But now, all the Russian tourists are gone and the border traffic has ground to a halt. The Allegro train no longer runs. Finnish media recently called Imatra “the emptying city”. Its sprawling Tsar Outlet Village, which once catered to Russian shoppers, is deserted. Imatra’s economy, already reeling from the pandemic, is seriously ailing. The city has an unemployment rate of 16.4%, well above the national rate of just under 12%. And South Karelia is said to be losing an estimated €1 million in tourism revenue each day.

Many residents say it’s a worthwhile sacrifice. The border with Russia has been closed since late 2023, when the Finnish government accused Russia of weaponizing migrants by sending waves of asylum seekers into Finland. Helsinki claimed this was retaliation for the Nordic country’s decision to join Nato earlier that year, a choice made in the aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The Finnish government responded by closing the entire 1,340-kilometer border and announcing the construction of a 200-kilometer border fence. The forbidding metal barrier was finished last month, but the beefing up of security continues. On Monday, the Finnish government announced that it was procuring one million anti-personnel landmines for the border, following a decision by Helsinki and other regional capitals to withdraw from a humanitarian UN treaty banning their use.

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The cursed outposts of America's empire

By Lily Lynch

The border region’s economic decline and rapid militarization are emblematic of the entire Nordic region’s radically changed approach to relations with Russia and the United States. During the Cold War and to a lesser extent after it, Finland and Sweden managed relations with Moscow through a combination of pragmatic diplomacy, deterrence, and trade. Today, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, both diplomacy and trade have been severely downgraded. These two Nordic nations, which touted an enlightened neutrality during the Cold War and maintained good relations with both the Soviet Union and the West, have recently joined Nato. Meanwhile, New Defense Cooperation Agreements (DCAs) signed with Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark, have given the US armed forces “unimpeded access” to 47 military bases across the region, some of them perilously close to the Russian border. Sweden and Finland are even weakening their long-standing taboo on nuclear weapons.

As the region’s security order has undergone an accelerated Americanization, Nordic societies have also increasingly been remade in America’s image. They have become more militarized, more hawkish and more hostile to diplomacy, while their once-robust social welfare states have been gutted and inequality has soared. In Finland, there has even been a marked increase in homelessness. Many say the deteriorating quality of life is a small price to pay in the face of Russian aggression in Ukraine. But others warn that the Nordic countries have surrendered their sovereignty to an unpredictable United States, which has left them weaker and more exposed — rather than more secure.

Overt dependence on the United States would have been unimaginable not so long ago. During the Cold War, Finnish President Urho Kekkonen saw neutrality as a natural state for his country, a function of both its geography and its history of wars with Russia. Neutrality, Kekkonen said, “is not the product of abstract thought nor is it imported from elsewhere: it has grown out of the soil of Finnish history”. Finland’s neutral position was articulated in the preamble to the 1948 Agreement of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance with the Soviet Union, which emphasized the country’s desire “to remain outside the conflicts of the great powers”.

Complicating matters, however, was the fact that the same agreement also contained a military-consultation clause: if an adversary like Germany were to launch an attack on the USSR from Finnish soil, then Finland was expected to consult with Moscow about a response. The clause was politically sensitive, as it would permit the Soviets to exert diplomatic pressure on Helsinki. Indeed, Atlanticist critics have characterized Finland’s Cold War neutrality as quasi-neutrality, one that supposedly cloaked deference to the Kremlin in neutral garb. There is even a pejorative word for it: “Finlandisation”. And yet, Finland’s foreign policy was also effective. It kept the peace, and by the Eighties, Finland was one of the richest countries by per-capita income in the world, exceeding both Britain and France. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Finland lost one of its most important trading partners. The effect was immediate and devastating: Finnish economists call the ensuing crisis “The Great Depression of the Nineties”.

Sweden embraced neutrality much earlier, following a succession of wars with Russia, particularly the devastating 1808-9 Finnish War that saw a defeated Sweden lose more than a third of its territory. The country’s longstanding doctrine was “non-alignment in peace, so as to maintain neutrality in war”. Indeed, non-alignment was part of Sweden’s nation-branding as a “moral superpower”, which supporters saw as a “cherished model for the world” ripe for emulation. During the Cold War, the policy was best embodied in the figure of Social Democratic Prime Minister Olof Palme. The late premier, who was assassinated in 1986, presided over what Swedish sociologist Göran Therborn has called “a radical independent internationalism”. Over the years, Palme was photographed chomping on cigars with Fidel Castro, protested the war in Vietnam (prompting the US to recall its ambassador on two occasions), and likened the 1972 American bombing of Hanoi to “Guernica, Oradour, Babi Yar, Katyn, Lidice, Sharpeville, and Treblinka”.

While Finland’s and Sweden’s decisions to join Nato may have looked like an abrupt decision made entirely in response to the war in Ukraine, Euro-Atlantic integration had actually been a long, gradual process that started soon after the 1991 Soviet collapse. Finland’s choice to purchase 64 McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 hornet fighter jets from the US in the early Nineties was a critical turning point. Finland and Sweden joined the Partnership for Peace program in 1994, and began participating in military exercises with Nato. The next year, Finland and Sweden joined the EU, unofficially ending their neutrality. Throughout the early 2000s, both countries supplied troops to Nato-led combat and stabilization missions, including in Afghanistan and Kosovo. These steps laid the groundwork for their rapid accession to Nato. All that was required was a trigger that could convert public opinion to Atlanticism en masse, and Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine provided it. Nato accession was presented as the only response to the shock of the Ukraine war, and with no alternatives discussed and the public afraid, the final push towards membership was made with a conspicuous lack of debate.

But Nato accession was just the start. Some commentators, including former Finnish President Sauli Niinistö, say the recent defense agreements have been even more pivotal than Sweden’s and Finland’s decisions to join Nato. The surge in DCAs actually began shortly before Russia’s full-scale invasion, with Norway. In 2021, Oslo and Washington signed an “SDCA”, or Supplementary Defense Cooperation Agreement, which eventually gave US forces and contractors “unimpeded access” to 12 military bases. After the Russian invasion, the SDCA with Norway served as a template for the entire region. In December 2023, the US signed new DCAs with Finland, Sweden and Denmark, bringing the total number of Nordic military bases granting unimpeded access to the US military to 47. The DCAs also authorize the US to take “necessary and proportionate measures” to protect US forces “within or in the immediate vicinity of” said bases, meaning they give US military personnel and military police power over local civilians in and around these locations. In addition, they grant the US exclusive control over who enters specified military facilities, construction rights to build on Nordic soil, and jurisdiction over crimes committed by American soldiers.

The DCAs have not passed without controversy. In 2022, the top military and civilian prosecution authorities in Norway expressed concern that the Americans’ threat perception might differ from that of Norway’s. Some fear that US forces might therefore drag the country into a confrontation without its consent. Others worry that an enhanced American military presence in Nordic countries would make them obvious targets in a war between the US and Russia. These concerns grew more acute after the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran, when American allies in the Middle East found themselves on the receiving end of Iran’s retaliatory strikes. Meanwhile, analysts at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute have warned that a US decision to deploy missiles to Nordic bases close to Russian assets could provoke a situation akin to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The agreements were signed with an initial duration of 10 years. Researcher Joel Linnainmäki, at the Finnish Institute for International Affairs, notes that this 10-year duration “somewhat cushions against political turbulence in the transatlantic relationship”. The DCAs were drawn up at a time of both deteriorating regional security and uncertainty over trans-Atlantic security guarantees. With the specter of Donald Trump omnipresent, the Nordic states sought stronger bilateral defense relations with the US outside of Nato. The DCAs also reflect the belief that even the Nordics’ accession to Nato is insufficient to counter the Russian threat.

“The underlying idea has been that Nato alone is ultimately not enough,” Markku Kangaspuro, professor and research director at the Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki, tells me. “Rather, the commitment of the United States is indispensable for a military deterrent that, in the final analysis, rests on nuclear weapons.”

Indeed, Sweden and Finland are doing away with their long-standing aversion to nuclear weapons, another dramatic transformation. During the Cold War, Finland championed disarmament and nonproliferation, hosting the first US-Soviet Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) in Helsinki from 1969 to 1972. Over in Stockholm, Prime Minister Palme joined a 25,000-strong anti-nuclear protest in 1983; demonstrators formed a four-mile human chain linking the American and Soviet embassies to protest against the planned deployment of 108 American missiles in Western Europe. The Stockholm protest was part of that year’s Europe-wide demonstrations against the stationing of US “Euromissiles” on the continent, which drew up to five million people.

The mass mobilization of the Eighties contrasts with the comparative silence that reigns today. In June, Finland lifted its blanket ban on nuclear weapons. The Nuclear Energy Act, on the books since 1987, had criminalized the import, transport, and possession of nuclear weapons on Finnish soil; amendments passed this summer have lifted those prohibitions. Kangaspuro tells me: “Finland is now signaling in many ways that its priority is no longer to promote international control and limitation of nuclear weapons, or nuclear disarmament, as it has done until now.” While there was political opposition to the decision and some small protests, it did not prompt demonstrations of the kind seen during the Cold War.

Similar changes have been floated in neighboring Sweden. Earlier this year, Defense Minister Pål Jonson said that Sweden should consider allowing nuclear weapons to be deployed on its territory in wartime. It was a pronounced shift from even just a few years prior, when both then-Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson and conservative leader Ulf Kristersson agreed that Sweden’s decision to join Nato should not change its prohibition on nuclear weapons on Swedish soil. Earlier this year, Sweden, Norway and Denmark were also among the first countries to join France’s Forward Nuclear Deterrence Initiative, while Finland became a member in mid-December last year. The war in Ukraine and Trump’s unpredictability have again made the unthinkable thinkable.

Meanwhile, Nordic countries have dramatically increased their defense spending in recent years. Sweden, Norway and Denmark have more than doubled their spending since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, while Finland has nearly doubled it. In Finland, the government has tied brutal austerity measures in part to wartime necessity. Campaigning in 2023, Riikka Purra, the chair of the nationalist Finns Party and current minister of finance, declared culture “a luxury service, which unfortunately costs too much money in present-day Finland”. As the Nordic countries have adopted a more US-dependent security policy, their economies have also grown to resemble the American one. The marketization of education and health care, rising inequality, and beefed-up military budgets are bringing once strong welfare states more in line with American free-market orthodoxy.

The Atlanticization of the Nordic states’ security policies occurred in tandem with the liberalization of their economies, and with direct and indirect influence from the United States. As Swedish historian Jenny Andersson describes it, during the late Sixties, the Swedish Employers’ Confederation (SAF) began to “actively promote international neoliberal ideas”, with the aim of changing attitudes towards the welfare state within Swedish society. Meanwhile, the neoconservative Swedish think tank Timbro, founded in 1978, “was directly modeled on the American Heritage foundation”. In 1982, SAF director Sture Eskilsson initiated the Market Economic Alternative for Sweden (MAS), adopted from the Heritage Foundation’s own Mandate for Leadership, a vast policy program prepared for Ronald Reagan’s administration during the early Eighties. One of the activists for MAS was Sweden’s uber-Atlanticist former Prime Minister Carl Bildt, who was a young MP at the time. In Finland, meanwhile, the adoption of economic liberalism was directly tied to the notion of “joining the West” — liberalization and free markets were always bound up with geopolitical alignment with Nato.

Today, between Trump’s demand that Europe spend more on its own defense and the threat of war with Russia, Nordic social welfare is being squeezed out of existence. The remnants of Cold War Nordic distinctiveness in both security and the economy are disappearing. These nations are gambling that all the breakneck changes are worth it. But by allowing the US armed forces unimpeded access to their military bases, the Nordic countries have sacrificed some of their sovereignty in pursuit of security. This has been presented to the public as an unambiguous good, with little discussion of the risks. But in tethering their fates to Washington’s whims, Nordic nations have reduced their own ability to act autonomously and painted a target on their own backs.

Despite this dubious assertion, Twenties post-Kaiser Germany remains a solid analogy for 2020s post-liberal America — just not in the way conservatives often claim. Though moderate by interwar standards, the Weimar regime paved the way for Nazi terror by normalizing state violence and repression. The Weimar’s SPD leaders did so by unleashing law enforcement, often in alliance with Right-wing paramilitaries, to crush and kill Leftist radicals. This brand of state violence occurred not only during the 1919 Berlin Revolution, when the Freikorps murdered Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, but for over a decade afterwards.

Of course, the comparison between Good and Luxemburg only goes so far. Yet one can see in the Minneapolis killing the same kind of insecure, panicky overreaction that often took place under the Weimar government’s violent suppression of radical protest movements and wannabe revolutionaries. Particularly relevant here is the social media bloodlust surrounding Good’s death, and the desire of so many in government and the commentariat to justify Good’s death, grimly echoing Weimar-era targeting of radical women by Right-wing paramilitaries acting with state approval.

After violently suppressing Luxemburg’s Spartacists in 1919, after all, many army officers went out of their way to declare that any women who happened to stray into their gunfire were fair game. Radical women were, in their view, essential obstacles to restoring order. The Weimar military’s overt and unapologetic contempt for women, especially those of a radical Left persuasion, derived not merely from their association with the fiery Luxemburg, but from General Arnold Lequis’s attempt to excuse a failed military operation.

In a battle to retake the Hohenzollern palace from radicals, Lequis gave an order to attack, but was thwarted by rebel gunfire from the roof. In excusing his failure, Lequis gave the following response to a Berlin newspaper: “My soldiers don’t fire on women and children. That was where the mistake was made. A rank of my troops was driven back, they laid down their arms, and the rest went back to the university.” The message — that the government’s effort to free the palace had been derailed by women’s resistance — spread swiftly among military circles. From that point on, there would be no hesitation, as Weimar troops were instructed to fire at any hostile mob: including if women and children were involved or even just nearby.

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In Trump’s America, a similar sentiment seems to have spread among ICE agents, now with a decade of cultural war baggage behind them. Yet their contempt for female activists, especially in the LGBT community, also has far deeper roots. Jonathan Ross, the ICE officer who shot Good, was dragged over 100 yards by another anti-ICE protestor in a vehicle last June. Ross, likely still traumatized by that event, may have made the same psychological leap General Lequis did in 1919: next time, there will be no hesitation, women or children be damned.

Securing stability through uncompromising state violence carried long-term consequences for the German psyche. The Weimar officials’ embrace of violence in pursuit of order normalized it, particularly against Leftist opponents. When the Nazis employed street violence and the assassination of political enemies — not only while in government but also during their ascent to power — it was far harder for ordinary citizens to recognize these acts as uniquely dangerous. For a while, at least, the suppression looked rather familiar.

Put the specifics of Renee Good’s case — or even ICE generally — aside for a moment. Normalizing state violence, and even violence between warring political factions, is the greatest danger of our current American moment. Certainly, it’s far more serious than a putative slide into “fascism”, whatever that means in the America of 2025, so different from the fragile democracies of interwar Europe. What is unfolding in the United States is clearly something different. It is an authoritarian movement, yes, but one that’s deeply American in character, shaped by frontier mythology and market absolutism. Projecting 20th-century fascism onto American politics therefore does little to help us understand what we are actually facing, or how to resist it.

The Social Democrats charged with governing Weimar Germany faced obscene challenges, many outside their control. Their menu of viable choices was extremely narrow, and under those conditions it is not surprising that the decisions they made were deeply flawed. After all, the Treaty of Versailles saddled them with unpayable debts for a war launched by a previous regime, one many Social Democrats had opposed. They also faced relentless risings from both Left and Right, each attempting to establish breakaway republics or overthrow the fragile national government altogether.

