The resulting system would amount to a major concession to the Islamic Republic, which didn’t collect any fees for permitting passage before the war. At least one vessel has already paid $2 million to pass. If that becomes the going rate, Iran could pocket some $70 billion to $90 billion a year, according to a JPMorgan estimate — in effect, obtaining through fees the reparations to which Tehran insists it is entitled for the destruction caused by the war. Hence, Karl’s question.

Trump’s response: “We’re thinking of doing it as a joint venture. It’s a way of securing it — also securing it from lots of other people. It’s a beautiful thing.”

Ponder the absurdity: a joint venture with the Islamic Republic of Iran, which just showed its capacity to unilaterally close the strait and thus cripple global energy markets. It’s the sort of bullshit — sorry, there’s no better word — that defines his rule, especially in his second term. Call it mad-king governance, in which the intellectual inconstancy, mercurial moods, and sheer gambling audacity of a single man are supposed to substitute for modern technocracy.

Except, mad-king governance is utterly exhausting for Americans and the world. And the process is so messy, the results so lousy, the risks so high, that the mad king is making liberal technocracy look better by comparison. One yearns to cry out: Bring back Hillary, bring back the Obamaian wonks, give us a thousand interagency briefing memos and think-tank white papers — policy formed in the pre-populist age may have been bad, but it wasn’t this bad.

I kid. Mostly. Pre-Trump technocracy, to adapt a famous adage of Mitterrand’s, contained in itself all the elements that made Trump’s rise inevitable. Above all, it removed important questions from democratic contestation; no matter which party voters elected, they got ruinous free-trade deals, pointless foreign wars, and open borders. In 2016, Trump got himself elected president precisely by re-politicizing the questions that voters had been told were beyond their ken.

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Trump, in other words, put his finger on a real crisis of democracy, and one that America had confronted going back to the beginning. Given its complexities, modern society requires complex administration. But in carrying out this function, administrative agencies can come to override the democratic will, often to the benefit of themselves and other elites. This, in turn, provokes backlash, with the popular classes sometimes elevating a brash figure to take on all the wonky bastards.  

The classic American case is the Second Bank of the United States. The bank was a pillar of the Hamiltonian state, designed to ensure the steady but disciplined flow of credit in the new republic as it set out to industrialize its economy. The BUS fulfilled this function with admirable effectiveness, as well as serving as a profiteering money-market actor in its own right.

Yet it also came to be seen, not unjustly, as a vehicle for the Northeastern commercial establishment and unfriendly to workers, farmers, and a rising class of small entrepreneurs in the South and West. Moreover, although the bank was established by Congress and partially funded by taxpayers, its leaders strenuously resisted democratic oversight and even used their financial might to bend election outcomes to their preferences.

The bank’s opponents found a champion in Andrew Jackson, a Tennessee militiaman who despised all paper money and saw the BUS as unconstitutional. Jackson, known as “Old Hickory” for his toughness, set out to destroy the BUS — and succeeded. Having failed to plan for the aftermath, however, the Jackson administration turned to local banks to serve as substitute depositories for government funds. 

The Jacksonians soon learned to their chagrin that small bankers were far more vulnerable to graft and mismanagement than the big federal institution. The immediate issue of the Bank War was a rash of wildcat banking and a recession, and a US banking system that for much of the 19th century was much more crisis-prone than those of comparable industrial states, like France and Britain, with more centralized banking systems. What the BUS needed was better democratic oversight. There were good proposals in Congress for ensuring this, which Jackson ignored, choosing instead a Hulk-smash strategy that ended up creating more problems than it solved. 

This fact pattern should be disconcertingly familiar. To be sure, Jackson was far more mentally disciplined and systematic than Trump. Indeed, Old Hickory doesn’t deserve the mad-king label. But Jackson’s flawed fight with the BUS also describes the self-defeating course of much Trumpian “reform.”

Consider tariffs and free trade. Trump identified a very real crisis, of course: a world trade system that profited Wall Street and China but sapped US manufacturing capacity and decimated working-class jobs and communities. But like the Jacksonians, the Trumpians could smash, but not design and develop. They imposed tariffs on certain Chinese goods in the first term, but it was left to the Bidenites to actually implement something like an industrial policy, especially focused on renewables and semiconductors.

Upon returning to office, Trump once more set out to restructure the trade system, with tariffs emerging as his only tool for doing so. Not even bothering with legislation in Congress, he used dubious statutory authority to impose across-the-board tariffs, derived using a cockamamie formula, on every corner of the Earth, including islands uninhabited by humans. It was unclear how imposing levies on bananas would revive manufacturing. Nor could the administration explain why all trade deficits, with all nations and in all sectors, had to be eliminated. Nor, finally, were the tariffs coupled with workforce development or industrial policy — the additional ingredients needed for a genuine manufacturing revival.

Then Trump went into mad-king mode, imposing and removing tariffs, raising rates and slashing them, based on pure caprice and in response to the gyrations of equity markets. Like Oprah dispensing prizes to her audience members, the mad king handed down tariff threats to every foreign country that dared to disagree with him, including some of Washington’s oldest and most reliable allies.

Eventually, the US Supreme Court held that Trump lacked the statutory authority he claimed for his tariffs. Manufacturing revival, the ostensible purpose of the policy, was all but forgotten. And indeed, it isn’t happening: in the first year of the second Trump administration, the United States lost more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs. And only about a third of voters approve of his handling of the economy, compared with nearly two-thirds who disapprove. Trump’s mad-king shenanigans not only failed to fulfill one of MAGA’s central promises, but may have even undermined the credibility of an important tool for protecting US industry.

It was his recent Iran war, however, that comprehensively sealed the debate on the dangerous folly of this kind of governance. As two administration officials, one current and one former, told me in almost identical words, with the Iran war, “there was no interagency process” — none of the usual compilation and exchange of views between different parts of the security and foreign-policy apparatus aimed at helping presidential decision-making. There was just the king and his favorite senatorial and Fox News jesters.

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Start with his rhetoric surrounding the conflict. Shut up, Trump effectively told those of his supporters jarred by his decision to join Israel’s war against Iran, given his 2024 campaign pledge of a “peace” administration. Wasn’t MAGA supposed to pivot away from Mideast wars? “MAGA was my idea,” he countered. “MAGA was nobody else’s idea. I know what MAGA wants better than anybody else.” Le MAGA, c’est moi.

The objectives were ever-shifting: changing the regime and putting Iran’s destiny in the hands of its people; degrading military capacity; stopping a nuclear program that had already been “obliterated” in the course of the earlier 12-Day War; reopening the Strait of Hormuz; not reopening the Strait of Hormuz, because we don’t need it anyway; you better “fucking open it, you crazy bastards,” otherwise America will “wipe out a whole civilization”; OK, how about we both run it in a joint venture?

Often, management of the war was based on the state of the stock market. It became a joke on Iranian state TV that Trump eased up on operations on Sundays to ensure the Dow could climb into the green on Mondays, then ramp up the war come the next weekend, when markets closed. If it were a true war of necessity, of course, the nation would fight it to the end, even if it meant destroying everyone’s 401(k)s. But only a mad king adjusts daily tactics in a war of choice based on equity values.

The upshot is a battered but strategically victorious Iran. The regime didn’t collapse, but hardened its internal position. Iran’s ballistic firing ability was judged to be improving as the war went on. Relief from sanctions and tariffs are on the way, per Trump himself. And above all, Tehran realized it doesn’t need a nuclear weapon when it can shut off one of the world’s economic arteries at will. And notice: Trump devoted nearly all of his remaining political capital to carrying out one of the long-time goals of the very hawkish “deep state” that had long sought his political destruction. Except he did it poorly, in mad-king fashion.

So what’s a better way? In the view of the American Founders, the answer is political contestation and compromise of the kind that’s supposed to take place, especially, in the legislative branch. But so long as Congress is more or less moribund, and American lawmakers see their jobs as auditioning for cable news, the country is fated to lurch between mad kings and imperious bureaucrats. Both are bad. Still, after what we lived through in 2025 and 2026, I say bring back the wonks.

Every week is like this. Perhaps we should be used to it by now: the weirdness began in earnest six years ago, when the first Covid cases were reported in Wuhan, China. In short order, this triggered the worldwide lockdowns that forced everyone online, with economies in freefall and cultures into a pervasive state of low-level derangement. 

Some of that first and loudest wave of Covid-era internet derangement seized upon the World Economic Foundation’s “Great Reset” program. The influential Davos talking-shop attracts an elite circle of businesspeople, financiers and their hangers-on (including in Labour), and has long been a bête noire for radicals across the political compass. The patrician “Great Reset” proposal to treat the pandemic as a social-engineering opportunity rapidly became a byword for every imaginable flavor of conspiracy. 

The program’s proponents, not least the Blofeld-esque WEF founder, German economist Klaus Schwab, celebrated it as an exciting new dawn for humanity. What was it really? And were the conspiracists right? As is often the way, the answer is: literally, no, but poetically: not far off.

The Great Reset called for coordinated global action by governments to “revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions”. On the face of it, that sounds utopian; but it proved, to say the least, unpopular. Why? Well, the WEF’s own website acknowledges that, to work, a Great Reset would call for a “level of cooperation and ambition” that “is unprecedented”, requiring “stronger and more effective governments” along with “private-sector engagement every step of the way”. 

And if Covid taught us anything, it’s that competence of this sort is not guaranteed. Quite the contrary: for most, the experience was both of a spike in high-tech control measures, such as drone surveillance and digital tracking, and a concurrent plunge in the quality of basic stuff, such as road surfaces or waiting times for a driving test or a GP appointment. Nor have things improved since. Labour may have been elected to restore competence after a string of hopeless Tory leaders, but even now the stories of state ineptitude come thick and fast, wreathed each time in a fog of cover-up and sometimes outright lying. We spend millions on fish discos and bat tunnels, while nothing gets built. There’s that Avanti train. And so much more! 

In the last year the number of prisoners released early by mistake has run into the hundreds, including very high-profile offenders such as the Epping sex attacker. The Home Office was recently forced to admit having lost track of 53,000 asylum seekers. The military emailed a spreadsheet of Afghan collaborators to half the planet, then tried to hide it by smuggling the list members into Britain under a super-injunction. I doubt the WEF actually are lizards in human suits or whatever. But given the manifest incompetence of our leadership class, the WEF haters are surely right to resist any further power-grabs (such as, for example, the recent return of Blair’s cherished digital ID scheme). Who in their right mind would entrust the kind of sensitive high-tech work envisaged by a “Great Reset” to the sort of clowns who make mistakes of this kind? They can’t even lie and manipulate effectively: their propaganda efforts and secretive “misinformation units” keep being spotted and denounced, only to resurface again with the next round of cock-up and cover-up.

But why is it like this? Why is everything now run by numpties? Nothing is ever monocausal, but the media theorist Marshall McLuhan might have argued that it’s not just falling birth rates, or MPs’ low pay (though this doubtless doesn’t help). It’s also the way our technologies are changing us. McLuhan argued, all the way back in the Sixties, that the objectivity, logical thinking, and technical wizardry that gave us the modern age was in important ways a byproduct of widespread print literacy. And this age had already been superseded by electricity. 

McLuhan claimed that this exit from the print to the electric age was driving a decline in rationality and technical competence, and return to tribalism and magical thinking. And perhaps we can point to the first use of “dumbing down” by Hollywood executives in the Thirties, to describe adjusting a film’s content for less intelligent people. Or we could note that especially beginning in the Sixties, when McLuhan wrote The Gutenberg Galaxy, electronic media were indeed competing ever more vigorously with books for public attention. Against this, though, international IQ scores went on rising over the 20th century. So for all that Starmer admits he doesn’t read, or at least doesn’t read novels, there is surely more to our now woefully thin political talent pool than just electric media dumbing everyone down.

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More recently, though, commentators have begun to warn that another factor accelerating this “more” may be the shift to digital reading. As Nicholas Carr warned in 2005, this activates the brain in ways quite different to reading things in print, with the effects including the degrading of concentration. And this, others argue, is driving our having apparently passed peak IQ in the early 21st century. Perhaps the culprit is our distracting smartphones, or — increasingly — the use of AI. (Labour MPs have been accused of reading out ChatGPT-generated speeches.) 

So what does it mean for our technocratic overlords if the world is getting dumber? The strongest argument in favor of technocracy was always that modern states are too complex to be managed by elected non-specialists, and should be left in the hands of super-competent experts. But what if the technocrats are also doomscrolling, and it’s making them stupider too? 

If so, you might expect to see (for example) tribal thinking and emotional logic coming to infect even technocracy, resulting in large-scale, top-down social engineering programs that don’t work as expected, or at all. Imagine. In response, then, you might also see supporters of such programs beginning to question their value. You might, in fact, see even such high-profile figures breaking ranks as Nicole Shanahan, ex-wife of Google founder Sergey Brin and erstwhile powerhouse philanthropist. 

