In an era that prizes freedom and choice, you are subject to the restriction and unpredictability of your own body. Your “failure” is shameful, but so, too, is your desire, a desire that is so strong that you will throw yourself at the mercy of an industry whose success rates are shockingly low.

According to the NHS website, the percentage of IVF treatments that result in a live birth is 32% for women under 35. However, this goes down to 11% for women over 40, and 5% for those over 43. Statistics for egg freezing — now increasingly promoted as a workplace perk — are even more depressing. Data from 2016 puts the pregnancy rate from thawed eggs at a mere 1.8%. Women suffer a great deal of physical and emotional pain for outcomes that are in no way assured. In the Yale case, the patients do this repeatedly, even before the Fentanyl issue has been exposed, enduring the agony of retrieval multiple times. “The women gear up for second, third retrievals,” we are told. “They change their diets. They cut chemicals out of their home… Despite these efforts, some of the women miscarry… It’s the cycle of hope and loss. It just clobbers you, and the longer you stay in it, the more that drugs mess with your head.”

What happened at Yale was a scandal because of the specifics: a drug-addicted staff member, victims gaslighted and disbelieved. But it also describes, in heightened form, the patriarchal attitudes that underpin the medicalisation of the female reproductive system. “A man’s life proceeds in smooth continuity,” wrote the gynaecologist Robert Wilson in the Sixties pro-HRT manual Feminine Forever. “How different is the fate of woman. Though modern diets, cosmetics, and fashions make her outwardly look even younger than her husband, her body ultimately betrays her. It destroys her womanhood during her prime.” The alleviation of specifically female pain becomes indistinguishable from the drive to “correct” women who are not fulfilling their designated role. “For centuries”, writes Cleghorn, “many medical ‘cures’ for women’s apparent deviancy and defiance had been punishments masquerading as therapies.” Fertility treatment is not a punishment, but it sometimes mis-sells hope. It sometimes downplays costs.

In criticising any aspect of the process, I feel unpleasantly unsisterly and finger-wagging. After all, it’s easy for me to say: I already have children. My experience of the pain of being denied is very limited. My first pregnancy ended in miscarriage, which prompted panic that any subsequent pregnancies would end this way, plus a kind of bewilderment. I’d “followed the rules” — I was under 35! My career wasn’t high-powered! I’d even given up coffee! — yet still lost out. I pored over miscarriage statistics and compared myself constantly to women who’d “managed” to stay pregnant. At times, I experienced the fact that every single person who has ever lived is the result of a successful pregnancy as a personal insult. Beneath my anger, though, was guilt. I must have done something, otherwise it made no sense. Like the Yale patients, I knew this was irrational. It didn’t alter my need for a story.

Since then, I have had three healthy babies, my last being born when I was 40. There is no moral, just a randomness to it. It’s one of two things those of us who obsess over making the world fairer for women — the feminists, the progressives — do not like: limitation and chance. It feels politically uncomfortable, and also regressive.

This is particularly the case at a time when a feminist politics rooted in the realities of the female body is being pitted against claims that sex is as socially constructed as gender. The latter position, which insists we interpret our own bodies regardless of the sex they have been “assigned”, implies endless possibility – you are whoever you say you are! – while also insinuating that those who continue to politicise the female body create the very limits it imposes. As Catherine McKinnon recently wrote, “women are not, in fact, subordinated or oppressed by our bodies”: “It is core male-dominant ideology that attributes the source of women’s inequality to our nature, our biological sex, which for male dominance makes it inevitable, immutable, unchangeable, on us.”

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This is true in regard to socially constructed inequality — what men choose to do to women — but not in regard to what our bodies are in relation to us. They do not always do what we want them to do. It is cruel to make us feel we can think ourselves beyond our own flesh. Some things are unchangeable. Yet a feminist politics that points this out — that explores both the possibilities and the boundaries, to the point of admitting that not everyone can get pregnant — will inevitably sound mean. By contrast, the false promises of the fertility industry, like those of the cosmetic surgery industry, will sound kind.

Patriarchal narratives which situate fertility in relation to virtue and women’s “natural” role are set in opposition to social justice narratives which prize the right to be and do whatever you want, with neither side accommodating the reality of women’s bodies. Sex difference has so often been presented as the justification for restrictions that are cruel and arbitrary — and the threat of infertility so often used as a stick with which to beat women who might otherwise become too liberated — that it has become very difficult to speak the truth.

We forget that the morality tales we impose on our reproductive lives are just that. Overwriting supposedly conservative narratives with apparently progressive ones is meaningless when the supposedly guilty party is at all times the female body. The betrayal of the Yale patients is symptomatic of a culture that profits from women’s self-blame at the expense of allowing them the space to grieve. A compassionate, honest fertility industry would tell the truth, and spare women further pain.

Arguably the most important tradition is Tradition 10: “Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the AA name ought never be drawn into public controversy.” The Washingtonians, a group of recovering alcoholics that preceded AA by about a century, disbanded due to infighting over its involvement in social reforms like prohibition, religion and slavery abolition. AA’s founders, William Wilson and Dr Robert Smith (Bill and Dr Bob), didn’t want AA to suffer the same fate. Best their organisation remain neutral, they thought, so as to be welcoming for alcoholics from every walk of life. For nearly 88 years, AA has never weighed in on foreign or domestic policies, nor has it endorsed political candidates or legislative proposals. And so desperate drunks of every race, colour and creed have kept on coming and — together — got sober.

It is up to every individual AA meeting to uphold the programme principles. (Tradition 4: “Each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or AA as a whole”). But where many struggle, I’ve found, over the 20 years I’ve been going to meetings, is with Tradition 10. In AA, alcoholics are free to share about anything they like, so long as it pertains to alcoholism; politics and the culture wars, they can leave at the door. And yet, a lot of recovering alcoholics can’t resist hot takes when they’ve been handed a mic. I noticed this particularly after Donald Trump was elected, and especially in New York City. Members started sharing about a fight they’d had that day with their idiotic, MAGA-hat-wearing uncle on Facebook — apparently unaware of newcomers, desperate to get sober, who might now feel unwelcome because they had voted for the wrong guy.

In 2020, violations of Tradition 10 reached a fever pitch. After George Floyd’s murder, institutions across the nation absorbed progressive ideals into their mission statements. I was finishing my last year of study at Columbia University. Having entered the university in 2017 as a self-described radical progressive planning a career in LGBT activism, I was graduating an exile. I had become disillusioned with, and spoken out against, my fellow progressives’ tactics: suppressing free speech, purity policing and reducing every individual to his or her skin colour, gender and sexual orientation. During my last semester, which was moved online due to the pandemic, I’d sign on to virtual AA meetings after class, and immediately be struck by how similar the two spaces had become. Pronouns lit up the screen. Whereas opening readings once consisted of the AA preamble, the 12 Steps and 12 traditions, and details about the meeting, now some groups chose to add a thinly veiled threat: “We will not tolerate racist, homophobic, sexist or transphobic rhetoric in this space.”

From my experience of post-Trump academia, I knew these proclamations wouldn’t so much prevent inappropriate speech as put everyone on high alert, encouraging an atmosphere of self-censorship. Recovering alcoholics carry a lot of guilt about the harm their drinking has caused others; they are often irrationally fearful of causing any more. If they feel like they’re traversing a mine field of potential triggers that could set off listeners in the room, they may be reluctant to admit shameful details about the past, which they want and need to get off their chests. Recovering alcoholics’ lives depend on their ability to share honestly, and to feel like they will be accepted by AA no matter their histories or their personal views. Increasingly, certain opinions — although you could never be totally sure which ones — were no longer worthy of respect in a democratic society. Meetings were not unlike my university classes, where the silence during discussions would extend for what felt like an eternity, as so many students stayed quiet rather than risk transgressing.

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But even silence could get alcoholics in trouble. In June 2020, Toby N. had been in the programme in New York for six years. He was raised in the Mormon church, but left it when he was 24 and came out as gay a couple of years later. On #BlackoutTuesday, when white people committed to posting nothing but a black square on Instagram for a full 24 hours, Toby decided not to partake. “I didn’t feel like it was going to do anything,” he said. Then he got a direct message from a friend — another gay man in AA — who asked: why hadn’t Toby posted anything about racial justice on social media? He accused Toby of inadequate allyship. (Toby had donated to Black Lives Matter.) In meetings, he would hear people whispering about other members’ “white privilege”.

Toby was generally in alignment with them about social justice issues, but he found the manner in which they spoke about them exceedingly “toxic”. But a line had been drawn in the sand, he told me: “You’re either with us, or you’re against us.” Exclusively attending meetings for gay alcoholics, Toby had previously found acceptance in AA, but now he felt like a stranger in the programme that had for years been like a second home. He decided to leave. The 12 steps worked for him, but the dogma and the groupthink, he felt he could do without. “It feels like I’m a man without a country,” he said. “I don’t have the gay community that I thought I did.”

For many years, I also attended affinity AA groups for gay and lesbian alcoholics. In these meetings, we felt no need to use coded language when sharing: we could say “my boyfriend” or “girlfriend”, rather than “my other half” or “significant other”. We could be honest about our difficulties with various spiritual aspects of the programme (Step Three: A decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him): the only God many of us had ever understood was one who despised us. It may seem like affinity groups violate Tradition 10, since some of the topics discussed in these meetings are technically “outside issues”. However, they are always spoken about as they pertain to alcoholism. And because these meetings are clearly labelled in the directory, straight members who attend are aware that some of the issues discussed might not pertain to them.

Sometime over the past decade, gay and lesbian meetings became “LGBTQ” meetings. After “intersectionality” leapt from university campuses into the mainstream, these meetings became the most ideological of them all. Suddenly, a whole range of difficulties had to be acknowledged. “If you suffer from chronic fatigue and don’t feel like you can make it until the end of the meeting to share, please alert me and I will call on your early,” the host of one LGBTQ meeting in New York I attended read aloud. Then: “If you want to share but you have difficulty speaking, please write what you would like to share in the chat and I will read it aloud for you.” I still can’t fathom how any member in attendance could have interpreted these announcements as anything other than disturbingly infantilising: one of the key ingredients for sobriety is personal responsibility.

Perhaps most disconcertingly, the language of one of AA’s best-known readings changed. The preamble has always read: “Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength and hope with each other.” On the last day of the 71st General Service Conference for the US and Canada, held virtually in April 2021, a vote was held on whether to change the wording of the Preamble from “a fellowship of men and women” to “a fellowship of people”. The motion passed. Many members were shocked. Alcoholics Anonymous is famous for its stubborn resistance to change: the first 164 pages of the Big Book have barely been amended since they were written nearly a century ago. The literature has saved thousands, maybe millions, of lives. “Don’t fix what isn’t broken” is one of AA’s unofficial mottos. Why risk changing something that works?

Another member, Justin D., says that another reason changes should rarely occur is that they are hard to reverse. At an LGBTQ meeting he attends in Baltimore, which began as a meeting for gays and lesbians, a young woman joined the group and began demanding changes to the opening literature because people were being misgendered. She called for a directive stating that only gender-neutral language should be used when calling on members to share. Group members reluctantly acquiesced to the woman’s demands. Not long afterwards, she stopped attending. Now, if members wanted to return the readings to their original form, they would have to propose it to the group and initiate a vote — which could result in accusations that they are trying to reintroduce trans-exclusionary language.

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Elizabeth S. said that at a “queer-identified” meeting she attended, all of the opening readings were amended to include only gender-neutral language. However, she told me, one gender-specific pronoun had apparently managed to slip through the editing process. When the woman who read that particular announcement aloud arrived at the pronoun, Elizabeth said, she began to trip over her words and look nervously about the room, as if she was uncertain how to proceed.

Another member I spoke to, Bernadette R., remarked that for decades women have bristled at the male pronouns used in AA’s literature to describe God, or a Higher Power. “The female demographic is much bigger than the non-binary demographic. So why are they getting a space faster than women are?” She also mentioned her frustration with the new gender-neutral restrooms at the meeting she attends every week, which make many women feel uncomfortable. “Women deserve to feel safe,” she said.

And yet it has long been a principle in AA that it doesn’t matter who you are, what you believe, or what wrongs you’ve committed — AA says “You belong here.” The only requirement for membership is “a desire to stop drinking” (Tradition Three). Critical social justice ideology, which scoffs at the idea of redemption for those who may have transgressed, is inimical to AA’s core mission. If the programme doesn’t recommit to upholding Tradition 10, it could go the same way as the Washingtonians. In the meantime, many alcoholics with the “wrong politics” might choose not to join a group that could shun them for their problematic views. And, as it is said in AA, for a real alcoholic, “to drink is to die”.

Names have been changed to respect AA members’ anonymity. All agreed to participate in this article. 

To an extent, this shift is already taking place, as leading Democrats, from Biden to California’s Gavin Newsom, start to inch away from orthodoxies of 2020. Take the movement to “defund the police”, which, observes former Clinton advisor Bill Galston, “is now over”. Even the increasingly Left-leaning USA Today admits the slogan has little support and that it is particularly resented among Latinos and African-Americans.

Aware of this change, Biden has correspondingly worked to bolster his crime record. He recently dropped his opposition to a Congressional initiative to clamp down on a lenient sentencing bill that would have lessened penalties for property crimes and even carjacking in Washington D.C. — to the great agitation of his progressive media allies. On the southern border, meanwhile, the administration has begun revamping its stricter asylum policies, particularly in border states with large Hispanic populations.

Perhaps more remarkably, the Democratic “post-woke” turn has also extended to climate policy. Of course, the spectre of ecological crisis still obsesses many on the Left. But barely 3% of the broader population consider it America’s most pressing concern, something some Democrats appear to have finally registered. Biden, for instance, recently stopped echoing the extreme predictions of the climate lobby. Instead, he appears more relaxed about fossil fuel development than early in his term — to the chagrin of green activists — and has taken tentative steps to restart the US’s largely moribund nuclear industry. Such changes are critical, notes long-term Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira, to winning over the increasingly diverse working class.

