But Nixon was no victim. While other presidents have engaged in dirty tricks against their opponents, Nixon is the only one to have had his own private criminal gang engaged in burglaries like the break-in of Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. On a tape recording from a June 17, 1971, meeting with his aides Henry Kissinger and Bob Haldeman, Nixon can be heard talking about having the Brookings Institution broken into by his goons, to retrieve files that he hoped to use to his advantage. Nixon: “I mean, I want it implemented on a thievery basis. Goddamn it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.”

But Nixon’s prison-worthy crimes and his personal flaws don’t discredit “Nixonism” — defined as a governing philosophy, relevant in our day as in his, with three main features:  national-interest realism in foreign policy; economic nationalism in trade and immigration policy; and at least an effort on the part of government to be even-handed between capital and labor.  

From a Nixonian perspective, peace can only be achieved by a favorable balance of power — not by the United Nations or other international institutions, and not by a utopian “global democratic revolution” that replaces all authoritarian regimes. Free trade and protectionism are equally valid national strategies, to be adopted or rejected in the service of strategic industrial sectors and a high-wage workforce. And rather than side with employers against workers, government should act as an honest broker between business and organized labor, in the interest of labor peace and a national home market enlarged by high take-home pay, rather than by high levels of government redistribution. 

Tragically, the rival public philosophy of Reaganism — combining a crusading Wilsonian foreign policy, dogmatic support for economic globalization and mass immigration, and unremitting hostility to labor unions — dominated the Republican Party between the Reagan years and the election of Trump in 2016, to the detriment of both the party and the nation.

Start with Nixon’s realism abroad. In foreign policy, the differences between Nixonism and Reaganism are unbridgeable. Although Nixon worked from the desk of Woodrow Wilson and hung Wilson’s portrait in the Cabinet room next to Lincoln and Eisenhower, Nixon’s view of foreign policy as an arena of great-power struggles and compromises had more in common with that of American realists like Alexander Hamilton, Theodore Roosevelt, and Henry Cabot Lodge and European statesmen like Bismarck, Disraeli, and De Gaulle.

In a 1972 radio address, Nixon told the American people that US foreign policy must promote a “structure of peace” among great powers that rests “on the hard concrete of common interests and mutual agreements, and not on the shifting sands of naive sentimentality.”

Nixon’s predecessors had overcommitted Washington in Vietnam and elsewhere. One response was the policy of “Vietnamization,” generalized as “the Nixon Doctrine” of 1969, which declared that the United States would no longer assume full responsibility for the defense of allies through ground troops. 

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Another Nixonian response to American overextension was his outreach to China as part of a strategy of dividing Moscow from Beijing and thus splitting the communist sphere. The tactic failed to end the war in Indochina while saving South Vietnam, but Sino-American diplomacy paid off in the “second Cold War” of the 1980s, when Beijing was a de facto ally of Uncle Sam against Moscow. Nixon can’t be blamed for the deindustrialization of the United States by China’s aggressive mercantilism, which was supported by unpatriotic American corporations that presidents from Clinton to Obama tolerated after Nixon’s death in 1994.

While Reagan’s defense build-up and proxy wars with Moscow in Afghanistan and Central America contributed to the pressure on the Soviet Union, the implosion of the USSR had other causes: long-term economic decay, rising nationalism among the bloc’s constituent peoples, and Gorbachev’s refusal to crack down against dissent. Reagan’s true foreign-policy legacy wasn’t winning the Cold War; it was grafting the utopian fervor of Woodrow Wilson and other 20th-century Democratic progressives and liberal internationalists onto the formerly realist GOP.

Wilson was literally Ronald Reagan’s middle name, thanks to his father, an ardent New Deal Democrat. And Reagan, a Democrat until 1962, remained all of his life an ardent Wilsonian idealist in his approach to foreign policy. Wilson, in a speech to Congress in January 1917, before the US entry into World War I, identified the goals of American foreign policy as national self-determination, global economic liberalization, and an end to the balance of power: “These are American principles, American policies. We could stand for no others…. They are the principles of mankind and must prevail.”

True to Wilsonian ideology, in his autobiography, An American Life, Reagan asserted: “It was our policy that this great democracy of ours had a special obligation to bring freedom to other peoples.” Jeane Kirkpatrick, who served Reagan as ambassador to the United Nations, observed: “The president and many of his principal advisers see themselves as purveyors and defenders of the classical liberal tradition in politics, economics, and society.”

Rejecting the reality of conflicts of interest among states of all kinds, Reagan declared: “People do not make wars; governments do. A people free to choose will always choose peace.” Likewise, Reagan said in his 1986 State of the Union address: “We know that peace follows in freedom’s path, and conflicts erupt when the will of the people is denied.” If this “democratic peace theory” is true, then the only way to achieve a peaceful world is to promote the replacement of every authoritarian regime on earth with a liberal multiparty democracy — by example if possible, by subversion, invasion, and occupation if necessary. Wars of regime change by democratic countries are “liberation,” but not “aggression” (it helps if the would-be “liberated” country, like Iraq, Venezuela, and Iran, has major deposits of oil and gas).

Reagan’s neoconservative allies successfully lobbied for the creation in 1983 of the National Endowment for Democracy, a government-funded organization that has engaged in both overt and covert operations to destabilize or overthrow governments that Washington opposes.  Contrast this with Nixon’s statement: “We would not welcome the intervention of other countries in our domestic affairs, and we cannot expect them to be cooperative when we seek to intervene directly in theirs.”

George W. Bush was as reckless in launching the Iraq War as Reagan was cautious in limiting his administration to small-scale interventions in Lebanon and Grenada. But a prudent Wilsonian ideologue is still a Wilsonian ideologue. There is a direct line from Reagan’s messianic rhetoric to the proclamation of George W. Bush in his Second Inaugural Address: “So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” Bush’s speech merely restated Reagan’s utopian conception of US foreign policy, evident in the Gipper’s 1985 pronunciamento: “We declared the principal objective of American foreign policy to be not just the prevention of war, but the extension of freedom. And we stressed our commitment to the growth of democratic government and democratic institutions around the world.”

Trade is another source of contention between the rival governing philosophies of Nixonism and Reaganism. Nixon was a bold and unapologetic American economic nationalist. In one of several “Nixon shocks,” Nixon in 1971 dealt with a balance-of-payments problem by suspending the convertibility of the dollar to gold, blowing up the Bretton Woods system that had structured world trade and finance since the late 1940s. 

The other Nixon shocks of 1971 included combating inflation with temporary wage and price controls and imposing temporary surcharges on imports to redress the trade deficit. While these were ineffective, market fundamentalists have been wrong to blame them for the high inflation of the later 1970s, which resulted from the increase in oil prices associated with the Yom Kippur War and the 1979 Iranian revolution.

Just as he found a like-minded geopolitical realist in Henry Kissinger, Nixon found an economic nationalist ally in his Treasury secretary, John Connally, who told a group of economists: “The foreigners are out to screw us. It is our job to screw them first. Thank you for your help.”    

Fervent support for free trade was another traditionally Democratic value that Reagan helped to graft onto the historically protectionist, pro-manufacturing Republican Party. While Nixon the realist was willing to sacrifice the world economy to US national economic interests, for Reagan, as for other Wilsonians, the promotion of global free trade was inseparable from the promotion of world peace. In 1988, Reagan said: “I recognize … the inescapable conclusion that all of history has taught: the freer the flow of world trade, the stronger the tides of human progress and peace among nations.”

The few cases in which Reagan as president reluctantly and temporarily used tariffs and quotas to protect industries like cars, steel, and motorcycles were deviations from his free-market dogmatism. Again and again, Reagan unpatriotically smeared the American victims of foreign unfair trade practices by mercantilist regimes like Japan and South Korea. In a 1987 radio talk, Reagan blamed American trade deficits on the alleged inferiority of American products: “The way up and out of the trade deficit is not protectionism, not bringing down the competition, but instead the answer lies in improving our products and increasing our exports.”

In a 1987 speech in Cleveland, Reagan asserted that America’s trade deficit was a sign of strength. In 1985, Reagan asserted that the financialization of the US economy was an adequate substitute for the loss of manufacturing when he complained that trade deficit statistics did not count the “billions of dollars of foreign capital” that had been “invested in our government bonds … because we are the best and safest investment in the world today.”

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The harm done by Reagan and Reaganism to American manufacturing was not limited to rhetoric. In 1971, the Nixon administration protected the American textile industry by imposing quotas under the Trading with the Enemy Act. In contrast, Reagan vetoed the Textile Apparel and Footwear Trade Act of 1988, claiming, “This bill represents protectionism at its worst. The supposed benefits of the bill would be temporary at best. Protectionism does not save jobs. Only improved competitiveness can truly protect jobs, yet there is nothing in this bill that would encourage domestic industries to become more competitive.”  

As he had so often done before, Reagan blamed Americans instead of foreign mercantilists for the struggles of American industry in global markets, ignoring the fact that American manufacturers couldn’t compete with foreign cheap labor or foreign government subsidies.  Today, the United States has one of the world’s largest markets for textiles, but 98% of textiles sold in the country are manufactured abroad. 

Americans were shocked to learn during the pandemic that the United States is dependent upon foreign countries, including Communist China, for protective textiles and apparel. Thanks, Mr. Reagan!

In 1970, Nixon sought to defend American shipbuilding from foreign rivalry with the Merchant Marine Act of 1970, which provided a variety of subsidies for the American construction of ships engaged in foreign trade. A little more than a decade later, Reagan eliminated these subsidies for the strategic civilian shipbuilding industry on the advice of his aide Martin Anderson, a free-market extremist who, along with his wife, had been a personal disciple of Ayn Rand — the radical-libertarian guru. In 1977, before Reagan, America had 77 sea-going commercial ships on order. In 2023, thanks to Reagan and his successors who shared his indifference to the survival of America’s merchant marine, the United States had only 5, compared to China’s 1,749.

Finally, Nixonism and Reaganism differ on the subject of the government’s relationship with labor. Because the majority of the people in a modern nation are wage earners, not capitalists or managers, no nationalist politics can be authentic unless it defends the interests of the national working class. And the lack of bargaining power of ordinary workers with most employers requires that employer-labor-market power must be countervailed, either through collective bargaining or direct government regulation.

With most other Republicans, the young Nixon in 1947 voted for the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act that allowed state “right-to-work” laws. But as a presidential candidate in 1960, he declared: “As far as the right-to-work law, itself, is concerned, I oppose any such law nationally.” 

As president, Nixon opposed labor leaders aligned with the Democrats, including Leonard Woodcock of the United Auto Workers, who made it onto Nixon’s secret “enemies list.” But he courted George Meany, the head of the AFL-CIO, and he sought the support of the Teamsters Union, declaring in 1971: “It is all too often taken for granted that the daily efforts of Teamster union members are a cornerstone of the American economic structure.” In his second term, as part of his outreach to unionized workers, Nixon appointed Peter J. Brennan, of the Building and Construction Trades Council of New York, as secretary of labor. 

In contrast, of Reagan’s three secretaries of labor, two — Raymond J. Donovan and Ann McLaughlin — were former corporate executives and the third, William E. Brock, was a career politician from Tennessee. Although he had been head of an AFL-CIO-affiliated union, the Screen Actors Guild, Reagan as president broke with the tradition of earlier Republican leaders like Nixon and Eisenhower and Coolidge who attempted to at least appear even-handed toward management and labor. 

In addition to breaking a strike in 1981 by firing 11,000 federal air-traffic controllers, Reagan stacked the National Labor Relations Board with anti-union, management-aligned appointees whose decisions restricted worker rights and expanded employer power.

To lead the NLRB, Reagan appointed Donald Dotson, who claimed that unions were responsible for “destruction of individual freedom.”

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Reagan, the former “traveling ambassador” of General Electric in the 1950s, did the bidding of his corporate and capitalist backers in promoting right-to-work laws, hampering federal enforcement of worker rights, and seeking to weaken child-labor laws. Reagan also sought to supply American businesses with wage-suppressing mass immigration. In 1984, Reagan declared: “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though, sometime back, they may have entered illegally.” 

Reagan repeated the employer-lobby propaganda line that illegal immigrants do jobs that Americans refuse to do at any wage. In a radio address in 1977, Reagan mocked “the illegal alien fuss”: “Are great numbers of our unemployed really victims of the illegal alien invasion, or are those illegal tourists actually doing work our own people won’t do?”

The major immigration law that Reagan signed, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, was a gift to cheap-labor employers at the cost of American workers. The law provided an amnesty for nearly 3 million illegal immigrants. To deter future illegal immigration, the law created penalties for employers who hire illegal immigrant workers — but thanks to business lobbying, under Reagan and his successors of both parties in the White House, including Trump, employer penalties have almost never been imposed. 

Meanwhile, to ensure that employers deprived of illegal immigrant labor did not necessarily need to hire American citizens and legal immigrants at higher wages, IRCA also increased the number of “guest workers” — a euphemism for foreign serfs with fewer rights than American workers who are indentured to their employers or labor contractors.

Not content with forcing US workers to compete with greater numbers of unfree, poorly paid “guest workers” on American soil, Reagan sought to merge America’s labor market with those of low-wage nations. During his 1980 presidential campaign, Reagan proposed a free-trade agreement between the United States and Mexico that influenced the later North American Free Trade Agreement, under which entire US industries were gutted as employers sought cheaper labor south of the border.  

In his 1988 State of the Union address, Reagan told Congress: “Our goal must be a day when the free flow of trade, from the tip of Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic Circle, unites the people of the Western Hemisphere in a bond of mutually beneficial exchange.”

Reagan’s wish was indistinguishable from that of Hillary Clinton, who in 2016 told Latin-American bankers that her “dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders.…”

The Reaganite synthesis of market fundamentalism, mass immigration, crusading democratic globalism, and anti-worker labor policy weakened the United States and contributed to the backlash that brought Trump to power twice. In fairness, the dwindling and aging number of Reagan’s Old Right defenders are correct about one thing: he was “inspirational” and “sunny” and “optimistic.”

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Donald Trump borrowed his slogan “Make America Great Again” from Reagan. But in many ways, he belongs in the Nixonian tradition.

Trump’s aggressive promotion of what he considers the national interest, at the expense of allies and without moralistic rhetoric, is distinctly Nixonian. The first Trump administration’s National Security strategy in 2017 contained the line: “An America First National Security Strategy … is a strategy of principled realism that is guided by outcomes, not ideology.” 

“Out with utopian idealism, in with hard-nosed realism,” declared Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in December 2025, in a speech at the Reagan Library (the Nixon Library might have been a more appropriate venue).

The exception to Trump’s realism is the disastrous Israeli-American war against Iran, which Trump might have avoided had he followed a precept of Kissinger in the Nixon years: “Our interests shall shape our commitments, rather than the other way around.”

In trade, too, Trump is a Nixonian nationalist, replicating the Nixon Shocks of the 1970s with frequent use of tariffs and other shocking departures of his own from the former free-trade globalist consensus.

Long before Trump in 2016 declared that “I love the poorly educated,” Nixon told some of his advisers in 1971 that “when we need support on tough problems, the uneducated are the ones that are with us.” In contrast: “When you have to call on the nation to be strong — on such things as drugs, crime, defense, our basic national position — the educated people and the leader class no longer have any character, and you can’t count on them.” For this reason, Nixon rejected anti-union conservatism and told his staff that it was “vital that we continue to recognize and work with [workers] and that we not attack unions which represent the organized structure of the working man.”

But Nixon’s outreach to organized labor was sincere and consistent, unlike Trump’s, which combines symbolism — like having Teamsters President Sean O’Brien address the 2024 Republican National Convention — with standard Right-wing anti-union policies. And instead of making the case that immigration restriction, by creating tight labor markets, can force employers to raise wages, Trump has appealed to nativist racism, describing most Mexican immigrants as criminals, and accusing Haitians of eating pets, while favoring white South Africans in refugee policy. Instead of insisting on a universal E-Verify mandate on employers, Trump has ordered ICE to forgo raids on farms dependent on cheap labor and expanded programs for unfree foreign guest workers.

Trumpism, then, is an incoherent mixture of Nixonism in defense and trade policy and anti-worker and anti-safety-net policies in the Reagan-Bush tradition. Even worse, Trump in his two terms as president has emulated some of the worst aspects of Richard Nixon, from claiming effectively unlimited powers for the executive branch to weaponizing the Department of Justice and other agencies against personal and partisan enemies.

Overall, Trump has accelerated the rejection by Republicans of the transplanted Democratic globalism of Reagan and the neocons and the party’s return to its historic nationalist tradition.  Just as Nixonism is more defensible than Nixon, a thoughtful version of Trumpism without Trump after 2028 would be better than a disastrous revival of Reaganism.

He is us, an equal creation of the Left and the Right, and our leaders will all be Trumps from now on — unless we do something. Gavin Newsom, the democratic frontrunner for 2028 has explicitly styled himself after Trump. And a new crop of politicians from Republican James Fishback in Florida to Democrat Kat Abughazaleh in Chicago have adopted his divisive, confrontation-all-the-time style.   

I first noticed the total-hatred phenomenon while living in Moscow in 2004, in the months leading up to the Orange Revolution. At that time, a corrupt outgoing president of the Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma, widely seen as a Kremlin puppet, had anointed his corrupt, Russian-leaning prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych, a representative of the oligarchic crime syndicate from the Donbas, as a successor. Yanukovych was facing a stiff challenge from the Western-leaning Viktor Yushchenko, who was campaigning against corruption and who had been spectacularly disfigured by an attempted assassination with the poison dioxin. 

To Americans in Moscow, already high on blue passports and cultural superiority, and to the Western-leaning Ukrainians among us, this was a clear battle of democracy against autocracy, and good against evil, with Yushchenko’s scarred face as a banner to elicit passionate feelings of outrage and righteousness. It was easy to dismiss the more pragmatic Russian opinion: that Yushchenko was merely the representative of a different crime syndicate; and that Russia and Ukraine were neighbors with mixed populations and deeply intertwined trade and military relationships, and they had to get along.

Prior to this point, at least in the United States, politics had been the business of politicians and a niche interest among wonks and lobbyists. To the extent that anyone got angry at their friends over dinner over the issues of the day, it was a foible. We lambasted our presidents — Reagan was an evil representative of wealth and greed, Clinton a liar with bad morals, George W. legendarily stupid. But personally, passionately, hating them, and delegitimizing them through the intensity of our hatred, that was still in its infancy.

Yanukovych — who appeared to deserve it — was the first politician I saw receive this kind of total character annihilation. 

He was a criminal and a rapist, Ukrainian friends told me, a person so tarred by savagery that any means were necessary to prevent his ascendency. One young Ukrainian woman, married to an American banker, trembled with rage when she discussed him over drinks. Her anger seemed so justified that it was easy not to notice that it shut down consideration of the issues. Frankly, there didn’t seem to be any issues — always a warning sign.

According to the website of the now-shuttered, reformist English-language daily The Moscow Times, Yanukovych was convicted for robbery as a teenager, served time three years later for severely beating someone, and was accused of large-scale theft, tearing earrings from people’s ears, and an attempted rape, all prior to being appointed Kuchma’s prime minister as a representative of the Donetsk oligarchy. Records of these crimes were missing from the local police stations that handled the crimes. 

In the event, Yanukovych won the election, which was swiftly condemned as rigged by then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell. My Ukrainian friends decamped Moscow for Maidan Square and, along with many others, overturned the election through sheer force of rage, and the rest was a beautiful Orange victory for democracy. 