In an interview this week, Shanahan lifted the lid on the clique of Silicon Valley “tech wives” whose money was, in her words, “used to set the groundwork” for “The Great Reset”. Shanahan no longer considers this a good use of philanthropic money. She admits: “I really believed I was giving black communities a chance to rise up out of oppression”. Now, though, she’s reviewed how those grants are performing and has concluded in fact “the problems of the community have gotten worse”. But nor can we hold out hope that the Right will save us from motivated reasoning, corruption or numpties. Remember literally everything the Tories ever did, in their 14 years in power. Are there really enough ultra-competent Reform-aligned people out there to form a government, should Farage win next time? I hope so; but I worry.

The central problem with the “Great Reset” was essentially the same as Reform’s, but on an even greater scale: the fact that there aren’t enough technocrats who are as detached, ethical, and competent as such a program would have needed for it work as intended. So does this mean the end of technocracy? Perhaps; but that should raise two cheers, at the most. It’s true that Schwab has left the WEF, and quit shilling the Great Reset. Indeed, the circumstances of his departure make him a vivid illustration of precisely that central problem. Schwab didn’t just retire; he resigned, following whistleblower allegations that he embezzled money, manipulated WEF reports, and booked “private massages” in hotel rooms. 

Now, he’s launching something called the “Schwab Academy” from what appears to be a garden shed. He’s also published a new book, titled Thriving and Leading in the Intelligent Age. But when you map the shift from “Great Reset” to “Intelligent Age” onto Shanahan’s loss of faith in top-down social engineering, something worrying emerges: a sense that the technocrats have given up on the public, and are now quietly building an ark.

For the unspoken small print to Schwab’s “Intelligent Age” is how we define “intelligence”. Schwab tends to oscillate between the human and machine kind, as if these needn’t be distinguished sharply from one another. And were this right, we might say: a new “intelligent age” in public life would make a nice change, so bring it on. But Emily Bender and Alex Hanna have recently argued that this isn’t right. So-called “Artificial Intelligence” is a con: it is not, and will never be, intelligent in the human sense. It’s far more accurately described not as “intelligence” but “automation”.

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And one of the side-effects of automation is de-skilling. The more shoe factories, for example, the fewer skilled cobblers. So if AI automates at least some aspects of thought, it follows that in embracing it we’ll de-skill ourselves. I suspect that Schwab sees this, and is carefully leaving it unstated, on the basis that the much smaller group of people he considers worth trying to save already know. He and his buddies are just planning for their own survival in a future of universal post-literacy.

The real vibe shift, then, may not be a swing Left, or Right, at all. Rather, I suspect it’s a swing within the class that endorsed the first Great Reset, away from even trying to make things better for everyone. Silicon Valley’s “tech wives mafia” has fallen out of love with progressive social engineering, for the simple reason that it doesn’t work. We can likewise expect the utopian justification for other tech-authoritarian policies to fall by the wayside too. The last great wealth transfer happened in the name of “flattening the curve”, drowning small businesses as Amazon boomed. Perhaps the next won’t even bother with a justification.

The real Great Reset, then, was always the post-literate collapse in intelligence. It’s already rendered large-scale technocracy unworkable. Now, the class that not so long ago dreamed of a global transformation are retreating to their bunkers instead, sometimes literally. The rest of us had better hold onto our loved ones; there is no one else coming to save us.

Brentford’s best chance also came from a long ball, misjudged by a defender who headed towards his own goal, letting in Brentford’s mountainous new striker, Igor Thiago. Modern football has become throwback football — a return to something basic, traditional, earthy. Across the Premier League, fussy ministrations and careful planning are out; the big man and uncompromising directness are back. Gone is the approach of cosmopolitan globalized technocracy and in its place has come something grittier, more visceral, perhaps more immediately appealing, something that — at least at first glance — feels more English. More like Brexitball. Who needs patient build-up or sophisticated theorizing when you can just get it launched? In football as in politics, the big man is back.

There will be those who think this is absurd, that it is ludicrous to discern in the way a team plays some sort of expression of a broader culture or societal trend. But if we accept that literature or music or architecture reflects the world around it, why should football be any different? Like any other cultural mode, football presents its practitioners with a series of challenges, some practical and some aesthetic: how could the way in which they answer them not be conditioned by the prevailing sensibility, even if they are willfully striking against it?

To understand how we got here, you have to go back to 2008, a moment of crisis for Europe’s political technocrats as they wrestled with the Eurozone crisis — and coincidentally, a major turning point in the game’s tactical evolution. Before 2008, there was only one occasion when the average number of goals in the knockout stages of the Champions League was higher than three. From then until 2020, there was only one occasion when that average dropped below three.

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As it happened, 2008 was also the year that Guardiola took over as head coach of Barcelona — but clearly something was already beginning to shift. No coach, not even one as gifted as Guardiola, can have that sort of impact in his first season. Changes in pitch technology had improved playing surfaces to the point that a player could almost take his first touch for granted; as the ball approached him, he didn’t have to give it his full concentration, waiting for a bobble — but could already be assessing his passing options. That made the game more chess-like. It was less about the ability to react than about strategy. How could players move around to create overloads or to isolate defenders? At the same time, the liberalization of the offside law meant defensive lines sat deeper, increasing the effective playing area. There was also a crackdown on intimidatory tackling, which allowed technically accomplished, creative but less physically imposing players to play a greater role. This was the era of Xavi and Andrés Iniesta, David Silva and Luka Modrić.

So Guardiola emerged into an environment perfectly suited to his approach. As a player at Barcelona under Johan Cruyff and Louis van Gaal, he was schooled in the Total Football played by the Dutch in the early Seventies and managed to repurpose the style for the new era. He was extraordinarily successful, first at Barcelona, and then at Bayern Munich and Manchester City. His way of playing was derided by his detractors as tiki-taka — an onomatopoeic term coined in the Eighties by the no-nonsense, Basque coach Javier Clemente for passing football that went nowhere. He preferred to call it juego de posición — the positional game — though Pepism might be a more useful label, given how closely identified it is with one man.

Whatever the label, the style became hegemonic. It became broadly accepted that “good” football — progressive football, the football elite sides had to play — must follow the Guardiola template. You try to dominate possession, and when the ball is lost, you win it back by pressing aggressively with a high defensive line. But Guardiola was also a cautious coach; his priority was always control. As the background conditions made retention of possession easier it became possible to defend by keeping the ball from the opposition. When Spain, playing a particularly sterile version of Pepism, won the 2010 World Cup, they did so by winning all four knockout fixtures 1-0.

Given the globalized nature of modern football, it’s probable that there has never been such consensus across the game as to how it should be played. But not everybody liked it. A vague culture war grew up. Did you admire the level of control, the triumph of tactics and technical ability — or did you find this attrition by possession all desperately dull? Did you yearn for the old days, for big tackles and working the channels? Did you seek a footballing identity outside what the European technocracy deemed acceptable, progressive, correct?

It should realistically be possible to hold both views simultaneously, to see this degree of control as impressive while acknowledging that there was something slightly bloodless about it — but that’s not how modern media works. Various figures within the game have recently taken to claiming that Guardiola, the most revolutionary and influential figure in football for 50 years, has somehow “ruined football” — a list diverse enough to include the former England manager Fabio Capello, the former USA goalkeeper Tim Howard and the Colchester striker Lyle Taylor.

If there is an issue, it probably lies less with Guardiola than his imitators. Guardiola himself has never stopped evolving — as can be seen in the way that two of his former assistants, Arsenal’s Mikel Arteta and Chelsea’s Enzo Maresca, have their sides play in such different ways having learned from the master at different stages of his career. Certain core principles have remained, but Guardiola has never stood still. He’s a pragmatist. It’s his disciples, the likes of Xavi, Jorge Sampaoli and Russell Martin who are the ideologues — who insist on playing their way however inappropriate that may be for their players or the circumstances.

Over the past year, though, Guardiola has acknowledged that he is no longer at the vanguard of the game’s evolution. “Today, modern football is not positional,” he said. “You have to ride the rhythm.” He was talking specifically about how there are now so many fixtures that there is no time to drill their players into efficient positional machines — and so, it is now external factors that are shaping the evolution of the game rather than individual coaches. Guardiola has been moving for several years now towards a more physical model of play, while against both Manchester United and Arsenal this season he had his City side sit deep, eschew possession and play on the counter-attack. Against Arsenal they had only 34% of the ball. Only once before had any of his sides ever dropped below 40% in a league game. This felt shocking — a Götterdämmerung. And as the one true faith falls away, what is left is confusion.

In the gloom, without an obvious ideology to follow, many teams have gone back to basics. Football has, abruptly, become more direct and more focused on set-plays. Over the first month of this Premier League season, non-penalty goals from set-plays rose by 21%. Long balls are up 7%. High turnovers (that is, occasions when the ball is won back in the opposition’s defensive third, an indicator of a high press) are down 14%.

On the level of personnel, inverted wingers and false nines are out, and in their place has returned something more traditional. Football at its simplest level is about putting the ball in the net, and who better to do that than an old-fashioned, physically imposing number 9? The summer transfer window was characterized by the great carousel of center-forwards: Liverpool spent £125m on Alexander Isak and £100m on Hugo Ekitiké; Manchester United spent £65m on Benjamin Šeško; Newcastle spent £65m on Nick Woltemade; Arsenal spent £55m on Viktor Gyökeres; Chelsea spent £30m on Liam Delap; Tottenham brought in Randal Kolo Muani on loan. That’s six of a putative Big Seven shelling out on center-forwards over six feet tall. The odd one out is City, who began the trend — Guardiola as usual leading where others follow — by signing the 6’ 5” Norwegian striker Erling Haaland in 2022. Not since the Eighties have big men been so in demand.

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As the dominant, often over-intellectualized, globalized liberal consensus falls away, so there is a demand for something more straightforward, more direct. For somebody who gets things done without worrying about retaining possession while a structure is established to rebuff a potential counter-attack should the ball be lost. Deal with that if it happens; for now, get it to the big man. There is a weariness with Pepism, a background sense that it is the ideology of a dominant international elite that has spent the past 20 years enriching itself at the expense of those lower down the economic scale.

The Champions League is now the preserve of, at most, a dozen sides. The superclubs dominate like never before. The gulf between the Premier League and Championship has never been so vast. Traditional fans are increasingly priced out in favor of wealthy tourists and globalization is destroying the community function of major clubs. The ticket prices for next summer’s World Cup, released last week, are just the latest example of a game that has lost touch with its roots, with most costing several hundred dollars. This used to be the working man’s ballet. And so there is a desire to go back — back to a perhaps illusory simpler past when the game was open to all, when it was possible to compete without being owned by a state, an oligarch or a private equity group, when football was a simple game, unadulterated by boffins with iPads, in which defenders defended and attackers attacked.

There are tactical-evolutionary reasons for a post-Pep reset, but it’s surely no coincidence that the form that it’s taken is this one. As politics has become more direct, so has football; as strength, unencumbered by subtlety, becomes a virtue in one sphere, so it does in the other. Football is part of culture, inevitably influencing it and being influenced by it. They may be very different people with very different views, but the turn to Haaland, Šeško and Gyökeres stems from the same place as the turn to Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán and Javier Milei.

With Macron floundering, and Scholz despised, von der Leyen’s continued tenure breaks with a global pattern of incumbency failure. Unlike mere politicians, though, von der Leyen doesn’t need to worry about what the voters think. To be sure, the President of the EU Commission must secure the support of the EU Parliament, but only after having been nominated by the government of each member state. In theory, that should reflect the outcome of European elections. In practice, however, the EU Parliament is a castrated legislature, constitutionally incapable of initiating law.

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Von der Leyen is less the executive of an open democracy and more the chief officer of a Soviet politburo. That’s clear, certainly, if you glance at the titles of the President’s commissars. From the executive vice president for clean, just and competition transition, to the executive vice president for cohesion and reforms, her underlings preside over departments that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Seventies Moscow. And during her first term in office, from 2019 to 2024, she relentlessly consolidated authority, slowly tilting the EU’s balance of power towards supranational institutions like the Commission — and away from the Council of Ministers representing member states.

This state-building project looks set to ramp up during her second term; as she makes clear in her political guidelines for the next commission, her vision is infused with existential discourse, insisting that Europe has no future unless it continues to grind its way towards unity. With von der Leyen’s determination to pursue the proxy war in Ukraine at the expense of European economic wellbeing, and her reliance on Baltic politicians such as Kaja Kallas as High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security, she seems to be following the historic pattern of state-making through crisis.

Yet if Ursula is a modern Charlemagne in her vanity and ambition, the fact that her efforts are so remote from the popular will means they’ll inevitably founder. Though centralisation at the top will doubtless enhance her personal sway, that means little without bolstering the wider EU system. In fact, concentrating power in this non-sovereign model is likely to make it even more lopsided, with a top-heavy superstructure perched over a continent seething with popular discontent. No matter how many Russophobes von der Leyen stuffs into her bureaucracy, after all, the Ukraine war will ultimately be decided not in Brussels but Washington, when Donald Trump shortly re-enters the White House in January.