Even in the bluest of states, political reality is reasserting itself. California’s Gavin Newsom has kept nuclear and natural gas operating (in large part to prevent politically unpalatable blackouts) and has even suggested amending the state’s landmark environmental law. Newsom and other Democratic governors are also having to revise their free-spending ways. Faced with an economy weakened by Silicon Valley’s meltdown, Newsom has tried to reinvent himself as a fiscally conscious moderate in the mould of Bill Clinton, making budgetary trims while avoiding the large wealth taxes which could prompt a brain drain from his state.

After all, it is increasingly embarrassing that the two rival states Newsom likes to criticise — Florida and Texas — enjoy large budget surpluses, and that several red states are initiating tax cuts. Aware that disorder in Californian cities is becoming a potent talking point on the Right, Newsom has also abandoned several other progressive shibboleths. Last year, for example, he even vetoed a bill that would have legalised “shooting alleys” — so-called safe drug-injection sites — in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Oakland.

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Despite this necessary ideological moderation, it is unclear whether this is anything other than a short-term feint. By and large, there has not been any wholesale change to the party’s approach to education, once a Democratic prop, and now a Republican hammer. The largely Democratic educational establishment continues to defend a system that has produced the first reduction of the average American IQ in 100 years and which has increasingly allowed China to dominate STEM fields. The progressive embrace of critical race theory, overwhelmingly opposed by most Americans, remains unbroken and increasingly threatens Democratic allegiance among aspirational groups such as Asians and Jews. The parental rebellion against race and gender-dominated teaching has instead made stars of its Republican champions, particularly Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Virginia’s Greg Youngkin. The recent election of far-Left union hack Brandon Johnson as Mayor of Chicago, by contrast, suggests that the core urban base of the party is nuttier than ever and will, once 2024 is over, reassert their agenda.

However, for the time-being, moderation will be needed, particularly to win the suburbs and exurbs who will determine the election. On economic and tax issues, in particular, the Democrats may need (at least for the short-term) to temper their redistributionist obsessions. No longer the party of the working class, Democrats now rely on an increasingly gentrified base, who will not want more of their wealth siphoned away. The ultra-rich now tend to be on what passes for the Left, and have consistently outraised and outspent the political Right in recent years by a margin of nearly two to one. These realities could, at least in the future, constrain the Democrats from proposing radical tax increases.

In California, Newsom seems likely to resist progressive attempts to raise the state’s income tax, already the nation’s highest, or add new payroll taxes to pay for universal healthcare. Yet there remains an initiative within the state’s party for a wealth tax that even would apply to some people who move out of the state. In reality, though, California and other blue states may need to lessen, not increase, the tax burden, if for no other reason than to keep their main funders in the state to to pay for pensions, climate change initiatives and maintain basic infrastructure. Newsom seems to recognise this, as do blue-state governors such as New York’s Kathy Hochul and Illinois J.B. Pritzker, who fear the loss of high-income residents. Biden, as President, is not so challenged, but proposals to raise taxes, as are now being contemplated, are not likely to appeal to those who stock the party larder.

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To win in 2024, particularly if the opponent is not Donald Trump, the Democrats therefore need to do more than lower their threadbare “woke” colours. A wholesale revision of economic outlook is required, towards a centrist pragmatism that the American middle class can aspire to. The rewards of moderation are clear. Around the country, red-state Democrats — such as Kentucky’s Governor Andy Beshear or Louisiana’s John Bel Edwards — have remained competitive with middle-of-the-road voters by cleaving to a moderate, pro-business course. But in the leading blue states, the party is dominated by diehard progressives, who make up roughly 8% of the electorate. This grouping, which will never vote Republican, might be able to dominate elections in urban centres such as Chicago, Los Angeles, Oakland , Houston and Boston, but it won’t win over the country. For that to happen, a new Democratic agenda is necessary.

What this looks like isn’t too hard to discern. A common-sense politics built on the bread-and-butter issues they used to run and win on: restoring manufacturing to the country, improving basic infrastructure, aiding low-wage service workers, student loan reduction and healthcare coverage. Such a shift in priorities will immediately be shouted down by the party’s vocal progressives. The only question then will be whether the Democrats have the political fortitude to complete the post-woke revolution that is only just beginning, but holds their surest prospects of remaining in power.

While one of the stars of Joyland is a trans actor, whose character has a budding romantic relationship, focusing on this aspect of the movie misses the larger themes its creators were looking to highlight: the soul-crushing demands made of women in Pakistan — particularly mothers — and the tragic choices some make to escape their desolate circumstances. Questions of masculinity, familial responsibility, and the struggles of working-class Pakistani families are all presented with care and nuance, as is the discrimination faced by transgender people. The latter, though, is not the crux of the story.

One wouldn’t describe John Wick as a movie about animal cruelty, or Jurassic Park as a tale of corporate negligence, even though those themes are present. But amplifying LGBT-related content in movies has recently become a trend in the West — partly fuelled by a marketing industry that has wholeheartedly adopted identity politics as a way to sell cinema tickets. It is, of course, encouraging that LGBT minorities in Western societies are increasingly accepted and visible in popular culture. But in nations where they are not, exaggerating their centrality to a storyline can spell disaster for struggling artists who are treading a line, carefully weaving overlooked narratives into their works.

Last August, Pakistan’s censor boards approved Joyland for release, but backtracked after receiving complaints from religious politicians that the film “contains highly objectionable material which do not conform with the social values and moral standards of our society”. It was banned until November, but was cleared for release after a government committee was set up to investigate the film. The hard work of local journalists, and a social media campaign in Pakistan with the hashtag #ReleaseJoyland, helped reverse the ban, and the film has enjoyed a successful run in cinemas. Still, the more sexual elements of the movie were censored for domestic audiences, and it is not being screened in the nation’s most populous province of Punjab.

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In all this, Western discourse has probably been more of a hindrance than a help. Pakistan’s traditionalist circles tend to be biased against anything given the stamp of approval by Western progressives. Maria Butt, for instance, one of the nation’s most influential and successful fashion designers, has vehemently spoken out against the promotion and screening of Joyland in Pakistan, accusing it of promoting a “trans agenda”. Given that she supports boycotting the film, we can safely assume that she hasn’t actually watched it. But her response is still useful, in that it reveals what happens when Western ideology is imposed on works of art set in more socially conservative nations. Here, the labels of “trans” and “LGBT” can easily discourage a local audience from engaging with a work’s more subtle themes, potentially prejudicing moviegoers before they’ve had a chance to watch it.

The implications of this are profound. It’s not a big deal for Disney if Thor: Love and Thunder is blocked for release in Malaysia due to its blink-and-you-miss-it allusions to bisexuality. But for indie production companies such as Khoosat Films — creators of Joyland — local audiences being put off their work can prevent a project breaking even, as well as discourage up-and-coming directors from pursuing more risqué stories. Filmmakers in Pakistan know this, which is why Joyland’s official trailers don’t mention the Queer Palm awarded to the film, instead only highlighting its Jury Prize at Cannes. (News of the award still made its way to Pakistan, with one politician responding: “Obviously if it’s received the Queer Palm award what kind of film must it be?”)

But where reviews in the West consistently describe the film as a “trans-cis” love story or a “trans drama”, Pakistani viewers rarely single out this plot point, focussing instead on its more universally accessible themes of loneliness and despair. Meanwhile, not all films with LGBT characters are met with condemnation in Pakistan. In 2019, Joyland’s director, Saim Sadiq, and trans star, Alina Khan, worked together on Darling. It’s possible that Sadiq was testing the waters with this 16-minute short film, which follows Khan as she tries to make it as an erotic dancer in Lahore, but faces pushback and discrimination. It was the first Pakistani film to be screened at Venice Film Festival and won the award for Best Short Film, but otherwise received little attention in the West. In Pakistan, however, it was heralded as a “landmark moment for queer cinema”.

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The myopia of Western critics also ignores some of Joyland‘s more tragic themes, which involve its non-trans female characters: the pressure to produce a male heir; the discouragement to pursue meaningful work outside the domestic realm; the feeling of powerlessness as the men in your life are free to explore and “find themselves”, sexually or otherwise. The despondency and desperation that millions of Pakistani women experience in their daily lives is not relatable for the average North American or European moviegoer. What Western audiences are well-acquainted with, however, is the claim that transgender people face discrimination in society. And as a result, the film’s layered exposés of Pakistani society are reduced to the latest progressive cause: trans activism. The mistreatment of women in Pakistan, meanwhile, is largely glossed over. 

This is part of a wider and worrying cultural trend. Last month, I wrote about how Pakistan’s annual International Women’s Day march, due to take place in Lahore today, had been hijacked by causes more palatable to Western progressives. The Aurat March organisers’ foregrounding of trans issues made it more controversial in its country of origin, to the point where, over the weekend, it was banned. Here, surely, is a sign that those seeking change in Pakistan must reach out to social conservatives — the nation is home to so many, both male and female — or face being outlawed. It may be unfortunate that some of the LGBT lifestyles presented by the Western media would be viewed as scandalous to the average Pakistani, but that is the reality. Pushing a unipolar idea of what “progress” looks like won’t remedy this. What’s needed are films such as Joyland — films which are doing the hard work of trying to change hearts and minds by presenting subtle, nuanced stories that encourage the viewer to come to a different understanding of what it means to be gay or transgender.

Despite the negative press and attempts at censorship, Joyland has received enormous support from Pakistanis who recognise how necessary the film is, not just for the country’s struggling movie industry, but also for its social culture. It deftly handles domestic challenges that devastate the lives of far too many in the country — men, women and transgender people. It’s a movie by Pakistanis for Pakistanis that reflects back to us a more complete representation of our society than we’re used to seeing on screen. By the time the credits roll, your heart swells — and, when viewed as its creators intended, it doesn’t occur to you that what you’ve just watched is an award-winning “trans romance”.

For years, they targeted me, calling me an “Islamophobe”. I am a Muslim. But I had had the temerity to call out Muslim establishment leaders who won’t acknowledge the Islamic extremism lying at the heart of crimes such as those of the Boston Marathon bombers. I am far from alone in suffering harassment on LoonWatch. Other Muslim reformers — such as Syrian-American physician Zuhdi Jasser and Pakistani-Canadian writer Raheel Raza — were also targeted; so, too, were ex-Muslims — including Somali-American author Ayaan Hirsi Ali — and agnostic thinkers such as comedian Bill Maher and scientist Richard Dawkins. Indeed, LoonWatch has denounced conservatives in general, as well as the FBI, the US military, the state of Israel and, more recently, Hindus and the state of India. I wondered: who was behind this network?

After a decade of research, I have revealed the architects of LoonWatch in my new book, Woke Army. They are none other than officials at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, which presents itself as the face of American Islam and the nation’s largest Muslim “civil rights” organisation. It is anything but. Rather, CAIR is a front for an extremist form of Islam. (The organisation didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment.) I also discovered that it is not acting alone. Although the internet often makes cancellations seem like spontaneous uprisings, the kind of character assassinations taking place on LoonWatch are targeted attacks by a loosely organised coalition of leftists and Islamist sympathisers. They seek to destroy, in the court of public opinion, anyone who strays from the “progressive” party line.

You’ve heard their catechisms: racism, not freedom, is America’s bedrock; white people are oppressors and black people are oppressed; meritocracy is white supremacy. And, as my own trolls so often implied, it is unconscionable to link Islam to the ghouls who murder in the name of Allah. Opinions straying from these principles cannot be tolerated.

These puritans are prolific beyond LoonWatch. I first encountered them after the beheading of my friend and colleague, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, in 2002. He was kidnapped in Karachi and then killed for being American, Jewish and of Israeli heritage. Danny’s savage murder in the name of Islam propelled me from the news pages to the opinion pages, where I rejected the extremism of my friend’s killers and advocated for an Islam compatible with human rights, women’s rights, and secular governance. For this, I was pilloried, labelled not only an “Islamophobe” but also a “Zionist media whore”. I was accused of being an agent of Israel, and of having sexually transmitted diseases. My son, born after his father abandoned us, was called a “bastard”.

The creation of LoonWatch — a watering-hole for these extremists — presented an opportunity to unmask some of the individuals enabling this hate. In 2018, I filed a defamation lawsuit, Nomani v. John Doe et al., winning the power to subpoena internet service providers for the real identities of 48 “John Doe” anonymous attackers. This led me to a treasure-trove of files, including one that revealed the identity of “Zuhair Thomas”.

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His order was recorded in GoDaddy’s internal “Shopper Info” files with the note: “Verified by Fraud Dept — Customer OK”. But data in the documents makes it possible to identify “Zuhair” as Muhammad Tauseef Akbar, a staffer at CAIR’s Chicago chapter, who used the moniker “Garibaldi” to harass critics of the organisation. Over the years, the bills for the account he set up were paid by the credit card of Ahmed Rehab, a longtime official with CAIR’s national headquarters and the executive director of CAIR Chicago. Rehab’s email, home address and work phone number appeared on the documents, although he used “Emperor” as his fake name on LoonWatch. This GoDaddy account also bought other websites on which CAIR critics were anonymously attacked — including IslamophobiaToday.com and IslamophobiaSucks.com.

Akbar and Rehab didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment, but an attorney did respond on behalf of the anonymous “John Doe” defendants. She wrote little more than: “My name is Lena Masri, and I represent persons affected by the subpoenas you have issued against GoDaddy and Twitter.” Lena Masri is the National Litigation and Civil Rights Director at CAIR.