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Except, from this early, larval form of total-virtue politics, sprung the hideous insect of total-hatred politics that afflicts us today. 

Total hatred, on the Left, is the belief that our political opponents are not just people with reasonable disagreements about how to achieve the common good, or different beliefs about what the common good should be — but that they are, personally, bad people, who want something bad, and their leaders are really bad people. To demonstrate your hatred of these bad people, in the most explicit and grotesque terms possible, becomes the highest good. You #Resist, nevermind that you’re resisting the results of a free and fair election in your own country. 

Trump Derangement Syndrome, of course, is the flower of total-hatred politics; as is cancel culture, and the split between Twitter and Bluesky, and all the broken families and broken friendships that have come in the wake of polarization. The arts have fallen victim, with satire and rage becoming the dominant mode of production. The Netanyahus, a satirical, fictionalized version of Bibi’s family’s visit to Harold Bloom at Cornell in 1960, by Joshua Cohen, won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2022. Satirist laureate George Saunders, once a good writer, has turned full-time to Trump-parody dreck. Since when has it been a virtue to make each other appear worse than we are? Performances demeaning the American president — he’s a giant inflatable toddler, wearing a crown! — have become so routine that even The New York Times is bored. 

The hatred has never felt quite so personal coming from the Right, but it’s equally destructive, taking the form of pointless norm-breaking, aggression, and rebellion against perceived injustices from the Left. One of the most insightful comments I’ve seen about Trump was that he had a seven-letter platform that starts in F and ends in U. Decisive pluralities of Americans voted for this — and relished doing so. And now we’re seeing the fruits. 

F-U to the Gulf of Mexico, to Europe, to Greenland, to Venezuela, to Iran. F-U to the illegal immigrants, and to the blue states that want to shield them, and to the many Americans who will be distressed by seeing long-standing neighbors ripped from their homes and deported.

Neither form of hatred has respect for American institutions or the rule of law. Democrats turned the mainstream media into organs of overt activism, discriminated based on race, passed off a vegetative president, and engaged in frivolous impeachments. Republicans are attacking free speech and academic freedom, and breaking norms on a massive scale. 

The emotional manifestation of total hatred is an urge toward murder and death, as we can see on social media, where calls for people to die have become their own form of parody. Trump should die. Netanyahu should die. A departing editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books thinks that the upper management — of a nonprofit book review — should die (for failing to pay staff and contributors). And of course, people are actually killing each other or trying to: Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk, Renee Good, Alex Pretti, three people in an Austin bar on Sunday. 

The political manifestation is what we have today: a politics that is increasingly incoherent, illiberal, and anti-democratic, and which makes no effort to fulfill its core function of negotiating a shared settlement. When the Democrats are in power, they illegally throw open the borders. When the Republicans take their place, they pursue the legitimate end of deporting people by cruel means. They kill people.  “Fuck Trump” and “Fuck ICE” the other side responds, and surges onto the streets to carry out its agenda by force.  

When we discuss this kind of dynamic, the usual culprit is social media. As the writer Freddie DeBoer once said, “the human mind was not meant to be constantly rubbing up against other human minds.” 

And surely that’s been an accelerant, but I’d place the moment we gave up on each other many years earlier, during the transition that, paradoxically, occurred with the triumph of Western liberal democracy in the post-Cold War era. 

Which brings us back to my first brush with Ukrainian hate politics. The fall of the Soviet Union was perceived as a victory for the West, chalked up to Ronald Reagan’s commitment to the arms race and his promotion of democracy and American values. Reagan’s foreign policy was a pivot for Republicans, who had previously stuck to a Kissinger doctrine of realpolitik — the idea that politicians should seek stability, rather than pursue a foreign policy that promoted ideology. Arguably, realpolitik worked — at least, it was inclusive, in the form of Nixon bringing both China and Russian into political relation — but it was easy to brand as both amoral and soft, and we’ve abandoned it. With Reagan, it became impermissible to demand anything less than Total Victory Over Evil in foreign policy.

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The moral high produced by winning the Cold War has been long-lasting. Star Trek: The Next Generation, a deeply influential and treacly good television show about exporting liberal democracy to the entire galaxy aired from 1987 to 1994. The West Wing, a similar idealization of the liberal project, ran from 1999 to 2006. The Wire, from 2002 to 2008, a deeply influential show that formed the moral architecture of most of today’s educated Left, was a grittier version of the same good-versus-evil narrative. These shows ran through the presidencies of George H. W. Bush to Bill Clinton, George W. Bush to Obama, all offering different flavors of the same virtue. A virtue that criticizes America, to be sure, but in the deep grounding of each human soul, a prideful, crusading one, that tells us we’re the good guys.  

This has rendered us unable to face reality and grapple with opposition. If Evil Russia has interests in Ukraine, we erase them. If Muslim theocrats wouldn’t actually be nice people to live with, and that contradicts our tolerant self-image, we deny it (Queers for Palestine, folks. Hands off Iran). If people in our own country aren’t totally with the program, we bully them into submission. And it’s that slippery spot where we can’t see our own pride that has shifted the political ground from reason to emotion, and from negotiation to sheer rage.

 Democracy is better than autocracy; Viktor Yanukovych stole an election and was a bad guy; Ukraine should be allowed to govern itself — none of these things is wrong. But promoting these goals in a complex world requires a foundation in the older, more rigorous Judeo-Christian values, which caution against pride, and promote self-sacrifice, and don’t ever allow us to view the other as all-bad. 

Without this kind of tempering, we get total virtue, and its corollary, total hatred. 

The pitiful fact is that unlike most political problems, the power to end total hatred really does rest in the hands the individual haters — in their personal relationships (stop canceling your friends and family), in how they behave online (stop telling people to die), and in how they consider their politics (consider the other side; give more than you’d like to). Given the state of world and domestic affairs, it would be impossible not to be angry; everyone is angry. But the first step toward healing the body politic and ourselves would be to consider that a vice. 

I still feel there’s a grain of truth in that vision of Thatcher as a nursery dominatrix, thrashing grown-up little boys who confuse punishment with love. But now I’m 57, I realize the reason Thatcher made our podium is more obvious. A powerful, intelligent woman who knows her mind and is unafraid to use her sexuality as part of her arsenal can act as catnip on certain men.

A new, pleasingly unconventional biography of Thatcher, The Incidental Feminist: Friend, foe, femme fatale? by Tina Gaudoin, places much of its focus on what sociologist Catherine Hakim terms “erotic capital” — the way personal assets, such as glamour and sex appeal, can be used to gain social and economic advantage. Instead of looking at the leader’s political legacy, Gaudoin tracks down Thatcher the woman: daughter, sister, wife, mother, fashion lover, flirt, manipulator of men. The book examines how the Finchley coquette’s utilization of feminine qualities propelled her to the top job, with chapters titled “Autistic Glamour Puss”, “Warrior Queen, Gender Blender?” and “All the Prime Minister’s Men”.

For all the “Attila the Hen” labels and Spitting Image’s puppet of a beaked PM standing at a urinal in a man’s suit, what stands out now is the constant sexual appraisal of a woman who was 53 when she entered Downing Street and 65 when she left. In 1989, Vanity Fair ran a major interview with Thatcher by Gail Sheehy, which contained the following frothy passage: “President Mitterrand says Britain’s prime minister ‘has eyes like Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe’. She also has the nerves of a five-star general and, increasingly, the sexual charisma of a woman in her prime. She manipulates her court of bedazzled male advisers with the skill of Elizabeth I.”

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If you think Sheehy’s wildly overstating the case, here’s a tableau I witnessed at the Spectator summer party in July 1992. I arrived just as a car drew up amid a cascade of paparazzi flashes; the former prime minister, dressed to the nines, stepped out and was greeted by a phalanx of adoring young fogeys with Simon Heffer at the fore. I recall thinking I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had laid down his immaculate linen jacket for her to tread on. For one surreal moment, in the crammed entrance corridor, I found myself bosom-to-bosom with Thatcher, looking into her blue eyes (which didn’t alight on me) and imbibing the heady cocktail of fame, glamour and mythology still in the making.

That, however, wasn’t the first time I registered Thatcher’s erotic allure. This happened earlier, in 1988, when a friend from university invited me to join her family for a country walk. Her charming father was Peter Snow, renowned for Newsnight’s election night “swingometer”. At some point in the conversation he made reference to the PM’s sex appeal, which his daughter and I — with all the callowness of youth — found impossible to countenance. How could the 60-something villainess of the Poll Tax, with her roller-set hair and pussy-bow blouses, possibly be seductive?

Nearly four decades later, I realize Snow was just one in a sizeable cohort of media men who — if not all ardent admirers — couldn’t help but relish the way Thatcher deployed her femininity (rather as many media men and politicos now battle inconvenient attraction to Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni). Peter’s cousin, Jon Snow, said of encounters with the Tory PM, “she enjoyed being a woman and I enjoyed being a man”. John Sergeant, the BBC’s former chief political correspondent, admitted on Michael Parkinson’s chat show in 2005 that Thatcher “could be… sexy, almost”. He explained that it was “unusual” in the Eighties “for a prime minister, or powerful woman of any sort, to put her hand on your arm and she could do that to devastating effect. And I would tend to weaken, I must admit.”

Thatcher’s allure was carefully cultivated, as Gaudoin’s book reveals. Childhood letters to her older sister Muriel reveal a passion for cinema, but also for clothes and quality lingerie. I hadn’t anticipated quite so much bra shopping. There’s even a moment on a trip via London when teenage Margaret fibs to her parents about the day’s trajectory and absconds to Bond Street.

Over the years, Thatcher’s love of fashion and finery was honed for strategic effect. When she won the Tory nomination for Finchley in 1959, an Evening Standard headline blazed: “Tories Choose Beauty.” She would go on to appear in Vogue four times. One fascinating example of Thatcher maximizing personal effect is the private deportment classes she took from Laurence Olivier, arranged by her speech writer Ronald Millar. She was advised by the thespian to take long confident strides, and to use her eyes to seduce and flirt.

Thatcher’s use of fashion as a seductive power ploy became even more effective when she took on Margaret King as a personal stylist. The Aquascutum director sharpened Thatcher’s look for a state visit to Russia in 1987, as a guest of Mikhail Gorbachev. Gaudoin describes King’s vision for Thatcher as “a kind of Julie Christie in Doctor Zhivago meets Sigourney Weaver as the boss in Working Girl”. The PM even wore a Lara-style fur hat. So successful was the Moscow visit that the Mirror ran a photo hoax on the next April Fool’s Day, using Thatcher and Gorbachev lookalikes cuddling up to one another in Gorky Park. Many readers fell for it.

Prime-ministerial tendresses appear to have cropped up all over. The Australian CEO and diplomat Sandy Holloway recalled attending a private Downing Street dinner for Australian leader Bob Hawke, and sitting next to Neil Kinnock who said, “You just watch how Margaret flirts with Bob.” Although, of course, that was a mere flicker compared to the flame that developed between Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Charles Moore once said that, “She had a sort of, it sounds a bit explicit to say, a sexual attraction” to the US president. It’s just as well Nancy and Denis got on too, so no one was left feeling too much of a wallflower. But the Reagan pash lends weight to Kinnock’s observation: “All of Margaret Thatcher’s favorite men and those she promoted, sometimes way beyond their abilities, looked as though they’d walked out of a 1950s B-movie.”

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Gaudoin takes Kinnock to task in the book for oversimplifying Thatcher’s predilections. She agrees the PM appreciated good-looking men. But argues that “she also liked men who flattered, and those with brains, tenacity and, to put it bluntly, balls”. The chevaliers and stalwarts are there, like Airey Neave, Robin Butler and Willie Whitelaw, who inspired her immortal line “every prime minister needs a Willie”. But there’s a more fun list of bounders: Cecil Parkinson, Jeffrey Archer, Alan Clarke, Jonathan Aitken and PR advisor Tim Bell (who boasted about putting his hand on the PM’s knee). It’s worth noting that the supposedly devout Methodist PM readily overlooked her favorites’ peccadilloes; perhaps because, in some part of her brain formed by wartime movies, she was swooning in their arms too.

Conservative women MPs didn’t enjoy the same leeway as the chaps with Thatcher. Those who succeeded — Virginia Bottomley, Edwina Currie and Gillian Shephard — did so for many of the same reasons she had: talent, graft, good hair, and persuading constituencies that they were good political housekeepers. Thatcher was never a “sister” and wasn’t even all that sisterly to Muriel, who she once alluded to in the past tense while still alive. Gaudoin makes it clear that it was the leader’s forward-propulsion and sense she was any man’s equal that rendered her an “incidental” feminist. In his 1990 TV interview with Thatcher, Terry Wogan says of male media interrogators: “They don’t seem to make any concession to the fact you’re a woman.” Thatcher flashes back at Wogan — another favorite — “Why should they? I don’t make any concession to the fact that they’re men.”

Notably, the one man who didn’t seem to attract Thatcher much at first was Denis Thatcher. Both Charles Moore and Gaudoin deduced from the Muriel letters that 20-something Margaret’s preferred suitor was a medical superintendent twice her age, Robert Henderson, inventor of the iron lung. There’s a tantalizing mention of an overnight stay with Roberts at a hotel in Eastbourne, but no indication of similar intimacy with poor, patient Denis who she was running alongside the medic. Then Henderson suddenly disappears from the correspondence and Margaret Roberts marries the man whose loyal support — and money — would allow her to fulfill her political ambitions.

It strikes me now that this long, stable, unsexy but mutually supportive marriage may, in itself, have contributed to Thatcher’s erotic glamour. For certain individuals, there are few things quite as tantalizing as an attractive woman (or man) who is unavailable, but happy to deploy their sexual energy within safe boundaries. Denis gave her that freedom and perhaps took a little for himself. I was intrigued to learn via the book of his late-blossoming friendship with Marilyn Foreman, better known as Mandy Rice-Davies of the Profumo Affair.

In the end, Woodrow Wyatt speaks for all of Thatcher’s admirers, the overgrown schoolboys who doted on matron: “I was in love with her, yes, but I suppose in the best platonic manner because — well, she was a marvelous girl… her skin was glowing and she had very fine legs.” You can’t help suspecting that for all Thatcher’s political achievements, that gushing appreciation of her sexual charisma might be her preferred epitaph.

There is even a move to re-evaluate his one-term presidency. Ejected from office in 1981 with abysmal polling numbers, the economy in a mess, and his party at war with itself, his years in the White House are now presented by his liberal fans as a triumph of far-sighted policymaking with a surprisingly enduring legacy. The distinguished political journalist Jonathan Alter has hailed Carter’s “visionary domestic achievements”. He appointed more female judges than all his predecessors put together (although, bathetically, he is the only president to serve a full term without being able to appoint a Supreme Court justice). Fifteen pieces of environmental legislation were passed on Carter’s watch, doubling the size of the national parks and providing subsidy for green energy. He liked to think of himself as a scientist (sometimes rather exaggerating his naval officer training to describe himself as a “nuclear engineer”) and recognised the impact on the climate of fossil fuels. He even installed solar panels on the White House roof (President Reagan had them ripped off, shipping one of the panels to the Carter Library, which seems like a rather pointed act of trolling).

In foreign policy, Carter’s crowning achievement was the Camp David accords in 1978 — the peace agreement signed between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, a rare moment of hope in the Middle East. The accords were a genuine achievement for a modest man who nevertheless had a deep, if sometimes misplaced, faith in his ability to bring people together.

Even so: poor old Jimmy Carter. For all of these achievements, and for all his manifold personal virtues, he remains the cardigan-wearer who nagged Americans to turn the thermostat down, the lonely fisherman in a pond in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, who was implausibly attacked by a hitherto unknown creature called a “swamp rabbit”. His relations with Congress — which was, after all, controlled by his own party — were probably the worst of any president since Andrew Johnson provoked the House of Representatives into impeaching him in 1868. Tip O’Neill, the long-standing House Speaker couldn’t stand the peanut farmer from Georgia, regarding him as a provincial who thought he was above having to learn Washington’s ways. Carter once invited O’Neill to the White House for breakfast but served him cookies and coffee instead of ham and eggs. In a misguided economy drive, he stopped serving liquor at receptions. Carter gave the impression that the only reason to pass legislation was because it was the Right Thing To Do, which was almost the opposite of how Washington politicians understood it. The result was that, despite big majorities and a relatively successful “batting average” in getting bills through Congress, important legislation on health care, tax and welfare reform failed. Long lines at gas stations were an everyday testimony to Carter’s failure to grip inflation and the energy supply crisis. And with fatal political consequences, he appeared to dither over the American hostages in Tehran.

His appeal in the 1976 election was as the un-Nixon. He grinned rather than grimaced. He was a fair-haired Southerner who promised, like a Boy Scout, to do his best, who would roll up his sleeves and mend the machinery of government. It is true that back when he ran for the Georgia governorship in 1970, Carter had not been above a few pseudo-Nixonian nods and winks to segregationists, but once in office he was clear as a bell in his opposition to racial discrimination. With Carter, there was no profanity, no wiretaps, no hush-money payments, no impeachment — and no White House taping system for the benefit of future historians. So undoubtedly, he was a triumphant success at Not Being Nixon. But that is a low bar.

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We can admire the rise to the presidency of someone so fundamentally honest — not least in the light of some of his successors. But the unfortunate truth is that Jimmy Carter could be excruciatingly inept at the business of politics, which is to say the business of winning power and using it. He was a prophet cast into a nation of sinners, and the trouble is he talked like one.

The best example is his so-called “malaise speech”, a televised address to the American people on July 15, 1979, which he had originally intended to be an address about the OPEC-instigated energy crisis but became instead a meditation on the “crisis of confidence” facing the nation. (He never actually used the word “malaise”, though it suited his opponents’ purposes to imply that he did). If the 1983 Labour Party manifesto was supposedly the “longest suicide note in history”, Carter’s half-hour-long sermon, mixing self-pity and moral exhortation, must have come close. Certainly, it’s hard to think of another politician who more publicly admitted failure.

In the 10 days before his address, Carter had invited a cross-section of Americans to Camp David to listen to their advice. Not just business, religious and political leaders but ordinary citizens too. He sat there in the presidential retreat soaking up their advice and their abuse and then, astonishingly, read out some of their most pungent criticisms on live TV. “Mr President, you are not leading this nation — you’re just managing the government,” one of them told him. Another said, “you don’t see the people enough anymore.” He had worked hard to enact his campaign promises, he said. And then added, rather plaintively, “but, I have to admit, with just mixed success”. Oh dear.

And then came the main body of the homily. The President paused, looked earnestly into the camera, and told Americans that “all the legislation in the world can’t fix what’s wrong with America”. There was a challenge “more serious than energy or inflation”, one that was a “fundamental threat to American democracy”. That challenge was a “crisis of confidence”.

A few weeks before this weirdly compelling, disconcerting TV appearance, Carter had met the cultural historian Christopher Lasch, whose book The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations had been published earlier that year. Lasch argued that the decline of paternal authority and excessive consumption had fundamentally altered American culture since the Fifties. A new personality type consistent with “pathological narcissism” had been normalised. Lasch’s ideas were imprinted all over Carter’s speech. We used to be a nation that “was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and… faith in God,” said the President. Now, “too many of us… tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.” In a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone, the President was blunt: “We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”

So, what was to be done? Well that, in the end, was up to the viewers. It was hard being President, Carter was saying, and try as he might, there wasn’t much he could do about so fundamental a dislocation in American culture. Since we, the people, were the ones who had lost confidence, it was the people, ultimately, who had to get us out of the mess.