Thus the paradox of von der Leyen’s second term is that as the power of the EU centre grows, Europe itself becomes weaker. Nothing that von der Leyen does seems likely to reverse this decline. In fact, her plan to completely end the flow of Russian gas into Europe, in favour of expensive liquified natural gas from the US, speaks to her congenital inability to act in her continent’s best interests. That, in turn, reflects the fact that the EU is not a nation-state, and by design can’t have a national self-interest. While von der Leyen has therefore been promising to slash the regulation that supposedly stifles European business — plenty of which were brought in under her last term — the fact is that industry from Rioja to the Ruhr will continue to suffer without cheap energy.

How will this historic decline be disguised? This takes us to the second of von der Leyen’s transformations: appointing Raffaele Fitto, a minister from the Brothers of Italy party, as her executive vice president for cohesion and reforms. In so doing, von der Leyen has broken the liberal cordon sanitaire whereby the continent’s technocratic establishment sought to contain the electoral insurgencies of EU populists. Fitto’s new job has cost von der Leyen the support of certain natural allies, notably the Socialists and Democrats grouping in the EU Parliament. Yet Empress Ursula is cunning enough to realise that by appearing to be responsive to public demands, and drawing in electorally successful populists, she can easily recoup any losses sustained among squabbling centrists.

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The nominal basis for this new political friendship is, of course, a shared commitment to pursuing the proxy war in Eastern Europe. Yet the basis for the Fitto alliance runs deeper than Ukraine. Rather, the alliance indicates that the continent’s hard-Right national populists are being carefully, and willingly, drawn into the court of the imperial centre. The reason? To help re-legitimise von der Leyen’s faltering clique of technocrats.

Certainly, Fitto’s appointment puts paid to the idea that populists defend national sovereignty against incursions from Brussels. It also suggests that the radicals are more than happy to collaborate with the technocrats to disguise the latter’s lack of real legitimacy. In many ways, then, Fitto represents a natural alliance, proving the point that both technocrats and populists ultimately despise national representative institutions. The technocrats dislike democracy because interest groups get in the way of the unfettered rule of experts. Populists, for their part, dislike it because, by their nature, institutionalised interests gnaw away at the demagogic charisma they so rely on.

In this way, then, both technocrats and populists are creatures from the void where national democracy should be. The fact that people such as Fitto have rushed to hide von der Leyen’s nakedness suggests that the age of European decline will be dominated by techno-populism, with both camps cooperating to accommodate each other’s weakness — even as they jointly rule over a deindustrialising continent. At any rate, that leaves space for Europe’s remaining democrats: what happens when voters realise the populists have betrayed them?

Yet for someone who’s held so much power for so long, it’s important to remember that Podesta has never been an elected official and has instead relied on his close proximity to the formal holders of authority to sustain his rank. Presidents have come and gone, but Podesta remains, always near the top, dispensing advice on both matters of policy and partisanship. He is, in other words, a modern-day courtier, and the courtier’s pursuit of power is an art that Podesta has all but perfected.

Podesta first emerged on the national scene in the Nineties, as Bill Clinton’s chief of staff. He was instrumental in realising that administration’s “Third Way” project, the central tenet of which was the neoliberal faith in deregulated markets and trade integration with rising industrial powers like China, who took the lion’s share of subsequent world manufacturing growth. Today, he plays a comparable role in executing the President’s economically nationalist “Bidenomics” agenda — the dialectical opposite of neoliberalism. He is, in effect, reversing the liberalising thrust of the Clinton years and positioning the US to compete once again with strategic rivals (like, say, China). It is almost a tacit admission that Podesta helped to create a series of problems in one administration, and has returned to fix them in another.

This seemingly breathless inversion, on the part of Podesta and his party, raises several questions. Is it the result of ruthless political opportunism, or an agile and creative pragmatism — or both? And what does it all say about America’s liberal ruling class, in particular the privileged caste of courtiers within it? The answers, I suspect, may lie in philosopher John Ralston Saul’s notion of the “rational courtier”, which he employed, in his 1992 magnum opus Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, to examine the breed of political technocrats who arose in the post-war era and who have since come to enjoy total hegemony over most institutions.

Written at the dawn of the globalised era, Voltaire’s Bastards was a prophetic warning about the excesses not just of the neoliberal economic regime but of the underlying mode of disembodied, instrumental reason that its apparatchiks practised. The result of this marriage of cold reason and raw power was a new incarnation of an old archetype, one who fused the clandestine, self-serving intrigues of an aristocrat at Versailles with all the expertise of a Harvard MBA (or, in Podesta’s case, a Georgetown JD). As Saul wrote: “The modern technocrat and the royal courtier are virtually indistinguishable… Taken together, they form a group, a class, a type, linked by a particular sort of intelligence involving their central talents as systems men… who create and work principally within and through the system of which they are emanations.”

Throughout the past century, such rational courtiers were present in both parties: Saul cites Robert McNamara, Henry Kissinger, and James Baker as examples. They were already far cry from Baldassare Castiglione’s Renaissance ideal, laid out in the Book of the Courtier: a versatile humanist statesman who drew on a broad range of virtues to provide wise counsel and point his prince toward justice. Instead, these figures submerged that ideal “beneath the growing need to prove everything by means of what were coming to be known as facts”, drawing exclusively on the “innate mechanical and logical talents which link our new men of power together”. This was the Book of the Courtier, but authored by Sir Humphrey Appleby.

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In this view, loyalty to particular persons, causes or ideologies becomes anachronistic. The courtier can alter his professed allegiances as casually as he changes neckties since his energies are really dedicated to preserving systems and his place within it, a field of rational administration that exists aloof from the plane of politics. Understood this way, Podesta’s seamless shift from one paradigm to another makes sense. Just as the rational courtiers survived (and thrived) in the transition from post-war Keynesianism to neoliberalism, so too will they find niches for themselves in the move toward a new form of economic nationalism. As any rational courtier can say: political movements rise and fall; only power is constant — and reason is the currency of that power.

A big difference today is that, thanks to a process of polarisation along the lines of class and credentials, the Democrats have become the new home of this class. And in very many ways, Podesta and his party’s flexibility on political economy is a positive development. It shows that the courtiers are responsive to changing times and that they might even be as rational as they claim. But as Saul warned in Voltaire’s Bastards, the blind exercise of reason, used as both a means and an end, always carries externalities. Beneath the courtiers’ impressive veneer of technical excellence lies a callous indifference to the social and human dimensions of any great enterprise. Looking closely at Podesta’s trajectory from free trader to neomercantilist can confirm as much.

The trend of financialisation, by which Wall Street would be unshackled from Depression-era regulations, reached its climax with the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. A White House memo dated from 1995 showed Podesta to be one of the more eager proponents, writing: “The argument for reform is that the separation between banking and other financial services… is out of date in a world where banks, securities firms and insurance companies offer similar products and where firms outside the US do not face such restrictions.”

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But perhaps more important was the Clinton administration’s support for China’s accession to the World Trade Organization. We can detect Podesta’s hand there too. At an event held in May 2000 to raise support for permanent normal trade relations with China, Podesta was front and centre in declaring that: “We have absolutely nothing to lose.” He assured Americans that “bringing China into the WTO will actually help the cause of human rights in China, by opening China up to new technology, more Internet access, more sources of information”. Podesta spoke then with the boundless confidence of a rational courtier who had reached the pinnacle of power, with the weight of the experts and their conventional wisdom behind him.

It should have been the first sign that hubris had set in and that a reckoning was near. Now, it is clear that on both counts, financialisation and free trade with China, Podesta and nearly all the era’s rational courtiers were dead wrong. In their rush to become more neoliberal than the Republicans, the Democrats enabled what has come to be known as “The China Shock”: the hollowing out of American manufacturing, along with the growth of massive inequality at home and the empowerment of an illiberal Chinese regime that has only grown more brazen in its authoritarian tendencies.

And yet, as the current administration now seeks to reverse globalisation and bolster America’s industrial capacities against a resurgent Beijing, it has turned to the very same John Podesta to save the day. Neither his failure to foresee catastrophe as an advisor to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, nor his embarrassing blunders as the head of Hillary Clinton’s disastrous campaign managed to dull his lustre within the party or to pull him away from the centres of power. The mark of a mandarin whose fate has become one with that of the system he inhabits.

Being such an expert courtier, Podesta knows how to change his tune on policy — but he could not change his tone, arguing for economic nationalism with the same boundless confidence as when he once shilled for neoliberalism. There is thus no hint of acknowledgment or contrition for the gravity of his past mistakes, or for the traumatic social dislocations caused by the China Shock. Neither is there much humility in Podesta’s recent pronouncements as he displays the same reflexive deference to the dictates of expertise, without considering the potential limits of such an exceedingly rational approach to politics. It is no surprise to see that Bidenomics, for all its economic ambition, continues to be a political dud. It also fails at the level of totality: the rational approach that’s been applied to industrial policy has not been applied to immigration and the border, where the logic of economic nationalism has been ignored altogether.

In the sequel to Voltaire’s Bastards, Saul suggests that the antidote to the dictatorship of reason is a return to “equilibrium”, that is the rebalancing of rationality with other positive qualities of the human condition, hewing closer perhaps to the well-rounded Renaissance ideal of Castiglione. But leaders of this kind and calibre are nowhere to be seen in contemporary America. Instead, there is continued polarisation between individuals like Podesta in the liberal ruling class and the antithetical figure in the opposition party, someone like Trump advisor Peter Navarro, who embodies an archetype that might instead be called the “romantic courtier”. Unlike his rational rival, this character cleaves to a premodern understanding of politics and suffers from the opposite defect, namely an excess of loyalty and devotion to his liege, often to the detriment of more practical concerns.

American politics may thus be reduced to a difficult choice: the clever tyranny of Podesta types, or the earnest but erratic government of his romantic counterpart. Until the return of statesmanship in either party, the world’s greatest democracy, like decadent late-Bourbon France or eunuch-ridden Qing China, is effectively condemned to live under the rule of courtiers.

Last month, he joined Freddie Sayers in Oakland to talk about the global war on motorists, the beauty of tinkering, and Silicon Valley’s threat to human freedom. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Freddie Sayers: A few years ago, you published a book called Why We Drive — and in many ways, you were ahead of the times, because drivers all over the world are now pretty angry. In London, there appears to be a full-on “war on motorists”: with a new 20mph speed limit, and an Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez). This motorist fury has spread to the Netherlands, to Spain, and to the truckers in Canada. It feels like drivers are forming some sort of coalition.

Matthew Crawford: You could also mention the gilets jaunes in France. And there have been protests about the German autobahn. The Germans have a saying that translates as “free driving for free citizens”. Then you also had this big fight between the London taxi drivers and Uber. It does seem like people’s attitudes towards driving have become a bit prickly, as though the political authorities somehow lack legitimacy. A lot of populist energy has become focused on the automobile.

FS: Quite often this is framed as a class thing. Drivers are presented as people who probably have all sorts of unsavoury political views and therefore if life becomes more inconvenient for them, it’s probably a shift in the right direction. But your book goes deeper than that: you suggest that the action of driving is existentially important.

MC: I like to start with the skateboard, or the bicycle: simple implements that extend and transform our native bodily powers. A bicycle becomes almost like a prosthetic, an extension of your body, fully integrated into your bodily habitation of the world. And I think something similar could be said of cars, especially relatively primitive and lighter vehicles, where there’s a lot of feedback from the road. A kind of directness of control. That’s why a lot of people get quite attached to the experience of driving. Nietzsche said, “joy is the feeling of your power increasing”, and I think that you can understand that not as a scary doctrine about power-seeking, but just as an insight into how some technologies seem to extend us out into the world in ways that are deeply pleasurable.

FS: So we’re not talking about political power increasing? It’s more of a sense of being alive?

MC: The absence of remote control is really a key part of that. The idea of driverless cars — the sense of being passively carried around — triggers a kind of revulsion about being a passenger. There are all kinds of dystopian movies where driverless cars feature and one of my favourites is WALL-E, where you have these grotesquely fat humanoid beings being ferried around in their hovering cars, slurping from their cupholders, and watching their screens with some sort of entertainment piped in from afar — their faces beaming with a sort of opiate pleasure. They seem to be slackened and completely safe, and somehow less than human. I think that’s a heightened or exaggerated picture of what disturbs us about this.

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FS: And, dare I say it, unmanly? The passenger character staring at the screen is the opposite of a strong person using a machine.

MC: Yes, or even genderless. A sort of gender blob. I guess there is a kind of masculine ideal of self-reliance, certainly in America — and just moving about the world by the exercise of your own powers appeals to that. So even using GPS, which I admittedly use all the time, forces you to turn your brain off, and there’s a kind of passivity and dependence to that. And I think the push for driverless cars is an instance of this wider pattern. For the sake of convenience, and in the name of safety, we’re lured further into passivity and dependence.

FS: There’s a line that you write about beyond which technology stops enhancing life: instead of making you more powerful, it starts to make you more dependent. Where do you draw this line in the case of cars?

MC: I think intelligibility is a crucial thing. Can you, by inspection at least, imagine how the thing works? Does it invite your intervention? Does it invite the effort to understand it? Or is it completely opaque like the shimmering obelisk at the beginning of the film 2001 that the humanoids are all entranced by? There’s a deep intellectual pleasure in being a master of your own stuff, in taking things apart and trying to understand them. Tinkering is a kind of quasi-philosophic impulse.