It’s clear that Muslim ideologues have allied themselves with leftist activists to exploit the freedoms of the West. Their aim, which they are pursuing relentlessly and often viciously, is to utterly discredit Muslim reformers, in order to promote a system of beliefs that runs counter to democratic values. These individuals, and the organisations they work for, seem determined to eliminate as much discussion of Islamic extremism as possible; the actual enemies of civilisation, in this twisted narrative, include the “Israeli apartheid state”, “white supremacists”, and more recently “Hindu extremists”. And these anonymous trolls have borrowed one of the most pernicious tools of the American Left to fuel their propaganda machine: critical race theory, which divides the world into white oppressors and oppressed people of colour. In the LoonWatch world, any criticism of Islam is a racist ploy to harm all Muslims. This framing is a diabolical co-opting of civil-rights language aimed at protecting people who are in fact determined to stamp out the civil rights of their critics. But we have reached a turning point.

Establishment Muslims and their far-Left sympathisers strike more openly now. Earlier this month, on the floor of the Virginia Senate, state Senator Ghazala Hashmi, a Muslim American from India (no relation to Javad Hashmi), hurled the “white supremacist” smear at another Indian-American woman of colour, albeit a Hindu one. Her name is Suparna Dutta. Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin appointed her to the Virginia Board of Education last year. On January 31, this year, the Virginia Senate Privileges and Elections Committee voted unanimously, 14-0, for her nomination. Every Democrat was on her side. But when the issue arose in the state Senate, a cohort of allegedly “progressive” Democrats derailed her appointment, in a 22-18 vote straight down party lines.

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What had Dutta, an advocate for meritocracy in education, done to deserve this? She had had the gall to call out the educrats who were behind the illegal dismemberment of the merit-based admissions process at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) — replacing it with a race-based process that, a federal judge ruled, discriminates against Asian students. In other words, in the name of “anti-racism”, real racism is being practised. With Dutta, in 2020, I got involved in the campaign to oppose this new “progressive” policy at TJ, where my son was a pupil. At one point, a school board member promoted the anti-Israel, antisemitic narratives of CAIR officials. At another point, teachers were instructed not to call the 9/11 hijackers “terrorists”.

Just as Dutta was labelled a “white supremacist”, I, too, was labelled a bigot for protesting against these policies. In September 2020, Virginia Education Secretary Atif Qarni, a Democrat, barred me from speaking at a town hall meeting he was hosting, though I was there as the TJ parent-teacher association representative. He claimed I belong to an “extremist” organisation: the Muslim Reform Movement, which advocates for women’s rights, human rights and secular governance.

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Over the past several days, I have worked with Dutta through the night to trace the roots of the campaign against her. The day after the Select Committee approved her nomination, February 1, Dutta got into a back-and-forth with fellow board member Anne Holton, the wife of powerful Democratic Senator Tim Kaine. Dutta was supporting an effort to remove divisive ideology from Virginia’s history curriculum. Holton advocated for socialism and said the US Constitution wasn’t “remarkable”. Dutta, referencing her experience as an immigrant from India, begged to differ. This enraged her critics.

On the night of February 5, the Twitter account @RedForEdVA — a teachers’ union group that self-describes as supporting socialism — posted grainy photos from a parents’ rally that took place in Fairfax County, Virginia, in October 2021, which far-Right activists had tried to hijack, unbeknown to Dutta and other parents. By the next morning, activists on Twitter were equating the protest to the infamous Charlottesville Unite The Right rally and and the riots of January 6. Shortly afterwards, a Facebook account, Herndon-Reston Indivisible, shared an online campaign, led by the “Virginia Grassroots Coalition”, which includes about 51 far-Left groups; it declared: “Don’t let the Virginia Senate Confirm a Far-Right Extremist to the Board of Education.”

In six days, Dutta had gone from unanimously approved to being a pariah, because of beliefs and events that have nothing to do with her. Plenty of Muslim leaders publicly trashed Dutta, including Raheel Ahmed, a Pakistani-American mosque leader in Manassas, Virginia, and Atif Qarni, the former education secretary who smeared me as an “extremist”. Democrat leaders apparently accepted their criticisms unquestioningly. After Dutta was rejected, Democratic lawmaker Chap Petersen told constituents that “mosque elders” with important connections had called him. Those familiar with the calls say that one was from Rafi Ahmed, the Pakistani-American chair of an organisation representing northern Virginia mosques, and that his message was: “Vote no on Suparna Dutta. She belongs to an anti-Muslim extremist Hindu organisation.” Ahmed shared no evidence, and didn’t respond to requests for comment. He is part of a network of Muslim establishment organisations. It includes CAIR.

This network is dangerous. It purports to stand for the admirable principles of racial justice and equality. But it is distracting the public from illiberal Islamism by loudly and perpetually accusing the institutions, history and people of the United States of blanket racism. Claiming to have the moral high ground, the Woke Army attacks anything and anybody that stands in its way. It’s time to see this project for what it is.

White people, he said, have been “too polite” to state obvious racial truths. Like the superiority of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven over all other musical forms and practices. There is no equality between these glories — white glories — and the simplistic rhythms and disconsonant noises that prevail among other peoples (save for East Asians, he granted, who have admirably made Western classical music their own).

I was repulsed. Not, mind you, because I’m any sort of an aesthetic relativist. While liberality demands that we approach each artistic tradition on its own terms, respecting its inner integrity, there finally are objective standards; and by any measure, the Mass in B Minor leaves the drone of the didgeridoo in the Australasian dust. No, what got to me was the weird racialisation of classical music: the idea that Bach & co. embody the achievements not of Christian or even European civilisation, but of the white race, and that this racial “reality” is supposed to bear (unspecified) political consequences.

Race chauvinism is an all too typical “meme” these days, part of a global resurgence of particularism. Ever since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc shuttered the utopian horizon of socialism, questions of belonging and identity have shoved their way back to centre stage, usually at the expense of the more universalist aspirations that used to animate the modern world.

Among the competing particularisms, the dumbest and most pernicious is race particularism. And yet I worry that it’s bubbling just beneath the surface of our “anti-racist” societies, in part as a reaction to the official pieties. If elite institutions applaud assertions of race-and-identity grievance, then why can’t white people celebrate their race and identity, with its ways of knowing and being in the world, its runes and cross stones, its Bach and Beethoven?

Liberalism, the last modern universalism still sort of hobbling along, has increasingly come to rely on racial disparities to perpetuate itself. In their neoliberal form, advanced capitalist economies did away with many of the social-democratic elements that once helped bridge the gaping inequalities in income and power generated by the unrestrained market. But fortunately for those getting rich, any remaining inequalities could be laid at the feet of “discrimination”.

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No longer were political-economic explanations sought for social dysfunction, much less political-economic solutions. At its most ludicrous, this tendency impelled supposedly “progressive” institutions to adopt racialised modes of thinking scarcely different from the type of classical-music chauvinism espoused by my dinner companion. Excellence, punctuality, orderliness and objective thinking came to be regarded as “White” values, not to be expected of “Black” people (the capitalisation of these terms required by the new orthography underscored their essential, immutable, and “natural” quality). At times, it became genuinely difficult to distinguish the latest woke diktats — such as the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s claim that “hard work” is a white value — from the rantings of David Duke.

For Kenan Malik, this strange mirroring, of progressive identity politics and reactionary racism, is no accident. He argues, in his new history of race and racism, Not So Black and White, that both are reactions to one of the Enlightenment’s most persistent and bedevilling paradoxes: the fact that this new order asserted the radical equality of all human beings, and heralded their emancipation in the political sphere, even as it allowed profound inequalities and vicious exploitation in the material, economic sphere.

His history briefly touches on the premodern era before very quickly shifting to the modern. This is for good reason. The premodern world, as he rightly notes, knew tribe, nation, and cult, and it certainly knew prejudice. But race — as a dubious biological category sometimes elevated to the ontological — is distinctly modern. As he writes, “race did not give birth to racism”. Rather, “racism gave birth to race”. It was only after the Enlightenment proclaimed the basic equality of human beings that racism sprung up, as a way to justify the social realities of the post-Enlightenment world, its hierarchies and brutalities.

In Malik’s telling, faced with the tension between their self-proclaimed ideals and the realities of exploitation and colonialism, too many Enlightenment liberals ditched those ideals or narrowed their radius to only certain groups of people: those who looked like themselves.

Immanuel Kant, for example, claimed that the “greatest degree of perfection” lies in the white race, while at the bottom were “the Negroes”, who could at best be trained as “servants”. In between were “yellow Indians”, American natives, and “Moors”. That last group, he advised, should be punished using split canes, rather than sticks, lest their thick skins prevent the blood from finding release. Likewise, even as Thomas Jefferson declared that all men are created equal, the American Founder determined that black people were by “nature” childlike creatures, incapable of abstract thought and fine art.

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In the 19th century, these incipient racial attitudes hardened into supposedly “scientific” knowledge. And yet, as Malik shows, the new race “science” was anything but. Why, for example, did early race theorist Johann Blumenbach pioneer the term “Caucasian”? Get ready for the hard science: “I have taken the name of this variety from Mount Caucasus, because its neighbourhood … produces the most beautiful race.” In other words, aesthetic biases were transmuted into “scientific” categories that remain in use among government census-takers and statisticians to this day.

Malik’s book is full of delicious nuggets of the kind, and though his claims about the modern invention of race and racism aren’t news, he must be commended for the sheer accumulation of evidence in their favour. Through it all, he maintains a consistent and compelling argument: that race and racism served as alibis for class-based regimes of domination and exploitation that took hold — again, paradoxically — in the wake of the Enlightenment.

Slavery in the American South, for example, was racialised after the fact, as a way to break alliances between European indentured servants and African slaves, and to legitimate the greater use of slaves (whose bondage had no limits). In Europe, meanwhile, as capitalist development necessitated imperial expansion, good Enlightenment liberals increasingly adopted racialised claims about the need for the higher races to discipline the lower.

In the imperial cores, meanwhile, they came to treat their own outwardly “white” working classes as a different race. Indeed, race “scientists” ranked various European peoples according to the different quotients of Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean mojo that supposedly coursed in their veins; it just so happened that the Irish were found to have an outsize portion of Mediterranean “genes” — a fact that naturally explained their subjugation.

Even within individual European countries, the working classes came to be coded as black in their supposed laziness and antisocial nature. An item in The Daily Telegraph, for example, lamented that “there are a good many negroes in Southampton, who have the taste of their tribe for any disturbance that appears safe”; the paper, to be clear, was referring to the overwhelmingly white English working class.

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Perhaps his most discomfiting argument — discomfiting in its unassailability — is that Nazi Germany didn’t rupture the ordinary development of Euro-American ideas on race and equality, but fulfilled them. Long before the National Socialists set out on their racial project, Theodore Roosevelt spoke of the moral rightness of subjugating Native Americans, for they were “but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid, and ferocious than… wild beasts”. In the Congo, Namibia, Australia, and, yes, British India, good liberals carried out their “compulsion to civilize”, as Malik puts it, with unspeakable tortures and mass atrocities.

America, especially, provided a racial template for the Nazis. The 1934 National Socialist Handbook for Law and Legislation noted that “the dominant political ideology in the USA must be characterised as entirely liberal and democratic” made it “all the more astonishing how extensive race legislation is”. The premier Nazi scholar of American law admired its “artificial line-drawing”, which dealt with the problem of “mongrels” by dividing the entire population into two groups, “whites and coloreds”, without fretting too much about details. In places, Nazi jurists felt American laws went too far, such as the rule that people with even a drop of “negro blood” are to be treated as black.

Did this affinity — between the world’s leading liberal regimes and their National Socialist foil in World War II — represent a betrayal of Enlightenment values? Yes and no, per Malik. The Enlightenment, he argues, may have inaugurated the modern ideology of race, but it also set forth the premises necessary to emancipate people from all arbitrary hierarchies.

The problem was that the radical, anti-racist Enlightenment of, say, a Diderot was eclipsed by the more moderate posture of a Burke or an Adam Smith, which was prepared to accept domination in the name of pragmatism and even “progress”. And as the liberatory promises of the Enlightenment crashed on the rocky shores of capitalist political economy, with its need for colonial expansion, darker racial sentiments took hold, as did the impulse for national purification and separation.

It fell to others — to Europe’s victims — to bring Enlightenment ideas to their logical conclusion. The heroes of Malik’s book are the “black Jacobins” of the Haitian revolution as well as C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, and even Malcom X in his later years. These were figures who saw — or in time came to see — that class and economic exploitation form the more fundamental power relationship in modern society. Race, in many ways, works to legitimate class-based domination and, especially in the United States, to forestall the emergence of a cross-racial labour movement.

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Progressive identity politics, he suggests, obsessed with “cultural appropriation” and language-policing, harkens back to old ideas of racial separateness. It, too, helps forestall class solidarity across skin colour. At one point, Malik notes archly that one of the earliest “Black Power” conferences, in the Nixon era, was sponsored by… makeup brand Clairol.

Malik’s class-based analysis is largely correct: once you notice how 21st-century identity politics helps uphold today’s neoliberal political economy — offering diversity in the boardroom, but not living wages, good health care, and safe retirement — you can also see how the 19th-century variety served to uphold that era’s class-based hierarchies.

In the face of this, what is desperately needed is a more robust universalism, capable of generating and sustaining solidarity across cultural divides. Malik puts his hope in the ideals of the radical Enlightenment. Yet as he concedes early on, the Enlightenment notion of equality is socially constructed — that is, it rests on a social, rather than metaphysical, claim made about the radically free and equal status of all members of the human race. That’s good, so far as it goes, but as his masterful history shows, it often didn’t go very far. Indeed, these very same claims about progress and liberation came to form the basis of new dominations.