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The only other speech in the canon of American presidential rhetoric comparable to Carter’s “crisis of confidence” speech is Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address in March 1865. At his moment of victory, with the Confederacy on the point of total destruction, Lincoln did the most extraordinary thing — he blamed everyone, Northerners as well as Southerners, himself just as much as his enemies on the battlefield, for the sin of slavery that had caused the war. Self-abasement can work as a political strategy, but to put it mildly, it’s a brave choice.

As Carter’s present-day defenders are quick to point out, the “crisis of confidence” speech initially seemed to go well. He had a polling bump. The White House received warm messages of support from citizens who were heartened to hear a president speaking the truth. But over time, the speech was reframed, as speeches always are, by the wider reputation of the speaker. For Carter’s enemies — and there were many — the speech made their case for them. “You see paralysis and stagnation and drift,” Carter said, truthfully. “You don’t like it, and neither do I.”

His great Capitol Hill rival Ted Kennedy didn’t hide his disdain: “Now, the people are blamed for every national ill, scolded as greedy, wasteful, and mired in malaise.” The youngest Kennedy brother’s decision to challenge the President in the Democratic primaries wounded Carter badly. But waiting in the wings was Carter’s ultimate nemesis, Ronald Reagan. There are some, said Reagan pointedly, in his twinkly way, who claim “that our energy is spent, our days of greatness at an end, that a great national malaise is upon us”. They say, “we must cut our expectations, conserve and withdraw, that we must tell our children not to dream as we once dreamed.”

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Unsurprisingly, in the midst of inflation and unemployment, Reagan’s feel-good let-it-rip optimism crushed Carter’s earnest calls for restraint and faithfulness. In an era of close elections and intense bipartisanship, it can be startling to look at the electoral college map for 1980. Reagan carried 44 states. Poor old Jimmy Carter.

Carter was unlucky in some respects. He faced a series of interlocking economic challenges that would have daunted any occupant of the White House. But in other ways, he had a golden opportunity when he came into office in 1977. America was not at war, there was unified control of Congress, and while he faced his fair share of crises at home and abroad, there was nothing on the scale of the dramas that others faced: no big terrorist attack, no threat of a nuclear exchange, no great civil unrest, no pandemic. How on earth, then, did he end up mournfully speaking to the voters about their lack of confidence?

With Christopher Lasch’s words in his mind, Carter was not necessarily wrong about the culture of narcissism. Donald Trump, after all, is the apotheosis of pathological narcissism, his election a dystopian fulfilment of Lasch’s worst nightmare. But Carter was very mistaken if he thought that such a profound psychological and cultural shift could be combatted by earnest exhortations from the Oval Office. “This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning,” he said. Fair enough, but sometimes the larger interests of a political project require politicians to hold back the unvarnished truth. His political opponents’ characterisation of his speech as entirely negative were unfair — he ended with a painfully sincere plea for Americans to “join hands” and commit to the “rebirth of the American spirit”. But what might work in a Sunday School didn’t work in a big and complex polity, at least not when Reagan was more than willing to give messages of happiness and reassurance. Poor old Jimmy Carter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a salutary reminder that the taming of the American wilderness was only ever provisional. And the broader political and cultural response to such forces of nature in turn reveals an unexpected twist, in the ongoing election-year battle for the future of the American empire.

Bears once stood for everything about the American wilderness that had to be conquered. Early pioneers gained ground for their settlements via a pitched battle with the bears. As journalist Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling puts it, they hated their ursine foes “with the sizzling, white-hot hatred that comes from living in constant fear”. Marauding bears would eat crops, livestock, or even — sometimes — human children. In response, the settlers hunted them ruthlessly, gradually beating back the bear population and wild forest to create space for farming.

In the 21st century, though, as Hongoltz-Hetling recounts, the same stubborn individualism that sustained such settlers in their endeavour ended up inviting the bears back in. In A Libertarian Walks Into A Bear (2020), he describes how a libertarian takeover of Grafton, New Hampshire failed after their aversion to collective action left them unable to maintain consistent, community-wide bear-proofing measures, such as secure bins. As a result, the local bear population grew dangerously numerous and intrusive, eventually precipitating the initiative’s collapse.

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The inference of this cautionary tale is perhaps that we’re all only as radically independent as technological buffers against the elements (and bears) make us. Radical individualism, ironically, works best in a context already pre-cleansed of the kind of material threats that require human cooperation and ingenuity to overcome. And this matters: for despite the fact that America’s continent and civilisation are more stereotypically associated, today, with ultra-processed lifestyles of junk food, air conditioning, and driving everywhere, its forests are still there, and still full of bears.

This is difficult to grasp in Britain. Despite the best efforts of rewilding campaigners to reintroduce wolves and even bears to the temperate British Isles, humans have been apex predators here since the last wolf was killed in 1390. This epistemological gap is no doubt worsened by the urge to reimagine Alaskan brown bears as game-show contestants; something that also attests to just how far modern America has also slid toward forgetting its own underlying wildness.

America’s founding economy was one of republican localism, practical industry, and (in some regions) an ongoing war of attrition against the wilderness (including its bears). But modern, imperial America achieved hegemony precisely by tilting away from material practicality, toward an economy of ideas and information. And those of us out here on the imperial periphery, meanwhile, receive little except the culture that empire has since exported globally: one more likely to foreground the comic anthropomorphism of Fat Bear Week and Disney’s Baloo than the grim-faced, gun-toting mindset of American settlers guarding crops and livestock in 18th-century New Hampshire.

And as its reach has expanded and de-materialised, so America’s governance has also adjusted from the original, fiercely localist model beloved of the early settlers, toward a more centralised and managerial one. First articulated by Woodrow Wilson, this “progressive” mode of governance views the checks and balances baked into the older American republican tradition less as enabling conditions for liberty, than as obstacles to progress. In turn, one conservative commentator has recently characterised the resulting imperial order as no longer republican at all, but rather a “total state” that subordinates atomised individuals to a totalising, technocratic tyranny.

And whether or not they go this far, many modern conservative critics yearn for that bygone localism — even as others worry that the modern polity no longer possesses what Tocqueville called the “habits of the heart” required to achieve it. After all, the success of early American settlers at cooperative bear-hunting suggests they excelled at working together on highly focused local objectives. But following a century of imperial expansion, material comfort, and Wilsonian technocracy, is this still true? And yet, even if these habits of the heart have withered somewhat through lack of use, it’s possible they will be forced to make a comeback, for the same reason as Grafton’s libertarian experiment failed: keeping back the wilderness is not an achievement but an ongoing war of attrition.

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In the American interior, this war has lost manpower as well as (perhaps) “habits of the heart”. Even as Wilsonian technocracy undermined republican praxis, the information economy drained talent to urban centres and the American coasts. In turn, as Hongoltz-Hetling recounts, much of the New Hampshire wilderness once clear-cut for farming has regrown — and as the woods have encroached, so have the bears.

But this is bringing its own backlash. For America’s persistent wildness exists in constant challenge to the softer coastal culture of bureaucracy and anthropomorphic bears. This, at least, is one interpretation of the way the Helene disaster response has been absorbed into America’s ongoing culture war. Social media has been full of images of aid efforts organised by practical people: mule trains, dirt bikes, and even Nascar. These images are emblematic of the kind of smaller-scale cooperation and practical skills strongly associated with America’s older “republican” culture. And against this FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has been the subject of rumours and criticism such as having spent its budget on illegal immigrants, or even obstructing independent aid efforts so as to protect for-profit aid contractors or prioritise foreign-policy goals over the needs of citizens.

The US government has made vigorous efforts to debunk these rumours. But they have proliferated because they dovetail so neatly with longstanding perceptions of hostility toward “flyover country” — a world that, in this narrative, is descended from the pioneer culture that first beat back the bears, but whose capacity to flourish has since been parasitised by economic changes, cultural decline, and managerial politics. From this perspective, perceived shortcomings in the federal Helene response demonstrate the weakness of the “total state”, usually identified with the Left. Implicitly: managerial bureaucracy is no more equipped to manage a large-scale hurricane response than the cosseted coastal liberals it sustains would be to cope with a real-life bear, as opposed to one with a cute name on the laptop screen.

But I’m not sure it follows from this that a Trump win in November would tilt the scales back toward the more practical, republican America of collective nostalgia. From what I can make out, all the way across the pond, that capacity to mobilise for prosocial ends is already abundantly in evidence, in local Americans’ self-organised aid efforts. Meanwhile, to date, the main interventions from the Trumpist camp seem to have been firstly amplifying mistrust toward the government, and secondly a contribution of aid by Elon Musk.

This latter intervention is especially significant for the emerging Right-wing consensus, in that it didn’t come in the form of food, vehicles, manpower, or clean-up efforts, but distribution of Starlink satellite wi-fi routers. So much so that, to me, it foreshadows the new “fusionism” emerging out of the cold ashes of the 20th-century Reaganite variety.

The “New Right” has been fiercely divided for some time on what this should look like. Musk’s Starlink transmitters provide the answer. What use, after all, is a Starlink connection when your home has been flattened by a hurricane and the woods are full of bears? Well, one possible answer is that if you can get online it’s much easier to organise help. In other words, that internet connectivity enables the older, more decentralised American sociopolitical model to re-emerge from the technocratic grip of the “total state”.

In the same vein, since buying the social media platform X, Musk has been an energetic advocate of retrieving the republican free speech tradition. But it’s also true that this decentralisation obscures new forms of control. My speech on X is not free in the same sense as, say, a private conversation between two bear-hunters in 18th century New Hampshire — because Elon Musk owns the platform I’m using to speak. The same goes for Starlink, which remains a tool of decentralisation for as long as Musk wants it to be.

What this all foreshadows is a Right-wing consensus that opposes the post-liberal “total state” — but not exactly by trying to reanimate 18th-century republicanism. Where the post-liberal Left dreams of individual freedom governed by omniscient administration, for the post-liberal Right, the way forward looks like a tech superstructure owned and operated by an Olympian class of plutocrats and financiers, within which ordinary people are more or less left to figure it out for themselves.

At ground level, this probably looks like a dividend of freedom and flourishing to those able to forge strong local communities for practical support, while taking advantage of dematerialised opportunities for work or political organising afforded by the digital revolution. And by the same token, for those who lack the connections, capacities, or skills to flourish, it probably means “devil take the hindmost”.

What does any of this matter to the British Isles, thousands of miles away and still (thankfully) innocent of bear-based “rewilding”? Well, as long as Europe lives in the shadow of the American empire, when the Land of the Free sneezes the rest of the world catches cold. So should we end up with a post-liberal Right-wing government at the imperial core, we will probably, in due course, need to rediscover our own modes of localist cooperation. Even if the only bears that trouble us are those of London’s dematerialised, oligarch-riddled, and increasingly American-owned financial markets.

And then came her time in office, all 44 days of it, which saw her grand plans swept into the dustbin of history, along, it seemed, with her reputation. Yet now — with a 4,000-word essay in the Sunday Telegraph and an interview with Spectator TV yesterday — we discover she is mounting something of a comeback, or, at least, a defence of her legacy. Her premiership might not have survived, so the argument seems to go, but her ideas will live on. And she is not Nixon or Reagan, but Barry Goldwater, the Arizonian senator who lost to Lyndon B. Johnson in a landslide in 1964, only to spark an ideological transformation of American politics.

As it happens, the first in Rick Perlstein’s series of books tells this exact story. In Before the Storm, Perlstein describes what came before Nixon and Reagan. Up until 1964, the party political divide in the US was not as simple as it is today. Back then, both parties contained distinctly conservative and liberal wings: southern segregationists and northern liberals in the Democratic Party, for example; Waspish liberals and mid-western conservatives in the Republican. After 1964, the two parties began to divide into more obvious ideological camps, sparked in large part by Johnson’s Civil Rights Act, which outlawed racial segregation.

In 1964, it looked very much as though the future would be Democratic. Goldwater had been crushed. Johnson won more than 60% of the vote, the highest share in history, collecting 486 electoral college votes to Goldwater’s 52. Still licking its wounds, the conventional wisdom within the Republican Party was that it needed to avoid Goldwater’s brand of ideological conservatism if it were to stand any chance of winning again. By choosing someone like him, the Republicans might have won the South, but they had lost almost everywhere else. In a stroke, Johnson’s Democrats were the party of civil rights and moderation.

And yet, the conventional wisdom was wrong. Over the following years, Goldwater’s acolytes began to win governorship after governorship before eventually sweeping into the White House in 1980 under Reagan. So complete was the conservative victory that in 1992 Bill Clinton and the Democrats had to sue for peace, accepting much of the conservative agenda just to stand a chance of winning.

No wonder Liz Truss is reportedly comforting herself with the belief that she is the Goldwater of Britain, rather than just a humiliated former prime minister. If only it were that simple.

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To begin with, the bridge from Goldwater to Reagan is quite a long one which, as Perlstein’s books show, starts with that distinctly problematic figure in American politics, Richard Nixon, before ending with Reagan. In other words, even if Truss were the Goldwater of Britain, if the American experience is anything to go by, it could be decades before the conditions are right for a Trussite agenda to triumph. And if it did, it would not be copy-and-paste Trussism, just as Reagan was not delayed Goldwaterism. Even Nixon, remember, was not a conservative Goldwater acolyte but very much his own man, who had already been vice president to the moderate Dwight Eisenhower for eight years before 1964. The idea of Truss being a second Goldwater is based less on the reality of the Nixon presidency that came next and more on the idea of the Reagan one that followed much later on.

Truss’s latest cosplay is made all the more peculiar given that Goldwater’s legacy is hardly blemish-free. Outside his own state of Arizona, Goldwater’s only endorsements had come from the segregationist south which supported his opposition to Johnson’s Civil Rights Act — a defining piece of legislation in favour of states’ rights. Prophets of our political future are rarely quite as all-seeing as they seem when re-examined. And Goldwater was no different: he is not some simple conservative hero, but a complicated figure whose policies were not even adopted wholesale by his ideological fellow-travellers who came next.

What, then, is it about her agenda that Truss believes will come to dominate the Conservative Party and British politics? Unfunded tax cuts which spark financial crises and a collapse in public support? I am being facetious, of course, but it is a reasonable question. Goldwater was an electoral failure but he didn’t cause a pensions and debt crisis after promising a sweep of giveaways without a fiat currency to depend on.

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The strongest argument in favour of the Truss-as-Goldwater idea, is that she was right to challenge the sense of inevitability about Britain’s poor economic performance, anaemic growth and high taxes. Outside the EU, there is a reasonable argument to say that Britain needs to work harder to carve out a competitive edge — and that regulation and taxes will play a big role in this. Other than Johnson’s big-state “levelling up” Toryism, Truss’s Reaganite dash for growth is the obvious alternative, more in tune with the ordinary Conservative member than Johnsonism. It is far from impossible that Rishi Sunak leads the party to defeat and a form of Trussism emerges, once again, to claim the leadership.

Yet, even if this were true, the other moral of the Goldwater story is that it is not just ideas which matter, but the people to sell and deliver them in a way that works. The practical application of Trussism sparked a financial crisis which forced her from office. The art of politics is to win power and wield it effectively. Truss only managed the former. For the Conservative Party the more interesting question is not whether Truss is Goldwater, but where on earth they are going to find their Reagan.

Flying cars are a great example. They’re anything but new; US aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss built and tested the first flying car in 1917. There have been many others since then, and some of them worked, after a fashion. The problem is that the engineering compromises needed to make a vehicle that’s both roadworthy and airworthy guarantee that your flying car will have lousy performance in either role. It will also cost so much that for the same price, you could buy a good car, a good plane, and put a down payment on a midsized yacht. That’s why we don’t have flying cars. They’ve been tried, they’ve failed, and only the fact that people won’t let go of the fantasy keeps engineers perpetually pushing on a door marked “Pull”.

Take any other iconic technogimmick that popular culture assigns to the future and you’ll find that it was a familiar notion a century ago. Fusion power? Jules Verne wrote about that in 1869. Replacement of human labour by robots? Introduced in 1921 by Karel Capek, the writer who invented the word “robot”. 24/7 internet connectivity for all? It’s a major plot point in E.M. Forster’s 1909 tale The Machine Stops. Space travel? Already done to death before the pulp magazines of the Twenties got to it. All of them, interestingly enough, turned out to have the same problem that doomed the flying car: sure, they’re possible — well, except for fusion power; the jury’s still out on whether that can be done on a scale smaller than a star — but the limited benefits don’t begin to cover the sky-high costs.

Yet the same old futures, grey with decades of dust, remain stuck in place in the popular imagination. Take Star Trek, the show that still defines the future for an embarrassingly large number of people. It premiered in 1966. In that year cars still had tailfins, surfer movies starring Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon were all the rage, books on space travel had chapters beginning “When man lands on the Moon,” and slide rules were the standard calculating device because computers were fragile contraptions the size of warehouses. That was the year when Ronald Reagan began his political career. Star Trek isn’t our future. It’s the embalmed corpse of a future that fell over dead a long time ago.

There’s an ugly political subtext behind this act of mummification. The rebels of the 1960s and 1970s framed their challenges to the status quo in visionary terms, portraying futures dramatically different from the present. Theodore Roszak’s Where the Wasteland Ends (1972) and Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1978) were among the most widely read of the literature that resulted. Those challenges caused stark panic among the comfortable classes. When the backlash hit in the 1980s, the corporate establishment set out to erase the idea that the future could differ from the present in any way that mattered.

Those who lived through those years will recall how environmental action groups were bought out and neutered, the scruffy radicals who founded them abruptly replaced by slick corporate enablers. The same thing happened to every other movement that threatened the existing order of things: that’s when feminism gave up on changing society, for example, and settled instead for giving middle-class women prestige jobs within the system. Stuffing the visionary futures of the previous decades down the nearest available memory hole was part of the same process.

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That’s how we spent forty years spent parading around the crumbling mummy of a failed future under the delusion that we were doing something innovative. At this point even true believers are beginning to have doubts. Every year we get told by the lab-coated cheerleaders of progress as usual that fusion power is only twenty more years in the future, that we’ll be going back to the Moon sometime soon, and so on through a litany of broken promises. Meanwhile creeping dysfunction spreads through the world’s industrial nations, marked by the accelerating decay of the built environment and the ongoing crapification of everyday life.

The result has been a paralysis of the imagination with dismal political consequences. Have you noticed how many of the political crusades of the last forty years have been against something rather than for something? It’s all about fighting this or stopping that, not about envisioning constructive change and then setting out to make it happen. Political parties pitch themselves to their captive constituencies by insisting that the other side will make things worse, without offering a scrap of hope that things might get better. It’s no wonder that so many people cherish apocalyptic fantasies. Compared to a future that’s never any better than the wretched mess of the present, global annihilation has a certain charm.

Anyone who wants a future different from the present thus needs to start by ditching the faux-future we’ve been sold by the corporate media for the last forty years, and envisioning something genuinely different. That’s harder than it looks. Most of the supposedly innovative futures these days abandon the Star Trek future in order to chase something even more antiquated.

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Consider Klaus Schwab and his loudly ballyhooed “Great Reset.” In the future Schwab and his fellow plutocrats are promoting, you will own nothing, vast intrusive bureaucracies will monitor every detail of your life, and you will be happy. You’d better be happy, because it’s clear what will happen to you if you’re not: the future Schwab is proposing, after all, is a carbon copy of the Soviet Union under Stalin with a few technology upgrades, and the only question he hasn’t discussed in print is where he plans on putting the gulags and mass graves. That sort of future was fresh and new in the late nineteenth century. At this point it’s roughly as fresh as Lenin’s corpse, and we all know how well it worked in practice.