The other feature that really rubs a lot of people the wrong way is this idea of remote control. It’s not so much that it’s digital. Conceivably, you could become an expert coder in the various software systems that run the car. But I think what people don’t want is a sense that they’re somehow geared into this bureaucratic machine that stands behind the technology.

FS: There’s also a practical sense that people want to have a car that works on its own, independent of any external network being operational.

MC: Right, and that cannot be disabled remotely. The trucker protests in Canada were mercilessly crushed by seizing the bank accounts of people who contributed money to the movement. Shortly after, the Canadians took steps to mandate that all trucks be remotely shut-off-able. So you can see that there’s a political taste for preventing any such occurrence again. This is one of those instances where I think a lot of Western leaders look to China enviously as a control society. And given the metastasising systems of surveillance and control in our own society, the car stands out as a last reserve of some kind of capacity to stand alone.

FS: More worryingly, electric and driverless cars can in theory be turned off or driven into each other by central command; in a wartime or crisis scenario, it doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to see that this could be dangerous.

MC: At least in the US, we don’t have nearly the electrical grid that you would need to charge all these cars, according to the vision being laid forth. And of course, building that infrastructure isn’t glamorous, politically. The whole green energy mandate is this massive diversion of investment to party-aligned actors that will tend towards energy poverty, which will hurt the working and middle classes. And all this is part of a larger phenomenon of the party-state capturing transportation and energy policy.

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FS: Do you think this anxiety is particularly strong in America?

MC: Yeah, when shit gets real, you’re going to want to hit the road and get the hell out of Dodge, right?

FS: This leads us to the question of what we should do about it, given that these technologies are already everywhere. What would a practical rebellion look like? How can we resist without simply being Luddite or reactionary?

MC: The first thing to notice is the feeling of futility that people have about putting up any kind of resistance. In San Francisco, you have street guerrillas putting cones on driverless cars to paralyse them. And you have quite a few cases of driverless cars impeding emergency vehicles because they stall out and need to be rebooted. Despite this, earlier this month, the California Public Utilities Commission approved to have driverless vehicles on the streets of San Francisco in large numbers.

It turns out that one of the four City commissioners is the former general counsel for Cruise: the equivalent of General Motors for self-driving cars. Hovering in the background here is this sense of a “corporatocracy”, where the will of citizens really doesn’t come into play. And, in fact, when Pew polls people about their attitudes toward driverless cars, the majority of them are not interested. They’re suspicious of it; they’d prefer to drive themselves. So this is not in response to consumer demand: you might say it’s a kind of for-profit social engineering.

FS: Perhaps also that faith in technology is central to an elite idea of progress? If you are on the wrong side of it, you are seen as a bad person. 

MC: It’s an expensive solution to a non-problem. Humans are actually pretty good at driving. This is merely another case of a transfer of wealth: Silicon Valley trying to grab profits from Detroit; Waymo versus Ford. So, yes, there’s always a narrative of progress.

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FS: What do you say to the counter argument: that while some people might enjoy driving, many people don’t. Driverless and convenient electric cars should open up hours in which we can be more creative, fulfilled, and productive?

MC: Sure, I feel the force of those arguments. I’m sure there are occasions where I would totally want the option of a driverless car. One of the difficulties is when autonomous cars share the road with human drivers: that has turned out to be a far harder engineering challenge than was anticipated a few years ago. We’ve arrived at the point now where in San Francisco, at night, when traffic is light, they’re allowing driverless cars. But there’s still a lot of breezy talk about outlawing human drivers in order to make the road more hospitable to driverless cars.

FS: You can imagine that being a serious proposal in a small number of years.

MC: What would you have then? You’d have the infrastructure of a city made hospitable to automation, including driverless cars; you’d have an urban operating system that’s essentially designed and installed by some cartel of tech firms — and you can be pretty sure they would not be amenable to democratic processes. Nor would the code be accessible to inspection. This is all very proprietary: it has to be because that’s what makes the “smart city” the next trillion-dollar frontier.

FS: And if you are considered transgressive by that private company, you won’t be able to get around. 

MC: You can imagine terms of service that have all kinds of stipulations. And you can view this development as part of a long arc of high modernist urban planning that goes way back. Yet this aspiration to remake the city often creates model cities that nobody wants to live in because the human element is somehow squashed. The ethnographer Jane Jacobs wrote a beautiful book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, where she shows how a street works at a fine grain level as a social place. She describes how neighbourhoods get vacated by these planning schemes that are hatched from on high and render the city vacuous. I think we should revisit some of these critiques of modernist urban planning, by way of trying to get a handle on what the tech firms are up to with the smart city and driverless car.

FS: I think perhaps we accepted too readily this idea that not having to drive would be liberating. And this points to a larger question about technology: is convenience always better? If you’re liberated from the more fundamental, supposedly mundane aspects of living — feeding yourself, moving around, sorting your car out — is your life necessarily going to improve? 

MC: If you go far enough down that road, the whole world begins to look like one big assisted-living facility. There’s a psychologist named Kelly Lambert, who’s done some interesting stuff on what she calls effort-driven rewards. She works with rats, but the idea is that we’ve evolved to secure our own basic physical existence, and when you make everything effortless, people become anxious and depressed. And of course, a lot of that leisure time will be filled with entertainments that plug us into the hive mind. Americans in particular don’t really know how to do true leisure — a Sabbath, a time of repose. We tend to fill up everything.

FS: Do you advocate trying to resist the relentless technological advance by living more simply? Some people are trying to feed their spirit by “unplugging” and trying to be more connected to the earth, more connected to nature?

MC: Well, this is the perennial question, isn’t it? That sort of romantic back-to-the-land or back-to-nature revolt against not just technology but technocracy — the entwining of these systems. People do want to escape it; to re-humanise themselves. I guess for some people, it’s back to the land — land, of course, is scarce and expensive — for some people, I think it’s tinkering and trying to get a handle on their own material existence and become self-reliant in various ways. We have people homeschooling, just trying to unplug from what feels like a voracious borg that feeds on individual agency.

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FS: Is there a good version of that and a scary version, do you think? For some people it seems that their answer is to burn it all down, to destroy the “borg”, which starts to sound violent?

MC: I’m thinking of Fight Club, is that what you’re thinking of?

FS: More that if there are enough people who feel alienated by technology — and by this supposedly sophisticated way of living — they are going to come with pitchforks and try to destroy it. Do you think we should worry about that?

MC: I don’t see much prospect of the pitchforks coming out — we’re too well entertained. A whole other type of technology is going to enthral us. Through a combination of virtual reality and AI, I imagine we’ll be sucked into worlds that are not real. What I mean by that is that they are constructed worlds: constructed for profit, and engineered from afar. They will probably offer us some simulacrum of agency: I’m sure there’s a menu of different options for action within them. Maybe they respond to us; they will flatter us with a sense of mastery, perhaps. But the thing about real reality is that it surprises us. It is inexhaustibly rich; it can’t be represented to completion. It contains mystery. I say that both as a former physics guy, and as someone with intuitions that there’s a created order that has a benevolence to it, and some elements that aren’t fully graspable and masterable by us, and that I think of as a source of renewal. When you put yourself in nature or even in the built environment, the human environment, there’s always scope for serendipity and surprise, and renewing your sense of wonder in the world.

FS: How do we defend that? What are the micro rebellions that we can try to unplug? You talk about tinkering with your car. What should someone in a city do? 

MC: Every time we meet face-to-face as we’re doing right now, we’re engaged in the permanent human possibility, encountering one another in a real way. And I think that will always be available to us. We often get a little too doomerish about the borg, especially when the ordinary pleasures of existence and of sociality remain available to us. We have to throw ourselves into that with courage and hope.

FS: Maybe this is finally a political fight that’s worth engaging in. Perhaps motorists should defend their right to drive whatever cars they want — and maybe, they’ll win. 

MC: Yeah, Sign me up. We hereby inaugurate the freedom to drive movement.

I’m not a climate sceptic. I’m a disciple in that regard of a great friend who died recently, James Lovelock. He used to say that climate science is inexact, but if it has a bias, it’s probably towards underestimating the speed of climate change. He thought that climate change would consist of sudden jumps and it could transform things quite quickly, in a couple of decades. We might be in the middle of it. That’s my view — I’m not a climate sceptic.

What I am very sceptical about is net zero, and the kind of conventional green policies that are being launched. Firstly, they were launched before the infrastructure was there — before the technology was developed that could make them work. No consideration was given to the fact that many of the raw materials that were needed for the inputs, the batteries and so on, were now substantially or even largely controlled by China in Africa and elsewhere. It’s in Africa that the Great Game of the 19th century is being refought.

Now, they might be found in other countries; in Sweden and America, various deposits have been found. But they are not easily developed. And in the meantime, these programmes can’t go ahead. Nor were the economic costs of these green programmes properly assessed. There was a constant insistence that they would be job-creative. Even in America, they haven’t been that job-creative. And remember, America is very big, and can throw very large amounts of money at these things — the Green New Deal is largely a protectionist scheme. We can’t do that because we’re too small; we’re too exposed to flows of international capital. The idea that in Britain or in Europe these programmes could ever possibly work — it’s a bit like suffering from cancer and using candle therapy.

Some people might say: “But we’ve got to, we’ve got to show that we’re on the right side, we’ve got to accomplish it, even if other people don’t do it.” I think that’s the politics of narcissism: “I want to feel good.” But in the meantime, you’re wasting resources and you’re wasting time. There is a serious possibility that we’re now in the early stages of runaway climate change. We should be focusing everything we’ve got — not on having an infinitesimal impact on global carbon levels, which would be the case even if the whole net-zero programme was implemented, but on policies of adaptation. And adaptation is not going to be easy. Remember, most climate scientists agree that once human-induced climate change is in the works, it goes on for decades or even centuries. You can’t just stop it. There’s a general idea among environmentalists that we started this so we can stop it. They are wrong. We started it, probably, but we can’t stop it.

I’ve said previously we’re living in an age of tragedy. I’m not too sure about that anymore. I think we’ve advanced further than tragedy. We’re entering an age of absurdity. Consider German climate policy. Germany, as we keep hearing, is incomparably more adult, more advanced, more modern, and in every way superior to bungling Britain. But in Germany, the result of their closing down of nuclear and going for renewables has been an increased reliance on the dirtiest kind of coal. Well, this is tragic, but it’s even more than tragic. It is completely absurd.

And it’s difficult to put these arguments forward because people start shouting at you or they start crying or they say they can’t get up in the morning. I rather brutally suggest: “Well don’t. Stay in bed until you get a better reason for getting up. And if you don’t, well, there we are. Progress always has casualties.”

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One of the great books of the last century in English was by the American scholar, Philip Rieff, called Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. He quotes a wonderful letter of Freud’s, in which he describes how his aim in therapy was not to enable people to realise themselves or to achieve happiness — his aim was to change hysterical misery into the everyday suffering of normal human life. Today, that’s been somehow forgotten.

Rieff later wrote a book called The Triumph of the Therapeutic, in which he said that a therapeutic model of behaviour was spreading through every part of society. Rather than using moral terms or even political terms, people started using psychoanalytical terms. “What do you want out of this? I want closure.” Well, the thing about Freud is there’s never any closure. Closure is impossible for Freud. We bear the scars as well as the good things from infancy, whatever we do. I think conventional climate policy is for therapeutic people to feel good. They don’t want to feel powerless, so they deceive themselves.

But with these policies, there is also the question of political legitimacy. And what’s being discovered now is that there are limits to political legitimacy for policies that severely disrupt the practical lives and incomes of large numbers of people in society. So, if you impose a Ulez scheme in an area where there’s practically no public transport, that has a severe impact on people trying to get to work. And there’s also the subjective feeling, which is very important, of being imprisoned in one of these 15-minute cities — of somebody doing something to you which you resist.

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In London, there are reports of people going round and smashing or disabling Ulez cameras. What will happen is that these numbers will build and either the policy will eventually be overturned or you’ll have a period of anarchy. I remember when Thatcher, having tried and failed to impose the poll tax in Scotland, introduced it in England. And this happens to all leaders, whether they are liberals or not. They tend to become anti-empirical. They double down instead of learning from their mistakes. For Thatcher, this resulted in riots and her being toppled. And something similar could happen with these green policies — because not only is it a huge blow to the worldview of the technocratic elites who support it, but also to our perception of their competence.

So what’s the solution? In Britain, I have a tiny sliver of hope. I’m hoping for a hung parliament, which might not happen because Labour has been rejuvenated in Scotland. But if it doesn’t get a working majority, there is a realistic chance of electoral reform. The only way you can really have any new ideas filtering into politics is by creating new incentives, which involves the destruction of the existing party framework. And the parties would split immediately. Perhaps two or three parts of Labour will split: you could have a real socialist party (hopefully non-Corbynite); you could have a green party but not not a not a conventional green party; you could have a liberal party; you could have a libertarian party. You could have a variety of parties, and that would be a much healthier situation. I think that’s still possible. There’s a sliver of hope.

The full discussion with John Gray will be available shortly on UnHerd’s YouTube channel. John Gray’s new book, The New Leviathans, is published by Penguin.