Which brings us to the actual solution to America’s accelerating descent toward an illiberal future — and it is not the election of a president with the “right” ideology. There is only one plausible way out of America’s Groundhog Day cycle of dysfunction, and it is the same structural change that might have prevented the Nazi seizure of power in Germany: accepting that our governing institutions are too large, too centralized, and too culturally incoherent to sustain democratic legitimacy.

There was far more ideological fluidity in Twenties German politics than is generally acknowledged. Across the decade, there were several radical uprisings, each attempting to create local worker-led governments. But whether in Hamburg, Saxony, or Halle, each of these experiments was brutally repressed by the Weimar regime. Had the Berlin government perhaps allowed more experimentation, echoed their Bismarckian predecessor in giving into some demands to weaken radicalism generally, things might have turned out differently. There’s a chance, of course, that the German far Left would have been further emboldened, but based on the experiences of the pre-1914 period, it’s more likely that they’d have lost purchase with everyday citizens. The same, incidentally, might be said of the Right — with a more flexible approach to governance potentially encouraging alternatives to Hitlerism, notably among economically radical nationalists like Otto Strasser.

Relitigating Hitler’s rise to power isn’t the point. In general, local democratic experimentation is something people in power detest, but it might also be the only way to free ourselves from the zero-sum politics poisoning American life. There is a fundamental urge, deep in the human psyche, to have control over our own localities without the oversight of distant governing bodies. Massive representative structures — of the sort now governing the 350 million Americans — no longer scratches our democratic itch. Much of what we’re arguing about online is a distraction from addressing that fundamental urge.

The down side of an intensely localist approach is, of course, the possibility of chaos ensuing. But given the reckless self-interest of those currently in charge of the United States, chaos increasingly seems to appear anyway. More fundamentally, recall that the republic wasn’t founded under the assumption that a powerful federal government should decide, over the objections of local populations, who counts as a citizen. It was fought in defense of small‑r republicanism — of local control, regional autonomy, and minimal centralized interference. The Constitution of 1789 represented a significant retreat from those principles, not their fulfillment. To avoid descending into outright dysfunction, and the normalization of political violence that follows, the United States must return to its original localist instincts. Breaking the United States into an “American Union” of six or seven regional political units, where state governments are framed by robust constitutions, executives, and greater autonomy — somewhat similar to how the European Union operates today — may be the only remaining solution to our culture-war deadlock.

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America was never inclusive

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Germany required total war, genocide and foreign occupation before being divided — and even then it lost nearly a third of its territory and has never recovered its pre-1939 standing. If America continues on its present trajectory, it’s hard to see why a similar outcome couldn’t happen here. Yes, Wall Street and national corporate entities would fiercely oppose such decentralization, since it would place meaningful limits on their power. But why should ordinary citizens care about that?

Besides, if you could go back and poll the Germans who survived the Nazi catastrophe on whether it would have been better to break up their nation in advance — allowing more room for the country’s various factions to experiment with different forms of governance — it’s fair to assume almost everyone would have preferred that option to the country destroying itself under Hitler.

There’s a broader issue here too. Though Weimar’s state repression wasn’t justified, at a certain point those in power must answer how they’ll deal with opponents who refuse to back down. Despite initial readings of the situation, it seems increasingly clear that Renee Good and her wife Becca were indeed obstructing ICE efforts before the shooting, with Becca taunting Ross in a highly reckless manner. None of this justifies Good’s killing, which was easily avoidable. But this is precisely how civil wars erupt. Flash‑bulb moments that have less to do with the immediate facts than with what they come to symbolize. If Renee Good’s death doesn’t trigger a national breakup, something else will. When these protests reach their denouement, the key questions will be who holds federal power, what their ideology is, and how they choose to respond. Yet as long as the two‑party cartel remains intact, the answer will almost certainly be law‑and‑order brutality that demonizes protestors — one way or another.

The mythic sanctity of a 50-state America still pervades, but cracks are forming. Red‑state secessionism, like the Greater Idaho movement, is real. Yet once Trump returned to power, much of that rhetoric evaporated, revealing that many Americans still cling to the illusion that they can eventually win outright and impose their will on unwilling regions. Blue‑state secessionism, by contrast, has never got off the ground. Fundamentally, this cuts to the core of progressives’ self‑conception, much as Twenties Marxist internationalists rejected settling for control over a single German province. Unlike deep‑red states such as Texas and Idaho — which flirt with secession when they’re out of power — deep‑blue states like Minnesota and Washington reject the idea entirely: they openly wish to impose their progressive vision on the rest of the country, imagining they enjoy widespread support in regions they’ve never even visited.

As an American who has lived in eight states, I find our conflict deeply sad and also deeply stupid. If we could recognize the problem for what it is — an irreconcilable divide in moral, religious, and cultural norms that cannot be solved by a federal government as powerful as ours — we might escape our march towards a second civil war and an illiberal, undemocratic future. But both sides still want to control the entire country, and that doesn’t bode well, just as it didn’t during Germany’s Weimar years. And at least they only had newspapers and the radio to contend with. These days, of course, social media pours constant, second‑by‑second fuel onto the red‑blue fire.

More anger means more engagement, which means more profit. Effectively speaking, big tech has exercised an outsized control over American governance since the Obama administration, and that isn’t likely to change anytime soon. The upshot is that the culture wars will continue to consume any possibility of a rational, broad‑based democratic movement capable of challenging America’s existing power structure. So until people abandon social media en masse, efforts to impose national unity through force will only escalate — until state terror becomes routine, regardless of which side happens to be wielding it. The sky isn’t falling yet, but the only way forward to halt our escalating dysfunction is to embrace the fact that local regions ought to decide basic governance decisions, like who is a citizen and who is not. Either that, or we accept many more Renee Goods over the months and years ahead.

But one factor remains underplayed. The United States is currently engaged in a fiercely contested space race with China, and, to a lesser extent, Russia. Space offers unlimited energy, unlimited resources, and unlimited internet connectivity — and the High North is crucial. This is because satellites that orbit from pole to pole must pass each pole with every orbit, which means that they fly over a given point in the High North far more often than a given point toward the Equator. As such, places like Svalbard are ideal locations for ground stations that keep in touch with constellations of satellites, be they commercial or military.

Those ground stations are where data transmitted by the satellites, from UberEats orders to key Ukrainian intelligence, are funneled into high-speed subsea internet cables. It’s little wonder, therefore, that Svalbard is always mobbed by Nato ships, and little wonder that those subsea cables have, in recent history, been attacked. Previously, space was about scientific discovery, but now, as the newly appointed Nasa administrator Jared Isaacman has acknowledged, it is also about strategic security dominance — it is the most important war-fighting domain. Whoever controls the highest altitudes in space, controls the battle domains on earth. And the world’s first space war is already well underway: Kyiv would have very limited offensive or defensive capability if it were unable to use Elon Musk’s Starlink service. China has therefore designated Starlink as a military entity rather than a private company, and is building satellite networks that have the ability to damage or destroy Starlink satellites.

Given this security situation, the US doesn’t want to rely solely on Svalbard. So it maintains another space base, Pituffik, on the northwest coast of Greenland. As the second most important space base after Svalbard, it is of immense strategic importance — not least because, being closer to the US, it is much more easily defended.

Given that Denmark already allows the US to maintain Pituffik and other bases, one might ask why the White House wants sovereignty over the territory. The answer is that the White House does not trust Europe to be a reliable partner. Remember Russiagate? Back in 2016, Trump, then Republican nominee for the presidency, was smeared by a dossier that was written by a former British intelligence official. The Democrats used this information against Trump, whose administration takes a dim view of European interference with American elections — especially when that interference is targeted against the MAGA movement. Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, has been declassifying material that the White House views as incriminating evidence of “weaponization and politicization of intelligence”, going so far as to refer to a “treasonous conspiracy” to prevent Trump from winning in 2016. It is an extraordinary political moment in American history, one where Trump is on the brink of bringing legal charges against the former heads of the intelligence agencies and former presidents.

It’s not just the Steele “Russiagate” dossier that embroils Europe in these high-stakes domestic politics. The White House also blames Europe, and Europeans such as George Soros, for funding Antifa, and other movements and organizations that oppose Trump. Combined, all this dirty laundry has been disastrous for Transatlantic relations, and it has come at a time when there has already been tension between Europe and Trump. In his first term, Trump loudly chastised Europe for sponging off the American defense budget. In his second, he has been trying to end the war in Ukraine. Europe’s leaders have, in the White House view, been nothing but obstructive to the goal of bringing peace to Europe. Trump thinks of himself as trying to prevent World War Three from breaking out, even as the Europeans oppose peace deals and call for more aggressive action against Russia and Putin.

And the White House believes that Europe is only going to become even more difficult to deal with. In 2024, JD Vance suggested that the “first truly Islamist country to get a nuclear weapon” might be the UK, which had just elected a Labour government. At the end of last year, the US National Security Strategy (NSS) struck a similar note, arguing that mass migration has created the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure” for Europe as we know it. “Should present trends continue,” the NSS had it, “the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less. As such, it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies.” JD Vance spelled it out, expressing concern about who is going to be in control of the nuclear arsenals in Western Europe, given the rise of “Islamist aligned” parties. Europeans might strongly disagree with this, but it is the White House’s interpretation; seen in this light, the purchase of Greenland would represent the transfer of a crucial security asset from an unreliable partner to the direct ownership of the US.

And there is specific dissatisfaction with Denmark as well as with the EU. The administration’s view is that Denmark has been at the forefront of not only supporting Ukraine in the war with Russia, but blocking any possibility of a peace negotiation going forward. Denmark, in short, is a troublesome vassal — and a vassal that happens to own an immensely valuable defense asset within the hemisphere that the “Donroe Doctrine” posits as America’s to dominate.

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Nor has the administration ruled out the use of force to take the island. One of Trump’s key advisers, Stephen Miller, was singularly belligerent, telling CNN that “we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower”, and that “nobody is going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland”. The pugnacity has shocked European leaders, who have issued a joint statement to say they are willing to defend the island. But the shock is all part of Trump’s plan. In every one of his negotiations, from property deals to international treaties, he first throws a negotiating grenade to create chaos. Then in he walks, and offers to talk. In this case, the seizing Greenland rhetoric is the grenade. Trump, who cares little about the norms of international relations, is probably hoping that this detonation will encourage Denmark and its allies to accept a deal.

Meanwhile, the White House is deploying a charm offensive towards the Greenlanders — fundamentally an Inuit population rather than a Danish one. The history between the Greenlanders and the Danes is a troubled one, which is partly why Denmark, over recent years, has devolved political authority to Greenland — and also because it is a terrifically costly territory to support. Trump, then, is reaching out to the Greenlanders and offering them the opportunity of no longer having to answer to the Danes, and instead gaining a privileged status within the United States. In financial terms, the Greenlanders have much to gain from being folded into the American economy: they could, for example, cut deals for the extraction of minerals. Denmark is vehemently objecting to these American overtures, but the fact is that it has devolved enough power for Greenland to be able to make its own decision about whether to be incorporated into the United States.

Europeans are now obviously hoping that Trump will get distracted and that the matter of a Greenland purchase will go away. But the game is already in play, and the White House knows it probably has limited time. Trump wants an expanded US, within a more secure hemisphere, to be the legacy he hands on at the end of his second term. Woe betide the Europeans who stand in his way.

Olivia Nuzzi, the former New York Magazine political correspondent-turned-social pariah, launched her career at about the same time. Of this personal essay industrial complex, she writes: “I could not participate because I did not care to write of my own life and experiences because I did not find any of it terribly interesting and certainly not more interesting than whatever I might learn about the world from other people and their experiences.”

The above passage appears early on in Nuzzi’s new book, American Canto, and let me be the first to say: it’s true. She could never have participated in this particular literary trend, and I know this not just because she said so, but because American Canto — or parts of it, anyway — reveals what happens when she tries. The result is cacophonous: mixed metaphors, run-on sentences, insights intended to come off as confessional or vulnerable that instead read as solipsistic bordering on delusional.

Well, she did warn us.

For those not in the know — or not in the media, where this story has played out over the past weeks like something between a soap opera and a trainwreck — the controversy surrounding Nuzzi dates to just over a year ago, when rumors began to circulate that she’d been involved in a long-distance sexual entanglement with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who she had profiled for New York some months before. That the affair was allegedly never consummated was a bizarre twist, but one that paradoxically made the whole thing seem more, not less, sordid, not least because it conjured images of RFK hiding in a closet somewhere in the Hyannis Port Kennedy compound, clutching a smartphone in one meaty hand, whispering dirty little nothings in that voice.

Nuzzi was suspended and then fired from New York for the ethical breach, whose revelation she blamed on her then-fiancé Ryan Lizza; around the same time, she filed for a protective order that accused Lizza of threats, stalking and hacking her personal devices in order to blackmail her. Lizza denied these charges, and Nuzzi eventually withdrew her petition. Then, she disappeared.

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For a while, at least. When she resurfaced again nearly a year later, it was as the new West Coast Editor at Vanity Fair — and with a surprise book deal. A memoir, written in secret, about the series of events that led to her downfall.

The controversy surrounding Nuzzi’s return to the media has been even more messy than the one that surrounded her ouster. The release of American Canto, which dropped 2 December, is messier still. The book was preceded by one week with a sensational excerpt in Vanity Fair, which was in turn immediately eclipsed by the counter-publication of a florid, multi-part series on Ryan Lizza’s Substack featuring previously-unknown details of Nuzzi’s misdeeds. The first installment, titled “How I Found Out”, ended with the shocking allegation that Nuzzi had also had an affair with a certain governor known for philandering, hiking, and lying about hiking when he was actually philandering.

The second, which reproduced various correspondences between Nuzzi and RFK, Jr., was basically highbrow revenge porn. (Lizza may or may not have tried to actually blackmail his former fiancée, but he’s definitely not beating the charges of having dug through her phone in search of the kind of material one might use to do this.)

At this point, the only character in this saga who has yet to weigh in is RFK, Jr. — perhaps because he’s busy doing other things, or perhaps because the only good response to having your terrible filthy poetry published to a global audience is no response at all.

But then, nobody seems to care what Kennedy thinks of all this. The vast majority of the opprobrium, maybe even all of it, has been reserved for Nuzzi. The consensus seems to be that this is a story about a woman doing a bad thing — and that the idea that the men in it might have been active players, too, is ridiculous and impossible. The consensus also seems to be that if you’re willing to admit Nuzzi had some power in this equation, you might as well go ahead and insist that she had all of it. And having identified her as the sole architect of this entire drama, the discourse then turns to outrage: how dare she do this! And worse, having done it, how dare she write a book about it!

The thing is, arguably, she didn’t. Write a book about it, I mean. Whatever American Canto is, it is not a tell-all memoir, a notion the author explicitly balks at. “When your privacy is violated, there emerges the expectation that you must respond by further violating it. I thought of that phrase, Tell all, often over the months that followed. Tell what, exactly? Tell why, exactly?” she writes. “I could tell you the facts. I could tell you the truth. I could tell you that where facts end, truth begins. I could tell you, probably, nothing that you would like. I could tell you, almost certainly, nothing that would redeem me.”

In fairness, the outrage surrounding American Canto is a valid response to the book’s Nuzzi-tells-all marketing, including in that much-discussed Vanity Fair excerpt — which is actually not an excerpt at all, but rather a series of disparate passages cobbled together to sell a sort of alternate-universe version of the story, like one of those goofy trailers that recut Mrs. Doubtfire to look like a horror film. These are the weakest, worst-written parts of the book.

Unfortunately they’re also the only parts most people have read.