How about the future that begins with young enthusiastic people moving out to communes in the countryside to lay the foundations of a new society? That’s even older than the futures we’ve already discussed. Nathaniel Hawthorne of The Scarlet Letter fame wrote a novel, The Blithedale Romance, which was published in 1852; it’s set on a commune in rural Massachusetts, with a cast of characters you could have found in rural northern California just after the Summer of Love. By the time Hawthorne penned that story, communes had been a familiar presence in the United States since colonial times. Nor did the communes of early nineteenth century America last longer or accomplish more than their lineal descendants in the 1920s or the 1960s.

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The moral of the story? If you’re going to borrow a future from the past, find one that worked. If you’re going to invent one from scratch, don’t repeat the failed gimmicks of futures that are already long past their pull date. Don’t make your future depend on some infinitely abundant source of energy that doesn’t happen to exist: that was the fatal flaw of the Star Trek future. Don’t hand unchecked power to a bureaucratic system under the fond illusion that it won’t be abused: that was the problem with the allegedly glorious socialist future that turned Soviet Russia, Maoist China, and Khmer Rouge Cambodia into abattoirs. Don’t assume that you can run away from society and create a utopia on fifty acres in the country: it’s been tried countless times, with a success rate best counted in imaginary numbers.

The futures that matter at this point are those that don’t simply rehash the failures of the past. They don’t extrapolate from the failed present in a straight line, for that matter. A glance back at the visionary futures proposed in the 1960s and 1970s might be useful; a glance at the strange alternative histories being dreamed up on the fringes right now might also help.

The exotic visions of past and present being promoted in conspiracy culture these days show that there is still a collective imagination out there. It’s just that the people involved in creating and circulating those visions have somehow managed to convince themselves that the bumbling stooges who run our political and economic institutions are monomaniacal masterminds obsessed with conquering the world they already mismanage. If the conspiracy-minded can shake themselves out of that dysfunctional notion, they can put their imaginative gifts to better use and start conspiring to bring about more interesting futures.

It’s a challenge that all of us would be well advised to face. One great lesson that can be learned from the total failure of the Tomorrowland future is that the world ahead of us won’t look like anything churned out by today’s corporate media. Nor, it probably needs to be said, will it follow any of the various linear extrapolations being hawked about by the single-minded these days. We need to be prepared to deal with technological progress and technological unraveling, sudden jolts and slow transitions, new opportunities and hard limits — all of these, all at once. That’s the way history happens. The sooner we grasp that, and ditch the outdated futures that clutter up the collective imagination these days like so much Victorian bric-a-brac, the more likely we will be to imagine a future worth having — and then to go out there and create it.

There are times when asking questions is more useful than offering answers, and this is one of them. Set aside the decrepit futures pushed at you by the corporate media, and ask yourself what you want in a future.

The former event brought the country’s warring white tribes together in a wary equilibrium of mutual benefit which lasted through more than seven decades of economic growth and modernisation. The latter cobbled together all the nation’s tribes — black, white, Asian and mixed-race — into a fragile comity that, despite a weakening State, has yet somehow survived its first quarter century; frayed, hissy and bowed, to be sure, but somehow miraculously still alive.

The Act of Union was forged less than a decade after a bitter war, described either as a noble, imperial mission, or one of Africa’s great freedom struggles, depending on which side of the kopje one sat. The critical fault-lines at the National Convention called to give form to a united South Africa were between a Cape liberal vision of South Africanism, which included a very limited form of “Native” representation in Parliament, and a bleaker, exclusionary view by the Boer Transvaal and Orange Free State delegates. English-speaking Natal, from which many of the imperial combatants had come, was also exclusionary: it wanted to exclude itself from Union altogether.

The Boer approach won and thus was early laid the contours of the apartheid state which, in various guises, survived two World Wars, The Great Depression, two fringe Afrikaner rebellions and a bruising white national strike in 1922 which was eventually suppressed, literally, by artillery fire. It also survived decolonisation, international sanctions, two decades of simmering internal rebellions, two States of Emergency and a 15-year-long defensive wars along the borders of Angola and Mozambique which consumed huge amounts of national resource and the time, although not many of the lives, of my generation of young white males.

How on earth did it hold together?

A healthy devolution of power to provincial level helped mollify Cape Liberals and “Natal Stand” reactionaries, as did a mutual respect for language, culture and religion. International sanctions also solidified a sense of unity: it is amazing what indiscriminate vilification can do to engender a sense of common purpose amongst otherwise diverse people.

But the real glue, despite all challenges, was the trajectory of the country towards modernisation, economic growth, rising employment in all sectors, burgeoning physical infrastructure and growing national prosperity, although grievously unequally distributed. Money, the balm to nearly all wounds, softened the edge of communal antagonism between English-speaking and Afrikaans-speaking whites; there was a quantum improvement in living standards across the board, initially for whites and then increasingly for other marginalised groups.

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International sanctions in the Eighties spurred a surge in internal industrial manufacturing and high tech development from which Afrikaners were disproportionately the winners. Sanctions thus won not by making white South Africans poorer, as liberals predicted, but by making Afrikaners richer and more amenable to the tides of history.  This was not the generation of 1948 that brought the Afrikaner’s National Party and Grand Apartheid to power. This was an educated, richer, more cosmopolitan generation which accepted the absurdity of a small racial minority trying to dominate a much larger, restless and offended majority. The Afrikaners started dealing for an inclusive future South Africanism, a broadened and modernised Cape vision if you will, that would bring stability and profit.

In the early Nineties arose the perfect confluence of event, circumstance and personality.  The border wars ended with the advent of Glastnost and the end of superpower meddling in the region: everybody went home. The internal rebellions were snuffed out by two brutal States of Emergency during which the State had assumed virtually limitless powers of arrest, detention and censorship. Stellar political leadership arose in the opposing camps. The two most important western leaders, President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, threw their weight behind the project.

It succeeded in a way it could never have done now. Catapult this moment forward to today and the African National Congress would be incited to up the ante by Western governments and a feral social media: armed resistance groups would be equipped and trained to “equalise” forces, human rights groups would have piled into the fray, white politicians would have been threatened with the Court of International Justice and progressives would have sought to virtue-signal the people of southern Africa into oblivion. Whites, like the Israelis, would have gone back to the trenches.

It never happened. Three years of intense negotiations at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa brought a genuinely and proudly homegrown solution: no local leaders being forced with gritted teeth to shake hands before some benign United States President here.

But this new Constitution, celebrating its 25th anniversary last Friday, differed from its original version in significant ways. And therein lay its strengths and its weaknesses. Its legacy, a sorely tried one, now lies intimately connected to the central question of whether South Africa will reemerge as a modern state.

The first change was a major concentration of power at the central level: the powers of the nine newly created provincial units — ironically created more on a geo-tribal basis than the old four provinces had ever been — are vestigial. When centralised systems do not work, through State weakness or lack of central political coherence and mission, as in contemporary South Africa, it creates damaging centrifugal forces throughout the polity.

A recent survey of Western Cape residents showed half wished to cede from South Africa. In the Zulu homeland of KwaZulu Natal, a low-level insurgency has been underway for two years, culminating in the bloody July Troubles for which the instigators have not yet been caught. The only thing stopping a renewed 1910-type Natal Stand is the fact that the rebels are a discredited faction of the ruling party with whom nobody wants to associate.

So bad is the collapse of the centre, that more than 60% of South African voters in a recent poll said they want a committee to run the country, if only they would deliver jobs, security and services.

The new constitution also eschewed the attempts by the then ruling whites-only National Party to entrench “group rights”, by which they meant race vetoes. Faith was instead placed in a durable constitution embedding individual rights and an impeccable Constitutional Court to defend those rights.

The Constitution and the Court has worked just fine for 25 years: the ruling party, on the other hand, has not. Massive public sector incompetence and corruption has crippled state and para-state entities; eroded confidence across the board in institutions (particularly criminal justice ones); forced a skills exodus and a foreign capital investment hiatus and driven unemployment: another benchmark in joblessness was reached last week when it officially topped 34.4 % and a heart-stopping 66.5% for those between 15 and 24 years old.

The minorities, meanwhile, are being systematically discriminated against by statute in terms of job opportunities, study grants, internships and other opportunities, a process in which craven corporates seek to outbid each other. Many of the victims were born long after apartheid. Many of the beneficiaries, meanwhile, are children of wealthy black parents; they also never knew apartheid nor indeed poverty.

Under those circumstances, it is not surprising that individuals are falling back on the oldest safe zone redoubts: family, community, tribe. Last month’s local government elections saw a significant drop in the support of the ruling ANC and surges of support for the extremist black socialist and conservative Afrikaans-speaking white and coloured parties. Independent candidates representing ethnic neighbourhoods did well.

So where should hope be sought, on this 25th anniversary of the new democracy’s founding document?

Two anecdotes and a comment.

One: in the run-up to the first democratic election, the African National Congress and members of the Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party engaged in a midday shoot-out in the centre of Johannesburg.

I found shelter behind an armoured personnel carrier with a young rifleman from a Cape regiment.

“So what do you think?,” I asked the soldier.

“Sucks”, he said, “and I haven‘t even had my fucking breakfast.”

So, it is a tough and resilient nation, bomb-proof, that has survived a thousand predictions of Armageddon.

Two: a few months ago I was invited to a Founder’s Day celebration at my once all-white, all-boy state school. The Head Prefect was white, her deputy Indian and the rugby captain black. And we won the memorial match. If it took 80 years for the white tribes to come up with the current constitution, perhaps we need to be patient a bit longer for the younger generations to have a shot.

And lastly. The toxic ruling party that has done such damage for so long is in free fall, its internal organisation is in a shambles; so toxic is it that not one of the major parties would enter coalitions to save its control of the country’s major metro’s.

Only in Ethekwini, largest metro in KwaZulu Natal, with its former Mayor and 16 councillors on bail for alleged fraud, did the ruling party hold on by its fingertips by allying with a tiny party sympathetic to the faction in the ANC’s own ranks that instigated the July Troubles. But that is the Natal Stand.

Last week, 26 ANC Parliamentarians broke ranks and voted against a constitutional amendment that would have allowed seizure of land without compensation. Small green shoots, perhaps, but potentially heralding the beginning of a seismic re-alignment in South African politics that could see a split in the ruling party and the emergence of a coalition of modernist parties committed to turning back, after so many wasted years, the country’s race to irrelevance.

Weinberger was a Right-wing Republican who worked for another, Ronald Reagan, and even in those days Right-wing Republicans were automatically written off as racists. But I never detected the slightest bit of discomfort in Powell’s demeanour, perhaps because neither Weinberger nor Reagan had any doubts about his ability: after leaving the Pentagon for a career-required Corps command once he was promoted to Lieutenant-General, Powell was summoned back to Washington by Reagan to serve as his National Security Advisor. That Powell was the first black man to run the “inter-agency” National Security Council was not much mentioned at the time, as far as I can recall, except perhaps in the vernacular press that I do not read.

More important was the impossible job at hand: in the aftermath of the Iran-Contra affair, Reagan’s entire presidency was in question. To outsiders who did not know any better, senility seemed the most charitable explanation for the President’s active support for an insane caper that ended at Tehran’s airport — and which could have left a very senior US official in Iranian custody.

His predecessor Carlucci, under Chief of Staff  Howard Baker, ex Senate Majority Leader no less, stopped the shipwreck, but it was Powell who righted the ship along with Reagan himself, and to such good effect that the faithful Reaganauts who had been plotting a backdoor exit from the White House for their hero when the scandal exploded suddenly found themselves discussing the possibility of the first third-term President since Roosevelt: Reagan’s ascent in the public opinion polls was astounding.

The famous Powell doctrine enunciated in 1991, on the eve of the Gulf War, weas that if the US goes to war, it must not play “controlled escalation” games as it did, disastrously, in Vietnam. If force had to be used, it was best used on the largest possible scale, to quickly end the war rather than start it.

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But there was also an undeclared Powell doctrine, not for the nation but for himself: prejudice exists; but if it can only be inferred because it is not visibly enacted, just ignore it. Do not sacrifice your own advancement to try to re-educate the malevolent and the ignorant; do not start a scandal that will only exacerbate the problem.

When his boss, Caspar Weinberger, complained in a Senate Hearing that the Senators were ignoring his own Secretarial advice and listening instead to the strategic lucubrations of a “PhD with a foreign accent” — he was referring to me, testifying about my book The Pentagon and the Art of War in a debate about the 1987 Defense Reorganization Act the book called for — Powell told me not to kvetch (he grew up with Yiddish speakers in the Bronx). Just be happy that the Senators are listening to you, he said, and that we will finally be able to re-organise the Pentagon.

But it was not until decades later, in a chance meeting aboard a transatlantic flight, that he told me why he was so little agitated by the subtle racial tensions of the Reagan years. As a battalion commander in Vietnam, he was recruited on a number of occasions by more senior officers to avert racial tensions among the troops, to avoid violence not with fists or even handguns but with fragmentation grenades or even M.16s.

For him, that was the end result of McNamara’s political science: a war not only endless but nonsensical, in which the same village might be flooded with economic aid, propagandised by a provincial team, bombed with napalm to destruction and then rebuilt. Hence his personal approval of Col. Warden’s “Instant Thunder” plan for the 1991 Iraq war: bomb every military target day after day to break up Iraq’s logistics, knock out bases and destroy as many armoured vehicles as possible. Then launch an all-out armoured offensive, force Saddam Hussein’s surrender and retreat from Kuwait — and bring the troops back home.

As a result of the 1987 Defense Reorganization Act, Powell was the first Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff who was in the actual chain of command. And although he was too tactful to order the Army and Marine field commanders about as the subordinates they were, when the Marines started nibbling at Kuwait before the two weeks of bombing was done, he made sure that it was no more than a photo-op. Ignoring the majority view in Washington that air power always disappoints (because it did in Vietnam) he understood that it was best to hollow out an enemy before moving the tanks forward. That was the Powell “first” that really matters: not that he was the first black US military chief, but the first and so far only US military chief since 1945 to win a war.

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The last thing that Powell thought would happen was the disastrous repudiation two decades later of all that was learned in Vietnam and all that was demonstrated in the 1991 war: that American military power can destroy high-contrast targets anywhere and can defeat enemies that assemble in conveniently targetable mass formations — but cannot defeat insurgents. As Powell well knew, the “counterinsurgency warfare” peddled by generals with PhDs was never more than military malpractice, as Afghanistan 2021 showed yet again.

Over the past week, every obituary of Powell has interrupted its praise to condemn his tenure as Secretary of State (another first for a black man that Powell himself hardly celebrated) because it was his approval that made the 2003 invasion of Iraq politically feasible.

As usual, the media criticises the intelligence malfeasance that trapped Powell — the failure to recognise that Saddam was only pretending to be developing nuclear weapons — as opposed to the inability of the over-staffed, over-funded intelligence community to recognise that if Saddam Hussein and his regime were removed, what would ensue was not “democracy” but a Hobbesian war of all against all as different factions killed each other. (When I testified accordingly before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee just before the war, the pro-war witness call me a “racist” who denied that Iraqis could sustain a democracy, just as the Germans and Japanese did after 1945…)

Then there was the fact that an Iraq in civil war would not be able to resist Iran. So there were ultimately two choices: stay out of Iraq, or convert the US Army into a 700,000-strong Mesopotamian constabulary forever. When Army Chief of Staff Shinseki said exactly that in a Congressional Hearing, he received zero support from the Intelligence Community, so Rumsfeld & Co ridiculed him with impunity for something he emphatically did not say — that 700,000 American soldiers were necessary to defeat the Iraqi Army — and denied him the customary extra year.

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That was Colin Powell’s world on the eve of the 2003 war that would tarnish his reputation. As a Secretary of State, he could not apply the Powell doctrine to flood Iraq with troops. What he should have done — as he was the first to recognise in the aftermath — was to give a simple choice to Bush: Mr President, either give up the dream of a US-made democracy in Iraq or send in 700,000 troops, which cannot be done.

If the intelligence community had realised and transmitted what was happening in Iraq, Powell could have calmed the war fever with a phone call. Without that support, Powell couldn’t turn harshly against Bush, who was not only the President but also in effect a family friend, from the days of his father’s vice-presidency.

As it was, the second Iraqi war became an agony for him that never actually ended — very poor recompense for a life well-lived from the time that he packed boxes in a Bronx shop as a teenager. Characteristically, Powell kept in touch with the fatherly owner (who urged him to study on at all costs) and then with his sons, all through the years.

I only met Powell now and again over years, and it was only early on, and then in 2003, that those meetings were charged with much significance. But his death is still a real blow. I miss him already.

A newcomer to the US, I had been hired off the streets by Francis J. West, Schlesinger’s Special Assistant, a young Marine combat veteran who had already published a celebrated book about the Vietnam War. Schlesinger liked to collect brains (one, Andrew Marshall, served as Director of Net Assessment for 42 years, retiring at age 94), but with me he was habitually quarrelsome, in part over his obsession with Jews — he was a convert to Lutheranism of all things.

When Donald Rumsfeld arrived, his very elegant suits cut a sharp contrast to Schlesinger’s tweedy birdwatcher clothes . Unlike his predecessor, he had no intellectual credentials at all but he was certainly a political prodigy; he had won a seat in Congress when he was 30, became a White House Cabinet-level counsellor for Nixon at 37, and then Ambassador to Nato before he was recalled to serve as Chief of Staff for President Ford in 1974.

When he asked me, with an openly sardonic grin, what I was doing on the premises, I explained that the Secretary of Defense must present a bulky annual report to Congress, and I was writing the “national strategy” front-matter, which Congressmen and lobbyists usually skip over to devour what follows: details about the various weapons and other purchases that will rain down dollars on their districts.

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“Why you?” he asked. “You are not even a US citizen!” So I explained that lots of others were also sharing the burden, and that I would not even be in the room when the final editing would be done. Then I gratuitously added that strategy was beyond the capacity of Anglo-Saxons because they are gloaters, while only brooders seriously think about threats.

His reaction was unsettling: he burst out laughing and went on laughing, stopping only to start again. Finally, he said that in Brussels at Nato they were all brooders, still resentful for no longer lording it over the Congo, Surabaya and Ceylon. As I walked out, he asked me if I wanted a job. I reminded him that as a non-citizen I could only consult. “So consult away,” he said, still laughing.

It was only later that I understood why Rumsfeld was in such an uproarious mood. He had just pulled off the bureaucratic coup of the century: with the amiable President Ford as his frontman, he had demoted Kissinger to Secretary of State, removing him from his more important job as the White House National Security Advisor. He had effectively hoisted Kissinger with his own petard; it was Kissinger himself who had shifted all the power from State to the National Security Council.

But Kissinger wasn’t his only target. At the CIA, meanwhile, Rumsfeld had removed the embarrassingly truthful William Colby and installed his associate and future President H.W Bush, sacked Schlesinger from the Pentagon and appointed his own loyal protégé, Richard Cheney, as his successor as Chief of Staff — to protect himself from further White House intrigue.