I wonder if the way forward lies (partly) in going back, in recovering what the moderns too rashly swept aside. In his early chapter on the premodern, pre-race world, Malik notes in passing that the Enlightenment made explicit a universalism that was always “implicit” in Christianity. In fact, Christian universalism is very much explicit. In the secularised West, it’s easier said than done, but having endured the modern horrors of racism, it might be worth taking inspiration from the universalism that proclaims that there really is “neither Jew nor Greek”. As I shudder at sentiments like those of my dinner companion, which seem to be rising, I take great comfort in the presence, however residual, of a religious doctrine that human beings share fraternity, not according to social construct, but owing to a common, divine paternity.

Three thousand faces, hidden by black, woollen ski masks, bore the distinctive features of the Mayan Indians of Central America: a people outgunned, outcompeted, pillaged, slaughtered or simply passed over since the Spanish conquistadors first arrived on their shores in the 16th century. Now, half a millennium later, here in Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest and southernmost state, “the ones without faces, the ones without voices” had come to make the world listen.

The people of San Cristobal de las Casas, the old conquistador capital of Chiapas, were still groggy from their New Year celebrations when their town came alive with the sound of marching boots. They heard orders barked in Tzotzil, a local Mayan language, by the black-haired major, carbine in her hands, pistol strapped to her chest, who commanded this uninvited army. And from the picturesque central square, the Plaza 31 de Marzo, its ancient yellow cathedral and colonial government buildings framed by a clear white moon, they heard the sound of gunshots.

Those citizens brave or curious enough to venture out into the square were met with a sight they were unlikely to forget: dozens of masked guerrillas were swarming around the Plaza. Some were standing guard with their battered rifles, others were surrounding the police headquarters, while others, armed with sledgehammers, were pounding on the great wooden doors of the Municipal Palace. There could be little doubt in the minds of the people of San Cristobal about what they were witnessing. It was the first act of a revolution.

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A small group of guerrillas raised a flag in the middle of the elegant square — a black flag, printed with four red letters: EZLN. As they did so, on to the balcony of the Municipal Palace emerged a masked figure. In his hand he held a piece of paper. It was a declaration of war against the Mexican government: one which, on that same morning, would be read aloud to the people of six other towns in Chiapas which this “EZLN” had also claimed as its own.

“We are the product of 500 years of struggle,” he read as, in the background, more gunfire and palls of smoke indicated that a rebel column was storming the police headquarters. “We are the inheritors of the true builders of this nation … denied the most elemental preparation so they can use us as cannon fodder and pillage the wealth of our country. They don’t care that we have nothing, absolutely nothing … There is no peace or justice for ourselves and our children … But today we say: Ya basta! Enough is enough!”

Five hundred miles away, Mexico’s president, Carlos Salinas, and his anointed heir, Luis Donaldo Colosio, were celebrating the New Year in an exclusive holiday resort on the Pacific coast. As the bells rang, Salinas and Colosio raised glasses of champagne and toasted the official arrival of NAFTA — the North American Free Trade Agreement — which, at the stroke of midnight, officially came into operation. With the sound of those bells, NAFTA had created, for the first time in history, one great borderless free market between Mexico, Canada and the USA. Mexico had officially entered the modern world, and Salinas was celebrating his legacy.

Two hours later he was on the telephone, listening to news of a development that would shatter not only that legacy, but his successor’s presidency and his party’s age-old iron grip on Mexican politics; and which, later — much later — would begin to shake the legitimacy of the global free trade project itself. The Secretary of Defence was calling from Mexico City, and he had bad news. Very bad news. An armed insurgent force, calling itself the Zapatista Army of National Liberation — EZLN — had seized control of seven towns in Chiapas state and declared war on the army, the government — and NAFTA itself.

“Are you sure?” croaked the president.

***

It’s been a long time since I wrote those paragraphs. That is the opening of my very first book, One No, Many Yeses, an account of the first wave of anti-globalisation protests, which was published 19 years ago. Back then, excitable young anti-capitalist that I was, I believed that I was part of a worldwide “mass movement” which was rising up against the colonisation of the world’s economies and cultures by an unaccountable corporate elite.

Since at least the end of the Cold War, the declared aim of the Western powers has been the spread of a global market economy, combined with a liberal politics and culture, to every benighted corner of the Earth. Since a globalised market can’t function without globalised tastes (you can’t sell your cheap burgers to Asia until you’ve convinced Asians that they’re lovin’ it), and since liberalism also needs an appropriate soil to seed in, the momentum of this ideological crusade is towards the creation of one global culture, whether the world wants it or not.

This threefold rollout — global economy, global culture and global political system, all of them based on the American model — has long been referred to with the bland moniker “globalisation”; or globalism, if you prefer. In reality, it is a form of soft colonialism — the latest iteration of Western empire — and a hugely successful one.

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Back in the late Nineties, the “anti-globalisation” movement that rose up in opposition to this process was a political melting-pot of anarchism, localism, indigenous perspectives, radical environmentalism, liberal commitments to democracy and various other strands, all of it uncoordinated and fervently anti-hierarchical. It was a mess, but it was an exciting mess. And though a lot of people involved, including me, were allergic to labels and boxes, there was no doubt that this was a movement of the Left.

Though wrong about plenty of things, the Left has traditionally been correct about the negative impacts of global capitalism, while the Right has floundered about denying its impacts on the poor, on democracy and on nature, generally valorising greed and rapine, and then wondering where the “traditional values” they love so much have gone. You wouldn’t have found any conservatives on the barricades at the anti-WTO protests. Most of them were either inside hymning the virtues of “free” trade, or back in Washington or London ginning up the next Middle East war.

How times have changed. Here in the 2020s, the Left anti-globalism that I once thought was the movement of the future is barely in evidence anywhere. The most incisive opponents of corporate globalisation today are often to be found on the Right; or at least, not from any identifiable sector of the Left. Conservative, traditionalist and “post-liberal” critiques of the impact of globalisation on local communities, nation states, social cohesion, family formation, working class prospects, culture and even (though not often enough) the natural world are pouring out daily. The post-working class Left, meanwhile, has veered into an identity politics cul-de-sac, dictated largely by its commitment to an elite class war and an obsessive pursuit of cultural inversion.

The worldview that the academic Eric Kaufmann calls Left-modernism is now the outlook of the professional managerial classes, the top 10% or so of society, and — not coincidentally — the beneficiary class of globalisation. Via transnational corporations, the academic and cultural sectors, NGOs, global and regional bodies and other collectives of usually unaccountable power, this class is rolling out the threefold ideology of globalism within their own nations and beyond. Meanwhile, a national populist movement built largely around a working- and lower-middle-class reaction to this ideology is coalescing around calls for national self-determination, some degree of cultural conservatism, economic protection and democratic accountability.

On the face of it, this is confusing. Why would transnational capital be parroting slogans drawn from a leftist framework which claims to be anti-capitalist? Why would the middle classes be further to the “Left” than the workers? If the Left was what it claims to be — a bottom-up movement for popular justice — this would not be the case. If capitalism was what it is assumed to be — a rapacious, non-ideological engine of profit-maximisation — then this would not be the case either.

But what if both of them were something else? What if the ideology of the corporate world and the ideology of the “progressive” Left had not forged an inexplicable marriage of convenience, but had grown all along from the same rootstock? What if the Left and global capitalism are, at base, the same thing: engines for destroying customary ways of living and replacing them with the globalised, universalist, technological matrix that is currently rising around us?

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We are living through a time of radical flattening, as this emerging global system, which I like to call the Machine, rapidly replaces previous ways of being with a new and novel global civilisation. Emerging from the industrial revolution and the dislocations of modernity’s revolutions, this Machine is now engaged in a project of deconstructing both human nature and wild nature, replacing them with a borderless world of etiolated, rational individuals, each of them equal participants in a global marketplace governed by algorithms, profit and dreams of universal oneness.

With the possible exception of the bit about the marketplace, this is also a good description of the project of the political Left. The very notion of a “Left” was birthed with modernity: the term comes from the seating arrangement of the anti-monarchy faction of the French assembly after the revolution. Despite much self-mythologising, leftist ideology has always been primarily a product of urban intellectuals and middle-class radicals pursuing a project of theoretical levelling. This levelling always begins with the destruction of previous lifeways — Mao’s four olds, the Bolshevik project to eliminate the “bourgeois family” (currently being resurrected by some on the contemporary Left), French revolutionary attempts to rationalise the landscape, the current progressive push to “transition” children — but what it ends up doing is clearing the ground for the Machine.

Progressive leftism and global capitalism, far from being antagonistic as some of us once thought, have turned out to be a usefully snug fit. Both are totalising, utopian projects. Both are suspicious of the past, impatient with borders and boundaries, and hostile to religion, “superstition” and the limits on the human individual imposed by nature or culture. Both are in pursuit of a global utopia where, in the dreams of both Lenin and Lennon, the world will live as one.

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If the past 40 years have taught us anything, it’s that dreams of universal equality can segue very easily into dreams of universal market access. There’s a reason that both progressives and The Economist champion open borders. There’s a reason so many hippies ended up as tech billionaires. If you have ever asked yourself what kind of “revolution” would be sponsored by Nike, promoted by BP, propagandised for by Hollywood and Netflix and policed by Facebook and YouTube, then the answer is here.

In the roiling breakdown of the 2020s, progressive leftism and corporate capitalism have not so much merged as been exposed for what they always were: variants of the same modern ideal, built around the pursuit of boundless self-creation in a post-natural world. The Canadian “red Tory” philosopher George Grant once observed that: “The directors of General Motors and the followers of Professor Marcuse sail down the same river in different boats.” These days, they have abandoned their separate vessels and are sailing downstream in a superyacht together, while the rest of us gawp or throw rocks from the banks.

Perhaps we could say that the levelling instinct is the West’s gift to the world. It’s a complicated offering, to be sure, but at its noblest it is one to be proud of. Without some levellers around, a culture is in danger of becoming ossified, abusive and top-heavy. Power always needs to be kept on its toes. Leaders and systems should always be prepared to justify their existence.

But what happens when levelling is the only instinct left? When the culture is so empty, so purposeless, so uprooted, that it has forgotten how to do anything but deconstruct itself? More to the point: what happens when levelling is the instinct not of the poor, but of power? What happens when the destruction of borders, limits and boundaries benefits big tech, big money and those who drink from their spigot, rather than the small voices left thirsting in the fields? And what happens when big money uses the language of the small voices — the language of levelling — to tie up its work in pretty bows?

This is where we are. The post-modern Left, which has seized the heights of so much of Western culture, is not some radical threat to the establishment: it is the establishment. Progressive leftism is market liberalism by other means. The Left and corporate capitalism now function like a pincer: one attacks the culture, deconstructing everything from history to “heteronormativity” to national identities; the other moves in to monetise the resulting fragments.

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Where, then, to stand? Could there be a Left without progress? Could there be a Right without capitalism? Perhaps, but we first need to come to terms with the radicalism of the times we are living through. This is a time in which the pertinent questions are not “who should own the means of production?” or “should we privatise the health service?” They are “what is a woman?”, “where should we implant the microchips?”, “how quickly can we get this digital ID system up and running?”, and “what do you think of my new killer robot?” The creation of designer babies, the abolition of the sexed body, the growing of brains in labs: whatever you want, the Machine can provide it, technology can fashion it, and progressive ideology can redefine it as justice.

When people ask me where I stand, I say these days that it’s with an older tradition: the same one I was writing about in that first book, although I didn’t know it then. It’s a tradition I saw represented in what the Zapatistas did back in the 1990s and I have heard its echo in historical uprisings in my own country, from the Luddites to the fen tigers. It’s a tradition which takes its stand not according to ideological positioning, but according to actual positioning: on Earth, under the sky, surrounded by people who know where the sun rises in the morning, where they come from and who they are.

It’s a tradition we could call reactionary radicalism: resisting the Machine’s totalising force from a perspective rooted in the Three Ps: people, place and prayer. Neither Left nor Right nor anywhere else, it’s a tradition that crosses all the modern divides, because it is older than all of them. It digs down, literally, to the root of the matter. It is the dream of a localised, populist opposition to gigantist, destructive modernity in all its forms.

Maybe this is a pipe-dream: but sometimes we see it carry the day. The Zapatistas are still there, after all, and still fighting. NAFTA is gone, too — though it wasn’t the EZLN, in the end, that did for it. The treaty that drew their ire as a symbol of all that was wrong with the imperial project of corporate globalisation was eventually torn up, not by indigenous guerrilleros or a socialist Mexican government, but by a reality TV star-turned Republican US president, who believed that globalisation was a con-job which empowered transnational capital at the expense of nations and their people. Whatever else he may have been wrong about, he was right about that. Unfortunately, most of the Left were too busy calling him a Nazi to notice the irony.

But this doesn’t seem to have yielded a generation that feels safe. Instead, we have one that feels so unsafe they want to use political process to make things better. That, at least, seems to be the upshot of a new HEPI poll which revealed that (along with broad and rising support for censorship, trigger warnings, and firing problematic professors) 79% of undergraduates think students’ demands for “safety” should always be met. And a look at the factors driving this seismic change suggests a startling conclusion: that we should take “woke” claims of “trauma” much more seriously — but also wholly disregard “woke” claims about their origin.

For it’s not the universities encouraging young people to make “safety” a political demand. Rather, such calls seem to originate with students themselves. In the recent persecution of Kathleen Stock at Sussex University, for example, administrators may have supported or at least failed to halt her harassment. But protests were led by undergraduate activists. One placard said “we were meant to be safe here”.

Nor do such demands start at university, but erupt in schools as well. In May, a British sixth-former was hounded out of her school for questioning consensus views on trans rights, and instead of defending her, the school apologised to other pupils for not maintaining a “safe space”.