But the great Victorian year of protest actually feels more recent than it has for decades. In its chaos and its power, it resembles our own historical moment, buffeted by populist uprisings and social turmoil, climate rebellion and violent insurrection. “We can take that place,” one man said confidently as he pointed to the Capitol on January 6. “And then do what?” responded his partner in crime. “Heads on pikes!” the first replied without really having the slightest idea of what to do next. As in 1848, radical and even violent protests are now expected, sometimes even desired, but without any clear programme or manifesto. Revolution doesn’t seem unlikely anymore, but at the same time, it’s hard to concretely envision a post-capitalist world.

Whether it’s the bolsonaristas invading the Brazilian National Congress, the gilets jaunes assembling spontaneously in the streets of France, or the “square movements” following the 2008 crash, the more traditional repertoires of contention that characterised the past century seem to be changing both on the Left and the Right. But far from being on the verge of a carefully planned coup d’état or a new social order, contemporary revolts instead resemble that tumultuous mid-century upheaval: “poorly planned, dispersed, patchy and bristling with contradictions” as Christopher Clark notes in his gripping new history, Revolutionary Spring. “The people of 1848,” he adds, “could see themselves in us.”

While the inter-war period and the rise of fascism has often been raised as a comparison for our present, Clark offers us a different and more accurate analogue. Far from being a failed revolution as Karl Marx had thought, 1848 successfully transformed Palermo, Paris and Vienna, and reverberated in Chile and Martinique. The year progressed not as chain or domino effect, but more like our own “populist revolts”: nearly simultaneous, interconnected and rooted in common socio-economical changes, but without being directly caused by one another. It was the “particle collision chamber at the centre of the European nineteenth century”. “People, groups and ideas,” Clark says, “flew into it, crashed together, fused or fragmented, and emerged in showers of new entities” with “profound consequences for the modern history of Europe”. The world, as Bismarck recalled in his memoirs, would never be the same after. Of course, at the time, the hopes of radicals were crushed. Many fled into exile in the United States or London, like the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini, the French socialist Louis Blanc, or Marx himself. For them, the disillusion was intense and the prospects of an immediate socialist transformation had rapidly vanished. But in the years to come, 1848 transformed how liberals, conservatives and socialists alike would relate to politics.

In response to the revolts, which were largely defeated, significant constitutional changes were passed, that slowly defined our modern representative politics and shaped for good the nature of the state and government. These new political constellations were more open to reform and to the aspirations of the moderate elements of society, but the state apparatus was significantly expanded, with the establishment of armed police forces trained to combat insurrections. The armed civic state is taken for granted now, but it was a marked novelty after the period spanning from the Vienna congress of 1815 to 1848. Most regimes had obviously been repressive, illiberal and change averse, but were also, as the historian Paul W. Schroeder has noted, inefficient and quite reluctant to use brute force against their own citizens. This allowed for a proliferation of conspiracies and popular revolts.

For a long time, ordinary people did not demonstrate, rally or strike, but would rather parade in mocking routines, seize grain, invade fields, attack tax collectors, destruct tollgates or sack machines. Conflicts unfolded generally at a local level, with a narrow focus and without coherent political aims. And revolutions themselves were rather the preserve of austere figures such as the Italian Robespierrist Philippe Buonarroti, who favoured revolutionary dictatorship over mass movements, convinced of the difficulty of involving the multitudes. Despite censorship, it was, in fact, Schroeder observed, “relatively easy and safe to promote revolution”. As a result, in 1848, the authorities of Europe weren’t ready to respond properly to the insurrections, used instead to small and carefully-planned uprisings.

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In that year, something quite different emerged for the first time. As Clark writes, the uprisings were “inchoate, multifocal, socially deep” rather than anchored in the “seditious conspiracy” characteristics of the 1830s. The revolutionary ideas “reverberated in cafés and political clubs, circulating in communicative networks that were incomparably denser, socially deeper and more sophisticated than their late-eighteenth-century predecessors”. Even if there weren’t yet “political parties capable of disciplining their members or binding them to commonly agreed positions” or “doctrinally authoritative ‘ideologies’”, it marked the beginning of the end of a certain form of protest. From here on, not only the middle classes and liberals renounced revolution for good, but the emerging working class would progressively work through parties, unions and strikes rather than coups d’états and barricades.

As the sociologist Charles Tilly later argued in the case of France, 1848 therefore stands in the middle of two crucial intertwined changes that would transform the repertoire of collective action for the following century. The first involved the centralisation of the state into a more complex apparatus, internally coordinated and with enhanced means of coercion. This was coupled with an unprecedented expansion of capital, producing a large and modern working class which populated large units of production. And within this new nexus of capital and state, social movements as we know them began to take hold within an emerging civil society. Change couldn’t be the product of a few heroes dedicated to the revolution, but had to come from organised and ideologically-driven masses. If class struggle was the steam of History, it would now require strong and sophisticated engines to move forwards and channel collective struggles into specific directions. The “social”, as Clark notes, could now “be grasped as an autonomous category, irreducible to politics”.

This transition wasn’t just a concern for revolutionaries. Even conservatives, as Eric Hobsbawm noted, “would have to defend themselves in new ways” and “to learn the politics of the people”. “Public opinion” — a distinctively liberal notion — could not be ignored any more. Defeating insurrections or censoring the press was not enough, and influencing and controlling the masses would become increasingly important over the next decades, shaping a new form of statecraft and political activity. It marked, Hobsbawm argued, “the end…of the politics of tradition”. As the rate of literacy increased, all political forces had to develop their own ideological apparatuses to shape the mentality of large groups, through political newspapers, youth movements or rallies. Politics was slowly embedded in a “thick” civil society, with a large range of deeply networked organisations and institutions that served as intermediaries between citizens and the state. Parties became not just machines to conquer power, but mediators between institutions and citizens, embodying the interests of mobilised and conscious social groups.

This kind of politics, that culminated with the total mobilisations of the first half of the 20th century, would shape the whole political spectrum. From socialists and communists creating their own counter-society within capitalism, to fascists who, while they crushed unions and labour organisations, still tried to fully integrate a broad range of voluntary associations and organisations within the fascist state. In that sense, everything was political, from the sport club to the local newspapers. This held for much of the 20th century, where even during the post-war period, politics remained transactional, and programmes and reforms generally reflecting pre-electoral deals with specific constituencies. It’s only with the more individualised ethos following the century’s own year of global protest, 1968, that this settlement began to unravel, opening the space for the more speculative and public relations-driven public sphere of the Eighties.

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And with the demise of social democracy and the collapse of the Soviet Union, collective engines to define human needs and collective endeavours slowly disappeared in favour of a more atomised civil society. That is why, as Alex Hochuli, George Hoare and Philip Cunliffe recently argued, “our political world…retained its external appearance, but if you crack open the shell, there’s nothing inside”. The formal institutions of democracy are still there, but are “divested of popular energies and innovation”. The populist explosions of the 2010s marked therefore what we could call the final disintermediation of politics, an exit from the associative structures that shaped politics for a century: parties, unions, mass organisations. And while the era of apathetic citizens characteristic of the Nineties has come to an end, the renewal of social turmoil and ideological battles hasn’t brought back such engines. People assemble and demonstrate not on the orders of parties and unions leaders but through the spread of messages and call for action posted on social media. We have been plunged back into the spontaneous, disorganised and unpredictable world that shaped 1848.

In the newly digitalised public sphere, political figures combine a strong and charismatic authority with a less mediated relation with their base. They speak to them through Facebook, Twitter, or even their own social media platform, rather than the outmoded bureaucratic structures of the mass parties. Within such a shift, in a sense ending the dynamic that began in 1848, even ideologies are not stable but rather, like in the era of Tocqueville, “an archipelago of texts and personalities across which [are] plotted quite idiosyncratic courses”. Large and influential newspapers have been replaced by a proliferation of media platforms, shaping the ideas of evanescent crowds on specific issues rather than precise political projects. Even the decorporation that went along the proletarisation of labour echoes this. Rather than a labour movement built upon a formalised labour market, we have witnessed a proliferation of the “working poor” and the “Uberisation” of workers. Social conflict has itself deserted the workplace, where the “great resignation” replaced coordinated strikes and mass labour militancy.

Whether it be the syncretic nature of their ideas, the irruption of spirituality into politics, the resurgence of violence, the tension between representation and direct forms of democracy, or even the rise of influential feminist figures and writers, our past decade has allowed the rebirth of the radicalism that ended with the mid-century revolutions. A world that would probably appear more familiar to Blanqui than Jaurès. Politics is now everywhere, but in a very different and more elusive sense than during the mass mobilisations of the 20th century.

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But among all these similarities, there is a difference. If 1848 led to an ascendency of the centre and the idea of superseding politics through technocracy and scientific government, our time appears to be heading the other way. Technocracy has been shattered, and the ability of the state to effectively govern is at its lowest since the late Sixties. Even if the idea of revolution has made a comeback, we still lack of engines to actually allow collective forms of decision making and to politicise human needs. Despite the development of new forms of digital engagement, the participation of citizens remains narrow and unable to sustain enduring political participation. There isn’t a week without headlines mentioning a riot or spontaneous assemblies or demonstrations. But the question still remains: what’s next?

But as Tocqueville had himself experienced, the end of an era is always an unpredictable process. “I cannot say and have no idea when this long journey will end,” he wrote in his Souvenirs, “and often wonder whether the terra firma for which we have so long been searching actually exists, or whether our destiny is not rather to ply the seas forever”. If the agony of the old can be a long and a painful thing it also, as the story of 1848 demonstrates, opens history to unexpected turns and innovations.

I was once one of those people. I’m a lower-middle class, suburban British bloke from Generation X, who was brought up to believe that the system broadly worked and was mostly fair, at least for people like me. The government did its best, though sometimes the wrong people got in; the police were here to help; there were career ladders and housing ladders, and if you worked hard and behaved responsibly and paid your taxes, then society would reward you for it.

Of course, this was a partial story, as all stories are. Plenty of people would have cackled cynically at it from the start, while others, including me, disabused themselves of it by degrees. I spent 30 years writing about the degradation of nature and culture by the state-capitalist technocracy that governs us, so I imagined I was a hard-bitten realist. But the last few years taught me that I was still too naive about the mythic “social contract” with the state that I apparently entered into at birth, despite having never signed a thing.

As I say, it’s not just me. The loss of faith across the West in our institutions, leaders and representatives in recent years has been radical. When, I wonder, did that contract expire? Maybe in 2003, when the lies with which the Iraq war was launched were so blatant that even those telling them seemed unconvinced. Or maybe later, in 2016, when Brexit happened and Donald Trump happened and European “populism” happened, and suddenly any opposition to liberal globalism became fascism or bigotry or the work of Russian bots.

But it was the pandemic — or rather, the response to it — that changed everything for me. I hadn’t been prepared see, in my allegedly free and democratic country, a merger of corporate power, state power and media power in the service of constructing a favoured narrative, of the kind which had previously only characterised totalitarian regimes. What the Covid regime brought home to me was that I had not, despite what I believed, really understood the real nature of power until I saw it exercised in its raw form over my life. Specifically, I had not understood the power of the state.

Nothing has the power or reach of a modern state. Its sheer scale and strength gives it the ability to corral, organise, define, measure and control its population in a manner that is unmatched in human history, and that power only grows and deepens. The momentum of a state is always towards the centre, always towards the agglomeration of more power. A state is like a black hole: at a certain point, it begins to suck in everything around it. As it grows, it will tell stories that justify its existence. Democracy, liberty and progress are some of the more recent banners beneath which state power has gathered, but there have been others: racial or ethnic homogeneity, human equality, religious purity. All of these stories have the potential to unite a people around a state core.

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What happens, then, when large and powerful states, along with the transnational institutions and corporations they promote and protect, are all driving towards the same goal: the universalisation of an American-style “global economy” and its associated culture? This has been the story of the world since 1945, and the result is the world’s first truly global system. The expansion of this system has created problems — ecological degradation, social unrest, cultural fragmentation, economic interdependence, systemic fragility, institutional breakdown. The system has responded with more expansion and more control, growing bigger, more complex and more controlling.

Modernity can best be seen as a system of enclosure, fuelled by the destruction of self-sufficient lifeways, and their replacement with a system of economic exploitation, guided by states and exercised by corporations. The disempowering of people everywhere, and the deepening of technological control, is the inevitable result, and the pandemic overreach will not be the last example. So what is the correct response to the problem of power, and the reach of the state? Avoid it? Hide from it? Confront it? Ignore it? All of these? Or something else? Can we escape the state and live differently? If so, how?

Jacques Ellul, the great theorist of technocracy, had his own answer to these questions: “The only successful way to attack these features of modern civilisation is to give them the slip, to learn how to live on the edge of this totalitarian society.” Ellul, I think, was right. The state is the chief enemy of human freedom. It cannot be conquered or replaced. But sometimes, under the right circumstances, it can be evaded.