It was only later that I understood the logic behind Rumsfeld’s political masterplan: Kissinger had to go because the “Ford-Brezhnev” duopoly of power — which aimed to control Third World troublemakers and deflate the pretensions of their tiresome European allies — was viewed as a pact with the devil among the anti-Communist wing of the Republican Party, which now demanded his removal. Getting rid of Kissinger would keep them at bay. But to demote Kissinger would unleash the power of Schlesinger, who was already demanding sharp increases in defence spending and had irritated President Ford by encouraging anti-Kissinger hard-liners. So the perfect solution was to fire both, and then use the dust-up to get rid of Colby.

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By Dominic Sandbrook

This collective defenestration was Italian-renaissance politics at its best, with Rumsfeld playing its Machiavellian puppet-master, though the vernacular press preferred the folksy “Halloween massacre”. It was a feat entirely beyond the imagination of Gerald Ford, an all-round decent fellow who became the uncontroversial Republican leader in 1965 because of his distaste for intrigue, and then Nixon’s obvious “squeaky clean” choice to replace the scandalous Spiro Agnew as Vice President.

It was Rumsfeld who had laid the entire plot and persuaded the mild-mannered Ford to act against character, especially in regard to Kissinger whom he greatly admired. Evidently, Rumsfeld had decided that the time had come for him to emerge from the back rooms of the White House and receive some career-enhancing publicity as Secretary of Defense. The then ample Pentagon press corps has the “SecDef” as its focus just as its White House counterpart has the President — and not his underling Chief of Staff, however powerful.

That, in turn, reflected another of Rumsfield’s priorities: he must have calculated that Ford’s election chances the following year were very poor, especially after eight Republican years, and he needed the prestige of being Secretary of Defense for his future job hunt. At the age of 45, he wanted to become a very well-paid CEO and not just sit on boards for small change.

He succeeded in that as well, becoming seriously rich during President Carter’s four years then Reagan’s eight years, initially by becoming CEO of a pharmaceutical company. During this period, he once invited me to dinner solely to complain about a passage in one of my books that he found objectionable. As he spoke, I realised that he was following the defence scene very closely. And as a prior appointee, and still quite young, he was an obvious candidate for high office when his party won the White House again with Reagan, and then again with Bush senior.

But he was still in his money-making phase, and was also flirting with Presidential ambitions of his own. In any case, had he wanted to return under Bush senior, Schlesinger’s admirers — a tenacious lot — were very well placed to block him. And so it was not until January 2001 that G.W. Bush re-appointed him Secretary of Defense.

It was, however, an unlucky return. In his years of reflection since his last Pentagon passage, he had applied his business brain to the business of the Pentagon, and he was looking forward to implementing drastic reforms, once he had staffed the department with likeminded officials. He told me that he wanted to change the very nature of the Department; he viewed it as an inefficient machine that turned every weapon purchase into an endless quest for perfection, and he wanted to change the military mind-set that turned every operation into another D-day.

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By Will Lloyd

In its place, he wanted intelligence-driven “manoeuvre warfare”, and focused combat efforts that replaced bulk with precision, along with efforts to set limits on bureaucratic overspending.

It was not to be — or, rather, it was starting to be. But after September 11, 2001, when the Pentagon itself was attacked, the Joint Staff started looking at different options of implementing another D-Day: there was talk of sending large forces with mountains of supplies to march up from Pakistan, some even amphibiously via Pakistan’s Baluchistan coast. Rumsfeld wanted none of it: he wanted to knock out the Taliban with small teams of green berets backed up by precise bombing directed by hand-held laser designators.

Rumsfeld pulled it off. He overruled the D-day crowd in the Joint Staff — though not without the support of Richard Meyers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and an airman who saw nothing wrong with relying primarily on air power. What followed was a triumph for Rumsfeld and his “light footprint”: the Taliban crumbled and everything went very well, except for the total failure of the CIA “operatives” who were supposed to help the Green Berets communicate with the anti-Taliban Tadjiks and Uzbeks: none knew a word of either language.

The much bigger failure for Rumsfeld was to come later, with his inability to persuade Bush and even Cheney that with the Taliban defeated and Al Qaeda camps liquidated, the next step was to leave Afghanistan to pursue his own history. Instead, what followed was the prolonged farce of “counter-insurgency warfare” (military malpractice institutionalised) with its corrupt “nation-building” twin (a very expensive and impotent form of colonialism).

Yet the great success of Rumsfeld’s own light-footprint method in invading Afghanistan was also the proximate cause of his own great failure of Iraq in 2003.

The plan was to conquer Baghdad swiftly from the north, via the Kurdish region where US troops would be welcomed. To get there, 80 shiploads of equipment for 60,000 US troops would land in Turkey’s port of Iskenderun to be trucked more than 400 miles into Iraq, while the troops would be airlifted into Incirlik base and to more forward airstrips.

When I heard about the plan, it struck me as foolish because I did not believe it possible to have Turkish parliamentary approval, given that the entrenched Kemalists and the newly empowered Islamists would both refuse. I explained that to Rumsfeld , only to be told that I was wrong and that the newly elected Islamist PM Erdoğan had just agreed everything in a meeting with his Deputy, who was in Ankara as we spoke.

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When, on March 1, the Turkish parliament refused to allow US forces to drive into Iraq via its Kurdistan region, as Erdogan had promised, the bulk of their equipment was loaded on to the 80 ships in the Mediterranean. It could not possibly be ready for the planned start of the invasion on March 20; aside from the long passage around Arabia via the Suez Canal, Kuwait’s unloading facilities were remarkably undeveloped — not much infrastructure is needed to unload Rolex watches, Rolls Royces and other Kuwaiti necessities.

As a result, the bulk of the invasion force, built around the 4^th Infantry division (that had twice the men of a normal division and lots of armour too) was missing when Rumsfeld decided to invade on schedule nonetheless, with just one Marine division and one infantry division as well as smaller units. Moreover, those scant forces were still strung out over the distance from Kuwait when the lead units entered Baghdad on April 9, 2003. The division and extra brigade stranded on the side of the Suez Canal would not arrive until later, while the British armoured division remained to secure Basrah and its surroundings, and that too with great difficulty because the US Marines who were supposed to secure their flank had been dispatched to Baghdad instead.

Two months earlier, on February 25, 2003, General Eric Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff, had testified in an open hearing of the United States Senate Committee on Armed Services that “something in the order of several hundred thousand soldiers” would probably be required “for postwar Iraq”. Accepting Shinseki’s estimate would not have required any change of plans, because no plan would be needed, given that there would be no invasion of Iraq because it was unimaginable that the bulk of the US Army would be converted into a Mesopotamian constabulary, ad infinitum. But instead of paying attention, Rumsfeld was scathing in his dismissal of Shinseki’s opinion.

Indeed, it was hardly surprising that his “light footprint” approach turned into an irremediable disaster when mobs across the country came out to destroy all they could. The Ba’ath militia had disappeared, the 500,000-strong Iraqi army had disintegrated, the local police were barricaded in their stations or at home and there were so few US troops in Baghdad — and in Falluja and in Ramadi and in other towns — that they could only protect themselves.

Whatever slim chances there were of quickly forming a provisional government — in spite of Sunni-Shia hostility, Kurd-Arab-Turkmen hostility, intra-Sunni tribal hostility, Barazani-Talebani intra-Kurd hostility, and the murderous rivalry of the Shi’a prelates — could not survive the complete collapse of public order.

And this time, Rumsfeld could not recommend evacuation: the United States had broken Iraq and now it owned the pieces, as Colin Powell had warned. Rumsfeld’s agony lasted till November 8 , 2006, when President Bush Jr announced his resignation, which Rumsfeld had actually proposed earlier. The delay cost Republican seats in the mid-term election the day before. American public opinion, disgusted by the war, did not turn against the generals, let alone the troops, but against Rumsfeld, whose elegant good looks merely added to his reputation as a slick manipulator.

Until his death this week, he tried to live down his arrogant rejection of the Shinseki warning — without, it must be said, much success.

As every American schoolchild knows, Hinckley was a schizophrenic loner who had become obsessed with the actress Jodie Foster after seeing her in the film Taxi Driver. To impress her, Hinckley planned “the greatest love offering in the history of the world” — the assassination of the President of the United States. And so it was that at 2.27 p.m. on 30 March 1981, outside the Hilton Hotel in Washington, DC, fate brought him together with his victim.

The events of that terrible afternoon are well known. Reagan, who had taken the oath of office less than two months earlier, had just been addressing a conference of labour union leaders. He was still waving to the small crowd outside when Hinckley opened fire, and although none of the bullets hit him directly, the sixth ricocheted off the door of his armoured limousine and lodged in his lung, coming to a halt less than an inch from his heart.

Had Reagan been a younger man, perhaps things would have turned out differently. But he had just turned 70. And although he was remarkably fit, his blood pressure was in free-fall by the time his car reached George Washington University Hospital. As all the world remembers, the dying president still had the poise and presence of mind to joke to his horrified wife Nancy — “Honey, I forgot to duck”. They were, however, the last words he ever said. Shortly after 3pm, with the news of the shooting still only just breaking across the world, the 40th President of the United States was pronounced dead. He had been in office for just sixty-nine days, the second shortest tenure in American history.

Ever since Reagan’s untimely death, amateur historians have traded in ghoulish fantasies about the consequences if he had lived. Today most academic experts agree that his economic policies would have plunged the United States into a second Great Depression, and many also argue that his hawkish foreign policy would probably have pushed the world into a Third World War. Bucking the trend, the ever-contrarian Niall Ferguson has suggested that Reagan might actually have presided over a softening of Cold War tensions, sketching out a fanciful scenario in which he and Mikhail Gorbachev enjoyed a warm personal relationship, the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and the Soviet Union even broke up two years later. Most academics, however, treat this idea with disdain.

What did happen, of course, is well known. Vice President George Bush was in Texas at the time of the shooting; he flew back to Washington immediately, landing on the south lawn of the White House at 6.30pm. He was sworn in an hour later as the 41st president, live on television from the mansion’s East Room. He looked pale and composed, his wife Barbara by his side. When it was over, he spoke directly to the American people. It was a time for “mourning again in America”, he said grimly, reminding his listeners that Reagan was the second president to be murdered in eighteen years. But he would never waver, he said, from the task his Californian predecessor had begun.

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The American Dream that failed

By Dominic Sandbrook

In many ways Bush had an unenviable inheritance. He knew the intricacies of American government inside out, having served as ambassador to the United Nations, envoy to China and director of the CIA. But he had little electoral experience, since he had served for a mere four years as congressman from Texas. Reagan had been a breezy populist; Bush, despite his attempts to rebrand himself as a plain-talking Texan, was really a patrician New England mandarin. Almost immediately, then, there were mutters of discontent from within the conservative movement. Barely a month after Reagan’s murder, there was even talk that Christian conservatives would prefer a different candidate in 1984.

Yet Bush proved a rather firmer president than many had expected. Although the US economy entered a deep recession in July 1981, with unemployment soaring towards 20% in states such as Michigan and West Virginia, he backed the Federal Reserve’s determination to wring inflation out of the system with high interest rates. By the spring of 1982 recovery was on the horizon. And it was at that point that Bush showed he was not afraid to take decisions abroad, too. When Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands at the end of March, he was adamant that the US should back the Galtieri regime, one of its closest anti-Communist allies in the western hemisphere, instead of yoking itself to Margaret Thatcher’s doomed British government. It was, he said firmly, the course the late President Reagan would have taken.

Although Anglo-American relations never really recovered — indeed, the next British Prime Minister, Francis Pym, was reportedly incensed when Bush invaded Grenada a year later — Bush had shown that he was not a man to go wobbly. The American people respected him for it, and by early 1984 he seemed set fair for re-election. Campaigning alongside his vice president, the former Tennessee senator Howard Baker, he easily dismissed a primary challenge from the conservative maverick Pat Buchanan, and was heavily favoured against the Democrats’ Walter Mondale in November’s general election. And with the economy booming, everything fell into place. On the night of 6 November, Bush won in a landslide, carrying every state except for Mondale’s native Minnesota and the District of Columbia. As one of Bush’s aides remarked that night, the elderly Reagan, had he lived, could never have dreamed of such a crushing victory.

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Under the 22nd Amendment Bush was barred from running for the White House again, since he had served for more than two years of Reagan’s term. In any case, his second term was overshadowed by tensions abroad. He had always been a cautious man, and his years at the CIA had taught him to be very wary of his Soviet counterparts. So when, in March 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev took over in the Kremlin, Bush knew better than to take his apparent moderation at face value. The Russian bear, he remarked to his White House aides, would never change. And as he reminded the American people a few weeks later, the Soviet Union was, and always would be, an “evil empire”.

Could history have worked out differently? Was there really a chance of détente in the late 1980s? Given how things unfolded, it seems very unlikely. Although the two leaders’s personal relations seemed relatively cordial, Bush’s CIA analysts reminded him that it would be foolish to trust a word the Russians said. So when Gorbachev talked of arms control, Bush was wary of committing himself. Reagan, despite his image, had been a genuine nuclear abolitionist. But Bush believed that strong deterrence was the only guarantee of lasting peace. As he told American journalists after the frosty Reykjavik summit in 1986, Communism was never going away. So the task of any US president must be to preserve his nation’s nuclear defences, not to tear them down.

By this point, attention was already turning to the 1988 presidential campaign. Following the drab Bush-Mondale walkover in 1984, both parties had an appetite for pizzazz, and after a bruising contest the Democrats eventually nominated the self-styled blue-collar populist Joe Biden. The Republican contest, however, was chaos. Religious conservatives had long since lost confidence in the Bush administration, and his heir apparent Howard Baker was thrashed in the opening primaries. That opened the door for the veteran Bob Dole, who duly won the nomination.

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Donald Trump's ruinous legacy

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But then came a wild card — a bizarre third-party candidacy by the real-estate mogul Donald Trump, who had for months been calling for ‘reducing the budget deficit, working for peace in Central America, and speeding up nuclear disarmament negotiations with the Soviet Union’. At one point, Trump was polling as high as 15%, and although he fell away eventually, he had left the infuriated Dole (“Crooked Bob”, as Trump called him) holed beneath the waterline.

It was Biden, then, who strolled to victory, memorably quoting the new British Prime Minister, Neil Kinnock, in his inaugural address. Yet his presidency was an exercise in crisis management from the very beginning, especially after the Red Army repression of the Eastern European uprisings in late 1989. As the temperature of the Cold War dipped below freezing, the pendulum was swinging towards confrontation, and in the summer of 1991 Gorbachev was eased out by Kremlin hardliners and replaced with the more conservative Yegor Ligachev. Just as the CIA had predicted, in other words, the Cold War was here to stay.

It is, of course, tempting to imagine that things might have been different. With a more liberal president at the helm, might the two great superpowers have found common ground in the mid-1980s? Speculations of this kind, though, are pointless. The sheer longevity of the Soviet Union, which celebrates its official centenary next year, proves that it was never likely to disappear overnight. Ronald Reagan loved to talk of mankind’s desire for freedom, but this was the hot air of a former Hollywood matinee idol, not the sober analysis of somebody who truly understood international affairs. And although cyber and chemical weapons have replaced the nuclear missiles that terrified our parents, the fear of war against the Communist bloc will surely remain with us for the rest of our lives.

As for Reagan, how many people genuinely recall him today? While other recent presidents, such as Al Gore, John McCain and Hillary Clinton, are household names, most young people know only that he was assassinated after just 69 days. He is the late 20th century’s answer to James A. Garfield, remembered only for his tragic and violent death. There are historians, of course, who claim it was all for the best, since Reagan was a trigger-happy warmonger who would have precipitated Armageddon. Even so, it seems a tragic irony that the California cowboy was denied what he so richly deserved — a Hollywood ending.

Not since Ronald “Morning in America” Reagan has a new administration come to office with so tenuous a grasp of the realities facing the United States — and so evident a determination to flinch from them. Look squarely across those oceans and you find diplomatic, political, and economic drift. An age of alliances? Not on Washington’s terms. As things stand, Joe Biden’s presidency is destined to mark an age of isolation.

Hardly two weeks after Biden’s November victory at the polls, 15 Pacific Rim nations signed what HSBC reckons is the largest trade accord in history, dwarfing anything the U.S. has sought to organise in recent years. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which come into effect by midyear, covers a third of the planet’s GDP ($26 trillion in 2019) and the same proportion of its population.

Who signed it? All 10 members of ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, as well as Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, and Japan.

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And China. All of America’s bedrock allies and partners in East Asia just agreed an extensive trade pact that can also be taken broadly as a plan to get along with the mainland. This is, in effect, an Asia-for-Asians accord. Not to be missed, it is the first trade agreement that puts Japan and China on the same piece of paper.

In his Senate testimony, Blinken made it clear the Biden administration expects America’s traditional allies to stand with it as it faces up to China. “We have to start by approaching China from a position of strength, not weakness,” Blinken told his interlocutors, “a position of strength when we are working with, not denigrating, our allies.” This is the sort of bureaucratic diplo-speak, wanting in all specificity, that gets Washington in trouble in one instance after another.

The RCEP, however, is a subtly rendered but direct repudiation of this view. The accord, which sets down a variety of economic and investment rules from tariffs to intellectual property, is the Pacific Rim’s declaration that it does not recognise the ideological red lines the US insists on drawing across the region — “techno-democracies” as against “techno-autarchies,” in Blinken’s histrionic terms. These nations evince absolutely zero interest in any kind of Cold War 2.0 with the mainland.

Yet the United States seems incapable of retiring the 20^th century’s binaries into the past and addressing our diverse, multifarious new era. Certainly, its ties with Asia are more strained now than may meet the eye: the continued presence of American troops, to cite one example, has long been a politically contentious question among the Pentagon’s principal hosts — South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines.

ASEAN’s desire to settle sovereignty disputes in the South China Sea at the negotiating table, as opposed to displays of power at sea, are another. Indeed, they are fully aware that Washington’s obsession with the South China Sea has nothing to do with security, as it claims: it has everything to do with supremacy.

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And so the Biden administration assumes office at a key moment in America’s trans–Pacific relations. It inherits alliances and partnerships of many decades’ standing, and no one at the far end of the Pacific, not even the Chinese, wants the US out of the region. But continue to get the China question so wrong and Biden’s national security people will severely damage Washington’s trans–Pacific ties, with the result that an incipient isolation will begin to assume a permanent character.

Something of the same obtains in Washington’s trans–Atlantic relationships, which now bear the character of irritated friends discovering they do not have as much in common as they once did. It is uncanny, indeed, how similarly Washington’s predicament unfolds in Europe. In the final days of 2020, China signed a bilateral investment treaty with the European Union that is at least as ambitious as the RCEP. In one interview, Valdis Dombrovkis, the EU trade commissioner, said it provided for “the most ambitious outcomes that China has ever agreed with a third country”. Are the E.U.’s 27 members really going to line up with Washington as it conjures a confrontation with China?

Critics immediately complained that the EU–China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment was poorly timed — a slap in the new American president’s face, a “kick in the teeth,” a “strategic mistake.” Implicit in this is the assumption Europe should continue playing follow-the-leader with Washington and has no business acting in what it judges to be its own interests. However, The CAI, as it is known, was seven years in the making and also bears broader interpretation. It, too, can be read as an indication that the Continent is no more interested than East Asians in Washington’s Sinophobic plans for some kind of decisive, king-of-the-hill reckoning.

It is Russia, however, as well as China, that has caused the Atlantic to grow wider in recent years. While the US has become increasingly hostile toward the Russian Federation, Emmanuel Macron has argued strenuously for some time that Europe must re-engage Russia as a key step toward a more independent foreign policy altogether. Angela Merkel has been less vocal on this point, but it will be interesting to see where her successor, Armin Laschet, lands on these questions.