That includes critics, many of whom rushed to publish their takes on American Canto based only on the excerpt, rather than the full text. The upshot is that a substantial portion of the critical response to American Canto amounts to lamenting the shortcomings of a book Nuzzi didn’t write, and had no intention of writing.

At the same time, to expect anyone to engage generously with this book was always a losing bet. For most people, any insights American Canto might have offered are nullified by the loathsomeness of its author, which is to say, people hate Nuzzi so much that she could be the second coming of Joan Didion, and she’d still get panned.

Of course, she’s also not the second coming of Joan Didion, at least not in this iteration. Perhaps there’s a version of this book that with the benefit of more time and more editing would have approached the sublime. But the book Nuzzi did produce was reportedly written both in secret and in haste, on an iPhone, and it shows.

And yet: what also shows, albeit much too fleetingly for a work of this length, is the same skillful prose styling and uncanny instincts that made Nuzzi a star to begin with, and which the landscape of American political journalism is poorer without.

Critics have scoffed at the notion, articulated in the book’s introduction, that this story is about more than its author’s ill-considered sexual choices: that it’s about America, and Donald Trump, and how the latter irrevocably and forever altered the former. But it’s Trump, not Kennedy, who dominates this narrative, who is the only person in Nuzzi’s cast of characters who is identified by name. It occurred to me more than once while reading that maybe the protagonist of this story is actually Trump, not Nuzzi. If nothing else, she certainly seems to understand him far better than she understands herself.

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That understanding is a valuable thing. Unfortunately, if understandably, it’s also a thing Nuzzi is no longer trusted to do. She’s simply too easy to slot into the archetype of the Unreliable Narrator, with a side of Machiavellian Slut for good measure, even though — and this is what makes American Canto less a memoir than a tragedy — she doesn’t actually fit that role. The whole reason this scandal is a scandal is that what Nuzzi did was so unstrategic, so stupid; it was a baffling act of self-sabotage where the consequences were potentially catastrophic and the upside was nonexistent. She had nothing to gain, and everything to lose.

But she did it anyway. There’s a group of people, about 50% of the population, who are understood as particularly prone to this sort of recklessness — which is why it’s often referred to, pardon the expression, as “thinking with your dick”. But Nuzzi doesn’t have that particular body part, which raises the question of not just how best to describe her behavior, but whether we might be unfairly ascribing to the penis an impulse that actually lives somewhere else. In the veins; in the heart; in the battle between good judgment and desperate desire that characterizes so much of the human experience. It’s not so much there but for the grace of god go we all. Most people never even have the opportunity to blow up their lives à la Nuzzi, and those who do mostly don’t take it, and that is for the best.

But if the specific object of Nuzzi’s life-immolating sexual obsession is neither universal nor relatable, its broad contours are. Who among us hasn’t desired someone we couldn’t have, or shouldn’t have; who among us hasn’t been driven so mad by that desire that we make ourselves look like idiots, if not to a national audience, then certainly to anyone close enough to the situation to see it for what it is. We know how that feels: foolish. Familiar. Maybe too familiar. Boring, even.

And if American Canto is meant to be received as a memoir, this is where it fails. It’s not a tell-all. It’s not a tell-nothing. It’s just that what it does tell us, when it comes to love as an instrument of destruction, is a story we already know.

In architecture, monumentalism means power and historical significance. Think of the Egyptian pyramids, which were constructed as elaborate tombs for the pharaohs, and our own Mount Rushmore. Sculptor Gutzon Borglum, the American-born son of Danish immigrants, conceived the idea of using jackhammers and dynamite to carve the faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln into the Black Hills of South Dakota. “American art ought to be monumental, in keeping with American life,” Borglum said. He wanted to memorialize America’s greatness in a way that would stand the test of time.

As a political movement, monumentalism is a policy agenda that commemorates people, events, and ideas — it conserves public memory for the next generation. The current moment, more than perhaps any other point in American history, calls for aggressive monumentalism. Since at least the Sixties, progressives have waged a multi-front war on public memory. 

They have undermined our system of education, rejected Christianity’s presence in national life, and insisted that America is irredeemably flawed. Supreme Court rulings in 1947 and 1962 effectively ended the centuries-long presence of Christian ideals in public education. Thereafter, activists filled the gap left by Christianity’s absence with leftist ideology. By some estimates, Howard Zinn’s famously controversial A People’s History of the United States (1980) is now used in as many as one-in-four high school history classes. Zinn, a self-described anarchist-socialist, deliberately ignored any historical facts that would have hindered his portrayal of America as a genocidal, imperialist, plutocratic ethnostate. But even if such attacks on cultural memory had already been going on for decades, the year 2020 was the Left’s Year Zero. 

After George Floyd’s death, monuments across the country were demolished, defaced, and desecrated. Remember the enthusiastic dismantling of statues of Confederates like General Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. Progressives cheered the attacks, claiming that the monuments were emblematic of “systemic racism.” But the city of Richmond, Virginia created the monuments to reintegrate the nation in the aftermath of a bloody civil war. In destroying them, progressives reopened old (and mostly healed) wounds.

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The iconoclasm that erupted in 2020 does not just target memorials to the Confederacy. In Rochester, New York, the seat of the 19th-century anti-slavery movement, a statue of Frederick Douglass, who called the city his home, was toppled. The rioters tried to throw it into the Genesee River. Why? Because when progressives attack American monuments, they aren’t targeting particular memories of history. They are trying to wipe away all of it, and replace national memories with false ones, which they conjure in the public mind by erecting new monuments to the symbols of their revolution. So, as monuments to Thomas Jefferson were felled, statues of George Floyd were raised.

The New York Times’ 1619 Project was an effort to replace the memory of the birth of our nation in 1776 with a fictitious founding in 1619, when the first ship of captured Africans came to our shores. The authors’ goal was to change America by changing how Americans remember the past. Their license to do so depended on humiliating the public, and convincing American citizens that their history had nothing worth remembering.

As the cultural revolutionaries laid waste to public memory, it wasn’t immediately clear how to counteract their efforts. While previous generations of Americans built up the nation in a monumentalist spirit, that spirit has been draining out of public life for decades. Perhaps because, in the years after the end of the Second World War, the past had been sufficiently memorialized: it lived in the hearts of all Americans. But the pride and triumphalism of one generation were replaced by the cynicism of the next. The political Left began to aggressively erase public memory — particularly through revision of school curricula. After that, many Americans no longer agreed upon what, specifically, we ought to remember. 

Donald Trump had some ideas. Trump didn’t become a monumentalist once he reached the presidency — he always was one. A teetotaler who seldom appears in public without make-up on his face, Trump is what Russians call a muzhik, a man’s man. He is brash, aggressive, and relishes a challenge. Before the self-proclaimed “builder president” was in a position to commission new monuments, he was building his own. Trump’s buildings in cities like Atlantic City and Las Vegas were maximalist in style and ambition, paying tribute to wealth, luxury, and risk. His first great works transformed the skyline of Manhattan. And, of course, Trump’s skyscrapers were also monuments to Trump himself. They were grand, gold-plated, and lavishly embellished. Before building Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan, Trump purchased the air rights of a neighbouring property to prevent anyone from building a skyscraper that would block his views. He wanted “soaring picture windows versus tiny ones, an aesthetic consideration that was of the utmost importance”, as he wrote in his book Never Give Up. 

But as his political career began in earnest, Trump directed his attention to creating monuments that memorialized America itself: our heroes, our victories, and our history. Trump made tentative monumentalist gestures in his first term. The 1776 Commission, an advisory body tasked by the president with creating strategies for delivering a patriotic education, was a laudable effort to combat the damnatio memoriae embodied by the 1619 Project. As he prepared to hand the presidency to Joe Biden, Trump issued an executive order to establish a “National Garden of American Heroes” consisting of statues of the most notable figures from our history. But when Biden took office, he (or his surrogates) issued an executive order revoking Trump’s plan.

Trump’s second term puts monumentalism at the heart of the agenda. On day one of his second term, Trump signed a memorandum (eventually formalized in an executive order titled “Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again”) which directs that federal public buildings should respect “classical architectural heritage in order to uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States and our system of self-government.” Trump embraced a style of architecture that originated in democratic Athens and republican Rome, not necessarily because he prefers order, proportion, and symmetry, but because this particular style is a symbol of America’s founding principles. 

The recently-passed “Big Beautiful Bill” sets aside funding to ensure the National Garden of American Heroes will be completed. And several of Trump’s other executive actions demonstrate his commitment to conserving public memory, including one that orders the Secretary of the Interior to take action if “since January 1, 2020, public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of Interior’s jurisdiction have been removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology.”  

Unsurprisingly, Trump’s actions have drawn criticism from progressives, who argue that he is monumentalizing a nation that no longer exists. They point out that the United States had fewer than five million people at its founding, most of them white and Christian. Today, the country’s population is 350 million people of every race and creed, and the critics claim that a coherent, common identity called “American” is impossible to achieve in such a diverse nation.

But the Declaration of Independence exposes such claims as lies. Americans are not defined by skin color, or wealth, or religion, but by life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — unalienable rights which the government must secure. The commonality of American citizens remains rooted in these fundamental principles envisioned and articulated 250 years ago. 

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In America, new organizations dedicated to this work are springing up. One such group called More Monuments is explicitly devoted to hastening an “American Renaissance” by “commission[ing] landmark monuments and awe-inspiring megastructures that define a new era of American craftsmanship.” On 4 July 2026, the 250th birthday of the nation, More Monuments will unveil a 650-foot tall “Colossus of George Washington.” The public, too, seems to have a renewed appetite for monumentalism: a viral movement to clean the Statue of Liberty has been gaining steam.

The new monumentalism that is unfolding is not limited to the United States. Burgeoning political movements in Europe, represented by parties such as AfD and the Sweden Democrats, are aimed at recovering traditional European culture by remembering the history of distinct European peoples. Unsurprisingly, the iconoclasts working to erase European history read the monumentalist effort to safeguard public memory as a kind of bigotry. It’s nothing of the sort, but they are right to fear it. 

The damage wrought by the Left’s attack on memory demands that patriotic writers and artists create new monuments that are worthy of a monumental people. Their task, which we might call a Great Remembering, is to transmit the nation’s traditions and values to future generations, ensuring that young Americans and immigrants to this country can look upon our monuments and read the record we have made. In doing so, we will restore the public’s fading memory of the great lives and historical triumphs that have shaped our way of life. 

One hundred years ago, Gutzon Borglum pointed to Mount Rushmore and said: “America will march along that skyline”. What moves the country forward is not the free market or the federal government, but individuals striving after their heroes. Only time will tell if Donald Trump becomes the fifth face carved into Mount Rushmore. 

But there are some economists who see things differently. A few of them have found their way into Trump’s orbit. Economists of this kind argue that tariffs can be effectively employed in a strategy to build a country’s industrial base. The classic examples of this are postwar Japan and then South Korea, each of which rebuilt their war-ravaged economies using a combination of state nurturing and protectionism. As a result, they became global manufacturing champions. (South Korea started practically from scratch.)

The origins of this approach might be unexpected. When Japanese bureaucrats first looked around for examples of such “infant industry models”, they found inspiration in 19th-century America’s industrialization. Contrary to its more recent policies, the US has some history of using protectionism to make itself great.

Neoliberal economists therefore stand accused of neglecting the examples of history. Another blind spot might be political. Neoliberal mathematical models anticipate the effects of tariffs, but they lack a theory of the state and of political economy. In their focus on the aggregate impacts of free trade, the neoliberals have too often neglected the differential impacts of opening western manufacturing to imports.

Yes, output and efficiency rose in America when it opened up to China in the Nineties. But the gains were largely captured by large owners of capital, whereas small businesses and workers didn’t do so well. There resulted what the economist Branko Milanović dubbed the “elephant curve” of income distribution, in which a global middle class of owners and professionals grew rich while workers in Western countries fell behind. In America, where Democratic elites once represented working-class interests, the neoliberal turn initiated by Bill Clinton left them largely abandoned, and they ended up turning to Donald Trump.

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Thus there is both an economic and political rationale for Trump to use tariffs to rebuild American manufacturing and restore the working class to its former glory. As Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, “Wall Street’s done great… but this administration is about Main Street.”

The problem is that it’s hard to detect much evidence of strategy in the way Trump is going about it. First, he’s going after countries like Canada that aren’t the source of the US’s problem. The US runs a much bigger trade deficit with China than with Canada but has imposed the heavier tariffs on its neighbor. Worse, hefty tariffs on Canadian cars won’t actually benefit American carmakers. They’re highly integrated with Canadian firms, moving parts back and forth in cross-border supply chains. So American carmakers will pay the tariffs, making their products more expensive than imported models from elsewhere.

Trump’s tariffs also lack precision. The Koreans and the Japanese ensured that their tariffs supported the development of strategic industries while enabling imports in industries in which their countries were not competitive. Trump, in contrast, is slapping on tariffs indiscriminately. It’s hard to see what advantage the US would gain from raising prices on Colombian coffee, for instance, because the US has no capacity to build its own coffee industry.

Note the apparent incoherence of the tariffs on Canada. Trump has variously said that his tariffs are intended to protect American jobs, stop fentanyl trafficking, improve border security and make Canada the 51st state. Which of these, if any, is his actual goal is anybody’s guess. When asked how he’d describe the “psychodrama” of Trump’s on-again-off-again tariff announcements, the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, sighed and said wearily: “Thursday”.

Worst of all, Trump fiddles with the tariffs constantly, imposing then suspending them, or announcing carve-outs. His recent pivot to reciprocal tariffs goes even further, essentially outsourcing the US’s trade policy to other countries. Rather than set an economic plan and stick to it, he’s entrenched a reactive policy in which the US will play tariff whack-a-mole with trading partners.

If Trump’s idea of generalship is to tell his troops to advance, retreat, turn right then left all in a matter of hours, sooner or later they’ll give up from exhaustion. That’s already begun. Rather than respond to his tariffs by altering their production plans, businesses are starting to stand back, waiting for the fog of war to lift so they can plan better for the future. They’re postponing investment and holding off on new purchases, with the recent survey from the Institute for Supply Management revealing orders to be dropping so sharply the sector will soon be contracting. One recent business survey estimated that the manufacturing sector in the first quarter may therefore contract by as much as 3%.

This reveals another apparent flaw in Trump’s approach to this war. Like many declining empires, America is both overestimating its strength and underestimating that of its opponents. The American exceptionalism of recent years, in which its economy has grown strongly while other developed countries have stagnated, was always something of a debt-fueled illusion. American borrowing has grown at twice the pace of GDP over the last few years. If the US had lived within its means, its economy would be as moribund as its G7 peers.

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The evident limits to a debt-fueled model started becoming apparent last year, when bond investors started driving up interest rates and thereby crimping demand. Trump took office at a time when the US economy was soaring high above its peers and its stock market was sucking capital in from all over the world, but the tide had already begun to turn. The economy was weakening, and money had begun quietly leaving the US. As America turned inward, foreign investors began to return home to Europe and Asia. Since the start of the year, the US stock market has gone negative, whereas those in Europe and Asia have been rising. Not surprisingly, Friday’s jobs report revealed an employment market that is losing steam.

And where America has been profligate, its trading partners have often been prudent. This has left many of them with ample fiscal firepower to respond to Trump’s provocations. Germany, China and the EU have all announced major increases in spending to stimulate their economies. This will help soften the impact of tariffs and further encourage investors to return home and chase the higher returns on offer. Three years ago, Liz Truss’s attempt at fiscal largesse provoked major ructions in bond markets, but no such turmoil has occurred in this new era of tariffs. It seems that investors are happy to continue lending to what have been comparatively tight-fisted money-managers.