In his 2009 book The Art of Not Being Governed — subtitled, “an anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia” — the historian James C. Scott offers up some historical examples. Scott’s aim is twofold: firstly, to lay out the history of a vast upland region he calls “Zomia”, straddling territories from India to Malaysia, which has managed over centuries to avoid assimilation by encroaching states. And secondly, to rewrite the standard story of historical progress as it applies to the region. The “hill tribes” and “barbarians” living outside civilisation’s walls, he says, are neither “left behind” by “progress”, nor the “remnants” of earlier “backwards” cultures; they are in fact escapees. “Hill peoples are best understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppression of state-making projects in the valleys — slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labour, epidemics and warfare.”

Scott’s thesis is that throughout history, escaping from the reach of oppressive states has been a popular aim, and that in response, some cultures have developed sophisticated ways of living in hard-to-govern “shatter zones”, which allow them to avoid being assimilated. Standard-issue historical accounts of “development”, he says, are really the history of state-making, written from the state’s point of view: they pay no attention to “the history of deliberate and reactive statelessness”. Yet that history — whether of hill tribes, runaway slaves, gypsies, maroons, sea peoples or Marsh Arabs — is global and ongoing. Taking it into account, says Scott, would “reverse much received wisdom about ‘primitivism’”. Instead, we would read a history of “self-barbarisation”: a process of reactive resistance, of becoming awkward, of making a community into a shape that it is hard for the state to absorb, or even to quite comprehend.

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The state, says Scott, is fundamentally a colonial entity. In its youthful vigour, it will institute a process of “internal colonisation”, creating a homogenised “national identity” from the various cultures it governs, flattening language and dialect and telling a story in which loyalty to community or place becomes indistinguishable from loyalty to the state. Later that colonisation process may move beyond its borders, as the state projects its power onto more distant peoples, assimilating them too. This is enclosure at work, and it is never voluntary. Like laissez-faire capitalism, or aristocracy, the state — which has only existed for the last 1% of human history — did not simply “evolve” as some logical phase of human “development”. It was created, by the use of raw power, through land seizures, slavery, enforced labour and taxation.

For this reason, escaping from state power and creating different ways of living in the “shatter zones” was an attractive option. Those zones were usually to be found in hard-to-reach places; in Southeast Asia, this meant the hills and mountains. Their peoples — the “tribals” or “Adivasi” or “savages” — would not, in most cases, be entirely cut off from lowland life; they would often trade with urban centres, for example, and some would raid them, too, if they got the chance. But they would keep their distance, wary of being corralled by the state machinery.

The Asian states, as they expanded, sought to impose the religious, cultural and economic practices of the dominant ethnic group — be it Thai, Burman, Han or Kinh — onto disparate peoples. When European colonists arrived in Asia, they simply continued the process, with a new cultural flavour. The official religion now might be Christianity rather than Buddhism, and “civilisation” might mean British rather than Han manners, but to the peripheral peoples the result was little different. British imperialist Sir Stamford Raffles spoke not only for his Empress, but for the mind of the colonial state across history, when he wrote of Sumatra:

“Here I am the advocate of despotism … Sumatra is, in great measure, peopled by innumerable petty tribes, subject to no general government … At present people are wandering in their habits as the birds of the air, and until they are congregated and organised under something like authority, nothing can be done with them.”

But such localised, potentially dispersed cultures can be tough to conquer. In the 1890s, the British found the conquest of the Kachin and Palaung hill peoples in Zomia almost impossible. Because they had “never submitted to any central control”, complained the chief commissioner responsible for the process, they had to be attacked “hill by hill” to ensure their submission. The historian Malcom Yapp invented a wonderful term for this kind of dispersed culture of refusal: jellyfish tribes. In Scott’s words, jellyfish tribalism is “a process of defending cultural and economic autonomy by scattering” to “make the group invisible or unattractive as object of appropriation”. The Berbers of North Africa, faced with colonisation by the Arabs, had their own way of putting this: divide that ye be not ruled. Lois Beck, who studied tribal culture in Iran, pointed to the same tactic in use there: “Large tribal groups divided into smaller groups to be less visible to the state and escaped its reach.”

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All of this points to some potential ways forward for those who fear the continued expansion of the increasingly globalised, technocratic state today. The challenge, it seems to me, is to move beyond pat political formulations of “resistance”, and begin to think instead like the hill tribes of Zomia. To think about becoming barbarians by choice. To begin to build parallel systems — economies and cultures — which are hard to assimilate, and have a robustness to them which can last. To construct “cultures of refusal”.

But how could this actually be done? The modern West is not like Zomia — indeed, as Scott himself points out, modern Zomia is not like Zomia used to be either, with many of its stateless people now being rapidly absorbed into state systems, which new technologies have made more powerful and far-reaching than ever. What hope of any kind of alternative life in a hyper-connected, monitored, digital age? Even if we wanted to retreat to the margins to build our own community, how many of us could do it? And what would make that community more robust than the last counter-cultural wave of “intentional communities”, which sprang up after the Sixties, and failed to create utopia?

This is why I find the notion of the jellyfish tribe so intriguing. Any attempt at building utopia will fail — but utopia should never be a goal. Some form of free survival is the goal; survival in order to uphold the values of a true human life. There is no easy or standardised way to emulate what Scott calls the “state-repelling characteristics” of the Zomians, but there is one question it might be useful for anyone who seeks to evade Leviathan to ask themselves: what kind of barbarian do I want to be?

In ancient China, the state distinguished between two different kinds of barbarian outsider: the raw (sheng) and the cooked (shu). A 12th-century document detailing the relationship of the Li people with the Chinese state speaks of the “cooked Li” as those who have submitted to state authority and the “raw Li” as those who “live in the mountain caves and are not punished by us or do not supply labour”. But while the raw Li were clearly enemies of the state, the cooked Li were not exactly friends either. State officials “suspected them of outward conformity while slyly co-operating with the raw Li”. The raw barbarians lived outside the walls and the cooked lived within, but neither were really to be trusted.

What we see here, then, is two potential escape routes: one outside, one inside. Shatter zones do not have to literally be in the hills: they can be within our homes and even within our hearts. My heart soars whenever I hear of some remote monastery or surviving rooted community with no online access or even electricity, whose people know exactly where they stand: outside the state, the better to see God and experience creation. Such places are the work of the raw barbarians, and we need more of them.

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But most people are cooked barbarians. We are, to different degrees, in the state but not of it. Perhaps we look like good citizens on the outside. But if we coalesce as a jellyfish tribe, we can begin to dissociate ourselves from the state, while creating alternatives to it. Plenty of people are already doing this. They create cultures-within-cultures, parallel economies and ways of living. Like small furry mammals running unnoticed beneath the feet of the tyrannosaurs, we can thus build our own little worlds on the margins and wait for the coming of the meteor, which we can already see coming in the very un-sustainability of technological modernity. The mice don’t attack the dinosaurs, and neither do they wait for them to die out: they just avoid them as best they can, and get on with their work.

What Scott’s book shows me above all is that the tension between expanding power centres and free peoples is eternal and never-ending. Throughout history there has been an ongoing flow of assimilation and breakout, consolidation and collapse. There has never been any system as large, as overwhelming, as inhuman, as all-seeing, as technological modernity, and yet Rome and Babylon and Han China operated on the same principles. The shatter zones that rise in response are sometimes geographical, sometimes psychological and spiritual, and often all of these at once. Today, some of those shatter zones are at least partly online; and despite my own instinctive Luddism, I have to accept that such spaces are meeting points for state-repelling people who might never meet in real life. I have to accept, too, that using technology to resist technocracy can be of benefit, even though it can also be a trap.

In the age of Starlink, eyeball scans, AI bots and digital passports, it is getting harder and harder to find anywhere to hide. But humans are creative. There are countless practical ways in which cultural refusal can manifest in our everyday lives. I am a writer, for instance, who is currently watching the publishing industry being taken over by political puritans who are purging incorrect thoughts from the shelves, while rooting around in the past for baddies to cancel. I can whine about this, or I can support or start new publishers on the margins who do things differently. The same might be true for music, art, academia, food-growing. Everything is compromised; nothing is easy. But building anew, retreating to create, being awkward and hard to grasp, finding your allies and establishing your zone of cultural refusal, whether in a mountain community or in your urban home: what else is there?

Whatever culture you come from, it will offer up at least one folk hero who earned his or her status through state-repelling behaviour. In England, we have hundreds of pirates, highwaymen, outlaws and rebels to choose from. You all know the name of the most famous: England’s shadow self, Robyn Hode, who flits through his shatter zone, the English greenwood, with his merry band of refuseniks in tow. We could do worse than to find our own greenwood and take our stand there, beneath the shelter of its great, ancient oaks.

*

A longer version of this essay was first published at the Abbey of Misrule.

It was not the last time the curmudgeonly prince would intervene against Rogers, and nor was it the last time Rogers would have to make room for St Paul’s. His skyscraper on Leadenhall Street, known as The Cheesegrater, owes its slanting profile to rules that protect certain views of Wren’s cathedral.

As we mark the 300th anniversary of Wren’s death, it’s worth noting a certain irony in all of this. St Paul’s may well be the nation’s favourite building, and Wren our greatest architect, but he is more like the grandfather of Richard Rogers than his antithesis.

This will strike some as blasphemous: Rogers’ buildings, which include the Centre Pompidou in Paris and London’s Millennium Dome, are technocratic in the most profound sense of the word. With their machine-like forms and conspicuous feats of engineering, they elevate efficiency and expertise into an idol to be worshipped, a religion in its own right. Impressive as these structures are, one can understand why they would make Charles despair whether “capitalism can have a human face, instead of that of a robot or a word processor”.

But technocratic monuments emerge from technocratic societies, where a fixation with how things work drowns out the question of what they are actually for. The natural and human worlds are treated as processes to be managed, with politics reduced to measurable outputs: higher growth, fewer emissions, a more equal distribution of benefits. Technology is held in awe, but more for its functional qualities than any greater purpose it serves.

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This could be a description of our own society, and Rogers’ buildings an honest reflection of it. But these tendencies did not appear from nowhere; they have deep roots in the evolution of modern forms of knowledge and power. And those roots lead us back to Christopher Wren.

Picture the scene: it’s 1656, in a house on Oxford High Street. Three members of what will become the Royal Society, an engine of the scientific revolution, are debating whether poison can be administered directly into the bloodstream. Wren, a 23-year-old Fellow of All Souls College, thinks it can. But how to be sure? One of his accomplices, the pioneering chemist Robert Boyle, duly provides a dog, and the experiment begins. Using various improvised instruments, including a syringe fashioned from a goose quill and pig’s bladder, Wren makes an incision in the panicked dog’s leg, successfully injecting opium into a vein.

This episode was later recognised as the first recorded use of an intravenous anaesthetic. (The drugged dog, Boyle reports, recovered after being whipped around the garden for a while.)

It was experimental science like this that occupied Wren for the first two decades of his adult life, not architecture. He was mainly an astronomer, though he pursued all manner of experiments. He studied Saturn’s rings and the lenses of a horse’s eye; he investigated atmospheric pressure and dissected the human brain; he removed the spleen of a puppy and presented the king with a model of the moon.

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This was the birth of modern science, but it was also the critical moment when the question of how began to displace the what and the why. These early scientists were driven by a growing realisation that our intuitions did not grasp the true structure of reality. Their response, at least in England, was to turn away from the philosophical mission of understanding what existence is and what its purpose should be, focusing more narrowly on how natural processes work. Already this shift was reflected in a new emphasis on technology: instruments to measure what the senses could not, and gadgets to show mastery of scientific principles. The patterns of the cosmos were mapped in the objective language of mathematics.

This outlook would eventually lay the ground for the technocratic management of society. And Wren, when he turned to architecture, was very much the technocratic type. Employed as Surveyor of the King’s Works, he was a talented but remote civil servant. After the Great Fire of 1666, his job was to Build Back Better, something he managed very well thanks to his relish for bureaucracy and admin. He even wanted to redesign the City of London in the form of a grid. Wren’s classical style did not reflect a deep connection with artistic tradition; it was, as the historian John Summerson pointed out, a matter of good grammar.

In fact, though Wren designed 56 London churches (of which only 23 remain), his readings of scripture suggest an almost Richard Dawkins-like literalism in regard to religion. He liked to demonstrate how astronomy could explain biblical miracles, and treated Samson’s ability to pull down temples as a maths problem. One of his admiring biographers sums up his mindset perfectly: “How a thing worked — whether that thing was a spleen or a comet, a palace or a government department — was as important to him as the end product.”

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What really made Wren tick was impressive engineering, mathematical rigour, and finding the most economic solution to a practical puzzle. This is already evident in his first building, the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, where he devised an ingenious system of trusses to cover a lengthy span. His London churches show his love of geometry — “always the True test” of beauty for Wren — as seen in their centralised plans, barrel-vaulted ceilings, and their pursuit of symmetry wherever possible.

It’s not entirely a coincidence, then, that both Christopher Wren and Richard Rogers built domes near the Thames. When Wren proposed this idea for St Paul’s, it was, like Rogers’ fiberglass egg, something alien to London, as well as a state-of-the-art engineering display.