Laschet is avowedly an Ostpolitik man, favouring friendly ties with Moscow and China alike. Should he take over as chancellor in September, among his early decisions will be whether to defy American objections and proceed with the highly contentious Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which is to connect Russian gas fields with German ports and the European market. All signs are he will see through the project, which is now 95% completed.

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Of course, we should not forget that America’s relations with Europe and Asia were growing increasingly distant well before Biden won the White House  — and, let us not be mistaken, before Donald Trump’s singularly disruptive term, too. Why has the U.S. been so consistently in denial about this? The best I can do is suggest that Washington, after seven decades of primacy, suffers an institutional inertia that prevents it from registering the 21^st century’s defining currents.

Anyone familiar with Washington’s foreign policy cliques understands that they have simply not had to make any fundamental decisions since the 1945 victories, and must learn again how to respond to changing circumstances. The reality is that Washington’s policy cliques just don’t seem ready to accept the multipolar world we all find out our windows. The Nixon­–Kissinger opening to China in the early 1970s stands among the few exceptions to the rule. Yet today’s policy planners condemn that highly imaginative move as a mistake, preferring, in effect, to take cover in the anachronistic thought that America’s place as a global leader is just as it was during the post-war decades.

A year ago Biden published a much-remarked essay in Foreign Affairs under the headline: “Why America must lead again.” This is what the president and his national security people mean when they talk of alliances and partnerships: Let us all work together — we the commanding officers, other nations adjutants following our lead. Barack Obama and his administration — many of whom will now serve under Biden — made the same mistake.

Does this mean the United States will find itself isolated as our new century unfolds? Quite possibly, though it is not inevitable. Isolation, if it comes to be the case, will prove a choice, not a fate. The United States could accept — indeed, participate in — the transformations in motion in Asia and Europe were it willing to do so as an equal partner with others. But all signs indicate that Biden and his foreign policy people have no intention of squarely addressing the complexities of our time, and will insist on sustaining a primacy of a bygone era.

It is almost 70 years since Luigi Barzini published Americans Are Alone in the World. It was a work of admiration for a nation that stood unambiguously above others after World War Two. Now, the noted Italian journalist’s observation has been turned upside down. Unless the Biden administration alters course — an unlikely prospect by any sound reckoning — Americans stand to be alone because they are falling behind.

This photograph is one of several from the Iranian Hostage Crisis that has lodged in the collective consciousness of the modern Middle East. It was a truly historic event – one that would come to sour US-Iran relations far more than the Iranian Revolution that precipitated it. It began on 4 November 1979 when a group of students calling themselves the “Muslim Student Followers of the Imam’s Line” stormed the US Embassy in Tehran and took the 52 embassy staff inside hostage. They would keep them captive for 444 days, releasing them, finally, on 20 January 1981 – 40 years ago to the day.

Fast forward four decades and today Joe Biden will be sworn in as the 46^th President of the United States. When he enters the White House, he will find a world cowering from a pandemic and a country strafed by civil unrest. But perhaps his biggest problem will only come into focus when he turns to face the east: Iran.

As Biden knows, the Islamic Republic of Iran poses a problem that has remained unsolved for 40 years. Even today, the Hostage Crisis remains at the heart of the US’s relationship with Iran – or perhaps more correctly, its lack of one. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — the so-called Nuclear Deal between Iran and the UN Security Council Powers plus Germany — lies moribund after Donald Trump unilaterally abrogated it in 2018. In the years since, Iranian proxies have wreaked havoc in Syria and Iraq, while the regime has busied itself killing dissenters. Biden’s options are few. He can’t even speak directly to Tehran. The two countries are implacably opposed. Both carry scars that remain livid on both sides — and they were formed in that embassy all those years ago.

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The hostage crisis occurred amid the turmoil of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when a combination of nationalists, leftists and Islamists overthrew Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, then Shah of Iran, forcing him to flee the country. They then set about fighting over who would take power: a battle the Islamists quickly and comprehensively won. A 76-year-old cleric from the provinces, Ayatollah Khomeini, became Supreme Leader, and brought with him a new system of government, the Velayat-e faqih (rule of the jurist), which mandated overarching rule by the religious jurists, or Mullahs, like him.

If 1979 marked a rupture in internal Iranian politics, then the hostage crisis was the Islamic Republic’s march on to the international stage. Despite the Shah’s fall, Washington wanted to salvage its friendship with its foremost Gulf ally and a number of meetings were held with Iran’s interim Prime Minister. Things looked hopeful. But then US President Jimmy Carter allowed the cancer-ridden Shah into the USA for medical treatment. Iranians were enraged. The anti-US protests and chanting that had swelled throughout the year suddenly erupted with the storming of the embassy.

How much did Khomeini know about the attack? He wasn’t forewarned, but undoubtedly then gave the hostage-taking his approval. There is no way that the diplomats could sit there for over a year without his say so. The truth is that it benefited him. Enraging the United States meant weakening moderates in Iran while strengthening his Islamist base, which rejected all ties with the “Great Satan”. It wasn’t just that the US had, along with Britain, organised the overthrowal the Iranian president in 1953, or that the Shah was seen as an American lapdog. It was something even more primeval: the US was the chief source of Gharbzadegi — literally “west-struckness” or westoxification — by which Western ideas and culture had seduced and corrupted Iranians. And there was something else, too: payback. “You have no right to complain,” a hostage-taker told a furious American captive, “you took our whole country hostage in 1953.”

Things got worse. On 24 April 1980, seeing that negotiation was going nowhere, President Jimmy Carter approved Operation Eagle Claw, a Delta force mission to rescue the hostages. It was a disaster. A combination of poor weather conditions and logistical problems meant the mission was aborted, though not before one of the helicopters crashed into the ground.

Back home, the US media railed against Carter. His 1980 election defeat to Republican Ronald Reagan was largely down to his failure to get them out. Iran had brought down an American president. But before he left office, Carter struck back. He froze billions of dollars of Iranian assets abroad, imposed sanctions and isolated it diplomatically. He threw American weight behind Iranian opposition groups and repositioned US foreign policy toward Saudi Arabia and Iraq to counteract the hostile Islamic republic. Both US politics and the geopolitical constellation of the Middle East had been reordered. And it was the hostage crisis, not the revolution, that did it.

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Forty years later, the legacy of the hostage crisis still dominates Middle Eastern politics: the US and Iran have never officially resumed diplomatic relations. Years ago, in the course of researching my book, I interviewed former US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Nick Burns, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was Burns, under the leadership of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the presidency of George W. Bush, who first tried to heal relations with the Iranians in 2005. It didn’t work that time, but it paved the way for Obama’s success.

Burns explained to me how, as a diplomat, he felt that the US’s relationship with Iran was the oddest it had with any country, and you couldn’t simply chalk it up to bad blood. Washington had a liaison office in Havana and throughout the Cold War had maintained embassies in Moscow and Beijing. American diplomats had even talked on key occasions to the North Koreans. But with Iran? Nothing.

He was hinting at the almost uniquely dysfunctional relationship between Iran and the US since the Hostage Crisis: at heart, it was so bad because they needed each other. For the Islamic Republic, the need to defend Iran from the United States is its ideological lodestone — it can never permit relations to become too warm. Even when Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in desperate need of sanctions relief because of Iran’s chronic financial woes, allowed President Hassan Rouhani to speak to Barack Obama (thus ending almost 40 years of silence at the official level) and eventually conclude the Iran Deal, he made it clear that their cooperation would stop there. There would be no détente.

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On the other side, for a certain strand of American politician keen to burnish their hawkish credentials and grab some attention, being tough on Iran is a guaranteed political, and often fund-raising, winner. This is not to draw equivalence between the two sides, but to observe that for four decades Iranian-US relations have been characterised by a unique dialectic that has played an increasingly central role in organising each side’s understanding of the other.

Like unlucky lovers, timing hasn’t been on their side. In 1988, after eight years of horrific war with Iraq, Iran’s leaders were less keen for the country to export its Islamic revolution than to rebuild bombed-out schools. Around a decade later, the reformist President Mohammed Khatami even went on CNN to talk about a “Dialogue among Civilisations”, but found US administrations reluctant to talk. Later, it was Barack Obama who, in his first formal TV interview after taking office declared that “if countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us.” Unfortunately, squatting in Tehran was the malign and absurd Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It wasn’t to be.

This relationship, which is far more than a collapsed deal centring on nuclear centrifuges and enriched uranium, is what Joe Biden must now address. And fixing it is what he must do for any deal to last. Iran is a 5,000-year-old civilisation with a well-educated population of over 80 million and huge oil and gas reserves. It dominates the Persian Gulf and controls the Straits of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil passes. You cannot adequately deal with the Middle East without it; and you absolutely cannot lock it out of the international order forever.

Yet Trump looked the other way and Obama confined negotiations to the nuclear issues; the Iranians insisted on it. But now that Iran’s need for sanctions relief is even more desperate, Biden must tackle the country’s human rights violations, its regional belligerence, its support for terror and funding of proxies that undermine Iraq and Lebanon. But if Iran moves, he must, too. He must ease sanctions and help to rebuild its shattered economy. Ever since the Hostage Crisis, America and Iran have been waltzing together, locked in each other’s arms, but always out of step. Forty years after the event that changed the history of the Middle East, we must hope that a new President can succeed where every other one before him has failed.

Mark from Peep Show’s take on the 1960s is one I have some sympathy for. That most controversial of decades saw revolutionary cultural change and, depending on your worldview, it was either a period of liberation or the start of a free-for-all that undid the social fabric. It was the decade that created now, and how much you like the modern world will shape your view of it, of the civil rights marches, San Francisco hippies, love-ins and various other groovy happenings.

In Peep Show terms, Christopher Caldwell is certainly on the side of Mark rather than Jez, although he’s rather sceptical even of the “I have a dream” part. Caldwell’s brilliant and bleak history The Age of Entitlement charts the development of the United States from Kennedy to the rise of Trump, and in particular its division into two tribes with two worldviews, even two different constitutions and two realities. Caldwell’s history was published in the US in January, before the Covid epidemic would bitterly expose those divisions weeks later following the death of George Floyd.

The Harvard-educated Caldwell is a gifted writer and chronicler, and he articulates a conservative vision of a disappearing country without ever sounding inhumane or shrill. It is a vision that for most of this period would have been almost mundane in its normality, but as speech codes and legal campaigns have successfully narrowed the scope of what is permitted in polite society, this idea of America has grown “controversial”, as the country’s high-end media now labels any idea they want to signal as unacceptable. And that narrowing of acceptable thought is a central thread of the story.

Caldwell writes as a historian rather than a polemicist. In fact, he comes across like a historian in the year 2200, in the reign of the Emperor Bezos III, looking back to the downfall of the Old Republic. Do not expect Steven Pinker levels of cheeriness and optimism.

He charts a republic in flux — a once-European society now turned multicultural, a highly religious and sexually conservative country now obsessed with personal liberation and also one which, dressed up in soothing talk of diversity and inclusion, has created a brutal system of winners and losers. Indeed, “Winners” and “Losers” are two of the chapter titles.

For the winners, there is not just the wealth — though that is extreme — but the prestige and glory, and the role in the country’s narrative. This group comprises what the LA Times writer Ron Brownstein called the “coalition of the ascendent” — immigrants, African-Americans, gays and lesbians, single women but, perhaps the most important minority of all to modern America’s story: the rich.

For the losers, the new society “would make it far more difficult to take an interest in anything after one’s own death. It would make men less active and probably cause them to retire earlier from work. It would diminish their interest in history and their sense of the continuity of historical tradition.” It would lead to de-sexualisation and addiction.

Caldwell charts the decline of the uniquely American egalitarianism of the 1950s, when CEOs earned as little as four or five times that of the lowest paid of their workers, compared with the 4,000 or so ratio now sometimes found at tech firms.

It was a society devoted to the wellbeing of the average man, one where the classes had similar tastes and interests, as well as incomes. The decade of liberation unleased what Irving Kristol called “the Aristocratic Impulse” in US politics, an aristocracy made so much more unpopular by its lack of noblesse oblige. If the country has become increasingly haunted by Roman fantasies of collapse, it is because, as with Rome, overmighty subjects now threaten its ancient constitution.

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Why the rich are revolting

By Ed West

So while the American culture of the post-Sixties era has been defined by a search for equality, it has also seen declining faith in democracy; and those two things are not contradictory. Today’s American wealthy are not just richer than their predecessors, they are also more disconnected from those less fortunate, culturally, geographically and ideologically. The new moral order – with its ideals of tolerance, openness, diversity, freedom – has liberated them, while granting them a sense of moral worth previous elites did not enjoy, constrained as they were both by Christianity and the widespread knowledge that their good fortune was conferred by inheritance and luck.

The Sixties was not so much a revolution as a reformation, and the new faith was codified, as all dominant faiths come to be — in this case with civil rights laws. For most Americans, the civil rights movement was a sacred, holy mission, led by secular saints such as Martin Luther King; for Caldwell it was a cure in some ways worse than the disease, creating “not just a major new element of the Constitution” but “a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible”.

What many Americans fear, an increasingly totalitarian streak in society, is to Caldwell not a perversion of civil rights, but its logical outcome. Illiberal progressives win not because they are popular or because of “the arc of history”, but because they have the law on their side. Companies remove employers for their Facebook posts because they know the authorities can sue them; universities go along with extreme political ideas, with real-world consequences, because it’s legally safer. Social changes are enacted by litigation, not laws, and public opinion follows.

At the start of the story, Americans mostly disliked the South’s backwards racial practices. In their minds “Americans were civilized, modern, gentlemanly. Segregation was sleazy, medieval, underhanded.” But when civil rights legislation began with the Supreme Court’s school desegregation ruling Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954, it would unleash a process that could not be stopped. “Brown granted the government the authority to put certain public bodies under surveillance for racism… And once the Civil Rights Act introduced into the private sector this assumption that all separation was prima facie evidence of inequality, desegregation implied a revocation of the old freedom of association altogether.”

For Caldwell and many great minds before him “freedom of association is the master freedom — it is the freedom without which political freedom cannot be effectively exercised”. He quotes philosopher Leo Strauss: “A liberal society stands or falls by the distinction between the political (or the state) and society, or by the distinction between the public and the private. In the liberal society there is necessarily a private sphere with which the state’s legislation must not interfere… liberal society necessarily makes possible, permits, and even fosters what is called by many people ‘discrimination’.”

But those older liberal arguments have been swept aside as race has become “invested with a religious significance… an ethical absolute. One could even say that the civil rights movement, inside and outside the government, became a doctrinal institution, analogous to established churches in pre-democratic Europe.”

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Welcome to the new Middle Ages

By Ed West

One of the first great civil rights controversies was the bussing in of black students into white schools. Conservative fears about this measure were laughed at in 1964; by the 1970s, bussing was nationwide (it was even tried at one school in north London, which subsequently closed).

When working-class neighbourhoods in Boston protested, they were put under military occupation with martial law. Those who enforced integration were entirely unaffected by it, and to a lesser extent by the huge explosion in urban crime. Homicide rates in New York and Chicago increased 200% and 300% over the decade; millions fled from violence and incivility. It made “liberal” a dirty word to many Americans.

The Sixties also brought sexual liberation, but then the Fifties were unusually conservative. “As surely as World War II had advanced the integration of blacks into the mainstream of American academic and work life, it had reversed the integration of women. The war done, women were shunted from the jobs they had filled, to make way for the returning heroes. Between 1920 and 1958, women went from a third of college students to a quarter.”

Yet even in the early 1970s, four in five American women felt that “being a woman has hardly ever prevented me from doing some of the things I had hoped to do in life”. Most had never heard of the major feminist authors and marriage status made no difference. “Fifty years later, married and unmarried women would disagree about almost everything.” Indeed it is the biggest values divide in American society. And sexual liberation was more complex than portrayed; men consistently were more in favour of changing women’s place in society; abortion was first legalised across the South, with the more liberal North dragged along by the courts.

Rich and poor were also diverging, with the collapse of working-class jobs; real income for Americans with advanced degrees rose by 21% between 1973 and 2000 and fell for everyone else, including 26% for those with only a high school diploma.

Liberalism became another form of class war after Vietnam, which was much more popular with the young than the old, with the exception of elite college students who clashed with working-class policemen.

In 1969 a member of the Maoist Progressive Labor group at Harvard lamented the drift towards elitism: “We imagined a great American desert, populated by millions of similar, crass, beer-drinking grains of sand, living in a waste of identical suburban no-places. What did this imagined ‘great pig-sty of TV watchers’ correspond to in real life? As ‘middle-class’ students we learned that this was the working class—the ‘racist, insensitive people.’”

The privileged were already starting “to look on ‘average’ Americans as the country’s problem”.

But then the “average” Americans were becoming sidelined in the country’s story as, post-1965 immigration reform, the country became multicultural, a process that would both accentuate class divisions and make the country more ideologically intolerant, out of necessity: “the more loudly a country professed its commitment to diversity, the less tolerance it would have for actual dissent.”

Immigration was one of those issues Ronald Reagan was elected to slow down but only accelerated, as with all the excesses of the 1960s. “Reagan changed the country’s political mood for a while, but left its structures untouched.” Worse still, Reaganism “began a process that by the early years of the following century would render American society unrecognizably inegalitarian, even oligarchic”.

Reagan enabled even more dangerous and egotistical radicals — businessmen who wanted to “cut the past away”, proving Irving Howe’s criticism that conservativism was “nothing but liberal economics and wounded nostalgia”.

A creed that “mixed untrammeled capitalism (deemed ‘conservative’) with untrammeled sexuality (deemed ‘liberal’) seemed self-contradictory” but “it was logical and powerful. It would come, a generation later, to seem invincible.”

Up went the national debt, as Ayn Rand-loving Republicans gave tax cuts to the rich while failing to cut back on Johnson’s Great Society or low-waged illegal immigration. This, also, was a form of borrowing that allowed pleasant lifestyles for the upper-middle-class, but would have to be paid for in the long term, “in the form of overburdened institutions, rapid cultural change, and diluted political power”. Reagan’s state of California, now a dystopian failure with Third World levels of inequality and outbreaks of medieval diseases among its homeless, become a trailblazer in this change.

“The Reagan era had in retrospect marked a consolidation, not a reversal, of the movements that began in the 1960s,” Caldwell writes.

American society took on a “Roman aspect” with the rise of a new super rich, seen as “cool (Steve Jobs), prophetic (George Soros), or saintly (Warren Buffett). Wealth has never been without its appeal and its power. But it was striking that, more than any generation for a century, and in sharp contrast to its own declared youthful values, the Baby Boom generation revered wealth.”

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When will my fellow liberals learn?

By Mark Lilla

For the poor, things grew steadily worse, and diverging cultural tastes between the classes grew alongside increased contempt. “Political engagement and economic stratification came together in an almost official attitude known as snark, a sort of snobbery about other opinions that dismissed them as low-class without going to the trouble of refuting them. Why offer an argument when an eye roll would do?” The target were the “Reagan electorate, minus the richest people in it”.

And so “a new social class was coming into being that had at its disposal both capitalism’s means and progressivism’s sense of righteousness”. Tech culture either “embodied the ideals of the 1960s or was the antithesis, or both”, more individualistic and cosmopolitan but also more hierarchical, with what we now call “woke capital” the product of the romance between radicalism and big business. Where once the Left was personified by the union representative, today it’s the head of human resources — a term that was five times as common in the 1980s as the 1960s. These HR departments became increasingly political, and “carried out functions that resembled those of twentieth-century commissars” checking there was sufficient “diversity”.