I asked Andrew, head of sixth form at an independent girls’ school, what he thought was driving the hunger to be safe. He told me that some of it is grounded in reality: in his observation many of his pupils are “genuinely apprehensive about the future”. Their worries vary from the abstract, such as climate change, to more concrete fears about economics, the job market and declining prospects for home ownership — worries that are objectively far from groundless.

In the view of sociologist Matthew Goodwin, a key driver of the new safety-oriented intolerance is the internet. The deputy head at one London state school, James, backs this up: in his view, social media makes it “much easier” to “isolate oneself from opposing (and discomforting) arguments”. His view resonates with Andrew’s observations of how his pupils behave: “Those who are most concerned about safety”, Andrew says, “are the ones who are very ‘online’.”

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And indeed, a defining feature of online sociality is filter bubbles, where we come to think everyone shares our opinions because algorithms filter out content from anyone who doesn’t. One pupil, Andrew tells me, goes even beyond the algorithmic hygiene of her filter bubble to create her own, proactively: she routinely checks an author’s biography for politically disagreeable views and discards “books written by anyone with whom she disagrees politically or philosophically”.

It makes sense, too, that a cohort accustomed to resolving conflict by muting, unfollowing or blocking disagreeable voices might struggle in real-world conflict. In the view of Anne, an American professor, “a big part of it is conflict aversion”, which means “any emotional discomfort they feel from disagreement (whether a peer or a text) is interpreted as a personal attack and ‘unsafe’”. In response to this poverty of interpersonal skills, she says, there’s an expectation that “professors are responsible to create conflict-free and tension-free environments”.

This tallies with a recent report on American campuses, where Title IX protections intended to shield women against sex discrimination have become an expansive means of refereeing interpersonal disputes, one Title IX coordinator tells the author “she sometimes thought of her job as running ‘The Break Up Office’”. In other words: instead of resolving an unhappy break-up among themselves, students seek redress via official sex-discrimination policies.

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Another factor that might contribute to such conflict aversion is well-meaning school policies designed to protect schoolchildren. My own daughter isn’t a university student at the other end of her educational journey; and yet her (lovely, attentive, empathetic) primary-school teachers regularly drum home the message that intractable conflict is best resolved by telling a teacher. It’s often struck me that if widespread, over time such policies might well result in more adults whose first response to interpersonal conflict would be seeking resolution via an authority figure.

And perhaps this starts before schools, too. Free Range Kids, a project and book by American mum Lenore Skenazy, argues that in the name of “safety”, over-protective parenting — or, as Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff put it in 2018, “coddling” — is undermining young people’s agency, confidence and resilience.

And it’s difficult to dispute that a fixation on “safety” pervades both products and services aimed at children and also behavioural norms. This inevitably shapes children’s experience, even in family cultures that aren’t especially anxious about safety. I realised how deep this reaches when my own daughter became agitated because I started the car moving, slowly, on our driveway, before she’d finished fastening her seatbelt.

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This still doesn’t feel like the root of it though. One of the first student eruptions of this nature to make the news took place at Yale in 2015, where two faculty members, Nicholas and Erika Christakis, wrote to students encouraging them to tolerate even offensive Halloween costumes. In the ensuing uproar one young woman told Christakis that the college “is no longer a safe space”.

What shook the world about the 2016 Yale video, and remains startling about the many subsequent similar scenarios at schools, universities and the wider world is how radically dysregulated many politically-engaged young people genuinely seem to be. They actually are that upset. For many proponents of “wokeness”, political issues genuinely seem to cause dramatic emotional highs and lows — so much so in fact that the phrase “literally shaking and crying” is widely used to parody this kind of high-pitched activist tone.

But while the fragility in question often seems to be channeled into political activism, what if it doesn’t originate there? A 2020 Pew study reported that the combination of progressivism and youth strongly correlates with mental health difficulties, a finding gleefully seized upon to claim that progressivism drives people crazy. But it’s possible that this has the causality backwards, and it’s more that unhappy people seize upon what Jason Manning has called “Victimhood Culture” to justify an already-endemic state of maladjustment.

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Consider this short article, published by an Australian university, which describes “coping with a meltdown”. Symptoms of a “meltdown” reportedly include shaking, terror, poor decision-making, and destructive self-soothing, and overwhelming emotions such as helplessness, anger and fear. According to the article, we all experience “meltdowns”. Except actually no, we don’t.

And the “meltdowns”, the emotional dysregulation and demands for safety — all the behavioural tics characteristic of militant wokeism — map startlingly closely onto common symptoms of pre-verbal trauma. That is, they’re consistent with symptoms displayed by children abused or neglected before they learned to talk.

The child development theorist Erik Erickson characterised the first stage of infancy as where we develop a foundational confidence that a caregiver will be there when we need them. And where this is interrupted by traumatic experiences, the sense of chronic threat can last forever. As psychotherapist Dorothy Scotten argues, pre-verbal experience of abuse or neglect then means “the infant loses the sense of safety and begins her/his life in a state of psychological mistrust and instability”. Long-term effects of such trauma can then include “a feeling of helplessness, residual fear and lack of safety” along with self-destructive behaviours such as substance abuse, difficulty forming relationships, and overwhelming emotions such as “infantile rage”. Not a million miles, in other words, from the supposed symptoms of “meltdown”.

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Another paper describes a traumatised child who expressed “feelings of being unsafe and inadequately protected by caregivers and an intense behavioural regression to an infantile level at home”. This included acting out; the child “would camp outside his mother’s bedroom door pretending to be a ‘lost puppy’ wanting to be taken in”. The longing this expresses for a place of absolute safety is echoed in Christakis’ confrontation with the Yale student body. Here several tearful young women berate Christakis about how Yale was a “home” for them — but now, as one puts it: “Somehow this home is broken.”

It seems unlikely that every single one of these young people has been profoundly physically abused. What about neglected, though? In the Seventies, John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth documented the way young children form a strong attachment to a single caregiver. They concluded that attachment took three broad forms: secure, ambivalent or disordered.

Most attachments styles fell within secure or ambivalent patterns, they found. Children with secure attachment were confident that their caregivers would respond in an attuned way; those with an ambivalent attachment pattern could either be anxious and clingy or avoidant. And disordered attachment was found in neglectful, frightened or frightening caregiving situations such as addiction or violent homes.

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Are we looking at a mass outbreak of disordered attachment? Perhaps; for the other generational change that swept across the West around the same time as the internet was increased uptake of institutional childcare. In 1980, the year after I was born, it was estimated that around a third of mothers had jobs. By 2011, though, a UCL study reported that among the middle class, stay-at-home mums of young children were increasingly a rarity concentrated among the richest and poorest, while in the middle class nearly 70% had jobs before their child was one year old.

A great deal of research has been done on the effect of childcare on attachment. Results vary considerably by geography and the age of children, but a review of results concluded that there’s likely to be some effect. And, importantly, especially where care is poor-quality and infants are very young, long hours in childcare pose a significant risk factor for disordered attachment.

There are, to my knowledge, no studies on whether any correlations exist between an institutionalised early infancy and an unhappy young-adult preoccupation with “safety”. But if there is a correlation, it might also explain the greater American prevalence and intensity of this type of dysregulated youth politics: American women have no right to maternity leave, and one in four American mothers is back at work within two weeks. That’s a lot of tiny babies in institutional childcare.

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Something as seismic as the change in sensibility we’re seeing is unlikely to have a single cause. But the step change in childcare uptake happened just long enough ago for those kids to be arriving in adulthood now. It’s possible that genuine worries for the future, internet filter bubbles, and a culture of safetyism have landed, for some, on psyches that were fragile almost from birth.

And it’s possible that this subset was predisposed to fragility, by an early infancy spent in “care” settings long on stimulation, and short on attuned caregiving and cuddles — a setting inimical to forming the kind of secure or even ambivalent attachment patterns needed for healthy functioning as an adult. If this is so, it’s also possible that much of contemporary student activism isn’t really about race, gender, climate or whatever so much as it is about young adults desperately trying to elicit the care from a new institution, that they missed out on in a different institutional setting long before they even formed conscious memories.

If this so, we should take student claims of distress and trauma more seriously – even as we dispute their origins. And we should also be cautious about taking such individuals’ political demands at face value. For it may be that some of our angriest activists have simply seized upon the opportunity offered by “Victim Culture” to make a renewed plea for something they craved as a baby, and didn’t receive: a reliable sense of being held, and loved, and safe.

After educating the ignorant and correcting the mendacious on inefficiencies and unfairnesses in the Criminal Justice system these last several years, he now has two bestsellers and half a million Twitter followers to his name. But the big reveal in his new book is that he, too, was once a sinner. An “ardent Daily Mail reader” at university, we are told that “soft sentences infused me with fury”. Then he beat a path to the Criminal Bar. (“I’M GOING TO BE A FUCKING BARRISTER!” he screams in “uncontrollable hysteria” when his pupillage offer lands.) And, over the course of his early years in practice, he sees the light. Nothing But The Truth — his third book, and an autobiography of sorts — tells the story of a moral awakening.

Observing that his “new creed” is now “the dominant strain of ideology” in the profession, he suggests that “there is something that this job does”. In my experience, this is true: the human moral compass — a motley collection of powerful emotional heuristics — did not evolve to navigate the business of prosecuting and defending alleged rapists and murderers. Doing so can shift a barrister’s focus, I think, away from judgment and towards a Taoist acceptance of The Way Things Are.

But that isn’t what the Secret Barrister is talking about. Rather, he is looking to explain his conversion to Progressivism.

Of course, in trying to establish causation, he neglects the base rate: everyone has become more progressive in recent years — barristers, ballet dancers, even Daily Mail readers. Especially Daily Mail readers. An intelligent, aspirational middle-England millennial abandons cumbersome provincial baggage on his ascent to a high-status job: this is no revelation.

As the author himself acknowledges: “It may of course be that mine is nothing more intriguing than a tale of subconscious conformity. Of a weak-willed youngster uncritically devouring the ideological gruel of their industry”. He does this a lot: spiking an objection by caricaturing it only slightly — but enough to make it unattractive. Not quite a straw man then, but perhaps a wicker man. For a tricky plea-in-mitigation, you could do a lot worse than this fellow.

And if his swing-o-meter did shift more than most when he started blogging in the early teens of this century, a cynic might observe that that was when questioning the progressive orthodoxy became a hazardous enterprise among the professional classes, and when those in search of a large, publicly appreciative audience needed to pivot.

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But the most disappointing misrepresentations have to do with class. At Bar School we meet the “Three-Piece Suit Wankers” who choose to wear “the obligatory public school tie” when everyone else is in jeans. In his early days in practice, our hero looks after a cocky work experience lad, “six foot three, public school tie” (that again), who in response to a witness’s pre-court question silences the SB with an outstretched palm and declares, “I’ve got this one”. The overbearing sky-scraper even boasts of his reliance on nepotism: “When fair and open competition did not bear fruit, a quick phone call from daddy straightened out any misunderstandings, he haws.”

Nothing But The Truth tells of applicants only a decade ago “whose lineage made it impossible for chambers to refuse them”; of the “institutionalised assumption that all aspiring barristers were born choking on platinum cutlery”; and of the “institutional reluctance… to ask ourselves whether it’s right, in the justice system of 2022, that blood remains thicker than water”.

Choose to believe this stuff if you want, but it is no more representative of the modern criminal bar than Mervyn Griffith-Jones in the Lady Chatterley trial talking to the jury about his servants. Any edition of Counsel magazine from the last 20 years will confirm that it is nothing like the truth. Public self-flagellation may serve some purposes, and yes, there is more work to be done. But public schoolboys encounter one another at court these days with all the noisy enthusiasm of former participants in an unsuccessful one-night stand, or veterans of an unpopular war.

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The question arises, why paint this inaccurate portrait?

Well, the Secret Barrister is a creature of social media, and has become an avatar: reliably representative of mainstream opinion, or at least of the publicly expressed opinions of the minority of the profession which uses Twitter. His credibility and popularity has benefitted from endorsement by senior colleagues, many of whom are of a generation for which the struggle against a reactionary hegemony is slightly less mythological. Sticking it to the forces of conservatism is as much their obsession as his. Will Lloyd’s description of Centrist Dads comes to mind: “they still carry on like they are hated by an establishment full of port-soaked aristocrats and Thatcherites who want Nelson Mandela to stay in prison”.

There may be a more personal reason for him to take this line. It is evident that the author is clever, ambitious, and highly sensitive. Solipsistic, self-righteous, egotistical, timid, paranoid, brittle — these are all adjectives he applies to himself in the book, most of them repeatedly. If there is any truth in this self-deprecation, could it be that the only possible impediment to his professional success — nepotism — is a monster that takes on exaggerated proportions in his perception of reality?

And he does at least deploy his disarming postscript thing again: “Some of my alienation may well have been attributable to my own shyness and awkwardness, of course… All the grown-ups present… went out of their way to emphasise how welcome we all were.” Oh right. Perhaps the Bar isn’t so cliquey after all.

Class interests are persistent and mercurial, but exaggerating a problem doesn’t help solve it. One third of new entrants to the Bar attended private school. The national figure is 7%. Even allowing for applicants on scholarships and bursaries — and for the possibility that private schools currently provide, on average, a better education — this indicates a problem: privately educated candidates are surely not several times more likely to be the best person for the job. If exam results are not a reliable guide, it can be difficult to work out who is the best, but it is in Chambers’ interests — and society’s — to do so. What is not in society’s interests, or working-class candidates’ interests in particular, is to entertain Twitter liberals by giving the false impression that the Bar continues to operate like a 19th Century Guards’ regiment.

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There is an interesting collateral effect, though — perhaps entirely subconscious or coincidental. All this tilting at the dwindling number of dauntingly privileged colleagues, the lamentations about “pompous regalia” and “pageantry”, the chin-stroking about what people make of us “swigging our port from outside the stained-glass windows” — it all has the side-effect, does it not, of reminding “the public” just how very special and important we are?