It’s true that Wren’s churches don’t feel overly stringent or rational, and this is a sign of his incredible intellect. Their precise balance of spatial and decorative elements can, at their best, create a sense of serene harmony. Nonetheless, later generations often found an artificial quality in his buildings; one 18th-century poet thought him “extremely odd, / To build a playhouse for the church of God”. It’s difficult to judge his work today because it is now contrasted with a modern architecture that fetishises pure geometry, technology, and the expression of structural principles. Yet these are ideas which Wren himself anticipated.

More than that, Wren and his fellow scientists unleashed a quest for knowledge which eventually created a world so complex it needs technocrats to manage it, as well as architects like Rogers to glorify it. It is a great irony that the designer of Britain’s most beloved cathedral also laid the foundations for a society so starved of spiritual meaning.

Amid this chaos, Rishi Sunak — former Goldman Sachs banker — has become Britain’s new prime minister. Has the technocratic order of the 2010s returned? Or has the modern world moved beyond its reach? Read Gray’s diagnosis, as well as his interview with Freddie Sayers, below.

The revenge of the technocrats

The point about these people is they’ve learned nothing. There’s no practical way of going back to before 2016. Already in 2016, the world hadn’t fully recovered from a near catastrophic financial crisis which these adults in the room, these extremely intelligent men and women, had given us. The halcyon period of technocratic competence included, going back to the start, long-term capital management melting down in 1998, after Russia defaulted on its debt. That was patched up but it also began what later was called quantitative easing … You then had the 2007-2008 crash. And you also had gruesome sideshows like 20 years in Afghanistan. This is what the adults in the room, this is what the technocrats, the people who are now coming back as safe hands, as competent administrators, this is what they did. So their record is not at all one of competence. It’s one of repeated near-disaster.

They think of themselves as the way of the future. But the future has melted down. It’s not there anymore; their future’s gone. Their future was one in which the whole world would marketise, in which geopolitics would surrender to geoeconomics, global markets. All the states that were emerging, China, Russia and others, would see that their advantage lay with integrating into the global market. Geopolitical struggles would attenuate. They would still be there, but would become less important over time. The opposite has happened. The global market doesn’t exist the way it seemed to exist then and it’s certainly not evolving towards this global market stability that they expected. So, the fundamental problem in this nostalgia, this Osbornist technocratic project, is that they’re adapting to a world that no longer exists, and isn’t coming back. It is a hopeless nostalgia.

What the Tories get wrong about Brexit

Insofar as Brexit’s a Tory project, it is: Global Britain, supply-side reforms, free market, open the British economy even more to the buffeting of the world. Whereas what people wanted in the North and the Midlands, and other parts of the country, from Brexit, I think, was some shelter from those storms. They wanted not a smaller state, a state that had retreated even further. They wanted actually, maybe not a bigger state, although most of them I think probably did, but one which was more protective of them and more concerned with their wellbeing and more active. So the majority of those who voted for Brexit did not vote — perhaps the overwhelming majority — for the reasons that the Tory Brexiteers thought. And that, of course, introduced a contradiction in the whole Tory Brexit project, which meant it couldn’t work.

Why the technocrats don’t get populism

The only way they could understand these movements, what they called populism, was to say that these are stupid, ignorant people. If they merit any sympathy, it’s that they’re being misled by demagogues. But there can be no real merit, no logic, no justice to their claims. And so that itself was a failure of intelligence. I think populism is a term liberals apply to the political blowback of their policies that they fail to comprehend. It was caused by them…

But I think apart from anything else, apart from the morally, profoundly repellent and even abhorrent attitude these technocrats, these liberals, these progressives, technocratic and otherwise, had for their fellow citizens — apart from that — it’s a failure of understanding. Where did it come from? The devil? Where did this strange sort of diabolical combination of demagoguery and mass stupidity suddenly emerge from? It’s a tremendous failure of intelligence and it’s being repeated.

The technocrats now believe they’ve got a second chance and they’re back in the seats of power. They haven’t got the conceptual equipment to understand that forces other than those that fit into their largely economic view of the world — and of human beings themselves and of human action, it’s an economic view of human action — isn’t realistic and doesn’t really work and they can’t acquire the skills without taking too much out of their worldview.

Why Rishi will fail

Anyone who thinks Rishi Sunak is going to be able to stabilise the boat of the British economy to the point at which growth can resume in a few years — they’ve only got two years more in office — is completely delusional. Because the recessionary forces — put aside even war — in the world economy are very, very strong. And the combination of tightening monetary policies with tightening fiscal policies, with higher taxes, lower spending, and cutting back on quantitative easing, can only exacerbate all kinds of painful trends for the general population. So it’s not going to be politically stable. I’m not convinced that the internal cannibalism of the Conservative Party will permit Rishi to even last to January 2025. There could be another cycle of regicide and folly. But then Labour come in, and then what do they do? Because they are actually also committed to Osborne’s vision.

Why Labour will fail 

They’ve joined the critique that the Tories were being fiscally irresponsible, and that the responsible thing is to obey the markets… But where’s the money going to come from? If they do shut down remaining forms of energy production, which they regard as damaging, where are the workers going to go? What will happen to Labour when it stops working, when the mixture of Osbornism and green utopianism breaks down, is that the party will internally fracture. I don’t necessarily mean a revival of the Corbynites but there are lots of people within Labour who are prepared to accept the bland neo-technocratic ideology of Starmerism because they think it’s a winning one. And it is a winning one, if only because the Conservatives have made such a mess of things.

Why the far-Right might rise

Mosley didn’t get very far in the Thirties. There wasn’t a single fascist MP in the Commons. We’ve remained, actually, relatively untouched by that. But one of the reasons we’ve remained, not untouched, but where we’ve been able to fend off those dangerously anti-liberal movements, is that the Conservative Party actually was able to moderate them and incorporate them within a broader political project that included social democracy, that included a paternalistic High Toryism, which included various strands. If the Conservative Party is going to melt down, which I think it’s in the process of doing now, then there are obviously risks, even in Britain, of something like that. I don’t know if people really, 10 or 15 years ago, thought that in Sweden there would be a government which depended for its support on having more or less a de facto coalition with the far-Right. But that’s the case now, is it not?

Why we need Proportional Representation 

The best outcome would be a change in the electoral system. I’ve not always accepted first-past-the-post. I used to support, 20 or 30 years ago, changes like the Alternative Vote. I think the only way that we’re going to get fresh thinking and a way through the intractable conjunctions that we face — the failure of the Global Britain Brexit, and the almost non-attempt at the more protective and state-centred Brexit that people really wanted — is by breaking up the existing party system and having a wider variety of parties and ideas.

Thrasymachus is directly acquainted with Athenian justice. He was a citizen of Chalcedon, one of over 100 subject-cities of Athens in the late 5th century. The imperial yoke so chafed the Chalcedonians that they revolted in the middle of the Peloponnesian War. The results were predictably bad.

Besieged by Athenian forces, the Chalcedonians were saved in 408 by the satrap Pharnabazus, who paid off the aggressors with Persian coin. In the Republic, which unfolds against the backdrop of these historical events, Thrasymachus is brought to a hard boil of indignation by the ridiculous spectacle of two Athenians, of all people, agreeing that it is never just to harm anyone. He interrupts the philosopher Socrates — for he is one of the Athenians — with astonishing belligerence.

Thrasymachos (Bold in Battle) knows that politics is nothing but domination and servitude, and that everything is political. He also thinks Socrates and his interlocutor are either fools or hypocrites, and Socrates in any case deserves scorn as he is a lowly craftsman, a stonecutter and intellectual amateur, whereas Thrasymachus’s professional knowledge and political office — he represented Chalcedon in diplomatic negotiations with the Athenians — place him in the ranks of the elite.

Thrasymachus polices Socrates’ language, forbidding him to offer certain answers to the question “What is justice?” An expert in the field of politics and an early practitioner of the hermeneutics of suspicion, he is certain that Socrates aims only to obscure the truth with specious arguments. He is therefore perfectly entitled to restrict his means of doing so.

Thrasymachus is quite the familiar character. Our highest-ranked universities have been training and credentialing his descendants for decades. He is more aggressive than inquisitive. His ideas are more precise than accurate, more critical than enlarging. His embrace of intellectual fashion springs in no small part from ambition. His combination of indignation, cynicism, social and intellectual elitism, and proclivity to abstract and totalising constructions is today unavoidable. He is the ancient ancestor of the contemporary ideological technocrat; types like him have recently flooded the political mainstream, altering the character of virtually every part of American life. They are the bitter fruit of an illiberal education.

By ideology, I’m referring to a reductive political theory that, when implemented, is incapable of securing the free and informed assent of the governed and so must rely on extensive fraud and compulsion. By technocrat, I mean someone belonging to a regime in which claims of scientific or technical expertise override traditional kinds of political authority and substitute for political debate.

Technocracy and ideology are intimately connected. Technocracy is necessarily ideological, for while the management of abject slaves may perhaps be reducible to a science, the governance of a political community — one in which free citizens share in the determination of public affairs — is not. Politics, a continual process of public deliberation and negotiation in the light of the available facts, engages and exercises the capacities of practical reason. It is a school of virtue, capable, at its best, of dignifying and ennobling human existence. Technocrats, though, regard human existence as a problem to be solved or a sickness to be cured; knowledge and agency belong almost exclusively to them, who approach the ignorant like surgeons preparing to operate on a patient.

Equally, ideology is very often technocratic. It is almost invariably so in late modernity, an era infatuated with what is unreflectively called Progress — the advancement and practical application of science. But the mixture of ideology and scientific expertise generates pseudo-sciences, such as Leninist dialectical materialism, which are used to consolidate and justify despotism. In this, as in other respects, modern ideological tyrannies trace their ancestry, as Karl Popper showed 80 years ago in The Open Society and its Enemies, to Callipolis, the Republic’s infamous city of philosopher-kings.

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The prototype of all scientific tyrannies, Callipolis deceives, manipulates, and constantly surveils its citizens; its very name, Noble and Beautiful City, is a lie. The regime claims to achieve perfect justice for all, offering what Karl Marx, in another context, called a “solution to the riddle of history”. Although radical technocratic and ideological responses to that riddle seem to lead only to final solutions, the nightmare of total scientific control in the name of justice and human liberation continues to stalk the West like a zombie horde.

The United States remains a constitutional republic, but technocratic progressivism threatens its future as a representative democracy. It is telling that, in the mouths of the governing elites, the word “democracy” no longer refers to government of, by, and for the people, but to progressive policies that are endorsed by credentialed experts yet have little popular support. And now we must contend with a monstrous union of science and politics that lames and deforms both.

Consider government responses to Covid. At the outset of the pandemic, a handful of unelected public health officials immediately began to advise and direct policy decisions of enormous consequence. Our elected officials in the US, trembling before these scientific experts, have followed their recommendations with little consideration of the cost that lockdowns, school closures, vaccine mandates, and the like exact on the economic and political well-being of the country and the mental and physical health of its citizens. Similar measures were adopted across the globe.

Americans have from the beginning been told to follow the science, but the science has mostly followed politics. In June 2020, for example, over 1,200 medical and health professionals signed a letter arguing that, despite the high risk of viral transmission, prohibitions then in force on small gatherings like church services should not apply to large (and frequently destructive and violent) demonstrations protesting what the authors called “the pervasive lethal force of white supremacy”. And when the science pointed toward the likely origin of Covid in a Wuhan lab, top health officials conspired — for political reasons — to smother that news.

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More ominously, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and most of the corporate media have acted, and continue to act, as willing handmaids of our public health officials. They have eagerly embraced the role of Covid censors, monitoring and restricting debate, dissent, and the flow of information — the lifeblood of all knowledge, and, in Tocqueville’s view, the last bulwark against complete servitude to the new form of oppression he called “administrative despotism”. Public speech is now substantially mediated by digital technology, whose constantly expanding and probably irreversible influence on our lives is a unique feature of contemporary technocracy.

Digital technology has amplified and accelerated the politicisation of almost everything, including scientific inquiry. Researchers who publish findings or explore questions that run afoul of progressivist ideology are regularly attacked by social-media mobs and can expect little support from the leaders of their universities and academic organizations, some of which, like Britain’s Royal Society of Chemistry, have formally institutionalised censorship. The situation has drawn thoughtful and informed comparisons with the Soviet Union, where engineers, physicists, geneticists, linguists, and others were purged from the academy for practicing “bourgeois science.”

This is not all. For technocracy and technology exacerbate the worst characteristics of late-stage democracy, a transitional period that Plato illuminates with prophetic clarity. His description of the growth of tyranny in the midst of democracy cuts close to the bone today.

In the Republic’s grand arc of political decline, democracy emerges from oligarchy, a regime ruled by stingy and avaricious money-makers. Oligarchy contains the seeds of its own destruction. The children of the wealthy are “used to luxury and unaccustomed to labors in body and soul, weak in resisting pleasures and pains, and idle”. The old misers are furthermore happy to make loans to this spoiled cohort. This produces a class of indebted and dishonored young men “hating and plotting against those who acquired their property, and all the rest, and longing for political change”.