Big tech, led by men of awesome individual wealth, epitomised the contradictory progressive aristocracy of the age. ‘The marketing campaigns of the internet giants were sweet narratives of liberation. Their inner workings were bossy, shifty, and ruthless.”

Eventually “real political decisions” were being made by businessman who prided themselves on being “disrupters”, less angst-ridden by their good fortune because they were “self-evidently virtuous” in supporting the right causes.

From a deeply moral country with low-church Protestant origins, Americans would increasingly turn their Calvinist instincts to agonising over race. Racial shame became normalised but not all were damned: “certain whites, however, far from feeling the shame of racism, stood in a newfound moral effulgence as fighters against it, sharing a little bit of Martin Luther King’s glory. It seemed coincidence at first that they were generally society’s leaders. CEOs, lawyers, professors, and other rich and well-educated people… were now the custodians of America’s conscience, the priests of the nation’s repentance.”

This Calvinism extended to what would now be recognised as “cancel culture”, an early example being baseball legend Al Campanis, whose career was destroyed in 1987 for some comments on race, his employers disowning him. Invariably the victims were uneducated, or at least ineloquent; they weren’t bad or bigoted, they had just not learned to mask their opinions, as cultivated Americans had (the more truthful the inelegant remark, the more sinful).

By almost any measure life has got much worse for working-class whites in America since around 1970. By Obama’s reign, poor whites were dying younger and younger, the country coming under the grip of an opioid epidemic as people with no work and no real future medicated themselves out of existence.

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Covid has exposed America as a failed state

By Aris Roussinos

Almost no one cared at first. Compared to Aids or the war on drugs, it barely passed notice. “Unlike blacks in the decades after the Vietnam War, twenty-first-century suburban and rural whites were not protagonists of the nation’s official moral narrative. Indeed, they barely figured in it.”

Polarisation would ramp up during Obama’s second term, much of it driven by the invention of the smartphone. Black Lives Matter grew out of the issue of racial disparities in income and imprisonment, now officially explainable only by the unfalsifiable idea of systemic racism. The young and rich grew increasingly angry and radical. The poor died.

By now “the parties represented two different constitutions, two different eras of history, even two different technological platforms. And increasingly, two different racial groups.”

Caldwell is a pessimist, but it hard to see that 2020 has exactly given Americans or Americanophiles reasons to be cheerful. At one point in the summer a part of the United States was ruled by an actual warlord, controlling a statelet with the highest homicide rate of any polity since the bronze age. This happened while much of the country was engaged in scenes of violence and hysteria, some people literally getting down on their knees to seek racial redemption after the martyrdom of George Floyd.

Liberations bring new forms of tyranny. Those who tear down Bastilles build their own Bastilles in turn. Was the cultural revolution a good thing? It’s too early to tell, but all cant aside, it has left winners and losers, and the costs of losing can be catastrophic. But perhaps it just wasn’t possible to have all the optimism of the 1960s, the “I have a dream”, without the squalor, too.

Having little historical imagination, the moral majority movement of the Eighties fetishised this very particular notion of the family — one that only flourished within some very particular economic conditions during the post-war period. But this iteration was only a blip during the long transition from large, extended kinship groups to the ‘chosen’, ‘blended’ family that begun to emerge within the gay community at precisely same the time Jerry Falwell and Ronald Regan were insisting that nuclear was the only proper way for families to be. For these two reactionaries, the nuclear family was the all-American redoubt against the twin threats of communism and homosexuality. The family was nuclear not just in the sense of being a nucleus, but also, as the premier expression of resistance to the nuclear threat of Communism. Family, God and country became “the holy trinity of American traditionalism”.

It is rather awkward for Christian conservatives, then, that among the most difficult to conscript into this cosy celebration of the bounded little family unit is Jesus of Nazareth himself. For again and again, throughout the Gospel accounts of his life and teaching, Jesus is portrayed as a thorough-going enemy of the exclusively narrow biological unit. Let one example stand for many:

^“While Jesus was still talking to the crowd, his mother and brothers stood outside, wanting to speak to him. Someone told him, “Your mother and brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you.”He replied to him, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” Pointing to his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.” (Matthew 12. 46-50)

One way of telling the story of the Biblical narrative about the family is as an arc that begins with the association of family life – and particularly procreation – with patriotic duty, and then gradually subjects this position to ever increasing scepticism. For a fledgling community intent on nation building, the production of children was essential to communal survival. Thus the suspicion of all those who do not contribute to the expansion of the population – eunuchs, homosexuals, unfertile “barren” women. The problem here is not about sex, it’s about children. This is what modern sex-obsessed conservatives miss about the argument that is going on within the pages of the Bible. The charge against homosexuality is not that people shouldn’t have sex this way, the charge is a lack of patriotism.

But even this gets challenged and broken down. Consider the following from Isaiah, 56:

“To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths,
who choose what pleases me
and hold fast to my covenant—
to them I will give within my temple and its walls
a memorial and a name
better than sons and daughters”

This is radical stuff. Keeping Sabbath is “better than sons and daughters”. And Isaiah is Jesus’s favourite book of the Hebrew scriptures — he quotes from it more than any other text. Jesus’s “whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” line is a clear extension of this tradition. He takes it beyond anything even Isaiah could have imagined. Membership of this new family is not premised on biological kinship but on baptism — water is thicker than blood.

It is very peculiar how religious conservatives have sought to construct an apologia for the nuclear family from the Bible. Broadly speaking, the Old Testament is perfectly relaxed about its heroes having multiple wives — Solomon had 700 of them. In contrast, the heroes of the New Testament are mostly single men, with little interest in the domestic duties and pleasures of a settled family life. St Paul even advised that it was “good for a man not to marry” (1 Corinthians, 7). To say the least, it is very hard work indeed to try and find a secure theological model of the nuclear family within the pages of Holy Scripture.

Nuclear family, no; but family, yes. The final passage of Brooks piece is a stirring cri de coeur for a return to something both “new and ancient”:

“We’ve left behind the nuclear-family paradigm of 1955. For most people it’s not coming back. Americans are hungering to live in extended and forged families, in ways that are new and ancient at the same time. This is a significant opportunity, a chance to thicken and broaden family relationships, a chance to allow more adults and children to live and grow under the loving gaze of a dozen pairs of eyes, and be caught, when they fall, by a dozen pairs of arms. For decades we have been eating at smaller and smaller tables, with fewer and fewer kin.

It’s time to find ways to bring back the big tables.”

My first thought, as I read it, was of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, with a dozen single men sat around a large table at one of the decisive moments of the Christian story. It was on this occasion that Jesus invited his followers to “do this in remembrance of me” — an invitation that over two billion of us regularly respond to by gathering around the Eucharistic table in a recreation of that founding meal.

Those who share this meal together describe each other as family. It is, to use the sociological jargon, a fictive kinship — in so far as it is not grounded in a biological connection, but a chosen identity. If there is such a thing as a Christian family, it is this. A place where, at best, “adults and children live and grow under the loving gaze of a dozen pairs of eyes, and be caught, when they fall, by a dozen pairs of arms”. Gay and straight, rich and poor, black and white — this is the ultimate extended family.

Yes, like the nuclear family, this family has also been thinned out by the community dissolving properties of contemporary capitalism. But as a model, it is far more deeply rooted in the Christian witness than the nuclear family ever has been. Which makes the church’s continued obsession with policing the biological mechanics of love-making so thoroughly depressing.

For what Brooks reminds us is that if we compare and contrast the moral majority nuclear family position with the forged families that sprung up within the gay community in the Eighties — often forms of collective solidarity and mutual care in response to the darkness of AIDS — it is the forged family that more closely resembles the sort of arrangement that Jesus was calling his followers into.

Throughout Christian history, whether it be the big table of the monastic refectory, the Eucharistic table (yes, an altar too) set as the central focus of the church, or even the big table of parish lunch clubs, it is who you eat with (and not so much who you sleep with) that defines the religious family. The blindness of many religious conservatives is to have set the small little Ikea table of the nuclear family against that of the large, inclusive table of the extended family, with always space for one more seat.

Yes, fidelity and faithfulness are important in all family structures. But when Jesus said do this in remembrance of me, he really didn’t have in mind a stay-at-home Mum in a flowery apron providing meatloaf for the table and only straight sex in the bedroom.

Gorbachev is widely reviled in today’s Russia for, as many see it, destroying the Soviet Union and their country’s status as a great power. It may take another generation before Russians regard him, if they ever do, through a more charitable lens, as the heroic figure who facilitated the end of communism and accelerated the demise of the Soviet bloc in such a way that these momentous transformations took place largely without bloodshed.

So much for the nostalgia. What about the unexpected timewarp? The surprise was less at how Gorbachev has aged — it is 30 years, after all; the early death of his beloved Raisa (in 1999) hit him hard, he is diabetic, and he has had spells in hospital with heart problems. It was more that, when Gorbachev voiced his fears for today, his apprehensions seemed framed by quite a different world, the world of then rather than now. Asked about contemporary dangers to world peace, he replied: “As long as weapons of mass destruction exist, primarily nuclear weapons, it’s a colossal danger.” Repeating a theme from his earliest summits with Reagan, he declared: “All nuclear weapons should be destroyed, to save ourselves and the planet.”

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It wasn't the Berlin Wall that divided Germany

By James Hawes

His prism remains that of East-West relations, the bipolar world that ended with the Soviet collapse, and the premise of Mutual Assured Destruction that underlay the string of arms control treaties concluded by the United States and the Soviet Union. Then, these treaties were hailed as guarantees of security for both countries and the European states in between. Now, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (1972), renounced by the United States in 2002, the Intermediate-range Nuclear forces Treaty (1987), which the US withdrew from after citing violations by Russia, and the latest Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (2010), which expires early in 2021, are passing successively into abeyance without being either renewed or replaced.

Is the world a more dangerous place because of that? Some would say it is, and blame Donald Trump for trifling with global security and abandoning the responsibilities of the United States as world policeman. Could it be, though, that the apparent lack of urgency to negotiate updated agreements is less a reflection of the US President’s brand of isolationism than evidence of how the world, and the perception of major threats, have changed since those years? Is codified arms control, including nuclear arms control, simply less significant than it was,  at least in the bilateral form it then took?

The tentative answer to this has to be yes — and it is one reason why Gorbachev’s anniversary observations marking the fall of the Berlin Wall sound so dated. The concerns of today, which may themselves be hopelessly obsolete in far less than 30 years’ time, are very different from those that derived from the East-West divide then.

How different became apparent when I took part in a discussion at the annual debating festival, the Battle of Ideas last weekend, entitled “Can we stop World War III?”.  Our panel put forward a range of views, but almost entirely absent — either from the presentations or from questions — were the following: any suggestion that World War Three would be waged between East and West in the old Cold War sense; arms control treaties, including nuclear weapons treaties; and even — strange though it might seem in the light of Washington’s recent preoccupations — Russia.

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The liberals are falling into Putin's trap

By Peter Franklin

The biggest difference between then and now is the focus on China, and the prospect of an eventual conflict with the United States, as the one power rises and the other — perhaps — declines. Thirty years ago, China was nowhere as a global player. It was isolated after after its leaders had crushed the democracy movement at Tiananmen Square; it was not projecting its power any further afield. Even now, it is reasonable to question how sure and steady China’s continued rise will be. It faces economic and demographic difficulties, the Communist Party has not relinquished — or been forced to relinquish — power. Internal turmoil cannot be excluded.

But the US and its neighbours are already uneasy about possible plans Beijing may have to control the South China Sea, and there is a fresh interest in maritime power. Perhaps those two British aircraft carriers some dismissed as a vanity project are not such an irrelevance after all. There is also much about China, from mass surveillance to the treatment of its non-Han ethnic groups, to the way it acquires other people’s technology, that could spell dangers, even confrontation, ahead. Hong Kong today has become a front-line of sorts, where one system is confronting another, but the imbalance in power between the two sides suggest that, if it escalates further, it will be settled only one way.

Then again, the whole nature of warfare is changing. There is no sign that regional conflicts will cease but whether they could escalate into a world war, however, is another matter. If you consider the existing or likely flashpoints of today — the greater Middle East, Kashmir, the Korean Peninsula — only Syria has come near to becoming a proxy conflict on the Cold War model and it is winding down. US self-sufficiency in energy has radically altered its calculation of risk when considering military engagement, even of a relatively limited kind.

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Who'll blink first: Trump or Xi?

By Helen Thompson

Will the next world war — if there is one — even be about territory at all, or control? Will it entail physical combat? It is not necessary to make prophecies about Artificial Intelligence to conceive of conflicts conducted remotedly, wars waged by cyber threats to critical infrastructure and weapon systems that require no human intervention.

This is why Mikhail Gorbachev sounds as though he lives in another world when he calls for the abolition of nuclear weapons worldwide as his prescription for world peace. Nuclear weapons still pose an existential threat, but the nuclear threat is now one among others, and deterrence may no longer be the only answer. If the US has the capability to sabotage other countries’ nuclear research and perhaps even their tests, that “smart” technological approach might achieve the same effect as developing your own nuclear weapon at vastly less cost.

International arms control treaties might not have completely outlived their usefulness. After all, they were never just about counting missiles and warheads. They were about establishing a framework of trust — which is one reason why they were seen as a useful start to trying to improve US-Russia relations whenever those relations soured. But the age of bilateral arms control has to be over. New arms negotiations might just foster a US-Russia rapprochement (though this looks unlikely before the next US election), but — as both the US and Russia quietly acknowledge, any serious arms control in future must include China.

In 30 years the world of international security has changed beyond all compare: geographically with the rise of China and the emergence of India and Pakistan as nuclear weapons states; technologically with the advent of cyber warfare, and philosophically with the evisceration of Soviet communism and threat from climate change. None of this was on the horizon when the Berlin Wall fell. A hero of his time, Mikhail Gorbachev’s anniversary call for the destruction of all nuclear weapons offers a salutary reminder of how far and fast the world has moved on.

Fortunately, we made an early call. Many who made a similar decision later on found themselves at the mercy of Uber, facing huge price hikes. Apparently, the Uber algorithm, more sensitive than the local cab company to the fluctuations of supply and demand, sent prices through the roof. A similar power cut in March 2018 meant that stranded commuters were faced with Uber price surges of up to 500%.

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The battle for the Tory Party's soul

By Peter Franklin

Amongst the most disturbing lessons that my father attempted to teach me as a child was that something is worth what someone is prepared to pay for it. There is no such thing as intrinsic value, he maintained. Value is simply a function of supply and demand.

Well, I didn’t like it then and I don’t like it now. For the kindly Muslim taxi driver that took us home, the algorithm was pretty simple: the job was worth his time plus his costs plus a reasonable profit. Our misfortune was not something to be exploited by a profit-maximising algorithm. And I thank him for that.

Now it may have been entirely incidental that our cab driver was a person of faith. And I absolutely do not put his behaviour down to the fact that, as a believer, he was a better person than those greedy, pagan executives over at Uber. But what I did wonder, as we trundled down the M1, was whether we had been the beneficiaries of a world-view in which things do, in fact, have intrinsic value.

The Uber algorithms, perfectly embodying the spirit of market forces, make all value beholden to fluctuations of supply and demand. Here, nothing is fixed. Everything is relative. It’s a metaphysics, of sorts. Or perhaps – because it’s so wholeheartedly materialist – an anti-metaphysics. Capitalism represents the triumph of the immanent – that there is nothing to human value except the ebb and flow of human behaviour. Value is not rooted in anything transcendent, beyond the continual drift of human desire.

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When will Uber feel the techlash?

By Marshall Steinbaum

This is why, at a philosophical level at least, capitalism and religious belief are fundamentally enemies. The former is inherently relativistic and free-floating, the latter rooted in a view of the world where there are immutable and stable values.

I mention this little story only because it sits neatly alongside a movement that seems to be gathering force, especially in the US, in which conservatives – and often religious conservatives – are ousting socialists as some of the most thoughtful critics of capitalism. Last year Peter Kolozi, an academic at the City University of New York, published a timely historical survey of the long tradition of anti-capitalism within US conservatism. To those who have become used to conservatives being capitalism’s most high-profile cheerleaders, this notion may seem odd. But there is no necessary connection between conservatism and capitalism: indeed, there is a strong case that they are antithetical. And that case is re-emerging.

For instance, as Kolozi points out, conservatism in the post-Bellum American South looked suspiciously upon capitalism as a northern phenomenon that threatened the traditional structures of community life. This was a version of conservatism that sought to maintain a form of life built upon racial privilege. And most of us are glad it was destroyed.

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Can America's national conservatives reunite the nation?

By Oliver Wiseman

But the South’s experience of capital’s power to destroy traditional community structures – for good or ill – formed an important part of the traditional conservative tradition (often known as paleo-conservatism) and its attitude towards capitalism.

As Kolizi explains, this tradition came to be obscured by the Cold War. Given the threat posed by communism, anti-capitalist conservatives threw in their lot with free-market conservatives, united against a common enemy. But the end of the Cold War, the 2008 financial crash, worries about globalisation, and the collapse of faith in the market’s ability to sustain community life – often code for church and family – has exposed old divisions within the conservative family. Thus people like Fox news presenter and Trump supporter Tucker Carlson are beginning to say things like this: “Market capitalism is not a religion. Any economic system that weakens and destroys families isn’t worth having.” Damning the “mercenaries” of the capitalist class, Carlson called for:

“a fair country. A decent country. A cohesive country. A country whose leaders don’t accelerate the forces of change purely for their own profit and amusement.”

This could almost have been Bernie Sanders.

More from this author

Why won't Remainers talk about family?

By Giles Fraser

The conservative case against capitalism is built on three basic differences between the two ideologies.

First, the obvious point. Conservatives like to conserve. By contrast, capitalism is the most powerful change-agent the world has ever seen. Karl Marx had it right when he explained capitalism in the opening chapter of The Communist Manifesto:

“All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.

To those who are capitalism’s most vigorous moral proponents, this is its virtue: creative destruction. When what is being destroyed is a society of racial superiority, as with the American South, that is a good thing. But when what is being destroyed is a whole infrastructure of mutual care and support – family, unions, church, stable communities – then we might think very differently.

The second difference is the one alluded to in my taxi story: capitalism’s anti-metaphysics – or, to use Marx’s expression, the profanation of the holy. It is not incidental that religion has played an important role within the conservative tradition. For religious belief locates value beyond the to-ing and fro-ing of human desire, beyond human subjectivity. God is the fixed point around which human value turns.

Suggested reading

Why we all need a share in capitalism

By Tim Bale

But hang on, weren’t the religious right of the Regan era, for instance, capitalism’s biggest fans? Yes, but this was more to do with their pathological hatred of Soviet Communism and its programmatic atheism. During the Cold war, the Christian Right imagined that their enemies’ enemy – capitalism – to be their friend. The new style anti-capitalist conservative of the Carlson variety believes this alliance to have been short-sighted.

Third, anti-capitalist conservatives maintain that the moral life is a communal and necessarily rooted activity. They put particular value on loyalty to place and kin as necessary constituents of moral formation and of human flourishing.

In this regard, they have begun to whisper to each other that the global reach of multi-national capitalism is undermining the very basis of moral existence and human happiness. Capitalism severs people from their roots, treating human labour as just another commodity to be moved around the world at the service of supply and demand.