An image of this type — of little crowds of ordinary people at the gates of Lincoln’s Inn Hall, collars up against the cold, pressing their noses to the glass and peering in at all the Learned Counsel as they swig port in their finery — is, I am quite sure, one that gets much of “legal Twitter” through the day. For what it’s worth, most practising criminal barristers attend their Inn for a fancy dinner a handful of times over the entire course of their career. There is no need to think, much less talk, in this way.

And I wonder if the Secret Barrister himself is tired of the alter ego. The latest book contains snippets of new information, surely not all invented, from which a determined researcher could, I expect, identify him. Perhaps that’s the plan. Strictly, Have I Got News, the Labour benches, Sir Keir’s Lord Chancellor perhaps?

In this sense, his perspective is representative: many of his colleagues have dreams beyond the bar. Huge numbers of criminal barristers have left the profession. Those who remain now find ourselves refusing to do sub-minimum-wage work. There will never be votes in it, but as the crisis in Criminal Justice deteriorates, perhaps the Government will yearn momentarily for a minimum level of administrative competence. It feels slightly heretical to knock the Secret Barrister — he’s raised much awareness of this issue — but some of us wonder whether it might be time to change the tactic of endlessly shouting “LIAR!” at Justice ministers.

People try to interpret their breakup as some dramatic conflict, but it was maybe more like the moment in your own life, when you realise that your family members are just random human beings trapped in a house together, and the sooner you’re out of it, the better.

*

Johnny Marr is a genius, and so is Morrissey. There had to be a moment somewhere in the initial sequencing of The Smiths’s DNA when one band member said to the others about Morrissey, “But mate, he’s like so incredibly, you know, um, how shall I phrase this, different. What are we supposed to do with him?” And then the other two probably shrugged and then decided to just run with it.

No offence to the other two, but, having been pulled from the want ads, they probably were a little bit replaceable/generic. And it must have been very rankling, indeed, for Morrissey and Marr to have to pony up £1 million to pay off the drummer who retroactively sued for back-royalties when he found out he was only getting 10% of the profits. Morrissey and Marr got 40% each. In his autobiography, Morrissey spends an astonishing amount of time describing that lawsuit and his incremental realisation that he was likely going to lose. That had to hurt on a few levels. Decades later, nobody even knows the drummer’s name or cares.

*

What I like about The Smiths is that they mixed corny with cool. Contrast How Soon is Now with Frankly Mr. Shankly. They were all over the map, but then so were The Beatles, and even The Smiths’s crap B-sides were better than most bands’ singles.

*

The Smiths to me represented a kind of revenge of the suburbs, where the children raised in Milton Keynes and Pasadena got back at society for coddling them, like in J.G. Ballard’s Running Wild. There was this moment in the late Seventies and early Eighties when a hundred million young people worldwide collectively decided to leave home — no, flee home as quickly as they could. The hippies were dead to them. Punk was a dead end. New Wave meant an actual new wave of being that was a rejection of the state and false utopian thinking.

There is a toughness to people who came of age in that era, a wariness of all systems that organically flowed from being a certain age and watching all forms of order implode or decay while “the answer”, the peace and love of the hippies, was utterly useless. “Hang the DJ” was like a battle cry when the Lord of the Flies children decide to kill Piggy.

*

The thing with Morrissey is the nagging feeling you get when you think back to how he was right about so many things back in the past, things like vegetarianism and veganism, as well as his proto-woke sense of underdoggism. I draw the line at saying prophetic, but he was definitely ahead of his time.

Morrissey expressed his essential Morrisseyness inside of what was still a music world filled with rock normative prejudices. His utter alienness was his protective coating. People were so busy trying to understand what was actually going on inside his head that they didn’t think to simply punch him. But it seems as though, as the years rolled on, people took less and less time to think about what he was doing, and the urge to punch him became almost instantaneous.

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The Simpsons did an episode about The Smiths (“The Snuffs”) which was astonishingly cruel to Morrissey. It really went way too far: shame on them. Sure, Morrissey’s a dick, but he’s always on brand when he’s a dick, and that prickliness is why we love him.

But then there’s his racism which is at such odds with his peace love and understanding persona, yet people tend to cut him some slack and chalk it up to the same gene that makes our parents crank up the racism in their late fifties. That’s right: Morrissey is old, which means you’re old, too. So, in a weird way, Morrissey (I hate it when people call him Moz) is cancel-proof. Like Donald Trump, he inhabits his own universe, and he genuinely doesn’t care.

*

Can you even imagine what a flaming radioactive mess a Smiths reunion tour might be like? It’s like contemplating the square root of negative one, or dark matter. There’s just no point.

*

I did my only interviewer gig ever with Morrissey in Rome in 2006. I’d been heavily using the sleep drug zopiclone for the first time ever in the days leading up to the interview. Meanwhile, the record company had been so paranoid about interviewers bootlegging an advance of Morrissey’s new songs that they only sent me CDs that were so heavily watermarked that they wouldn’t play in any device in the US or Canada. When I got to Rome, the company let me listen to the new album on some weird sound system that was like something out of the former DDR. And then, six hours early, they rang my room to say that Morrissey was bored and wanted to do his interview right then.

As he walked into the hotel’s basement bar where the interview took place, my zopiclone massively kicked in and I remember seeing Morrissey’s head balloon in size like a Christmas parade balloon in New York. Then I blacked out and suddenly it was another six hours later, and I was on the phone with my agent in New York, when I snapped out of the zopiclone blackout and said: WTF just happened? There’s no real moral here. But if they’d just given me the fucking album a week earlier, I could have written something a bit better about the whole cosmic clusterfuck of an experience in Rome.

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Which is all to say that nobody ever compares Morrissey’s solo albums to The Smiths’ albums. But the solo albums are really, really good, and Morrissey doesn’t get enough credit for that. Viva Hate (1988) was astonishing, and Kill Uncle (1991) was excellent. With Your Arsenal (1992) his bus started to veer towards some nearby cliff, but then a few albums later, Ringleaders of the Tormentors (2006), the album I was in Rome for, showed great song writing and performing talent once more. Solo Morrissey is a boutique listening experience, albeit one that will endure.

In my mind The Smiths were 75% Morrissey, 24% Johnny Marr and 1% the others. I hear Johnny Marr has done great stuff since the band split. I assume it’s excellent and wish him well. But the sum of the band’s isolated solo efforts isn’t greater than their whole. So many of us miss The Smiths and we always will. Missing The Smiths is like missing that Christmas dinner where everyone screamed at each other and behaved appallingly and damaged crockery and said untakebackable things, and yet ever since all other Christmas dinners seem listless and fake and dull. What a shame, and so needless, to miss them while they’re still here. It’s like they ghosted all of us when they ghosted each other.

It’s easy to see why the images of the debris, a very pandemic-era combination of online shopping and urban lawlessness, received heavy play on local news and spread far and wide across the web. So bad was the litter problem — caused by systematic robbery, with criminal groups pilfering packages, ripping them open and running off with the most valuable goods — that a cargo train had derailed just a few days before Newsom’s late-January visit. And so here was the state governor, in jeans and a t-shirt (and a cloth mask outdoors) in a litter-picking photo-op: an irresistible visual to add to the thick dossier on Democratic misrule in California.

But the bluntness of Newsom’s reaction — as well as comparing his own state to a third-world country, he explicitly blamed organised criminals — was a revealing sign of this safely Democratic state’s changed political landscape.

Put simply, such statements might have been a political headache for a California Democrat only 18 months earlier. With the country in the throes of its post-George Floyd “reckoning” — dominated by a mood of hypersensitivity around anything relating to crime, policing, race and any combination of the three — references to the third world, as well as daring to be seen to be tough on crime, might not have gone down well. But Newsom received only fringe pushback.

In California’s two biggest cities, the signs of progressive retreat are everywhere. The extent of that retreat, and the question of exactly what comes after years of Leftwards shift, will define the political future of America’s most populous state.

In the past two years, London Breed, the Mayor of San Francisco, has performed a dramatic about-turn on crime and policing. In 2020, the city chief cut $120 million from the budget of the San Francisco police department. Yet a year later, she asked for emergency extra funding for the police and announced a crackdown on crime in the Tenderloin, the city’s most lawless neighborhood which operates as an open-air drug market. It was time, said Breed, to end the “bullshit”. Now she is doing battle with the city’s progressive forces to deliver on what, anywhere other than San Francisco, would be considered a reasonably common-sense clampdown given the scale of the city’s drug overdose and crime problems.

And she is far from alone. The campaign to recall Chesa Boudin, the city’s progressive prosecutor whose short time in office has been a disaster, was started by a group of local activists and quickly developed serious momentum. Campaigners secured enough signatures to force a citywide vote, which is scheduled for June, and look increasingly likely to triumph. A mid-February survey found that 68% of San Francisco voters planned to vote Boudin out of office. (That in a city where just 6.7% are registered Republicans.)

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Campaigners in another recall push in the city found success last month when voters ousted three members of San Francisco’s school board. 70% of voters opted to ditch officials who seemed more interested in what to rename the city’s schools than figuring out how to reopen safely during the pandemic. (Among the names they hoped to erase from the San Francisco schools: George Washington, sitting Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein and author Robert Louis Stevenson.) As part of her tack towards the center, Breed has supported the recall campaign.

A few hundred miles to the south, a group of Angelenos have taken inspiration from the anti-Boudin campaign and hope to oust LA’s head prosecutor. The move to recall George Gascón is in its early stages, with campaigners recently given the all-clear to start collecting signatures. But things don’t look good for Gascón, who is cut from a similar, hyperprogessive cloth to Boudin. Like Boudin, he has overseen a lethal slide towards lawlessness. And, like Boudin, he faces a furious internal revolt from his prosecutors. In a recently published internal survey by Los Angeles Association for Deputy District Attorneys, nine in ten prosecutors supported the recall effort. “Over a year ago, Gascón began a massive social experiment by redirecting prosecutorial resources away from enforcing the law while simultaneously ignoring large portions of the legal code,” said its vice-president Eric Siddall. “The result is an emboldened criminal element that knows the DA will not hold criminals accountable. This experiment needs to end.”

Even before a single vote has been counted, the anti-Gascón campaign has already changed policy in the city. In an effort to fend off the backlash, he has reversed two of his landmark policies: a ban on trying juveniles as adults and on seeking life without parole.

Meanwhile, in the crowded race to replace Eric Garcetti as the mayor of Los Angeles — Joe Biden has appointed him as the US ambassador to India — the mood is unmistakably moderate. Homelessness, crime and the cost of living dominate the debate. Karen Bass, a former congresswoman and the pick of the city’s Democratic machine, has swerved Rightwards, with a policy platform that features clearing homeless encampments as a prominent promise. This has dismayed the city’s progressives, who complain that she is “pandering to affluent Westside and Valley voters at the expense of black, Latinx and working-class ones”, as two Black Lives Matter activists put it in a recent column. (Needless to say, LA’s working-class voters, whatever their race, are by no means as on board with a far-Left approach to criminal justice as the authors claim.)

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Meanwhile, Rick Caruso, a billionaire former Republican, has thrown his hat into the ring. Caruso, a shopping mall developer, is a big beast in LA civic life: he is a trustee at the University of Southern California and has been a member of the city’s Police Commission. In a statement confirming his switch from Independent to Democrat, he said that he “won’t be a typical Democrat… I’ll be a pro-centrist, pro-jobs, pro-public safety Democrat.” Caruso has backed the Gascón recall campaign. (Bass has not.)

The counterrevolution in California’s cities may seem fairly mild by national standards: a shift in tone among the same class of Democratic politicians. But the backlash on America’s left coast demonstrates the outer limits of tolerance for radical progressivism in American politics. As the novelist Wallace Stegner noted, California is like “America, only more so”.

When it comes to experiments in far-Left urban politics in recent years, that has undoubtedly been the case. Now the question is whether Californian Democrats have learned anything but the most shallow lessons from the last few years. It is one thing to acknowledge that “Defund the Police” is political kryptonite and nudge public safety spending back up. It is another to face up to the grave problems facing your city.

Voters are watching closely as the likes of Breed, or whoever is chosen to replace Garcetti, try to clean things up. A nod to the centre might be enough to spare short-term political disaster. But it will likely take more than that to actually solve the problems that have voters so frustrated.

The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, for instance, wondered whether “people with guns” should even be responding to mental health calls. Pilot projects were launched all over the country to replace police with civilian response teams for 911 calls involving mental health, drugs and homelessness. Congresswoman Katie Porter introduced a bill to pay states and cities to set up more such units, while her colleague Cori Bush introduced a bill that does much the same. In many cities, “decriminalisation”, long a rallying cry for progressive critics of policing, became standard operating procedure.

The activists are right that police cannot be the “solution” to mental illness and drug abuse, which overlap in about 50% of cases. But the programmes developed to replace law enforcement have had mixed results. That’s because in many of America’s progressive enclaves, the problem isn’t that it’s the police who are responding to these emergencies. It’s that there is little the police can legally do once they get there.

Lejon Butler is a tall, lean, black man who lives in Rodeo, a bedroom community in the North Bay Area. As a kid in the East Bay in the Eighties, he recalls going to school and being taught to “Just Say No” to drugs, then coming home and smelling the familiar chemical odour of freebased cocaine wafting through the air.

Lejon’s mother, Martin, who is now deceased, and his stepfather, Craig, were drug addicts. But Craig was such a high-functioning addict that he was able to conceal his use from his family for years. He ran a successful landscaping business while getting high every day, even trading services with one of his clients for Oxycontin. But a few years ago, he overdosed. After that, dementia set in.