Europe’s sudden largesse also poses a potential threat to one of the key pillars of the US’s postwar global dominance: the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency. Contrary to what conventional economic theory would predict, US tariffs have been accompanied by a weakening of the dollar in favor of other currencies and gold.

The dollar has on its side the depth, liquidity and openness of America’s capital markets, as well as the dependability of its regime. No currency has ever come close to rivaling the dollar as a reserve currency. But Europe’s bond market is likely to expand substantially, just as the US has started to look less safe for foreign investors. (Trump has even hinted that the government could default on some debt.) As a result, the impossible is becoming at least conceivable.

One storyline currently doing the rounds in Trumpland is that this is all part of a plan — that Trump is deliberately engineering a downturn to squeeze excesses out of the economy before teeing up a strong rebound once his tax cuts and deregulation kick off. It would be a pugnacious approach to economic revitalization, especially since he didn’t ask for a mandate from voters to do this. But it is at least plausible, since that’s essentially what Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan once did. Still, it’s hard to square this fine-tuned strategy with the volatility of Trumpian policy-making. Besides, the tax cuts being proposed are largely baked in, being not new but an extension of the 2017 tax cuts. It’s not clear how much added stimulus they’d bring.

One can make a case that a trade war would be a just one. But Donald Trump isn’t fighting that war. In fact, other than the approval of his followers, it’s hard to tell what he’s fighting for.

Donald Trump is a master at disrupting stale bipartisan orthodoxies and remaking the politics of familiar issues. He did so with free trade and industrial policy in his first term, forcing even the Biden administration to adopt his views. This time around, his tough stance on the border, which helped him win in November, may form the next consensus. America’s mental-health crisis — recently highlighted by a string of horrific attacks in the New York subway system — presents another such opportunity.

That crisis consists of the four million or so adults with untreated serious mental illnesses, such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. The result is homelessness, mass shootings, random subway violence, and incarceration, especially in Democratic areas that shifted sharply to the Right in the 2024 election. Trump can disrupt and realign the status quo — provided he ignores small-government zealots in his own camp. 

The mental-health crisis stems more from partisan agreement than disagreement. In his hit 2023 book, The Best Minds, author Jonathan Rosen noted that “Left and Right often met at the gates of the asylum.” He was referring to how, back in the 1960s, the deinstitutionalisation of the mentally ill was a joint effort of fiscal conservatives and progressive civil libertarians: the former shuttering mental hospitals in the name of austerity, the latter for autonomy’s sake. In the six decades that followed, the number of psychiatric beds nationally dropped to 35,000 down from 560,000.

That coalition still controls mental health-policy six decades later. Reformers and relatives of the seriously mentally ill have long called for allowing Medicaid, America’s public-insurance programme for the poor, to fund care in specialised psychiatric hospitals. Yet the move has long been opposed by a coalition of Republicans, who believe it would cost too much money, and Democrats, who worry that it would risk mass re-institutionalisation.

Enter Trump, whose first term mental-health agenda was underrated. Trump appointed a dedicated change agent as his mental health czar and weakened (if not removed) restrictions on the use of Medicaid for psychiatric hospitalisation. A second Trump administration raises hopes of further progress.

One reason to be optimistic about mental health is that the Trump-led GOP is less fiscally conservative than previous iterations. Greenlighting Medicaid funding for more adult beds in specialised psychiatric hospitals would cost $3 billion to $4 billion a year. This cost should be owned up to. Yes, savings could be realised from reduced spending on jails and homeless services and a serious reform agenda would slash funding for the numerous and pointless wellness programmes within the federal mental health budget.

Yet to DOGE-ify the discourse on mental health would risk repeating the mistakes of the past. One of the original sins of deinstitutionalisation was the belief that serious mental illness could be treated on the cheap. We learned the hard way that it wasn’t enough to offer meds and benefits to former asylum patients and expect them to take matters in hand from there. Schizophrenia is a chronic condition, characterised by episodic emergencies that necessitate extended supervision. Real reform will require a bigger mental-health budget. Hospitalisation, particularly, is an expensive intervention if we want to ensure high standards of care.

Sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better. As blue-city voters complain and the data show, public transit and street conditions have recently worsened. In last November’s election cycle, some high profile progressive prosecutors were voted out of office, and Californians passed Proposition 36, which strengthened penalties for low-level crimes. The proposition’s nearly 40-point pass margin signals that the politics of law and order are almost as popular in California as Donald Trump is in West Virginia.

Treating serious mental disorders and fighting crime are different government functions. But the reality is that a Democrat who votes to crack down against retail theft will likely also support a more paternalistic turn in mental health. Paternalism needn’t, and almost surely won’t, mean the return of the asylum order. Every Western nation deinstitutionalised its mentally ill, and none has brought back former asylum systems.

Community-based mental health will remain central, but nestled within that system must be a more robust stock of psych beds than is currently available to the seriously mentally ill Americans. And many forms of paternalism stop short of hospitalisation, such as programmes that mandate outpatient treatment programs, such as mental-health courts and New York’s Kendra’s Law, which gives judges the power to order people to receive care.

Bipartisan policymaking used to be more common in America. It was dealt a fatal blow by Democrats, 15 years ago, when they overrode traditional legislative norms to ram through ObamaCare. We’ve forgotten the old model’s two attractions: bipartisan reforms give cover to politicians facing competitive reelection races — and they’re more sustainable in the long term. When the backbench party wins power, it won’t immediately set itself to undoing the previous administration or Congress’s achievements, because their fingerprints are on those achievements, or some of them.

The framing is crucial. Untreated serious mental illness tends to be seen as an “urban” problem, in a way that harms the chances of federal-level reform. New York City plays a large role in this conception because of its media profile and the fact that most everyone uses public transit, thus bringing the broader population into direct contact with the unsheltered homeless in all their untreated acuity.

In most of the country, where private transportation is the norm, the crisis of mental illness is more hidden. But it strikes rich families, such as Sam Altman’s, as well as the poor, and those in rural America, where housing may be cheaper but psychiatrists and other specialists are practically non-existent.

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Families are one group for whom the mental-health crisis is not at all hidden. The community-based system in many respects is really a family-based system. Government assigns to families supervisory functions that, in decades past, were handled by massive asylum programmes.

Caring for an adult schizophrenic child entails interminable fights over taking meds and not taking street drugs. They’re prone to paranoia but also to trusting too much, making them easy prey for malefactors such as drug dealers and financial scammers. They can be irrationally risk-prone or overcautious to an extreme. The strange hours, hoarding, atrocious hygiene habits, and property damage: mental illness overwhelms family caregivers. It also sometimes makes them victims of violence. One 2016 study estimated that the seriously mentally ill commit more than 1,000 family homicides each year. Most matricides and patricides involve serious mental illness.

To promote reform, we should frame untreated serious mental illness as more of a family problem than an urban one. Thinking about how government may best support family caregivers is the most coherent way to build an effective mental-health system, one that anticipates crises before tragedy strikes.

Perhaps that framing may also build more support among Republicans, the party of family values. In terms of the policy, a realignment on mental health should be structured around more spending on services for the seriously mentally ill and more paternalism. New York and other major cities would benefit. But they would be far from the only beneficiaries.

For decades, as a scion of the Kennedy family and environmental litigator, Robert F. Kennedy Junior was considered an establishment hero. In recent years, however, his rhetoric against Covid lockdowns and vaccines — culminating in him making a comparison with Anne Frank and the Holocaust at a vaccine mandate rally — sealed his reputation among most commentators as irresponsible and potentially dangerous. So, since he announced that he was running for president two weeks ago, challenging Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination, he has presented the establishment media with something of a conundrum. He is already polling at 20% — should he be ignored or interrogated? 

When Mr Kennedy agreed to speak to UnHerd, we thought we’d try something different: instead of re-rehearsing familiar arguments over vaccines, we thought we’d actually try to understand the way he thinks, and why he appeals to so many people. Does his curious basket of views — on the environment, Ukraine, corporate power, cultural issues — hang together? Below is an edited transcript.

Freddie Sayers: The issue of vaccines was notably absent from your campaign launch speech last week. Was this a deliberate effort to set the issue aside and appeal to mainstream Democrats?

Robert F. Kennedy: My approach is that, unless I’m talking to a group that specifically wants to talk about that issue, I would not lead with it. The issues that I want to lead with are those I talked about in my speech. If somebody asks me about vaccines, I’m going to tell them the truth. But I think for most Americans, it’s not on their top list of issues.

Freddie Sayers: It’s not going to be easy to set aside, as every interview will mention it. What would be your message to mainstream Democrats who might be interested in some of the things you’re saying, but have made up their mind about you based on the vaccines issue?

RFK Jr: I’m talking about issues that I think most Americans and probably most Democrats are concerned about: the systematic gutting of the middle class; the elevation of corporations — particularly polluting corporations; and, from the financial industry to the military-industrial complex, the corrupt merger of state and corporate power. Through wars, bank bailouts and lockdowns, we’ve been systematically hollowing out the American middle class, and printing money to make billionaires richer. During the Covid lockdown, there was a $4.4 trillion shift in wealth from the American middle class to this new oligarchy that we created — 500 new billionaires with the lockdowns, and the billionaires that we already had increased their wealth by 30%.

That’s just one of the assaults, and then you go to the bailout of the Silicon Valley Bank, and the war in Ukraine, which is costing us $113 billion; the war in Iraq and the wars that followed that have cost us $8 trillion. The total cost of the lockdowns was $16 trillion, and we got nothing for any of it. Is it any wonder that we don’t have a middle class left in the United States of America? Unless we rebuild the middle class, and rebuild our economy, our national security is going to fail, and our democracy is going to fail. 

FS: You’ve been using the word “corporatism” a lot in interviews — what do you mean by it?

RFK: It’s the domination of government, and particularly democratic governments, by corporate power. I’ve spent 40 years litigating against the agencies, the regulatory agencies in the United States, so I can tell you that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is effectively run by the oil industry, the coal industry and the pesticide industry. When I was on the trial team that brought the Monsanto cases, and we ended up with a $13 billion settlement after winning three trials, we uncovered that the head of the pesticide division at the EPA was secretly working for Monsanto, and was running that agency to promote the mercantile ambitions of that business rather than the public interest. He was killing studies, he was fixing studies, he was ghost-writing studies. And that’s true throughout the agencies.

If you look at the pharmaceutical industry in our country, it runs the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The FDA gets 50% of its budget from Big Pharma. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) spends half of its budget purchasing vaccines from Big Pharma, and then distributing it. And the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is just an incubator for new pharmaceutical products. It doesn’t do the basic research that we want them to be doing — about where all these diseases come from. The studies that do get done are studies that develop pharmaceutical products. And then the NIH collects royalties when the pharma company sells those products. The regulator is essentially a partner with the regulated industry. The Department of Transportation (DOT) is run by the railroads in our country and by the airlines; the banks have utterly corrupted the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC); and the media has corrupted the Federal Election Commission (FEC).

FS: Are you alleging actual corruption within all these government agencies, or is it more of a general sense that there’s a revolving door between them and industry? 

RFK Jr: It’s both. There’s legalised bribery and illegal bribery. The rules governing conflicts of interest aren’t just ignored — they’re systematically ignored. And the rules started out not strong enough to really protect the public interest. You have both things going on — honest graft and dishonest graft.

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FS: This sounds like a traditional Left-of-centre critique, but you’re now being described as Right-wing. Do you think the old distinctions between Left and Right are breaking down? 

RFK Jr: I consider myself a traditional Kennedy liberal. I don’t know of any values that my uncle John Kennedy harboured, or my father shared, that I don’t share. They had antipathy and suspicion towards war and the military-industrial complex; they did not want corporations running the American government; they were completely against censorship. They were against the use of fear as a governing tool, and they spoke out about it often. If you go down the list of things that they believed in, I don’t think there’s really any daylight between me and what they believed. 

But I do think that there is a growing coalition in this country of populist forces, on the Left and Right, that are convening now and finding common ground. And I think that really is probably the only thing that is going to rescue American democracy.

FS: So you’re overtly trying to get support from conservative voters?

RFK Jr: I always have been. I spent 35 years as — I don’t want to toot my own horn, but — arguably the leading environmentalist in the country. I was the only environmentalist who was going on Fox News constantly, on Sean Hannity, on Neil Cavuto, on Bill O’Reilly, on Tucker Carlson. People would say to me: “You’re legitimising those platforms by going on there.” And I said: “I’m not compromising my values.” When I go on there, I’m talking to their audiences. I want to speak to their audiences. How are we going to persuade people, how are we going to end polarisation, if we’re not talking to each other? I’ll go on any platform, and the only platforms I won’t go on are ones that my wife just can’t live with. If it was up to me, I would go on Steve Bannon and I would even go on Alex Jones, because I want to talk to those audiences.

I think there’s a rebellion happening in our country now — there’s a populist rebellion — and if we don’t capture that rebellion, for the forces of idealism and the forces of generosity and kindness, somebody else is going to hijack that rebellion for much darker purposes. I don’t think it’s a good idea to say we’re not going to talk to American populists because they’re deplorable. Americans are our brothers and sisters, and we need to listen to them. And their backs are against the wall because of policies that have come from both Republican and Democratic parties.

FS: One name you mentioned there is Tucker Carlson, who obviously lost his job last week. He is thought of as a Right-wing conservative, but seems to agree with you on a lot of things. What is your view of Tucker Carlson?

RFK Jr: There was nobody, during most of his career, who was more critical of Tucker Carlson than I was. But I think Tucker has evolved over the past three years into probably one of the leading populist voices in our country. He’s one of the only people on American television that’s talking about free speech. It’s extraordinary — when I was growing up, the people who were most militant, who were the First Amendment absolutists, were journalists. The average American journalist seems not the least bit concerned by government-orchestrated censorship. It’s very, very strange.

FS: It’s been speculated that you could run on a joint ticket with Tucker Carlson. Is there any scenario in which you would work together?

RFK Jr: I wouldn’t speculate about that. I can’t see Tucker Carlson running as a Democrat and I’m running as a Democrat.

FS: And if you don’t win the Democratic nomination, will you consider running as an independent?

RFK Jr: I intend to be successful. I don’t have a plan B.

FS: There are some areas where you seem to have a very different view to people like Tucker Carlson. On culture-war issues such as gender, do you think that the Democratic Party has become too “woke”?

RFK Jr: I’m not going to cast judgement on a generalised description of the Democratic Party. I feel like we should take a common-sense approach to these issues. I’m trying to figure out ways to emphasise the values that we have in common, rather than the issues that are tearing our country apart. So I don’t feel the need to take a position on every issue. If it’s an issue that I will have nothing to do with as president, then I’m very unlikely to take a position on it.

FS: Let me be specific then. The concept of “equity” is central to President Biden’s ideas about governance — the idea that minority groups, such as racial minorities, should be retrofitted into positions via quota rather than just through a normal meritocratic process. Do you agree with the principle of equity?

RFK Jr: I wouldn’t agree with the policy that you just described. My family has been deeply involved in the Civil Rights Movement, and I’ve been involved with environmental justice issues. My first case was representing the NAACP [The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People]. In 2001, I spent the entire summer in a maximum security prison in Puerto Rico for civil disobedience that I did in conjunction with a case that I brought, defending the poorest black and Hispanic populations in America, arguably — the population of Vieques. I brought probably as many environmental justice cases during my career as anybody else, and I understand that there is institutional racism in our country. You see it in many police departments, although not all of them. Certainly not all police are racist, but it is a huge problem. Blacks in our country are living not only with the legacy of slavery, but the legacy of 100 years of Jim Crow, having their leaders systematically murdered — and then being redlined! In the 2008 collapse, it was black homeowners who were targeted first. We need to figure out ways to make sure that those communities are participating in the American experiment.