Suggested reading

Who whacked Jensen Huang?

By J. D. Vance

These new-look conservatives have a totally different feel to the ones that progressives have been used to dealing with. Take someone like Kentucky farmer and contemporary poet Wendell Berry. Radically committed to the environment, a lyricist of human rootedness, implacably hostile to technology, broadly Christian, in many ways he feels more Left than Right, yet his moral vision fits more comfortably within the old tradition of Southern Agrarians than it does within that of the progressives.

Or take American writer Rod Dreher, more obviously on the Right, yet whose Benedict Option advises a withdrawal from the values of capitalism:

“what has been missing from capitalism for a long time is any sense of morality, care for neighbor and community, and love for the “other” that Christianity absolutely demands, but that this current iteration of capitalism says is foolish.”

The US TV Series American Gods is premised upon the idea of a war between the old Gods of religion and the new gods of technology and celebrity and finance. This is the war that a new generation of American Conservatives have now joined. J. D. Vance, for example, the Conservative author of Hillbilly Elegy, was baptised a Catholic last week. Agreeing with Carlson, he has asked: “What happens when the companies that drive the market economy — and all of its benefits — don’t care about the American nation’s social fabric?”

Even Vance, a venture capitalist, is wobbling in his faith in the redemptive potential of corporate finance. I suspect that is why he has chosen the old gods over the new.

Ironically, it is progressives – the Clintons, for example – who continue to look to the gods of finance to drive us all towards the sunny uplands of a bright new world. Historically, it is liberalism that was formed alongside capitalism, and liberalism – especially classical liberalism – that shares the same basic assumptions about the freedom of the individual. That is why, for instance, woke liberalism and Silicon Valley capitalism sit so neatly together. And why, to the bafflement of many on the traditional Left, the case against capitalism is now being made more forcibly from the Right.

To his parents’ surprise, the boy gets even more excited and starts to dig wildly into the pile. “Son,” the mum cries, “what are you doing?” The boy turns around with a smile on his face and replies, “With all this stuff, there must be a pony in here somewhere!”

That neatly sums up the state of mind for many American conservatives today. With Donald Trump in the White House building tariff and border walls, and the Left gunning at them from their towers in academia and the media, conservatives often feel like their movement is dying under a heap of dung. If only there were a pony somewhere in there, they mutter to themselves.

The reality is not so bleak. Fading American conservatism has an excellent chance to renew itself and become again a dominant political force. But to do that, it needs to be a little less distinctively American and bit more like the conservatism found in other Anglosphere countries.

American conservatism differs from the rest of the world’s centre-Right attitudes in two respects: it is distinctly Protestant in tone and policy, and it remains unreconciled to the existence of the modern social welfare state – both of which attitudes are now decisively out of touch with mainstream American thought.

Further reading

The political centre is not where liberals think it is

By Peter Franklin

Vice President Mike Pence excellently encompasses them, however.  His acceptance speech for the Republican Party’s nomination in 2016 started: “I am a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order.” This expression of faith is non-controversial within conservative circles. But fewer than one-third of Americans would be able say the same about themselves.

Pence’s weren’t empty words. As Governor of Indiana, he garnered national attention when, in 2015, he signed a law allowing businesses to cite religious convictions to exempt themselves from anti-discrimination statutes. Staunchly anti-abortion, long opposed to same-sex marriage, and notably religiously observant, Pence is an excellent representative of the evangelical Right’s political movement. He is not, however, an excellent representative of the middle of American political opinion.

Fewer than 40% of Americans attend religious services weekly, and non-believers – or non-Christians – are a large and fast-growing share of the population. Polls consistently show a majority favours a woman’s right to have an abortion, at least in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. Americans also favour same-sex marriage, and those under the age of 30 favour it by nearly 4-to-1 margins. The only major group in America that still opposes it is white evangelical Christians; in other words, Mike Pence and the core of the Republican Party.

Further reading

The Trump temptation that Evangelicals can’t resist

By David French

If Pence’s sincere but ostentatious religiosity is off-putting for tens of millions of Americans, his devotion to conservative economic nostrums dismays millions more. American conservative thought remains opposed to virtually any expansion of social welfare programmes; it has opposed efforts to expand government-subsidised healthcare coverage, regardless of whether such efforts were pushed by Republican or Democratic presidents. Pence enthusiastically opposed both Obamacare and President Bush’s expansion of the popular health insurance programme for senior citizens, Medicare.

This deep-rooted antipathy stems from the very beginnings of the modern American conservative movement. It began in opposition to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, which established the first national government regulation of business and the first government pensions (Social Security). The journalist William F Buckley summed it up in an oft-quoted epigram from the mission statement of the magazine that became the bible of the new movement: “It [National Review] stands athwart history, yelling Stop.”

But history did not stop, despite the election of Buckley’s friend Ronald Reagan and then three more Republican Presidents since. It turns out that Americans like big government, even if they prefer less of it than do Swedes or Danes. Every significant conservative-led effort to curtail, reform, or reduce large government programmes has failed spectacularly. Yet movement conservatives remain undaunted. Their biggest domestic priority today is dramatically to reduce spending on Social Security, Medicare, and a government-run health insurance for the poor and the disabled, Medicaid, without raising any taxes to help finance the indebted programmes. As they say in the South, that dog don’t hunt.

Further reading

Trump’s tax cuts will benefit Republican donors - not Republican voters

By Liam Halligan

One can only begin to understand the conservative intellectual opposition to Trump in reference to these foundational beliefs. Trump openly said he would not cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid and – to put it mildly – did not strike a conventional Christian pose on the campaign trail. His embrace of tariffs and opposition to free trade struck movement conservatives as heresy precisely because it championed government intervention in markets to help people in need. Yet their caterwauling availed them not; it turned out that even a majority of Republicans had long since ceased to worship at the conservative altar.

Trump’s tenure in office does, however, show how certain longstanding conservative priorities can be part of the new emerging conservatism. Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation of business are longtime conservative priorities. His focus on religious liberty, without the ostentatious preaching of religious belief so common among other Republicans, is proving popular. Trump is even curbing some of the less central elements of the social welfare state. The number of people receiving disability insurance benefits had been rising dramatically for over 15 years, but the number has been shrinking since Trump’s inauguration. Conservatives may not be getting what they want, but they are getting what they need.

Trump’s victory was marred by his casual insensitivity to gender, racial, and ethnic sensibilities: he offended and drove away millions of people who could have rallied to the cause of a new, less doctrinaire conservatism. But he nonetheless shows conservatives something they ought to have seen long before his arrival. Americans may revere the past, but they have no wish to return to it. They live in the present and dream for the future and they want political leadership that shares those values, not one that scorns the present and see the future in the past.

Further reading

Are capitalism and Christianity really compatible?

By Giles Fraser

America remains open to a moderate conservatism, one that is at peace with the modern state and modern morality and seeks only to trim its excesses and preserve core religious freedoms while placing its power squarely in the service of the vast majority. That is what Republicans in state leadership roles have done, and they have consistently won re-election even when more doctrinaire, national Republicans have faltered. In this sense, Republican governors are more like Trump than most care to admit.

This brand of conservatism should sound familiar to non-American readers. It is more like what the British or Canadian Tories, Australia’s Liberals, and New Zealand’s National Party have done for decades, following Edmund Burke rather than Milton Friedman. That brand of centre-Right thinking has its own difficulties. But that does not mean that American conservatives should not look abroad for some inspiration.

American conservatism faces what Reagan called “a time for choosing”. Reagan burst on to the national scene with a 1964 television speech with that title, and told Americans that “there is no Left or Right, only an up or down”. How to move up, towards what Reagan called “the maximum of individual freedom consistent with law and order,” requires choice, and that requires judgment rather than ideology. American conservatism can thrive if it can discard old ideological coats that no longer fit and instead choose new, better-tailored ones.

Further reading

Is America a failed state? Or is liberalism a failed ideology?

By Peter Franklin

True, Donald Trump is not Ronald Reagan (though there were doubts in Europe about the former B-List actor’s capability), and Kim Jong-un is not Mikhail Gorbachev, but events in Reykjavik 32 years ago – which in strategic terms is only yesterday – are worth studying for their possible relevance today.

Further reading

Let's not be naive about North Korea

By Benedict Rogers

In 1985, Reagan and Gorbachev, who had become leader of the Soviet Union in March, met for the first time in Geneva. The purpose was to talk about the arms race, particularly the US’s Strategic Defense Initiative – “Star Wars” (an ICBM interception system) – which threatened the equilibrium of “Mutual Assured Destruction”. SDI was only in the theoretical and experimental stage, but Moscow knew that the US’s technological resources – not least money – were formidable.

The Geneva summit was held in November 1985 at a chateau owned by the Aga Khan, and the two leaders’ first meeting ran half an hour over schedule. A promising start. The two men had a cheery disposition (Gorbachev’s immediate predecessors, Konstantin Chernenko and Yuri Andropov, had been in the “old waxworks” category), and Gorbachev accepted Reagan’s invitation to visit the US.

The major outcome of Geneva, though, was the Reykjavik Summit, held in October the following year, 1986. The summit’s purpose was to explore the possibilities of reaching an agreement on arms control. However, while Gorbachev wanted an agreement on all ballistic missiles and to limit the talks to arms control, Reagan was determined to continue with SDI and also wanted to include talks on human rights, the emigration of Soviet Jews and dissidents, and the Soviet 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, a continuing source of East-West friction – issues that had been stuck in a time warp since Carter’s presidency. Inside the Washington beltway, however, there were many who were worried that Reagan would “give the store away” – ie SDI.

Reagan had views on how the Reykjavik summit should proceed. He thought Gorbachev might be a man he could do business with (Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister, had said the same). Much to the consternation of Washington staffers, he insisted on starting with a private meeting with the Soviet leader plus interpreters.

Reagan’s thinking was straightforward: even with SDI, he believed a nuclear war could not be won and therefore must never be fought. Incredible as it now may seem (or perhaps not, given Donald Trump’s tweeted threats), this was by no means a universal view, and there was considerable planning for the waging of nuclear war, if only as a contingency in case deterrence failed.

Reagan believed that he and Gorbachev could identify areas of common interests, convinced as he was that the Soviet leader – like him – understood that his own people wanted prosperity and economic development. It followed logically that he and Gorbachev were best-placed to satisfy the demands of their people.

Sceptics in Washington and other Nato capitals did not share Reagan’s sunny optimism. The same was true of the KGB with their leader. Indeed, they were opposed to, and tried to block, the meetings, even though Gorbachev’s evolving doctrine of Perestroika and Glasnost. came originally from the KGB as a means of maintaining Communist Party control of the Russian state and the Soviet Union.

In fact, the KGB saw the greater threat to the continuation of party control as coming from the West, the US in particular, than from the internal contradictions of the Soviet economic system. Indeed, the obstacles to Reykjavik in Moscow were far greater than in Washington. The chances of the summit not coming off at all were high.

In the end it was Gorbachev and Eduard Shevardnadze (his foreign minister) who made sure it happened, as much as it was Reagan and Shultz.

Further reading

How should we rate Trump? Not as bad as some past presidential rascals

By Eliot Cohen

At Reykjavik, Reagan’s basic message was that the US was prepared to give up offensive nuclear weapons over a period of time in order to establish a relationship based on defensive weapons, offering to share SDI technology – a sort of “Mutual Assured Protection”. In reply, a sceptical Gorbachev said he didn’t believe the US would even share milking machine technology with the USSR. On the subject of SDI, for the time being at least, Gorbachev and the KGB saw eye to eye.

While, however, offensive-defensive trade-offs were the central issue, there were also discussions in the margins on intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF)[2.  These were intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) and ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCMs), having ranges of 1,000 to 5,500 km (620 to 3,400 miles) and shorter-range ballistic missiles (SRBMs) with ranges from 500 to 1,000 km. The deployment of these in Europe had been a cause for concern since the late 1970s, when the Soviet Union began replacing its older single-warhead SS-4 and SS-5 IRBMs with newer and more accurate SS-20s, which could each deliver three nuclear warheads from a distance of 5,000 km. Mounted on mobile launchers based in the western Soviet Union, the SS-20 could strike targets anywhere in western Europe in less than 10 minutes.].

Nevertheless, over the central issue – which boiled down to SDI – the talks became increasingly acrimonious. At the end of the two-day meeting, Gorbachev refused to sign the proposed INF arms-reduction agreement because Reagan would not give up development of SDI:

We cannot go along with what you propose. If you will agree to banning tests in space, we will sign the document in two minutes. We cannot go along with something else. We have already agreed to what we could; we are not to blame. Even though our meeting is ending in this way, I have a clear conscience before my people and before you. I have done everything I could.

Reagan replied:

It’s too bad we have to part this way. We were so close to an agreement. I think you didn’t want to achieve an agreement anyway [emphasis added]. I’m very sorry.

The two leaders left the Hofdi House on the Reykjavik waterfront grim-faced, which the cameras soon conveyed to the world as the total failure of the summit.

However, six months later the finishing touches were being put to an INF agreement which reduced allowable missiles to zero. The summit was ultimately a failure in dealing with ICBMs, but the meeting had subtly changed the relationship.

Considerable progress had been made behind the scenes on how the US would deal with human rights issues between the two countries – the first time that the Soviet Union had ever allowed another country to become involved. Gorbachev has cited Reykjavik as the beginning of the end of the Cold War – though when exactly he realised this isn’t clear. Whatever the case, five years later the USSR was dissolved.

After Reykjavik, Gorbachev had gone from one European capital to another saying that it would have been possible to have a nuclear-free world if it hadn’t been for the American insistence on pursuing SDI. However, he had misjudged their mood, for the European members of Nato had been shaken by the potential agreement on the removal of INF missiles, which would have left them without any continental-based nuclear defence against the Red Army. INF missiles in Europe was a guarantee of US commitment in the event of a Soviet attack; no INF missiles on European soil equated to no guarantee.

In the US itself, luminaries such as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski (President Carter’s national security adviser) also publically criticised Reagan and his team for their “recklessness” at Reykjavik in drawing down INF, predicting that the Europeans, seeing it as a withdrawal from Europe, would seek realignment, opening the possibility of an entirely new balance-of-power, one unfavourable to the US.

More by Allan Mallinson

When do empires end?

By Allan Mallinson

Eventually, however, Gorbachev came to accept that he would not be able to kill SDI, while the Europeans also came to see the benefits of reducing tensions by a “zero-zero” INF agreement: the withdrawal of all Soviet and US intermediate-range nuclear missiles from Europe. Washington became the venue for the next summit, in late 1987. Its centrepiece was the signing of the INF treaty on December 8. Reagan’s reputation in the West stood sky high.

The irony is that if there had been a far-reaching agreement at Reykjavik, it would almost certainly have been sabotaged by the bureaucracies in both capitals. The USSR might have been able to stagger on a few years more, with the threat of doing untold damage. Walking away, as Reagan did, had been courageous, and based on his clear central intellectual position. That it also proved smart is testimony to Gorbachev’s – eventual – pragmatism; and to what goes on behind the scenes when two sides are in proximity or approaching proximity.

In June 1988, with the INF treaty now in force, President Reagan went to Moscow, and Gorbachev took him to see some of the sights. As they were strolling arm in arm across Red Square, one of the accompanying media called out, “President Reagan, do you still think this is the ‘Evil Empire’?”

Reagan answered, “No, that was another time, another place.”

It remains to be seen if North Korea is ready to give up its “treasured sword of justice”. And it would be difficult to say that Trump has a clear, central, intellectual position. But after his startling cancellation, North Korea did issue a conciliatory statement indicating it was ready to “resolve problems at any time”. And news from Washington suggests that the talks may yet take place.

Looking forward to meeting with Kim Yong Chol in New York to discuss @Potus potential summit with Chairman Kim. We are committed to the complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula @StateDept

— Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) May 30, 2018

And they may fail. But as the power games in Washington and Pyongyang play out, before rushing to doomy conclusions, it’s worth remembering how impossible it was to conceive of Reagan and Gorbachev ever being arm in arm after the failure of Reykjavik.

Remembering Ronald Reagan, Henry Olsen – author of a new book on the former president’s philosophy – struck a similar note. While Mrs Thatcher’s transatlantic soulmate during the 1980s wanted to advance economic freedom and did, he repeatedly talked of social obligations, too – but is overwhelmingly remembered for the former rather than the latter. This is unfortunate because he worked with Democrats across the political aisle to build a consensus on key entitlement programmes and had, on occasion, to fight fellow conservatives who disagreed with his support for the tax rises necessary to sustain those programmes.

In the fourth clip of this interview, to be published tomorrow, the two authors will discuss the gaps in the thinking of Thatcher and Reagan – especially in terms of relevance to the challenges of globalisation that we face today.

For all clips in the series click here.

Buy a copy of Charles Moore’s book(s) via this link and Henry’s “The Working Class Republican” via this one. Other booksellers are available!

Today, the two biographers talk about how both reached out to poorer Britons and Americans. Thatcher won the support of fabled “Essex man” and there were “Reagan Democrats” in the USA. Every successful conservative leader of modern times has depended on such outreach for their majorities – John Howard had his “battlers” for example and Stephen Harper his “Tim Hortons voters”.

In remarks that are very relevant to today, Charles Moore explains that Mrs Thatcher was as interested in spreading ownership (and, therefore, wealth) as well as income. Sadly, because her government and subsequent governments did not build enough new houses the great rise in home ownership that she engineered with her flagship council homes policy has been completely reversed when measured as a percentage of the British population.

In the third clip of the interview, to be published tomorrow, the two authors will discuss how the modern day disciples of Thatcher and Reagan misremember their heroes.

Buy a copy of Charles Moore’s book(s) via this link and Henry’s “The Working Class Republican” via this one. Other booksellers are available!

If Tories and Republicans are to look to these two leaders from the 1980s it’s probably useful for them to be properly understood. Unfortunately, I’ve long believed many Right-wingers misremember Thatcher and Reagan, almost as much as those on the Left do. In particular, they remember the times when they were boldly ideological – against the “Evil Empire” of the Soviet Union or in tackling striking air traffic controllers or coalminers. They forget how they declined to cut welfare or health provision in any significant ways and the times they occasionally raised taxes. Reagan would not be on the ‘right’ side of the tax pledge introduced by Grover Norquist and which helps explain why no Washington Republican has a voted for any tax increase since 1990.

Over the next six days, therefore, we’ll be running clips from an interview UnHerd conducted with Charles Moore, The Daily Telegraph columnist and official biographer of Margaret Thatcher and Henry Olsen, Editor of our Flyover country theme and who, last year, published a new book on Reagan that attempted to argue that he was not the economic libertarian that some claim he was.

We begin with Charles Moore explaining what Mrs Thatcher meant by her controversial “there is no such thing as society” quote and Henry Olsen putting Reagan’s “government is the problem, not the solution” in context. And, wow, what a context. Reagan added, critically, “in this present crisis” to those words and the rest of his first inaugural included important promises to safeguard a wide range of government provisions. He was, as Henry’s book contends, a “New Deal” Republican – preferring to save rather than dismantle the systems of social protection that were often built by Democratic Party opponents.

In the second clip of this series, to be published tomorrow, the two authors will discuss how Thatcher and Reagan reached out to low income workers.

Buy a copy of Charles Moore’s book(s) via this link and Henry’s “The Working Class Republican” via this one. Other booksellers are available!

Additionally, the video below providers a three minute summary of the key arguments in Henry’s book.