By now Craig was living in Richmond, a working-class residential city in the East Bay. A few months before Lejon’s mother passed away, Craig had started to become violent towards her. When she died, in April 2021, he fell into a deep depression. He became aggressive and unpredictable. He threatened to kill his grandson with a samurai sword. He put a dagger to his own stomach and threatened to gut himself. On January 5 this year, he started a fire in his kitchen and then refused to leave the house, acting like nothing had happened. His family called 911.

The responding officer was Brian Lande, who, as part of the county’s Mental Health Evaluation Team, specialises in handling these sorts of calls. Officer Lande had spoken to Craig only a few days earlier. He makes a point of checking in on people with mental illness and addiction issues when they’re not in crisis. That way he’s able to get to know them as they really are, and not just when they’re sick.

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When Lande arrived at Craig’s house, Lejon, his wife, and his niece Dnaya were already outside. Lande intended to put a psychiatric hold on Craig, which would allow a hospital to keep him for up to 72 hours. He also recommended that Dnaya fill out an application for a restraining order, which might help persuade the hospital to keep him there instead of just releasing him within a few hours.

The family had been through this drill many times before. Craig fell neatly through a gap in the system. He had dementia, but that didn’t count as a “mental illness” for the purposes of institutionalisation. He threatened his relatives’ lives, but he rarely actually attacked them, so the criminal justice system wasn’t inclined to take him seriously. “Someone’s going to have to get killed for them to do anything,” Lejon told me.

An ambulance pulled up, and the EMTs walked over to get a rundown from the cops. Then they went inside with two of the officers and came out with Craig on a gurney. Craig is in his seventies, and looks, if anything, older. He’s a small, stout Japanese-American man with sheet-white hair and an unkempt beard and moustache. His belligerence with the family stopped as soon as the first responders arrived. Suddenly he was compliant and reasonable.

This, according to Lejon, was a tactic of his stepfather’s. “He’s a very intelligent man,” Lejon said. His antics cease the moment he’s interacting with the authorities. Craig was deemed stable and released back to the family that evening, at which point the chaos flared right back up again.

It’s a pattern Officer Lande has seen time and again. “People have crises, they go to the hospital, they get stabilised,” he said. “They agree to a treatment plan. Then there’s no follow-up.” He continued: “Having a system of coercive mental healthcare that’s limited to emergency psychiatric crises that’s wedded strictly to voluntary participation — you’re condemning people to not getting the level of care they need. You’re condemning them to never get better.”

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By Joel Kotkin

Craig is drug-addicted and psychologically debilitated, but he at least has a house to sleep in and a family to keep tabs on him. Hundreds of thousands of Americans suffering mental illness and substance addiction lack even that basic structure to their lives. In recent months, we’ve seen what happens when the most violent among them are left to their demons: America’s cities have been struck by a series of grisly, unprovoked murders of women committed by homeless men.

The deceased in these homicides were not the only victims. The acutely mentally ill and drug-addicted are prisoners of their sicknesses, and despite all the money we’ve thrown at homelessness, our policies have amounted to a wholesale abandonment of these broken people to their grim fates.

In San Francisco, that chronic failure has become the city’s official policy. An entire downtown neighbourhood, right in the heart of the city, has been effectively ceded to drug dealers, addicts and the mentally ill, all in the name of compassion. Users in the Tenderloin smoke fentanyl and shoot heroin on the sidewalks in broad daylight. When it rains, the train station there becomes a huge underground shooting gallery.

Following the spectacular failure of the War on Drugs, the prevailing ideology in the addiction treatment world became “harm reduction”. Harm reduction aims to respect the rights and dignity of drug addicts by destigmatising their drug use; to minimise the social harms that accompany drug addiction such as crime, incarceration and discrimination; to save lives by providing safeguards against overdoses; and to offer detoxification but not to require it as a condition for social services and subsidies. The motto of harm reduction is “meeting people where they’re at”, rather than compelling abstinence as a one-size-fits-all-solution.

But the approach has its critics, who view it as well-intentioned but ineffective. “There are aspects of harm reduction that I support, and there are aspects that blur the lines between harm reduction and enabling,” said Tom Wolf, a former addict in San Francisco. “The most important thing is to have a full continuum of care that focuses on recovery, not an indefinite maintenance of one’s addiction.”

“Out of thousands of people I saw maybe two get clean,” said Ginny Burton, a former addict in Seattle, describing her work as a case manager employing the harm reduction model. “What I’ve seen actually work, and experienced myself, is separation. Separate the person from the destructive environment. Maintain that separation long enough for the person to get clarity. Then implement services based on priority of need.”

This is how she got clean. “Thank God I was arrested,” she said. But in cities like Seattle and San Francisco, the enforcement policies that resulted in her arrest don’t exist anymore. “If I was loaded today, I wouldn’t be able to pull myself out,” she said. “I wouldn’t be arrested.”

Tom Ostly, who was a prosecutor under the former San Francisco District Attorney, agrees that the state’s coercive powers are what are needed to jolt drug-addicted people into making the commitment to go clean. He once prosecuted a man who had walked up to a random man on the street, punched him in the face and broke his nose. The whole assault was caught on video. With his priors, the defendant was facing 12-15 years in prison.

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It turned out the man’s son had died, and the grief had turned the father into a drug addict. The day of the assault was the anniversary of his son’s death. He had been on a self-destructive spiral. Facing 15 years in prison, he agreed to go to intensive drug rehab instead, where he received counselling for PTSD. He’s now taking classes to be a drug counsellor and will soon graduate from college.

Those kinds of prosecutions just don’t happen anymore in San Francisco, where it’s considered more humane to allow people to continue killing themselves with drugs than to force them to stop. “The current administration lets everyone out and gives them no services,” said Ostly. “It’s bullshit.”

Jail is a lousy place to get clean, and drug use in and of itself should not be treated as a crime. Those lessons have come across loud and clear from the failed War on Drugs. But in rejecting the politics of mass incarceration, we’ve also thrown out the very idea of coercion. And without that, we’re empty-handed in the struggle against addiction and the rampant crime that it engenders.

Drug addiction itself is coercive. Giving an addict the “choice” to continue to use or to voluntarily get clean is as illusory as pushing someone off a roof and giving them the choice to either fall or fly. The current approach in cities such as San Francisco, Officer Lande said, “assumes people exercise full voluntary volition over their behaviour, and they don’t”. The decision to get clean has to be as non-optional as an addict’s “choice” to continue using. It has to be forced.

That doesn’t have to mean jail — in fact, it shouldn’t. Ginny was incarcerated repeatedly, but she finally got clean not through the criminal justice system but through her diversion to drug court and mandated rehabilitation. Nevertheless, coercion was an indispensable element in that successful intervention. The certainty of consequences is what finally broke through the fog of addiction.

“You don’t want to overly criminalise people,” said Officer Lande. “But you have to have some non-carceral way. Some judicial process beyond what the current system has.”

“Right now it’s very black or white,” he continued. “You’re either a psychotic or you’re not. You’re either a grave danger to others or you’re not. We don’t have anything in that grey area. We just have to wait until people are hitting rock bottom before we can do something.”

But what do they have to show for it? Not as much as they might have expected. Rather than a Bolshevik-style assumption of power, there’s every chance this institutional triumph will not produce an enduring political victory, let alone substantially change public opinion.

Even before Biden’s botched Build Back Better initiative, American progressives faced opposition to their wildly impractical claims about achieving “zero Covid” and “zero emissions”, confronting “systemic racism” by defunding the police, regulating speech, and redefining two biological sexes into a multiplicity.

Increasingly, the “march” has started to falter. Like the French generals in 1940 who thought they could defeat the Germans by perfecting World War One tactics, the progressive establishment has built its own impressive Maginot Line which may be difficult to breach, but can still be flanked.

That is not to deny the progressives’ limited successes. It has certainly developed a remarkable ability to besmirch even the most respected institutions, including the US military. But that is where its achievements stop.

While the Pentagon’s top brass focused on “domestic terrorists” and a progressive social agenda, it calamitously bungled its withdrawal from Afghanistan and appears utterly unprepared for Chinese or Russian competitors. And the effect of this progressive march is plain to see: the percentage of Americans who feel “a great deal of trust and confidence in the military” has dropped in just three years to 45% from 70%.

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This decline in trust in major institutions, so evident in America, is also rife across Europe and Australia. In Europe, for example, young people express less pride in their cultural and religious heritage, and are almost three times as likely as their elders to believe that democracy is failing.

The great paradox of progressivism is that nowhere are its shortcomings more evident than in its geographic heartland: the dense urban centre. Conventional wisdom has dictated that America’s high-tech economic future will be shaped in dense urban areas, where superstar companies stand the best chance of recruiting superstar employees.

But while the upper crust of the labour force continue to head to the dense urban cores, on the ground people are moving in the other direction. Across the high-income world, not only in America but Europe as well, the vast preponderance of growth has taken place in suburbs and exurbs. In the last decade over 90% of all US metropolitan population growth and 80% of job growth took place on the periphery. On the ground, then, the progressive dream is withering.

The pandemic has greatly enhanced these trends, with downtown neighbourhoods recovering far less quickly than suburban, exurban, and small towns. But even if these changes are not permanent, at least not entirely, city residents will still have to contend with another pitfall of the progressive agenda: rising crime. Twelve American cities have experienced record homicides this year; all are ruled by Democratic, often progressive, leaders, many of whom explain away crime and excused, even praised, the looting and mayhem caused by protestors in the summer of 2020.

Yet despite this visceral impact on urban neighbourhoods, it is in education that our new hegemony could have its most long-lasting impact. The West’s new educational mandarins, increasingly strident and increasingly influential, have no use for our liberal inheritance, which they consider little more than a screen for racists and misogynists.

In Canada, we have seen an instance of “flame purification” for everything from old encyclopaedias and maps to Depression-era cartoons. In America, the disconnect between the professoriate and the people also keeps growing, as conservatives head towards extinction on many campuses: on some well-regarded campuses such as Williams, Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans reaches between 70 and 132 to 1.

These trends have long been evident in the fading humanities and social sciences, but now even the sciences are becoming politicised. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that universities are losing credibility even among some traditional Leftists, who marvel at how they burnish their progressive credentials while making huge profits off their endowments and seriously underpaying most of their employees.

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And just as with the growing disaffection for the military, teachers, students and parents are starting to push back. A number of teachers who have been “cancelled” or otherwise threatened for dissenting are now fighting back in the courts. There’s also considerable criticism from parents and alumni, some of whom are now pledging not to contribute to their schools, and instead support well-publicised and well-funded efforts to start new initiatives, such as the recently announced University of Austin. Even more importantly, would-be students are also voting with their feet: after decades of rapid expansion, the number of college students enrolments fell by 5% last decade, and dropped an additional 6.5% since 2019.

Likewise, only one in three Americans have confidence in their public schools, where the education establishment’s goal seems to be to obliterate merit. In my adopted home state of California, this “post-colonial” approach includes deemphasising the importance of tests, excusing bad behaviour, and imposing ideology on often ill-educated students. The San Diego Unified School District, meanwhile, is busily getting rid of mandates for such things as knowing course material, taking tests, handing in work on time, or even showing up; all these, the district insists, are inherently “racist”. This in a state that ranked 49th in the performance of poor, largely minority students. (Still, the situation could be worse: neighbouring Oregon no longer requires any demonstrable proof of competence to graduate.)

In the past year, this blindness has incited considerable public outrage. Criticism of Critical Race Theory buoyed the Republican win in Virginia in November, and has become a rallying principle for parents around the country, including a recall drive against San Francisco school board members.

Other parents are trying to opt out of the public system altogether. The pandemic saw the departure of more one million American students from public schools, while 1.2 million families switched to home-schooling last academic year, bringing the total number of home-schooled students to 3.1 million, roughly 11% of the total. According to the Census Bureau, Black and Hispanic families now have the highest estimated rates of home-schooling, at 16% and 12%, respectively.

Meanwhile, the mass media, particularly its legacy outlets, constitute another progressive bastion losing credibility. One recent survey found that barely one in three Americans trusts the media, including a majority of Democrats, while only 15% of Americans have confidence in newspapers. Part of this surely stems from their bias: although there remain some powerful conservative voices, notably on talk radio and Newscorp properties, the vast majority of journalistic power lies with the Left. It’s the same story with social media, which increasingly dominates news access and is also widely distrusted.

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But the media’s Maginot Line may prove more vulnerable than expected, and this breach is certainly a far better prospect than those that came with the German flanking. There is a definite challenge not just from the traditional Right but a plethora of new publications which offer intelligent analysis outside the establishmentarian party line, as well as from Substack. Unless the media oligarchs find ways to repress these elements, a resurgence of free thinking may rescue journalism from progressive editors and journalism schools.

The shift in the media parallels that in mass culture. As late as the Fifties, mass culture was seen as largely neutral. But in recent decades, it shifted towards a more monochromatic look — one which a significant portion of the public are fed up with. Gender flipping may excite progressive creatives, but politically correct remakes of household favourites have proved box offices disasters. Indeed, it’s striking that openly conservative presenters, such as Fox’s Greg Gutfeld, now do better in ratings than their more established network rivals like Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon.

Yet perhaps nothing is more ironic, and potentially dangerous, than the takeover of the corporate suite by progressive ideology. Traditionally, the dispersion of ownership and the conflicting views of entrepreneurs and inheritors fuelled the dynamism of democracy: you had far-Left businessmen like George Soros and doctrinaire Right-wingers like the Kochs in competition. They fought it out, and sometimes even aligned. But they came from diverse viewpoints.

Today this diversity of viewpoints is being obliterated by design, with corporate behaviour now married closely to the notion of the “great reset” and “de-growth”: an economy where improving conditions for the masses is replaced with lowering carbon emissions and diversity tokenism. Such standards, of course, do not apply to snotty private schools attended by their offspring, or areas that are home to their mansions.