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FS: The question is whether, as a “Kennedy liberal”, you believe the best way to address those inequalities is to try to improve equality of opportunity rather than selecting candidates by identity criteria. When, for example, the President announced that he was going to find an African-American female to fill the latest Supreme Court vacancy before having started the selection process, did that make you uncomfortable in that it wasn’t an open, meritocratic choice? Or did you feel that that is the right thing to do?

RFK Jr: I’m not going to second guess President Biden on that choice. I’ve sat for 20 years on the board of Bedford-Stuyvesant restoration, which was the first community development corporation in our country. I watched that bring capital and mentorship into one of the poorest black communities in this country. We saw a renaissance in Bedford-Stuyvesant because of that. Black Americans want to feel represented, and I think a black child ought to be able to look at our Cabinet and our courts and be able to see a possibility of positions that they can aspire to. But I also think that our real target needs to be getting capital into those communities, making homeownership more widespread in those communities, reducing crime, making healthcare available, and all of those things that will invite black Americans into the American experience.

FS: Let me ask you about climate and the environment, which is a lifelong issue for you. In the last few years, environmentalism seems to have shifted from being an anti-establishment position to an establishment, corporate-endorsed position. Do you think there is a good version of the green movement, and a corporate, Davos-style version of the movement? And how would you distinguish between them?

RFK: Yes, definitely that has happened. Climate has become more polarised than ever, and with good reason. The crisis has been, to some extent, co-opted — by Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum and the billionaire boys’ club in Davos — the same way that the Covid crisis was appropriated by them to make themselves richer, to impose totalitarian controls and to stratify our society, with very powerful and wealthy people at the top, and the vast majority of human beings with very little power and very little sovereignty over their own lives. Every crisis is an opportunity for those forces to clamp down controls.

And then you also see, with climate, there’s been a shift — from habitat preservation and regenerative farming to trying to reduce the power of the carbon industry — towards corporate carbon capture, which can be monetised by the corporations and exploited without seeing any real benefit on the ground. And also with geoengineering solutions, which I oppose. It tends to be that the people who are pushing them also have IP rights — in other words, patent rights in a lot of those technologies. There is definitely an optic of self-interest.

FS: We had an example here in Europe, with the farmers’ protests in the Netherlands. New environmental rules on use of nitrate fertilisers and other things came in and populist voters — frankly, the kind of voters who might be interested in you — were very angry about it, as it seemed to ignore ordinary people’s economic reality? Did you observe that?

RFK Jr: I fell on the side of the farmers in that debate because I saw what happened over the years, which is the increase in the power of this combination of corporate and government power, which colluded to get those farmers to switch over to heavily nitrate fertiliser-dependent and GMO farming. It was purposeful and systematic. Once you get all of those farmers to switch to hydrocarbon-based fertilisers and to monocultures, then you say: “Those things are bad and now we’re going to shut you all down.” It’s a bait and switch, a way of destroying small farmers.

If we want to have democracy, we need a broad ownership of our land by a wide variety of yeoman farmers, each with a stake in our system. That’s what Thomas Jefferson said. Wiping out the small farmers and giving control of food production to corporations is not in the interests of humanity. We need to help those farmers transition off the addiction that we imposed upon them in the first place.

FS: Similarly, to be anti-nuclear, as you’ve been for decades, has historically been an anti-establishment position. But now things have changed, as countries such as Germany have shut down their nuclear power and now find themselves vulnerable and dependent on Russian gas. Have your views evolved on nuclear?

RFK Jr : No. I’ve always said I’m all for nuclear if they can make it safe and if they can make it economic. Right now, it is literally the most expensive way to boil a pot of water that has ever been devised. We were told that nuke energy would be too cheap to metre, and actually it’s so expensive that no utility in the world will build a nuclear power plant without vast public subsidies from the taxpayer. In our country, we had to pass the Price-Anderson Act because nuclear is dangerous. It’s too dangerous for humanity — look at Fukushima. There is so much contaminated water that is pouring out and contaminating the entire Pacific Ocean; they’re finding radiation in fishes all over the ocean. And the only solution is for them to pump the water into these huge tanks, and then store it forever. If you look at the pictures of Fukushima now, there are these giant tanks that just go on as far as the eye can see. Look at Chernobyl.

You may say there’s new forms of nuke power that are safer, which I would say is not true. But don’t listen to me — listen to the insurance industry; ask them: “Would you ever insure one of these plants?” and they won’t. Until they can buy an insurance policy, they shouldn’t be saying it’s safe. In our country, they had to make a sleazy legislative manoeuvre in the middle of the night and pass the Price-Anderson Act which shifts the burden of their accidents onto the public. So it’s not hippies in tie-dyed T-shirts who are saying it’s dangerous; it’s guys on Wall Street with suits and ties. This is so dangerous that they can’t get an insurance policy and then they have to store the stuff at taxpayer expense for the next 30,000 years, which is five times the length of recorded human history. How can that ever be economic? If they had to internalise the cost, nobody would ever build one of these plants. To build a solar plant, a gigawatt of solar now costs about a billion dollars. To build a nuke plant, it’s between 9 and 16 billion for one gigawatt of the same thing…

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FS: In the European context, though, France has a lot of nuclear power and seems to be sitting quite pretty now, while Germany has had to restart its coal-fired plants.

RFK Jr: Well, my solution to that is stop making oil wars.

FS: That takes us to this pressing question: one thing you talk about a lot is that America is in a permanent state of war and you want to put an end to that. With regard to Ukraine, how do you propose to do that?

RFK Jr: Settle it. The Russians have repeatedly offered to settle. If you look at the Minsk accords, which the Russians offered to settle for, they look like a really good deal today. Let’s be honest: it’s a US war against Russia, to essentially sacrifice the flower of Ukrainian youth in an abattoir of death and destruction for the geopolitical ambition of the neocons, oft-stated, of regime change for Vladimir Putin and exhausting the Russian military so that they can’t fight anywhere else in the world. President Biden has said that was his intention — to get rid of Vladimir Putin. His Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, in April 2022, said that our purpose here is to exhaust the Russian army. What does that mean, “exhaust”? It means throwing Ukrainians at them. My son fought over there, side-by-side with the Ukrainians and we’ve sacrificed 300,000 of them. The commander of the special forces unit in the Ukraine, which is probably the most elite fighting force in Europe, has said 80% of his troops are dead or are wounded and they cannot rebuild the unit. Right now, the Russians are killing Ukrainians at a ratio of either 1:5 or 1:8, depending on what data you believe.

FS: If you became president you would inherit the situation as it is. Would your policy be to say that Russia can keep the territory it has conquered? You would be accused of surrendering.

RFK Jr: What I’m accused of is irrelevant to me, as you may have figured out by now. Let’s do what is sensible, what saves lives. This was supposed to be a humanitarian mission — that’s how they sold it to us in the United States. But that would imply that the purpose of the mission was to reduce bloodshed and to shorten the conflict, and every step that we’ve taken has been to enlarge the conflict and to maximise bloodshed. That’s not what we should be doing.

If you look at the Minsk accords, it sets the groundwork for a final settlement. The Donbas region, which is 80% ethnic Russian — and Russians that were being systematically killed by the Ukrainian government — would become autonomous within Ukraine and would be protected. Let’s protect those populations with a United Nations force or whatever we have to do to make sure the bloodshed stops. In addition to that, we need to remove our Aegis missile systems, which house the Tomahawk missiles — nuclear missiles — from 70 miles from the Russian border. When the Russians put nuclear missiles on Cuba, 1,500 miles from Washington DC, we were ready to invade them, and we would have invaded them if they hadn’t removed them. The way they got removed ultimately is: my uncle and father made a deal with Ambassador Brennan and Khrushchev, who they had a close relationship with and they could talk directly to at that point. The deal was: we will remove our Jupiter missiles from Turkey, on your border, because we know that’s intolerable to you. 

Russia has been invaded twice in the previous 100 years. One could see why they wouldn’t want nuclear missile systems in hostile countries on their border. We should also agree to keep Nato out of Ukraine, which is what the Russians have asked. I think based upon those three points, somebody like me could settle this war. I don’t think the neocons are capable of settling it, nor the people who surround President Biden — because they were the ones who created the problem. I don’t think they’ll ever recognise that. I think part of a settlement is to recognise that, with some of the history that went into this war, there were geopolitical machinations on both sides. And by the way, I am not excusing or justifying Vladimir Putin’s barbaric and illegal invasion of the Ukraine. But my uncle always said, if you want to actually achieve peace, you’ve got to put yourself in the other guy’s shoes and you’ve got to figure out the local pressures on him too.

FS: You mention the Cuban Missile Crisis and your uncle’s strategy: you could argue that’s an example of the opposite approach. He stared them down. He played chicken and he won, in a sense. He took a firm stand. And there are lots of people who feel that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is just such a moment and that somehow a stand needs to be taken and Putin can’t be rewarded for invading. What do you say to those people?

RFK Jr: You can argue the history of it. My uncle was surrounded by joint chiefs of staff, by an intelligence apparatus that was trying to get him to go to war. And the fact that there was one confrontation, where the Russian ship that was carrying supplies to Cuba stopped before it hit the embargo wall of US ships, that wasn’t the end of the crisis. That was just a midpoint, and it could have gone anywhere from there. The end of the crisis happened because my uncle reached out to Khrushchev directly, and said: “Let’s settle this between ourselves.” And their settlement was secret, and it remained secret for many years. But my uncle wanted to settle it, and he understood that he had to put himself in Khrushchev’s position and that Khrushchev didn’t want war, and neither did he, but they were both surrounded by people who did want to go to war.

FS: So what is the wise, equivalent action that the US president should have taken when Russian tanks started rolling across Ukrainian borders from three directions, headed for the capital? 

RFK Jr: We should have listened to Putin over many years. We made a commitment to Russia, to Gorbachev, that we would not move Nato one inch to the east. Then we went in, and we lied. We went into 13 Nato countries, we put missile systems in with nuclear capacity; we did joint exercises with Ukraine and these others for Nato. What is the purpose of Nato? This is what George Kennan asked; this is what Jack Matlock asked. All of the doyens of US foreign policy were saying: “Russia lost the Cold War. Let’s do to Russia what we did in Europe when we gave them the Marshall Plan. We’re the victors — let’s lift them up. Let’s integrate them into European society.”

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FS: So you would have had Russia inside Nato?

RFK Jr: I think that that’s something we should have considered. What is the purpose of Nato other than to oppose Russia? If you’re addressing Russia in a hostile way from the beginning, of course their reaction is going to be hostile back. And if you’re slowly moving in all of these states, who we said would never become part of Nato. What happened in the Ukraine is that the US supported essentially a coup d’etat in 2014, against the democratically-elected government of Ukraine. We have telephone call transcripts of Victoria Nuland, one of the neocons in the White House, handpicking the new cabinet that was hostile to the Soviet Union. If you look at that, and you put yourself in Russia’s position, and you say: “Okay, the United States, our biggest enemy, is treating us as an enemy, has now taken over the government of a nation and made them hostile to us, and then started passing laws that are prejudicial to this giant Russian population.” If Mexico did that and then started killing — they killed 14,000 Russians in Donbas, the Ukrainian government — if Mexico did that to expatriate Americans, we’d invade in a second. We have to put ourselves in the shoes of our opponents. And it doesn’t mean saying that Vladimir Putin is not a gangster — he is. Or he’s not a thug — he is. Or he’s not a bully — he is. But going to war is not in his interest, either. And he repeatedly told us: these are red lines, you’re crossing. 

FS: Day by day, we hear news of atrocities taking place within the Russian-controlled parts of Ukraine. The idea that a peaceful settlement will be reached seems very distant at this point. Should we take it from what you’re saying that your support for Nato as president would be different?

RFK Jr: That is something that I’m going to look at as President. I’m going to look at how we de-escalate tensions between the great powers: between China, between the United States and Russia. How do we let these countries deal with their neighbours without pressure from the United States that makes them feel like they’re going to have to go into a military mode. I’m not saying that’s what happened here. I’m saying that’s something that we need to look at, and the reason that we need to look at that is we have institutional problems in our country. 

This is something my uncle discovered in 1960/61. He realised during the Bay of Pigs crisis that the CIA had devolved into an agency whose function was to provide the military-industrial complex with a constant pipeline of new wars. And my uncle came out of one of those meetings as the Bay of Pigs invasion collapsed, and he realised the CIA had lied to him, and he fired Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, Charles Cabell, Richard Bissell, the three top people in the CIA, for lying to him. And he said at that time: “I want to take the CIA and shatter it into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind.” We have to recognise that it’s not just our civilian agencies that have been captured by industry — the military agencies, the Pentagon, and particularly the intelligence agencies have been captured by the military-industrial complex. We have to recognise that and we have to say, “We don’t want constant wars in our country; we can’t afford them.”

FS: So do you see yourself finishing the job they started then — do you want to take the CIA and shatter it into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind?

RFK Jr: I think the CIA needs to be reorganised. Most of the people who work at the CIA are patriotic Americans. They’re very good public servants, and we need them to function. But I think we really need to separate the espionage functions of that agency and the Plans Division, the division that actually does dirty tricks, that kills people, that makes wars, that involves itself in actions. Because what happens is, that operations tail begins to wag the espionage dog. That term has been hijacked — it means information gathering and analysis, and that is the function that we want, that the CIA was created to perform. And very, very early on, Allen Dulles, essentially corrupted the purpose of it by getting the CIA involved in assassinations and fixing elections. 

The CIA has been involved in coup d’etats and attempted coup d’etats in about a third of the countries in the world, most of them democracies. So if our national policy as a country is to promote democracy, the CIA’s policy has been the opposite. It has been at odds with the United States. My father recognised this too: his plan was to reorganise the CIA along those lines to separate the espionage and the analysis and information gathering functions from the black functions, because otherwise the espionage section sees its job as justifying all of these nefarious activities they’re involved in, and there’s no accountability. There’s never any accountability. You overthrow a government in Iraq, and what happens: you create Isis. You then get involved in Syria, from Isis, and you drive 2 million refugees into Europe which destabilises democracy all over Europe and basically causes Brexit. That’s the outcome of what the CIA considers a successful operation to depose Saddam Hussein. Is it really successful? I don’t think so. We have a 60-year war with Iran and that war began when the CIA overthrew the first democratically-elected government in the 6,000-year history of Persia. And we are still living with the blowback from that operation. And there’s no accountability and these agencies need to be accountable, and I would break up the CIA in a way that would make them accountable.

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FS: The way you talk about the CIA and other agencies, saying that these organisations are corrupt, that the media is corrupt — at the same time, you talk about how you want to bring people together, and you’re worried about how divided society is. Is there not a sense that your rhetoric is divisive? It leads people to believe that a big chunk of their own country is against them? There is an enemy within, in the RFK world view, that needs to be destroyed. Isn’t that divisive?

RFK Jr: The way that you bring people together is by telling people the truth and getting them to agree on facts. If I’m wrong in any of the facts I told you, you and other people should challenge me. Because I feel that my job is to search for empirical truths, and then to be honest with people about it. If you try to censor people, if you try to lie to them about what’s happening — that our government is broken — if you try to lie about that, it just divides them further. You have to acknowledge there’s a problem. I’m a former drug addict and the first thing that you do if you want to deal with drug addiction is you admit there’s a problem and then you can deal with everything. We need to admit there’s a problem in our government before we’re able to heal our country.

FS: The rot, by your account, goes deep and wide. It almost feels like a revolution when you talk about it, because there must be many thousands of people who are in positions of power who you would want out. Do you think of it as a revolution?