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The revolutionary longing of these frustrated and dispossessed elites finds fulfillment in democracy, which is characterised by freedom and free speech, personal license, the indulgence of criminals, the neglect of education, and the equality of equals and unequals alike. License and leveling go hand in hand, because the acknowledgment of fundamental differences between what is noble and base, good and bad, hinders the unrestricted satisfaction of individual desire. The democratic man turns a deaf ear to the admonishments of older relatives and banishes shame and moderation, calling them foolishness and cowardliness.

The desire for limitless freedom eventually becomes insatiable, especially among the young, who attack customary restraints with sacred fervour. Rulers who resist are accused of being religiously polluted, while obedient citizens are vituperated as willing slaves and nonentities. Anarchy pervades the polity and enters the household. Fearing vilification, fathers capitulate to their sons, while sons have no fear or shame before their parents. Rulers imitate the ruled and the old come down to the level of the young, flattering them “so that they won’t seem to be unpleasant or despotic”. The condemned carry on like free men, foreigners are treated like citizens, and the souls of the people become soft and tender and unable to bear anything that smacks of servitude.

In the end, ancestral customs and written laws lose all authority, and the city is governed by the most ferocious among the idle sons of the oligarchs — the ones who had longed for political change under the regime of their fathers. These rulers seize the wealth of the money-makers, the class that is most invested in civic order, keeping the lion’s share for themselves and distributing the rest to the poor.

In the Republic, we see the present in an ancient mirror. The radicalisation of the children of the elites; the repudiation of ancestral customs, political traditions, parental and educational authority, and the very idea of sacred order; the normalisation of previously illicit pleasures; and the weakening of civil rights are all features of contemporary American life. So are the vehement shaming and scapegoating of political opponents; clemency toward criminals amid a surge of lawlessness; the enrichment of the ruling class, destruction of the middle class, and increased dependency of the poor; the fragility and unwonted aggressiveness of the young; and the fatuousness and cowardliness of the old. Is this not astonishing?

But these ills are now supercharged by technocracy, which is perfectly compatible with democratic passions even if it is incompatible with representative democracy. There is currently no shortage of “scientific” support for the liberation of human beings from the constraints of nature and custom alike.

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Wesley Yang recently used his Year Zero substack to draw attention to a 2019 USA Today article that cites policies adopted by the American Medical Association in 2018 to substantiate its claim that feminists who resist the inclusion of transgender women within female-only spaces, including restrooms and athletic competitions, “deny transgender people their full humanity and go against what the medical community today has accepted as scientific fact around gender and sex”. The arguments of these “transphobic” feminists get no mention; the exclusionary position is summarily dismissed on the ground that it violates an implicit and newly minted right to “full humanity”— a term that can mean whatever those who claim that right want it to mean.

This example illustrates the invidious political dynamic of our time. Having begun to condemn great masses of Americans as scientifically illiterate bigots, our self-appointed guardians find themselves on a road from which there is no exit. Turning political disagreements into occasions for public shame and vilification has failed to produce the desired alignment of public opinion. It has only emboldened the opposition, whose refusal to be silenced has been met with increasingly heavy-handed controls. Extreme democratic passions have paradoxically fuelled the anti-democratic takeover of the public square.

Read in the twilight of the present, the great books of the past disclose new meanings. The Republic’s Cave Image offers a chilling prophecy of the human terminus, the total triumph of ideological technocracy in the age of advanced technology.

Chained prisoners facing the bottom of a cave watch a play of shadows on the cold wet wall beneath them. The shadows are cast by puppets manipulated in front of a flickering fire by men above and behind them, players in a rigged game of whose existence the prisoners know nothing. Living in social quarantine, they cannot move their heads and have never seen a human face, never directly encountered another existing individual. All they know of themselves and one another is mediated by the shadows of artificial things: dark, flat, uniform, fundamentally negative shapes, abstract forms not of light but of its absence.

These shadows — today limned by an electronic glow — tell only the official story, the thin and impoverished “narrative”, that the puppet masters, competing for money, power, and honour, wish to project.

This whole human tragedy will be complete, the dying embers will sputter and smoke, when not a single person in this dank and gloomy underground — not one prisoner or puppeteer — has any remaining inkling that, on the sunlit uplands above and beyond their poor constructions, there is a warm, vibrant, colourful, three-dimensional, naturally ordered organic world. The one that was once called reality.

Ashraf, the father, was the country’s last president. A trained anthropologist, he believed in books, and the power of the ideas within them to move the world. His wife, Rula, a student in Paris in 1968, said she believed in women. Mariam, their daughter, became a filmmaker — she believed in Art. Their son, Tarek, believed in his father. His two-decade career in American academia and philanthropy is an echo of Ashraf’s own cloudless trajectory through blue-chip universities, the World Bank and think tanks. It was a tribute.

For half a century, Afghanistan was simultaneously obscure and at the centre of world events. It had swallowed the fading comet tail of the USSR and absorbed the late afternoon light of American Empire. It had been a hideaway for renegades and a bazaar of ideologies. From Hippie free love to political Islamism, from Marxist-Leninism to market democracy — all had been hawked and bartered over in Afghanistan.

Whether it was itself a “real” country at all, or simply a vast outdoor laboratory worked by imperial meddlers and narco-criminals was hard to say. But every force and idea that acted on Afghanistan acted on the Ghanis too. They were both the victims of events and the instigators of them. They had been exiles, then leaders; they had been scattered across the globe and enthroned in Kabul. The family was Pashtun, and prominent, with a history of political influence. The Ghanis first left in 1977, as the communists began their takeover.

Ashraf Ghani fled again this week. Mariam posted about it — “I’m pretty burned out” — on Instagram from her home in New York. Tarek and Rula have so far remained silent. This time it was widely reported that Ashraf had attempted to upholster four cars and a helicopter with millions of stolen dollars. This was surely — hopefully — untrue, and not because the source was a Russian news agency.

By Afghan standards the Ghanis were not that corrupt. It was for other politicians to mainline America’s billions into lavish compounds, or to be apprehended in Dubai’s airport with $52 million in cash. Ashraf did not believe in money. He believed in books.

When he became President, in 2014, after a fraught and nervous election, he indulged his obsession. Like all Afghan presidents, Ghani moved to the Arg — a labyrinth of palaces within a 19^th-century fortress in central Kabul. But unlike his predecessor, he immediately set about restoring the ruined royal library, with all its decaying antique volumes. His personal library was his most valuable asset, according to a New Yorker profile. He owned seven thousand books. Every day he woke up before the sun rose and read them under his favourite chinar tree. He would have taken his volumes, not cash, when he fled on Sunday, wouldn’t he?

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Ghani didn’t just read books — he wrote them. With his collaborator, the British human rights lawyer Claire Lockhart, he published Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World (2008). “Novel strategies” were needed, they argued, to stabilise failed states that were contaminating “our fully globalised world” with anarchy.

By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, these chaotic zones were spreading. Ghani believed he had the ideas — a “sovereignty index” to be annually published by the UN, and a “citizens-based approach” to state-building — that could mop away the disorder. Fixing Failed States offered, according to a small review in Foreign Affairs, “a surprisingly hopeful vision”.

The vision was delivered as a TED talk in 2007. Ghani’s manner is cerebral, candid, impish, shrilly excitable — theory excites him. His voice is as squeaky as an old floorboard being stepped on. The TED stage suited a pedagogue like Ghani. It was not so different from the lecture halls and seminar rooms of John Hopkins, where he’d spent the 1980s teaching. He never looks uncomfortable.

America was comfortable enough for the Ghanis. It was their main chance, as it was for other exiled Afghans. It gave Ashraf, Rula and Tarek the opportunity to collect the academic prizes that are today’s proof of intelligence and moral worth. It allowed Mariam to transform herself from the child of exiles to an artist; not merely an artist working in “installation, performance, photography, text and video”, but, according to the Guggenheim Foundation, an “activist, archivist, writer and lecturer”.

A 2015 New York Times profile found Mariam in her loft apartment in Clinton Hill, worrying about being “a Brooklyn cliche”. The Times sketched her “as well-versed in the politics of extraordinary rendition as she is in the very Brooklyn pursuit of homemade chile-passion-fruit sorbet”.

Mariam’s work was exhibited at Tate Modern in London, and the Guggenheim and MOMA in New York. One exhibit, “Afghanistan: A Lexicon”, was made in collaboration with Ashraf over Skype. Over 72 panels of text and photos created by the Ghanis, the history of Afghanistan is shown to be cyclical — an endless rotation of invasion, revolt, reform, collapse and recovery. A country cruelly frozen in dynamism.

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She made films about the discovery of oil in Norway, and the melancholy difficulties of translation. She was born in New York, but identified “most with the border”. What Edward Said called the “essential sadness” of exile was there in Mariam, and in all her family. Perhaps that’s why the “Lexicon” had one telling absence from its story — the Ghanis themselves.

Ashraf had returned to the country with Rula in 2002 almost as soon as the Taliban were banished. First a finance minister under Hamid Karzai, he was an unsuccessful candidate for the presidency in 2009, and then the winner of that disputed election in 2014.

Afghanistan was a problem for the family in a way that America — where they had flourished — was not. America only needed Ashraf’s theories in the classroom. Afghanistan, Ashraf believed, could be saved by his theories. It was all in his book, and his TED talk. Opium farmers would make t-shirts. Embroiders in Kandahar would partner with Versace. Guns would become ploughshares. One day the daughters of Afghanistan would be like his own, free to study in America; free to make jam in Brooklyn; free to exhibit their work in Berlin.

Afghans were not fools. They only needed jobs. The people, Ghani said in 2005, were internationalist by temperament — “they’re much more sophisticated than rural Americans with college degrees and the bulk of Europeans.” Well, perhaps.

Becoming President gave Ghani the chance to govern the country that shone in his mind. Afghans would learn about sheep raising from New Zealand, and hydroelectricity from the Swiss. Afghanistan was a blank slate. Ghani began to doodle his beautiful diagrams on it.

Sigmund Freud once said there were two “impossible professions”: education and government. Ghani was a wonderful educator. He proved to be an impossible President. He micromanaged his illusions and his staff. He took anger management classes.

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Why was he so angry? Was it the pressure — grinding and invidious — of watching his theories of the state become exposed as just another exile’s hopeless fictions?

Either way, he grew ever more solitary behind the blast walls, barbed wire, and checkpoints of the Arg. The library was his succour and support — one journalist described Ghani’s office, filled with open books on every surface, marked neatly with pencil annotations. This is what most intellectuals (quite rightly) do in a crisis. They retreat, like Michel de Montaigne did during the 16th century French wars of religion, to brood in their towers and libraries, hoping that solitude will yield new ideas. Montaigne, though, only advised the king of France, he had no pretensions to power itself; Ghani was supposed to be something like the king of Afghanistan.

At least, as everyone said, he was not corrupt. That was a blessing in a country where the MPs alone ritualistically stole over a billion dollars a year. But there was the rest of the family. Ashraf’s brother, Hashmat, and his nephew Sultan.

Hashmat will be remembered, not for driving a bulletproof Mercedes Limousine, or the 23,000 square feet of his Kabul home, but for the SOSi scandal. It was extraordinarily complicated; it involved hugely valuable rights to mineral deposits in Kunar province, illegal links between US special forces and militias — and the Ghani family. It was Hashmat who owned significant shares in the US company that wanted to buy the rights to the minerals, and it was President Ghani who signed off on the deal. Was it corrupt? “If there was a colour redder than red, that’s what colour this red flag would be,” said one American expert in procurement law.

Sultan, meanwhile, styled himself the President of ‘The Ghani Group’ on LinkedIn, and the co-founder of ‘The Institute for Afghan Women’ on his website.  As the country started to tremble a few weeks ago, he shared photos of himself on Instagram walking towards a Learjet 75 Liberty.

Ashraf had promised to clean up grift when he first ran for President, but if it flourished in his immediate family, what hope did Afghanistan have?

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When Ghani fled on Sunday he left behind half the population in poverty, a third of the population facing emergency levels of food insecurity, stagnant GDP, a massive trade deficit, a restive and furious countryside, and, in the words of one report, “a largely lawless, weak, and dysfunctional state”. Now the Taliban control it, down to the very last bumper car.

A few days before, Mariam Ghani’s latest film had its theatrical release in the United States. It’s title? What We Left Unfinished. For Ashraf — intellectual and politician, then, at last, a corrupted idealist — it was all unfinished.

How shocked, how distressed he looked, when he surfaced this week in the UAE, exiled once more. When his security team extracted him, he said, he was “in a condition where I couldn’t even put on my shoes”. Did Ashraf Ghani realise that the things he put his faith in, the codes by which he lived his life — ideas and books, globalisation and rational governance — had been diminished? That if the reports were true, and he really had left the country, not with his library, but with $169 million dollars, that he had maimed his life’s work, as well as Afghanistan?

Maybe he knew. All year, until almost the very end, he had promised his army could hold out against the Taliban, “forever“. But there was lucidity amidst the delusion.

“The future will be determined by the people of Afghanistan,” he told the BBC in February, “not by somebody sitting behind the desk, dreaming.”

He was wrong about the people of Afghanistan. Whether they stayed or fled, they would still be dragged into the conflicts of others. But he was right about the dreamer behind the desk. Ashraf Ghani, unable to determine Afghanistan’s future, was describing himself.