The oligarchs may feel they deserve dispensation from the masses by their “good deeds”, but people are not as stupid or malleable as the ruling elites believe. Trust in major corporations, never too robust, is below 20%, less than one third that for small businesses. It is slowly becoming apparent that ‘woke capitalism’ will never solve divisions which are essentially economic. The key, notes Richard Parsons, former President of Citigroup, lies not with racial quotas or hiring transgender workers but the economic growth and opportunity. There will never be “unity”, he suggests, until people “feel it in their pockets”.

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The question now is whether there will be sufficient pushback to turn the tide. Unlike local school boards, online magazines, and even alternative colleges, it’s difficult to replace or challenge an Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google, or Morgan Stanley. Yet fortunately these institutions do not yet control all wealth. Big companies may have shamed themselves out of oil and gas, but investors are ramping up due to the soaring price of these assets.

So, here’s the good news. On what sometimes seems the inexorable course towards progressive capture, we can see multiple fronts of resistance, and the early congealing of independent-minded forces, from the rational Right to the traditional liberal-left. Our society may never regain the feistiness of previous eras, and our new elites might continue marching through our institutions. But as they become increasingly discredited, they would be unwise to forget that all long marches one day come to an end.

Like so many nations that have heard the siren call of populism, Argentina was a deeply unequal county when, 75 years ago today, an anti-establishment candidate decisively won a presidential election. Two decades before that, the nation had boasted the eighth-largest economy in the world; its capital, Buenos Aires, was seen as the “Paris of the Americas”, glittering with the wealth of an Anglo-Argentine upper class. But beyond this elite, poverty was rife, and when the Depression struck, the city, like so many around the world, had been flooded with struggling poor, from the rural “interior”. Urban poverty spiralled out of control.

Things improved, a little, during the Second World War. Having to manage without imports prompted a rise in manufacturing industry. A new military government, which took power in June 1943, needed the working class — the so-called descamisados, or “shirtless ones” — on their side. And so the administration created a new post: Secretary of Labour. It was filled by the man who came to be known as “Argentina’s First Worker”, Colonel Juan Domingo Perón.

Spearheading redistributive policies, Perón won the hearts and minds of the descamisados. He announced, early 1946, that he was running for president, in a speech that criticised oligarchy and foreign interference, which he claimed was abetted by the coalition of traditional parties he stood against. The 52-year-old won what was widely recognised as Argentina’s cleanest-ever election, held on 24 February 1946. The final results, announced in April, had Perón at nearly 1.5 million votes, versus the 1.2 million for the establishment candidate. The traditional coalition his opponent represented, arrayed against the popular colonel, were shocked by the defeat; they genuinely believed that a man disliked by the establishment could not enjoy widespread support. But the descamisados had made their opinion known.

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Populist appeals these days are addressed primarily to those who feel downwardly mobile. But in 1940s Argentina, the working classes increasingly felt buoyed by greater possibilities and rising expectations. They were proud of their nation, but saw the traditional powers as exploitative investors to be curbed rather than as a threat. Perón assured would-be voters in his candidacy speech that he would collaborate with other nations, but on the basis of equality. His brand of populism, like modern-day versions, certainly mobilised the working class as a source of power; but it also genuinely boosted their position. Perón, rather than exploiting the working class, seemed to believe that his interests were identical to theirs: that he knew the solutions and was the best person to implement them.

Perón showed his genuine concern for the ordinary person while secretary of labour. He engineered a remarkable series of reforms: labour courts, minimum wages, paid holidays and sick pay. Labour rights were extended, for the first time, to rural workers. Child labour was regulated. Industrial workers gained substantial wage increases. Perón’s Secretariat also actively encouraged unionisation, promising that, unlike in the past, unions would negotiate benefits for their members. Of course, the advantages for Perón in the creation of this institutional support base were an equally important motivation. But the unions did make life better for his descamisados.

Perón also took very public charge of the relief efforts surrounding the January 1944 earthquake in San Juan — fundraising for it introduced him to his wife, the equally charismatic radio actress Eva Duarte. Both were unconventional — illegitimate children, she an actress of dubious reputation and he a man of mixed-race heritage — and both of them grated on polite society. This, of course, only increased their appeal in the eyes of their most devoted supporters. The Peróns, unlike some of today’s better-known populist leaders, could genuinely claim to understand and have shared the social and economic challenges the working classes faced.

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In some ways, Perón did not let the descamisados down when he assumed the highest office. The flurry of pro-poor and anti-elite measures continued. With the economy unusually flush after the Second World War, he embarked on a round of nationalisations, taking utilities and railways out of foreign hands and bringing them under state control (albeit at excessive cost). The government also invested in health and public education, with a political programme often decried as demagogic, yet in fact based largely on that of the post-War Labour government in London. It put money into schools, hospitals, nursing training and tertiary education for workers, as well as holiday hotels for union members. Through the Eva Perón Foundation, low-cost homes were built. For Argentina’s hitherto ignored marginalised classes, they had truly never had it so good.

This was partly to do with Perón’s rhetoric. Despite his anti-oligarch and anti-imperialist stance, his was a more optimistic brand of populism than that espoused more recently in countries from the United States to Hungary. He of course shared some qualities with more recent populist figures, not least a talent for using mass media to get his message across — radio propaganda was the Twitter of its day. Yet his was generally a message of hope and prosperity for all, whereas today’s populists tend to be exclusionary.

Take Budapest’s propagandistic use of the term “cosmopolitanism” to deride “foreign” figures such as George Soros — compared with Perón’s attempts at inclusiveness (despite frequent claims of Nazi sympathies, he was the first Argentine president to denounce anti-Semitism and actively courted the large Jewish community). And faced with an imminent coup in 1955, Perón stepped down and left the country, rather than urging his supporters to fight and risk mounting casualties. His was an idealistic populism — naïve, even.

Perón was plagued with the same problem as all populist governments: his depended on personality, rather than a clear ideology. The government headed by Perón and Evita — a first lady with no elected post but who arguably came to wield at least as much power as her husband — used its power capriciously. It had little regard for legal forms, and, as time went on, dissent was increasingly repressed. Perón was also deliberately vague about any supposed ideological content in his Peronist Party (due to his frequently expressed belief that “if I define, I exclude”). Indeed, he defined his foreign policy, the so-called Third Position, as being on the Left, in the centre or on the Right according to the circumstances. Like any populist, he wanted to be all things to all people.

And despite a good stint in office, President Perón was never able to generate good economic management and sustained growth. The boom-bust cycles that had characterised the previous 50 years continued (and continue to this day). Perónism, like populist regimes throughout history, had reacted to immediate problems with short-term solutions, but stuttered when it came to the long-term.

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By James Bloodworth

Populism often grows out of a lack of institutions, but is ironically ill-suited to creating them; its focus is more on fighting fires than laying groundwork, on individual decision-making than strong policies. A country cannot be run by one man. It needs strong institutions. But for the charismatic, self-obsessed leaders who often head up populist governments, institutions are seen as a threat, because they create a framework that can make them redundant. So any benefits that populists bring a nation are invariably unsustainable. Perón’s achievements were ultimately and quite swiftly dismantled by the military government that overthrew him and sought to erase him and his supporters from history (a counterproductive approach that would only bolster his support in coming years.)

Now, Perón’s legacy is still a source of polarisation in Argentina. For many, he wrecked the nation permanently, while for others he dragged it into the modern age and gave the working classes an enduring political weight. Millions saw their wages increase and were able to buy a house or go on holiday for the first time. Thousands were beaten up for not shouting ‘Viva Perón’, or forced to join the president’s party to retain their jobs. As Perón liked to say, ‘the only truth is reality’.

The West today, like Argentina in 1946, is deeply unequal. As the middle classes have become more precarious, calls for a rebalance have mounted. It’s worth remembering that populists like Perón are skilled at channelling popular frustrations and shaping media narratives — and prone to demagogic outbursts and authoritarian tendencies when in power. Such leaders grow out of divisions that they skilfully exploit but rarely heal — no matter how immediately successful their policies — and sometimes generate backlash that only exacerbates those divisions. Yet they are also a symptom as well as a cause; they flourish in systems with deep pre-existing problems that last a lot longer than they do.

Jill Hedges’s Juan Perón: The Life of the People’s Colonel is published in May.

Nature is dying. Human existence is under threat like never before. Our air is polluted. Our rivers run dry. Our oceans have become dustbins of disposable plastic. From coral reefs to the earth’s forests, from bees to elephants, the planet faces existential threat. A million species are now threatened with extinction.

In ages past, natural catastrophes were designated acts of God – in other words, not a human responsibility. In the Anthropocene era, however, we humans are in the dock and our economic activity is being judged.

Our obsession with growth, with GDP as the measure of human success, has given more of us more wealth along with extraordinary technological toys. It is, apparently, one of the great success stories of the modern era. But it has come at too high a cost. Public intellectuals such as Steven Pinker may flatter the present generation with talk of our enormous progress – but the latest UN Report on the state of the planet shows that progress is being purchased at the price of our future existence.

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Anyone who believes in infinite growth on a finite planet, according to David Attenborough, “is either a madman or an economist”. Or a philosopher. Pinker is simply a thinking man’s Bernie Madoff, selling us a flashy Ponzi scheme that points the way to disaster.

“Things can only get better” sang Labour activists in 1997, on the way to Tony Blair’s first election victory, as even the Left parroted the virtues of economic growth. These days it is almost impossible to find a mainstream politician who doesn’t believe in the virtues of having more, the very engine of our coming environmental catastrophe.

There was a time when we thought a few lifestyle tweaks were the answer – a bit of re-cycling here, cutting down on meat and long-haul flights there. But we’re well beyond that now, far past what George Monbiot calls “micro-consumerist bollocks”. He goes on: “Instead of pissing around on the margins of the problem … We have to go straight to the heart of capitalism and overthrow it.”

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By Peter Franklin

For Monbiot, the destruction of capitalism is not some Left-wing fantasy of universal equality, it is not about class warfare or Marxist politics, it is about survival plain and simple. Either we kill it or it kills us.

In this new world, two things will be necessary: we will have to learn to have less, learn to be poorer. And we will have to learn to be smaller. Scale down, don’t scale up. “Small is beautiful” as the people-centred economist E F Schumacher put it back in the 70’s.

The trouble is, not even the Green Party seems to believe in small any more. With Brexit, it too has caught the bigger is better bug. One honourable exception, though, would be Green Party member of the House of Lords, Jenny Jones. Writing in the Guardian in 2016, she observed:

“The most profound weakness of the EU, from the Green point of view, is that it is a super-sized, top-down dogmatic project of endless industrial development and growth. It fosters the pointless carting of goods enormous distances, and it smashes local resilience and self-reliance.”

Yes, yes, and yes again. And there is a small but worthy Green Leaves movement (great name, btw) that agrees with her.

But, unfortunately, the wider Green movement has come to be hijacked by this whole corporatist top-down approach, prioritising free movement – including the free movement of film stars to take international flights to protest climate change – and free markets, insisting that the only way to tackle the big issue of climate change is through the very globalised structures that create it.

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The Greens, too, been suckered by the idea that being progressive is the path to climate restoration. Yet, in truth, those who believe in progress have little to offer the environment. Because it was under the gas-guzzling banner of progress that the current scourge on our planet was justified.

Indeed, it is probably conservatives who now offer the greatest hope for the future. By definition, they seek to conserve the best of what is threatened. You get a strong sense of this connection between conservatism and conservation in the writings of the novelist, poet and farmer, Wendell Berry, a man so anti-progressive he won’t even use a tractor:

“We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us”

Most conservatives have yet to recognise is that capitalism is not their friend. I noted in my Confessions interview with Roger Scruton that Capitalism is the greatest change agent the world has ever seen. And he acknowledged that this has become the great question for natural conservatives to wrestle with.

Trust conservatives to save the planet

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The problem, in the USA especially, is that conservatism has come to mean conserving free-market capitalism. But increasingly, this view is being challenged. In Peter Kolozi’s 2017 book, for example, Conservatives against Capitalism: From the Industrial Revolution to Globalization, an older tradition of conservatism is appealed to. One that pre-dated the neo-liberal revolution. And, earlier this year, the deeply conservative Fox anchor and Trump supporter Tucker Carlson opened up the subject by providing a compelling critique of the cult of the free market, in a way that no ‘progressive’ Democrat would ever dare.

The Green Party, though, has been mugged by progressivism, which has left its environmental credentials surprisingly poor. When I was younger, the Green Party’s European position was all about contesting the terrible Common Agricultural Policy. Now that the butter mountains have gone, too many Greens assume that the issue has been resolved. But it hasn’t. Monbiot calls the CAP “among the most powerful drivers of environmental destruction in the northern hemisphere.”

And here he makes common cause with the unlikely figure of Michael Gove:

“Each year, around £3.2 billion comes to U.K. farmers under the CAP. Of this, a full £2.6 billion is not paid according to how farmers manage their land but according to the size of their holdings. This perverse arrangement means public money flows to those who are already wealthy.”

All of which is just a little more evidence that our political goalposts are rapidly shifting. Left and Right are changing their meaning. My own diagnosis of this change follows the brilliant analysis of this by Nancy Fraser, that Bill Clinton and then Tony Blair made their peace with free-market capitalism at just about the same time as some on the Right were beginning to wonder whether capitalism was really their ally.

The shock of this re-alignment has yet to fully work itself out. But for those of us who have long been suspicious of unrestrained free markets and their effect on human flourishing, the thought has started to dawn that the old-fashioned Right – with its emphasis on family, religious belief and small-scale wellbeing – might be a better place from which to challenge the evils of capitalism, than from within the assumptions of the progressive Left. And nowhere is this more evident than when it comes to the environment.