RFK Jr: We need a revolution, I would say that — a peaceful revolution, and a revolution that brings us back to the values that have been robbed from us over the past 40 years, systematically, which I watched happen. I was watching what happened in 1980. We had a functioning government and we were in the middle of the Great Prosperity and most Americans trusted the government and we all trusted the media. And today, 22% of Americans trust their government and 22% trust the media. And the reason we have this blizzard of misinformation — or what is called misinformation — is because people are looking for other sources of information that they can actually trust, because the people who are supposed to be giving us good information are not. It’s spin; it’s propaganda. It’s government-orchestrated, and people know it. 

Everybody knows we were lied to about Covid. Everybody knows we were lied to about Vietnam. Everybody knows we were lied to about Iraq. “Weapons of mass destruction.” My opinion about these agencies is not happening in a vacuum. Everybody knows that Pharma lied to us about opioids, and about Vioxx. These aren’t conspiracy theories: “Robert Kennedy is crazy, because he thinks a corrupted FDA helped the pharmaceutical companies create the opioid crisis.” This is a fact that is well-known, well-documented, and that happened. And the question is: how are we going to stop it from happening again? And the answer to that is we’ve got to start by telling the truth about it. 

 
FS: Speaking of truth, and returning to the subject of vaccines for a moment, do you acknowledge that you went too far at any stage? Do you think that you yourself might have lost perspective?

RFK Jr: Here’s what I would say: show me where I got it wrong. Show me one fact that I’ve said in all of my social media postings that was factually erroneous. If you show me that, I’ll fix it, I’ll change it. And if it’s appropriate, I’ll apologise for it. But, that’s not what’s happened. What’s happened is, the media has said: “Oh, he passes misinformation.” And I say: “What piece of misinformation?” Everything I post is cited and sourced to government databases, and to peer-reviewed publications. I have probably the most robust fact-checking operation in America today. I have 320 MD physicians and PhD scientists, including, until recently, Nobel Prize-winner Luc Montagnier, on our advisory board looking at everything I post. If I get something wrong — and I will ultimately get something wrong — but so far, nobody’s been able to show me anything that I’ve gotten wrong. I wrote a book on Anthony Fauci — the biggest bestseller in America for a year, not reviewed anywhere, not acknowledged, but nevertheless — it’s 240,000 words, and nobody’s been able to find one. There’s 2,200 citations, every one of them with a barcode on it, so you can look up the citation while you read the book. Show me anything I got wrong. And we’ve had 12 or 15 editions, so if there was something wrong, we would correct it. 

FS: You talk a lot about the corruption of America, at home and abroad. Do you even think a good version of America is achievable at this point?

RFK Jr: I do think it’s achievable, and I think it’s achievable very quickly. I think my ultimate ambition is to restore the faith and the love of America, and the pride in America, so that my children can grow up with the kind of pride that I felt about my country. I can restore our moral authority around the world, and restore the reputation of America as an exemplary nation, something that the rest of the world can look to as an example, one that people will want to copy rather than as a threat. My uncle believed that America should be a leader, but we should not be a bully; and people understand the difference between those two things. Because my uncle steadfastly avoided war, and instead said: “I don’t want the picture of Americans around the world to be somebody with a gun, I want it to be a Peace Corps volunteer. I want it to be the Kennedy milk programme, in all the countries in Latin America and Africa; USAID, which was built to foster the growth of the middle class in those countries; and the Alliance for Progress.” And because of that, people around the world love John Kennedy more than any president in our history. There’s more boulevards named after him, more avenues, more statues to him, more universities and hospitals, in Africa and Latin America and all over the world than any other US President. That’s because he had a different vision that was not based on conquering people, but on helping them.

You can watch the whole video interview HERE…

“Mr President, you’ve said before that torture works, you’ve praised Russia, you’ve said you want to ban some Muslims from coming to America, you’ve suggested there should be punishment for abortion,” began the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg. “What do you say to our viewers at home who are worried about some of your views and worried about you becoming the leader of the free world?” Smiling, Trump turned to May and asked: “This was your choice of a question? There goes that relationship.”

It was a joke, of course — and a funny one. The press pack loved it. I remember, because I was part of it. As so often with Trump, however, it was the humour of power: the glint of steel visible, even when sheathed inside a joke. What made it so funny, though, was the fact that everyone knew the special relationship was in his control, not May’s — and he was the type of man who could perfectly well jettison it because of some personal grudge. May had done everything she could to secure a good relationship but she was weak and he was strong. For the rest of her miserable time in power, Trump would remind her of this fundamental imbalance.

Eight years later, and the new PM is in exactly the same position. Keir Starmer has done everything in his power to ensure a smooth relationship with Trump. Through his foreign secretary, David Lammy, the Labour Party has formed close links to Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance. Starmer was the first foreign leader to speak to Trump after he came within inches of being assassinated in July. The pair even had dinner in New York during Starmer’s visit to the UN General Assembly in September.

And yet, here we are, the British Prime Minister once again caught in a Trump storm, battered from one side by allegations of election interference and from another by claims that the Starmer operation is involved in a shadowy censorship war against Elon Musk.

The furore began on Wednesday when it emerged that the Trump campaign team had filed an extraordinary legal challenge against the Labour Party’s “blatant foreign interference” after Starmer’s head of operations revealed that 100 current and former party staffers were headed to the US to campaign for Kamala Harris. The letter also refers to a report in The Washington Post claiming that Labour has been advising the Harris campaign on how to win, including Starmer’s most important aide, Morgan McSweeney — an allegation Labour denies.

The importance of this story, however, does not lie in the technicalities of the allegations themselves — whether the Labour Party officials who travelled to the US to campaign for Harris broke US federal laws by doing so, or whether McSweeney has formally offered advice to the Democratic Party. Such details do matter. But what it really shows is that Starmer and Lammy have not learnt from May’s experience and are therefore doomed to the same fate. For as long as they are chasing after Trump’s approval, he will not respect them. Unless they have something of value for him, no amount of schmoozing will alter his fundamental assessment of British weakness.

There’s a salient lesson for Starmer in Trump’s 2015 book, Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again. In it he explains how at military school he had to deal with a particularly intimidating teacher called Theodore Dobias. “​​What I did, basically, was to convey that I respected his authority, but that he didn’t intimidate me,” Trump writes. “It was a delicate balance. Like so many strong guys, Dobias had a tendency to go for the jugular if he smelled weakness. On the other hand, if he sensed strength but you didn’t try to undermine him, he treated you like a man.”

Trump, of course, is not really talking about Dobias, but himself. The only people he respects are the strong or the slavishly loyal. And in the British Prime Minister, Trump sees only the weakness of a supplicant. He also knows that Starmer abhors his politics and wants Harris to win.

Like some kind of strange journalistic Russian Doll, however, the story of Starmer’s election “interference” comes with an even odder tale buried within. According to the American journalist Matt Taibbi, the real story is not just that Starmer sits atop a party which is actively campaigning to elect Trump’s rival, but one that also has shadowy connections to an organisation in Washington which is locked in a “disinformation” war with Elon Musk’s X.

Central to this allegation is the “Center for Countering Digital Hate” (CCDH), an organisation founded in 2018 by McSweeney and another Labour Party official called Imran Ahmed. While McSweeney is no longer involved in the CCDH, under Ahmed’s leadership it has become one of the more controversial campaigning organisations in Washington, leading the charge against what it calls “online harms” but which is seen by Musk and many Republicans as little more than a front in a wider ideological struggle for free speech online. Starmer, then, stands accused of not only election interference, but cultural interference.

The online harms the CCDH highlights certainly reflect the concerns of Liberal America, including issues such as “anti-vax misinformation”, “climate change misinformation” and the dangers of the “manosphere”. On the CCDH’s website it accuses social media companies of using algorithms with a “systematic bias towards hate and misinformation” which pose “real-life harms to marginalized communities, minors and democracy more broadly”. In July 2023, Elon Musk also tried to sue Ahmed’s CCDH for “tens of millions of dollars” in lost advertising revenue, but the case was thrown out earlier this year. Bad blood clearly remains.

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Much like the attempt to portray the Labour Party as a “foreign interferer”, the attempt to tie Starmer’s government to the CCDH’s ongoing war with Musk is pretty thin. McSweeney left the CCDH in 2020, two days after Starmer was elected Labour leader. What’s more, Trump’s campaign team has described Starmer’s Labour party as “far-Left” when McSweeney’s early involvement in the CCDH grew out of his battle to defeat the far-Left, which, at the time, was in control of the party and mired in allegations of antisemitism.

To the actual “far-Left” in Britain, McSweeney is a malign conservative presence. Indeed, in many ways this is closer to the truth. McSweeney’s operation in No. 10 has little time for American progressive politics, which many of those closest to Starmer in Downing Street see as dangerously out of touch with ordinary voters.

But, as with the furore over Labour activists campaigning for Harris, the real importance of Taibbi’s “British invasion” story lies less in how close the connections really are between Starmer and Harris — tentative at best — and more in the wider allegation that the misinformation movement is structurally set up to advance a Liberal world view at the expense of those who dare to question its most fundamental tenets. And on this score, there is clearly some truth.

Earlier this year, UnHerd discovered that an organisation called the Global Disinformation Index had placed us on what is called a “dynamic exclusion list” of publications that supposedly promote “disinformation” and should therefore be boycotted by all advertisers. Our crime? “Anti-LGBTQI+ narratives”. The evidence for this assertion was the fact that we had published the academic Kathleen Stock who it said was “acknowledged as a ‘prominent gender-critical’ feminist”. Stock’s crime was to assert that biological sex differences exist — a belief specifically protected in British law. While misinformation exists, this clearly isn’t it. Much remains in the eye of the censor — or, indeed, the algorithm.

The moral of this strange modern fable, then, is ultimately one of power. Keir Starmer is learning that no matter how nicely he plays, his government will be buffeted by the wider struggle for dominance currently playing out in the US — not just between Trump and Harris, but between the titans of Silicon Valley and the party establishments in Washington. These are battles with huge stakes, financially and politically, the winners of which will control the world’s most powerful country and the world’s most powerful industry. Keir Starmer and Morgan McSweeney are mere straws blowing in the wind. The Brits aren’t coming for America. The Americans have already taken Britain.

Nothing better supports this argument than the rise of China and its economic influence around the world. The Chinese economic model notably makes no clear distinction between corporation and state; its government lavishes support on corporate “national champions”, while those corporations act not only in the interest of profit but as agents of Chinese strategic interests across the globe.

This model has been tremendously successful for China, helping to fuel its rapid economic expansion and allowing it to challenge American and European market dominance around the world. Even sectors traditionally considered critical to American national security, such as the defence and telecom industries, now see their supply chains dominated by Chinese companies.

In this context, the argument for some wise “corporate statecraft” — such as the concentrated application of industrial, technological, and trade policies to restore America’s defence-industrial manufacturing base — makes a lot of pragmatic sense. It may also simply be a necessity now in order to compete with China’s far more extreme use of the same model.

The public-private partnership approach, however, also comes with some significant dangers and risks that we ought to carefully consider and debate. There are of course the traditional arguments against state-corporate coordination from both the political Right and Left that have been heard before. From the Right, we are likely to hear warnings that state inference in the private sector risks undermining market mechanisms, and that “picking winners” risks creating significant inefficiencies and distortions. From the Left, we are more likely to hear that corporate influence risks distorting the government’s responsibility to adequately regulate corporate behaviour or to look out for the interests of workers or the poor — or that it enables corruption by the wealthy.

Both of these critiques and the risks they highlight are real. But there is a greater risk, which I believe is already producing significant and dangerous political and economic distortions visible across the Western world today.

The key problem with the public-private partnership model is that, despite the word “public” appearing in the name, far too often in practice the actual public seem to be left out of the approach entirely. That is to say, the alignment of corporation and state that occurs through the public-private partnership model seems far too often to operate entirely outside the system of democratic governance. The interests of various “stakeholders” — corporations, NGOs, state bureaucracies, and numerous self-interested officials — may be consulted, but the demos notably is not.

In fact, often the advantage of the approach — as perceived by said stakeholders of both corporation and state — seems to be precisely that public-private partnership allows for a convenient end-run around the obstacle of the broader democratic process and any potential concerns that the voting public may hold. And, once they are shielded from democratic accountability, policies and priorities pursued through the public-private partnership model naturally become particularly ripe for rent seeking, regulatory capture, corruption, and abuse. Or, worse, there develops a gross distortion of basic interests between the “agents” involved and their true “owners” — that is, the public.

More and more often today, we see one particular distortion above all coming to the fore with use of the public-private partnership model. That distortion is the synchronised advancement of so-called “global” interests over national ones.

It is impossible for those pursuing “global” interests to align them with the democratic interests of a particular people — a nation. There is no global democracy, only national democracies. So when multinational corporations and state bodies with supranational ambitions collude to pursue interests and objectives extending beyond the national level, the result is overwhelmingly likely to transgress and trample the interests of sovereign democratic polities. Which again far too often seems to be precisely the goal of such ventures.

Let me get specific with a few big examples. When millions of migrants illegally cross the borders of Europe or the United States each year, they do not do so without a vast, powerful network of institutional support that helps to facilitate that crossing. Hundreds of transnational NGOs guide, ferry, traffic, shelter, and run legal interference for these migrants every step of the way. These NGOs are in turn often funded by governments and international bodies, which seem to do almost everything in their power to enable — migrants’ entry and permanent residency as a matter of de facto policy.

In this they are abetted by the corporate sector, which stands to benefit, either directly — as in the case of hotels, developers, and contractors who are funnelled billions in taxpayer money to house and service new arrivals — or indirectly, as in the case of agricultural and other sectors that benefit from cheaper labour. Not coincidentally, corporate interests have been among the most influential stakeholders consistently lobbying against the implementation of readily available mechanisms that could prevent illegal hiring and deter migration, such as universal e-verify requirements for employment.

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As a result, there today effectively exists what might reasonably be described as an immense “migration-industrial complex”. And what is this complex other than what we can call a sweeping public-private partnership in action? It is a collusion of state and corporation, along with quasi-state-quasi-corporate NGOs that exist in parasitic relationship with both. All parties involved are working together to achieve a shared goal that stands to benefit each of them across an array of material, demographic, political and ideological interests.

But, of course, what no part of this partnership ever bothers to do is to democratically consult or even at all concern themselves with seeking input from national populations about this migration project. Doubtless because those populations happen to vocally object. Through joint public-private action, however, such democratic objections are simply circumvented and rendered irrelevant via fait accompli.

Similarly, governments, corporations, and NGOs have taken it upon themselves to jointly act in response to what they characterise as a global emergency: climate change. In initiative after initiative, we have seen these actors align together to eagerly push “green” energy transition schemes developed without real public input. Whatever their stated intentions, what these public-private partnerships have served to do in practice is mostly to significantly grow the scope of state power while also leveraging government mandates and huge subsidies to force into life entirely new, otherwise unviable sectors — sectors in which corporate players may extract profits from a captive public. Simultaneously, an innumerable swarm of non-profits circle endlessly around this heaping pile, bloating themselves on an unending feast of public and private grant money.

Whatever the threat from climate change, this vast exercise in public-private partnership in the name of green energy transition has produced little to show for it — except for making a select subset of well-connected people a whole lot richer than they would be in actual free-market conditions.

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Meanwhile, across Western nations, the common people suffer under an escalating tide of onerous and often absurd regulation, energy inflation, and deindustrialisation. But, whether they are farmers in the Netherlands, factory-workers in Germany, or lorry drivers in France, their cries of protest tend to be met only by the mobilised forces of the state.

To them, what public-private partnership looks like in practice is the forced redevelopment of the family farm at the barrel of a police water cannon.

Finally, there could be no more shameful and glaring example of public-private partnership gone wrong today than the censorship-industrial complex. A vast, transnational, wholly unaccountable network of international bodies, government bureaucracies, technology and media companies, and zealously ideological NGOs now works tirelessly together to systematically remove and censor politically inconvenient information from the internet, manipulate search results, algorithmic feeds, and AI models, boost chosen propaganda narratives, blackmail advertisers and financial institutions into sidelining political adversaries, and, increasing, to justify the outright authoritarian criminalisation of dissenting opinions — as we’ve seen recently in places like Britain, Brazil and, of course, Brussels.

Notably, the goal of this furious public-private effort seems overwhelmingly to be to manipulate and silence growing public criticism of elites’ anti-democratic use of public-private collusion on controversial issues like migration and climate change.

But, for much of the public, the cat is already out of the bag. In fact, we ought to recognise that the growth of so-called “populist” movements across the Western world can be seen as, in large measure, a democratic backlash against the increasingly widespread use of public-private collusion to “solve” nearly every controversial issue that arises today — that is, to sidestep democratic debate and accountability on these issues in order to force through ill-considered “progressive” policy changes which all-too often actively harm the interests of national populations.

Such behaviour is utterly corrosive to public trust and the democratic legitimacy of institutions of all kinds. Government and corporate leaders therefore had best be warned: if you don’t want to lose your heads — metaphorically, of course, though perhaps someday literally — you had best act now to regain that legitimacy by more carefully setting boundaries and safeguards on the use of public-private partnership as a tool.

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We must realise that if the West acts too much like China when it comes to the coordination of corporation and state, we risk becoming more like China in other ways as well — and much of the public already clearly recognises this trend as a real threat to their liberty and way of life. After all, we already have a word to describe when the fusion of corporation and state is taken to its ultimate, logical conclusion — and that word is “fascism”.

Yet, even so, this doesn’t mean that public-private partnerships are always bad and can never be used wisely. Some level of state-corporate cooperation on critical issues like industrial policy is probably both inevitable and potentially very beneficial — but how can this be done rightly?

Those seeking to wield benign and genuine corporate statecraft ought, above all, to adopt as their guiding principle the idea that public-private partnerships must always put the interests of the nation first. To push multinational corporations into subsuming their multinational interests in favour of the sovereign nation’s interests may be democratically legitimate, and even find much welcome among the public. To use state power to advance the multinational interests of corporate stakeholders over those of the very nation which the state supposedly exists to serve can in contrast never be legitimate. Sticking to this principle alone would help prevent a good deal of the damage currently being done by the wayward use of public-private partnership.

Simultaneously, private corporations must realise that allowing states to coopt them into serving anti-democratic ends, as in the case of the censorship-industrial complex, only risks harming their long-term interests by generating festering public anger, undermining political and social stability, and eroding the very institutions that form the necessary foundation for free-market capitalism to function smoothly. It is in their long-term material interest to resist such pressure as firmly and publicly as possible, not to enable it.

Finally, all parties must strive to be as publicly transparent as possible about public-private partnerships, their intentions and actors, and how they operate. Secrecy breeds well-founded suspicions of conspiracy.

Overall, state-corporate coordination may at times be necessary, but it is best treated as a necessary evil, to be approached with all due caution — and never as an unalloyed good.

***

A version of this essay originally appeared on The Upheaval on Substack.

If there were fissures, they had been smoothed over: deviant Hungary, long a blemish on the pact’s public-facing unanimity, had agreed not to block military aid to Ukraine provided it would not have to partake in any Nato operations there. All members of the alliance were in total agreement on the basic facts of the war, Stoltenberg insisted. Under Biden’s steadfast leadership, he asserted, the world had united behind Ukraine.

The self-mythologising PR was fitting for a summit that was also the 75^th anniversary of the alliance’s founding. And 75 years after the 12 original signatories of the North Atlantic Treaty gathered in Washington to pledge collective defence, the alliance and the world look very different. NATO has always cast itself as a moral arbiter, disseminating “values” and ideology, while simultaneously fostering member states’ dependency on the United States and securing American hegemony over Europe. But this vassalisation has reached a new stage since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The invasion brought a Cold War alliance of questionable 21st-century utility roaring back to life; the long-time neutral holdouts of Sweden and Finland have even opted to join. During the Cold War, NATO counted many of its most ardent critics among left-wing opponents of US militarism; today, its most prominent skeptics are on the Right, and include Donald Trump.

Small wonder, then that American domestic politics loomed large. Held just days ahead of the Republican National Convention, the gathering was timed perfectly to allow Nato leadership to ensure one of their key points for this year — that many hitherto freeloading allies had stepped up their defence spending — would be fresh in the minds of its Republican critics. Back during the now infamous 2018 summit, Trump lambasted flunkies for not paying their fair share and even threatened to withdraw the US from the alliance. This year, though, Nato leaders could boast that at least 20 out of 32 member states would be spending 2% of their GDP on defence. Both anxious Atlanticists and Nato sceptics would be reassured that the alliance was, as Stoltenberg said, adaptive and agile; it would endure, regardless of dramatic changes in political leadership in its member states. And it was responsive both to events on the ground and internal criticism.

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But efforts to make the event about the steadiness and durability of Nato — a rare fulcrum of stability in an unpredictable world — were challenged by mounting concerns about the cognitive fitness of 81-year-old President Biden. Despite the usual pomp and pathos, along with attempts to pander to Trump Republicans, inevitably, it became a referendum on Biden’s age. Then, during the brief interlude between the summit and the start of the Republican National Convention, an assassination attempt on Trump’s life made it clear that there would be no assurances forthcoming about Nato’s future, that nothing would be predictable.

Things had begun on a triumphant note, in the Mellon Auditorium in Washington, where the North Atlantic Treaty was signed in 1949. There was no shortage of grandiosity on display. “The most successful military alliance in history”, claimed Stoltenberg, had now become the longest-lasting — outliving even the Delian League of ancient Greek city-states. The auditorium looked like Nato’s holy temple, with Biden describing the US commitment to the Alliance as a “sacred obligation”. His performance was better than at last month’s debate, but it wasn’t reassuring. His eyes were glued to the teleprompter as he seesawed back and forth between jingoistic shouting and barely audible, indecipherable mumbling. He managed to muddle through.

The President’s lapses of memory and coherence weren’t such  a surprise. Earlier this year, Biden twice referred to dead European leaders — former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and former French President François Mitterrand — when referring to recent discussions with foreign counterparts. At the summit, Biden did not mistake contemporary leaders for those long dead, but he did confuse allies with enemies, calling Ukrainian President Zelensky “Putin” and Kamala Harris “Vice President Trump”.

With Biden faltering so badly, the spectre of a new Nato-sceptic Trump administration drew closer, prompting some of the more hawkish member states to tailor their talking points to address the Republicans. At one panel composed of the three top defence officials from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, participants spoke in a language they knew the Trump camp would understand: golf. “Nato is a club,” Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur said. “When you have club rules, then you respect the rules and you expect that everyone will also respect the rules. When you pay your fee in the golf club, you can play. It doesn’t matter how big is your wallet.” They hammered away at the idea of all those members who were now spending 2% of GDP on defence, hoping to convince Republicans that Europe was now pulling its weight. And yet, as international relations theorist Patrick Porter told me, this “magical 2% figure” was arrived at with full US commitment in mind. Europeans are still avoiding the difficult question: if America scales back its commitments in Europe under a Trump presidency — many in his camp advocate for a “pivot to Taiwan” and a shift of focus to the Indo-Pacific — who will fill in the gap?

In fact, much of the summit did seem to be a carefully calibrated pitch to America — or at least those Nato sceptics at the RNC. Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti, whose country is a Nato aspirant, wrote a front-page op-ed in the New York Times with the title “Don’t Doubt NATO, it Saved My People”, outlining the role the alliance played in ending the Kosovo conflict in 1999. Meanwhile, Latvia’s President Edgars Rinkevics addressed the criticism that the US does much more than Europe to support Ukraine, claiming that in truth, it was the other way around. “It’s also very important to explain to the American public,” Rinkevics said in a speech on Tuesday. European Atlanticists fear an American retreat from the continent under Trump, who has complained that Europe has given too little aid to Ukraine, while the United States has given too much.

The contentious subject of Ukraine’s future membership in Nato was the other big theme of the summit. Germany and the United States are unwilling to extend full Nato membership while Ukraine is still at war with Russia. Instead, they say, Ukraine should be granted a “bridge to Nato”, a nebulous promise that fell far from aspirations of full membership that Ukraine has been waiting for since 2008. However, some felt the language of the communique was made stronger by the insertion of the word “irreversible”: apparently the bridge to Nato can only be crossed in one direction. But the Ukraine section of the Washington Summit Declaration, published last week, was ambiguous about its future. “We reaffirm that we will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met.”

Meanwhile, Ukraine and its supporters in Eastern Europe are adamant that the country be granted membership, or at least a timetable for it. Only full membership, they claim, can deter Russia. Some suggest that Article 5 security guarantees — the provision that states that an attack on one member state is an attack on all — be introduced incrementally, first on territory already under Ukrainian command, and eventually under those parts of the country Zelensky’s forces win back.

But critics counter that admitting Ukraine risks triggering all-out war with Russia. They contend that membership would make it far more difficult to negotiate a ceasefire or engage in peace talks, since Russia has long insisted that Ukraine in Nato is a “red line”. And they point out that, contra the exalted Atlanticist rhetoric surrounding the current war, Nato has no intention of fighting for Ukraine. And if Nato is not committed to entering the war now, as Ukraine is fighting for its life, then it certainly isn’t going to make any promises about some undefined point in the future. They suggest a dialing down of the rhetoric and scaling of expectations. In fact, dozens of foreign policy experts signed a controversial letter ahead of the summit urging caution. “If Ukraine were to join NATO, Russia would have reason to doubt the credibility of NATO’s security guarantee — and would gain an opportunity to test and potentially rupture the alliance. The result could be a direct NATO-Russia war or the unraveling of NATO itself.”

Notwithstanding membership, Ukraine won’t leave the summit empty-handed. Nato has pledged five strategic air defence systems over the coming year, as well as F-16 fighter jets. These will be donated under the proviso that they can’t be used to strike targets inside Russia. Along with the equipment, a new Ukraine command, staffed with 700 employees, will be established in Germany, and Nato will deputise a senior representative to Kyiv. Ukraine will also receive at least €40 billion of assistance within the next year. The Alliance is also looking to “Trump proof” its assistance for Ukraine and will take over coordination of military aid for Ukraine through the Ukraine Defence Contact Group, a role hitherto played by the US Department of Defence. This reorganisation was made to ensure that Ukraine will continue to receive military aid, even if a new Trump administration decides to cut it.

With Biden’s cognitive state drawing all media attention, some significant developments received far less scrutiny. There was, for example, a joint-statement by the US and German governments announcing that the US would, in 2026, begin “episodic deployments” to Germany of long-range missiles, including SM-6, Tomahawk, and developmental hypersonic weapons. Some of these weapons have a range that would have seen them banned under the defunct Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987. Russia’s response to news of the planned deployments was dramatic. “Without nerves, without emotions, we will develop a military response, first of all, to this new game,” deputy minister, Sergei A. Ryabkov, told Interfax. But what was most remarkable about news of the imminent deployment was how closely it echoed events of the Cold War — but with one glaring difference. During the early Eighties, the United States began deploying Pershing II missiles to West Germany. The news was met with deep anger by the European Left. More than one million people took to the streets in West Germany as weeks of demonstrations also swept through Paris, Stockholm, Rome, and London.

Today, in contrast, the announcement was met with comparative silence. This is doubtless down to the fact that the Left is being slowly absorbed into the Nato project. All four of Nato’s newest member states — Sweden, Finland, North Macedonia and Montenegro — opted to join with Social Democratic-led governments in power. Emblematic of this shift are the German Greens. One former party leader, Petra Kelly, was a star of the anti-missile protests in West Germany, yet some 40 years on, the Greens are now among the most hawkishly Atlanticist in Europe. Meanwhile, many peace initiatives and calls for a ceasefire in Ukraine have come from the Right. Hungary’s Viktor Orban has been on a self-styled “peace mission” in recent weeks, visiting Moscow, Kyiv, and Trump in Mar-a-Lago in an effort to bring the warring parties to the negotiating table. Orban and his ilk are not the dedicated anti-war activists of the Cold War. They support conflict; they just don’t like this one, which they view as an unwinnable liberal pet project. But broad swathes of the Left have also proved inconsistent: they may say they dislike the foreign policy of the United States, but they have uncritically embraced a military alliance that ensures its hegemony over Europe.

As Biden stumbled through his final, possibly terminal, press conference, he did manage to make one clear point: that Trump and his ilk were a threat to Nato. Why the average American voter should care as much as the tbose assembled in Washington, he did not say. And while the eyes of the world watched this very public demonstration of his vulnerability, it was clear that the future of Nato and the entire transatlantic order will be determined by who is elected president in November. The summit that was supposed to be a celebration of the alliance’s stability and longevity was instead a testament to its frailty.

Many view the co-existence of these two economic characteristics as, if not a paradox, a cause for concern. Indeed, a number of observers, from Left-leaning policy wonks like Larry Summers and Richard Reeves to Right-leaning US senators such as Josh Hawley, appear terrified of its implications. In March, for instance, as the Nasdaq soared to new records, the rate of prime-age labour force participation fell for men, despite rising for the population as a whole. So, what’s driving this, and how is it remaking the relations between the sexes at a time of escalating gender conflict?

Here, my friends could spare the social-policy establishment some man hours: they are a microcosm of a cause-and-effect relationship that ties together two trends. Among the surest ways to cause people to work less is to make them wealthier. When you have wealth — accumulated money and assets — you can afford to rely less on income from paychecks. “A larger bribe,” as one Harvard professor puts it, “will be required to convince a wealthier person to enter the labour market.” And a defining characteristic of the US economy in the 21st century has been an explosion in household wealth. In 1999, on average, the American household had $661,000 (in 2023 prices). By 2023, this had exploded to an average of $1.15 million. By historical standards, this is a mammoth gain: in the four decades before 1999, the increase in average household wealth was just $358,000.

Much of this wealth, it turns out, has accrued to men. “Although the gender income gap has narrowed,” according to a 2022 publication by Harvard’s Angela Lee, “the gender wealth gap has widened from the mid-Nineties to the mid-2010s.” The numbers are stark. “Women’s median wealth as a percentage of men’s median wealth dropped from 90% in the mid-Nineties,” Lee reports, “to 60% in the mid-2010s.” Why was this? The straightforward answer is that men were probably bigger asset-holders to begin with, and have historically tended to earn more money from their jobs and to work longer hours than women. Financial markets also reward bigger risks with bigger rate of return and, on average, men have tended to make riskier investments.

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Other sources of wealth data tell the same story as Lee’s study. According to the US Census Bureau, the average man aged 25-54 who’s left the labour force now reports 21% more in income from investments than one with a job. The surprise, then, would be if America’s men were not choosing to work less.

So deeply has this trend become entrenched that it appears in one of the oldest and easiest to measure vectors of privilege: height. A population’s average height is a barometer of its economic status: it is economics’ equivalent to psychology’s “the body keeps the score”. The skeletons of the mummified elite in ancient Egypt are, on average, 3.6 inches longer than those of its commoners. The aristocrats of late-18th century Germany were 5.2 inches taller, on average, than its peasants. Data from the 20th century confirm this isn’t down to genetics. When South Korea grew rich while North Korea fell into the abyss, despite sharing a genetic pool, men in the south became three inches taller.

In terms of average height, America’s non-working men were once the commoners to its working pharaohs. For all intents and purposes, they are now eye-to-eye. In 2017, America’s prime-age men out of the labour force were 0.1 inches taller, on average, than those with jobs. This was the first time since the relevant CDC data begin in 1976 that they could look down on the working men. Back then, America’s prime-age men with jobs were 0.7 inches taller. That difference trended up until 1985, peaking at 0.9 inches before dropping back towards the convergence that prevails today.

Such biological analysis might suggest a wholesale economic revolution for American men. But, despite all the fretting about the number of drop-outs and a crisis of masculinity, this isn’t a society-wide issue. It is barely in the double-digits: the percentage of prime-age men who have left America’s labour force now sits at only 11%, up from 5% in October 1975. And this is because this isn’t a story about the male population, but about a sub-population of men: a class we might call the petit-aristocracy.

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Like the aristocrats of the pre-industrial world, this group’s economic existence relies on assets. In this case, they were produced during the 21st century’s wealth explosion. And this species of aristocrat is petit not in height, but in consumption. Many maintain relatively modest lifestyles to be able to live without a steady paycheck. Some will work jobs for brief spells, however, if necessary. Their ephemeral imprint in the jobs numbers has even led to “in-and-out” becoming a term of America’s labour economics jargon as well as its fast food.

Though currently small, like America’s gross wealth and the number of people who own part of it, this petit-aristocracy is set to grow. Neither the dot-com bubble nor even a financial crisis changed the upward trend in the US wealth-to-income ratio that started around 1999. Because modern assets are not finite like land, today’s petit-aristocracy can grow its ranks in a way that land-based aristocracies couldn’t. Nor is the decision to drop out of the labour force purely a function of wealth. The allure of leisure relative to work matters, too. And if past is prologue, improvements in leisure technologies, such as video games, will increase leisure’s allure in ways that appeal particularly to men.

Where does this leave America’s women? Thanks to the liberating effects of household technology and changing gender norms, a “quiet revolution” has taken place, to the point where women now almost outnumber men in the workplace. And their readiness to work is what has facilitated men’s exit (without women, the gross national product would have collapsed). But they do not enjoy the same benefits of this position that men did in the 20th century. Women lack the financial power over men, now wealthy, that men once had over women, when gender norms locked women out of the labour market. And as they take over the job market that men are vacating, they’re not finding that jobs pave a path to happiness. “Female well-being appears to be compromised (or male well-being enhanced),” according to one representative study, “by high female involvement in gainful employment”.

The effect of this is to tee-up a clash of biblical proportions between men, women and norms about work. In Genesis, as humanity’s original punishment, God effectively hands the labour market over to Adam, and condemns Eve to live in the household. At least some men and women have long wanted to escape each of these settings. Now, each finally can. But will humanity’s technological and financial escape leave anybody, men or women, happier than they were in the divine prison? It’s unclear.

As Oscar Wilde said, there are two tragedies in life. One is not getting what you want. The other is getting what you want. The challenge is that the social norms about the importance of work that increasingly satisfy men or women increasingly dissatisfy the other. Men out of the force would benefit from norms that facilitate their finding of purpose, identity, and flourishing, without jobs. The ancient Greeks, who viewed the enablement of leisure as the purpose of work, offer examples. And the obsession of manosphere activists with the Stoics, who lived before Christianity dominated the Western mind, is revealing in this regard. Women, meanwhile, would benefit from the social veneration of paid jobs associated with Weber’s Protestant Ethic. After all, abandoning the Protestant Ethic now, once women have finally entered the labour force, would be devaluing a social currency as soon as women start to acquire it.

This is the economic backdrop that today’s gender wars are playing out against. Men, despite growing wealthier, feel increasingly alienated by a society that still views a job as an admission ticket to polite society. Women, despite breaking ground in the labour market, sense that their gains have failed to turn into the lives of empowerment that they expected them to. What comes next is unclear — but it will certainly open a new chapter in the social history of Adam and Eve’s descendants.

Columbine was not unprecedented. I knew that. Armed people had shot up American schools before, and Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine killers, may have been inspired by some of these killings. But their truer inspirations were not shooters at all. They were larger events of mass mayhem and death. In an online journal Harris sketched his ambition to create something “like the LA riots, the Oklahoma bombing, WWII, Vietnam”, and various apocalyptic video games “all mixed together”. Accordingly, he and Klebold conducted a careful study of their school’s cafeteria, to learn when it would be most densely packed with students (11:17am, they determined). They built several large propane bombs, timed them to explode at this peak moment, and, on the morning of their attack, carried them into the cafeteria, using the lunch-hour busyness as cover for their unusual lugging and dropping of heavy duffle bags in a lunch room.

So Harris and Klebold murdered 12 students and a teacher in their attack, and this was the deadliest school shooting in American history, at the time. But their plan was to kill many more — “at least four hundred”, Harris said. Given the size of the bombs he made, and given the number of kids in the lunchroom at 11:17am of April 20, 1999, he may have hit or even exceeded his number, if his poorly made bombs had actually gone off. The Columbine massacre is notorious as a school shooting, then, but it was also, and perhaps more consequentially, a failed bombing.

Beside its failed-bombing aspect, another core fact of Columbine that had faded in my memory is that its mastermind and driving spirit was a figure of evil so total and so extreme that, were he a character in a cartoon, you’d think him too cartoonish. Unlike many other school-shooters and mass-shooters both before and after Columbine, Eric Harris was neither abused nor delusional. He was smart and had a decent number of friends and was somewhat attractive to girls. He was fairly well-raised by a doting mother and an ex-military father — who was kind of a jerk, apparently, but hardly a tyrant to his two sons. Although early reports identified Harris as a bullied member of a group of outcasts called the “Trench Coat Mafia”, he wasn’t in TCM, and he wasn’t bullied. Instead, he just wanted to do bad things, and, as he got older, the badness he wanted to do expanded in scale until it was basically total. He wanted to kill humanity itself — and for no external reason. It was just what he’d come to want. His journals often show him to be angry, but he wasn’t despairing, and his anger, generally arrogant and affronted, was also exuberant. He was high-spirited in his desire to kill everyone, and self-aware. As he put it in one journal entry, “I’m full of hate and I love it.”

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Psychiatrists who’ve profiled him since his death have declared him a psychopath. This is probably accurate, but it’s also inadequate and unsatisfying. Like other psychopaths, Eric Harris totally lacked empathy and remorse, and he took pleasure in — and was very good at — deceiving and manipulating others. But, unlike most psychopaths, Eric Harris had an active, urgent lust to kill all the people in the world. And he had a restless practical bent. He was eager to work. He recruited and groomed his brainy, fitfully suicidal friend Dylan Klebold and, over several years, he made and described and carried out concrete plans for exploding, if not all of the world’s people, at least several hundred of its teenagers. Had his ambition to stage a large-scale massacre somehow passed before he could die attempting it, had he finished school and continued on to a psychopath’s semblance of a regular life, it’s easy to see him becoming a serial killer. His writings include several passages like this: “I want to tear a throat out with my own teeth… I want to grab some weak little freshman and just tear them apart like a wolf, show them who is god.”

That he wrote this stuff down, not only private journals but on a blog, and that he was just such a bristling site of evil energy, raises the predictable question: “How did people not know?” How could the nihilism and murder-lust of a prolific internet braggart, a kid who was making plans and making bombs and arranging for slightly older friends to buy him guns… how could all this have not raised eyebrows and hackles and red flags? In fact it did raise those things. This is the other incredible shock of the case that I’d forgotten.

More than a year before the massacre, Harris fell out with his friend Brooks Brown and began to torment and threaten him, and so Brown’s parents reported Harris to the county sheriff’s department. They’d seen the hair-raising pages from Harris’s website and sent them to the sheriff as well. Investigators there learned that, on top of the Brown harassment and the bloody fantasies and plans he described in his web journal, there was solid evidence that this Harris miscreant was building pipe bombs. They drew up an affidavit requesting that a search warrant be executed on his parents’ house.

But the affidavit somehow never left the sheriff’s department. A judge never saw it. A search warrant was never issued or executed. Again, this happened more than a year before the massacre Harris and Klebold eventually committed. Then, in the days after the massacre, the sheriff’s department learned they already had an old and highly suggestive file on one of the killers, now dead, and that they’d failed to request the search warrant for which they had the affidavit. That is, they could and should have prevented the massacre, and they failed. At this point, with federal agents poking around everywhere, the sheriff and the local prosecutor did what many low-level politicians would do in such a situation. They hid the file and lied about it.

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Such notes of mischance and ineptitude have become a leitmotif of school-shooting narratives. When they emerge, as they always seem to, they inspire the mix of agony and resolve carried in the phrase if only. If only the police had better procedures. If only they’d followed the good procedures they actually have. If only the parents had just paid attention. There’s always something that might have been done differently. Next time we will do the thing that, inconceivably, we failed to do this time.

After Columbine, law enforcement agencies throughout the US resolved to implement one huge lesson from the police response: stop treating school-shootings as hostage situations, in which police set up a perimeter and wait to negotiate with the shooters. Assume there is no negotiating, only murder, and storm the building! Engage the shooter! This was thought to have become the standard for active-shooter incidents in American law enforcement. But when, 19 years after Columbine, a disturbed kid began shooting up a school in Parkland, Florida, the school’s armed “resource officer” named Scot Peterson put himself in a safe position and waited for more cops to arrive.

This cop, a deputy in the local sheriff’s department, would be vilified for his cowardice and then prosecuted for neglecting his duty; but when his fellow deputies arrived, they also set up a perimeter and waited as the shooter claimed his 17 victims, instead of engaging him. When police from a neighboring jurisdiction arrived, they did finally storm the building and engage the shooter. The difference between two groups of officers, as the Atlantic’s Jamie Thompson outlines in a remarkable article, was their training. The second group had received sound, clear training on quickly engaging active shooters. The first group, the sheriff’s department to which the vilified school cop belonged, had received vague, ambiguous training that seemed to tell officers to wait for a bigger team to arrive.

Three years after the Parkland shooting, the elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, featured an even more paralytic response from local police, who waited outside the school for 70 minutes as the gunman finished killing his 19 young victims — after which came another agonised phase in which we looked to the heavens and said: If only. These events, mass killings of schoolchildren, are so unbearable that our psychological response when they happen is to undo them in our minds, to transport ourselves to the alternative timeline on which they didn’t happen. Then we can tell ourselves what actually happened was unnatural, owing to that one deviant thing — the uncanny failure to submit an affidavit, the singular cowardice of a sheriff’s deputy, the tragic loophole in the system for preventing schizophrenics from having guns, the criminal negligence of those oddball parents, who should have snooped on their psychopathic son way more than they did, who should have known their son was a psychopath in the first place, because we would have known. Any normal person would have known.

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And our legal and policy responses to these tragedies express, more or less directly, this need to undo them, fancifully and retroactively — sometimes through policies that are concretely illiberal and sadly unrealistic, sometimes through legal actions that are obvious acts of displacement and scapegoating, such as prosecuting Deputy Scot Peterson for doing what he was trained to do, because we can’t undo the outrages he was merely, haplessly present for.

Recently, in Michigan, a mother and father were convicted of negligent homicide for failing to prevent their teenage son from bringing a gun to his high school and murdering four of his fellow students. This conviction does not mean “[p]arents are… expected to be psychic”, the trial judge said. Rather, apparently, they should just know in advance if their child is going to bring one of their guns to school and murder four people. After all, mere days before his crime, these parents outrageously took their child to a gun range, when a “reasonable” parent, in the view of the court, would have known he might be on the verge of murdering people. One legal commentator captured this theory of responsibility in revealing terms. The parents’ conviction, he said, “is a shot across the bow to all parents, to all people who have firearms in their house, to keep them locked up, if they could be in the hands of the wrong people”. Parents don’t have to refrain having guns and teenage children in the same house, in this formulation, or even keep their guns locked up as a rule. They just have to lock up their guns “if they could be in the hands of the wrong people”.

This is a very American hedge. The problem isn’t guns being everywhere, or kids having guns. Across America kids have guns, even congressmen’s kids. The problem is the wrong people having guns. How do all those parents know they aren’t raising the wrong people? How do those congressmen know? The only real confirmation your kid is one of the wrong people is when he goes to his school with some of your guns and murders a bunch of other kids. Because access to lethal firepower is more-or-less universal in America, the contingencies of life — the fallible insight and foresight of parents, their inconstancy in keeping their millions of guns locked up, the leaky procedures of exurban bureaucracies, the variable quality of 18,000 separate police agencies, the hidden-ness and unpredictability of people’s thoughts and desires — sometimes reveal themselves in the sickening manner of mass shootings. America can’t do anything about the guns, and so it tries to stamp out the contingency. And if we can’t create a plausible fantasy of stamping it out, we mould it into an effigy — parent-shaped or deputy-shaped — and bring criminal charges against it.

The availability of so many high-capacity firearms, and the self-fuelling sequence by which the evil and unbalanced inspire each other to stage new spectacles of violence, has placed us in a bizarre condition — a mix of archaic thralldom before unruly fate and a very modern, and latently totalitarian, urge to master the smallest and blurriest variables of human action with state power. To the problem of school shootings and other gun massacres we direct an attitude of tribal magic, and also an ambition for total administration and surveillance informed by the latest teachings and terminology of mental science. As I noted above, it’s hard not to view figures like Deputy Scot Peterson and the Michigan parents as sacrificial tokens, ritual offerings to the implacable god of crazed gunmen. And it’s hard to miss the strangeness of Republican politicians, and other small-government conservatives and libertarians, arguing for comprehensive national monitoring of everyone’s mental health, so that some opaque procedure of psychological bureaucracy can determine who’s not sane enough to exercise what they also say is a fundamental right.

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In other words, the distinctively American understanding in which unrestrained ownership of and commerce in firearms is a non-negotiable component of political liberty in its very essence has been revealed as a strange bargain, fraught with self-contradiction. For us, the prerogative of owning and bearing arms is a foundation of citizenship in a free republic, something guarded with manly vigilance by our proudly armed yeomanry as they bear the standard against political tyranny, and also we might need the government to monitor our brains to keep us from going crazy and shooting up a school.

It may derive from convenient hindsight, gained from Columbine and its progeny, along with my time living in several American cities where gun-death is its own social system, but I think this bargain is a fundamentally bad one. The theory of citizenship that underlies American gun rights is bad political theory. In the American ideology of guns, uninfringed gun rights belong to a maximalist notion of political liberty. But our wide and unrestrained distribution of guns directly and indirectly limits civic and political freedom far more than even robust gun restrictions would. In encounters with our local agents of sovereign authority, police officers, we citizens must perform an elaborate kabuki of submissiveness and harmlessness, because the police are, understandably, a little freaked out, pretty much all the time, at the possibility that the person they’re dealing with is carrying one or more of America’s half-billion guns. That we accept this obligation to grovel before the sovereign’s men as totally natural and not at all humiliating is a symptom of the ideological numbing induced by our gun absolutism, our psychic need to cope with its self-contradictions. It may happen one day that the police, not knowing what you’re up to and nervous about getting shot, will scream at you, “Get on your knees!” and at that moment you’ll know you can’t refuse or even protest, even a little, as a citizen of a free republic. You’ll just have to get on your knees.

If you understand the possession of firearms as a kind of executive power, the ability of one will to coerce another, then you’re forced into an uneasy realisation as an American. For us, executive power is in fact all around us, all the time, requiring prudence and deference in our everyday interactions, constraints on what we do and when, and — if the wrong dudes roll up on you — absolute submission, as of a subject to his king. When the wrong dudes rolled up on a friend recently, directly across the street from my house, and one of them let an arm fall out his open window so that my friend could see the pistol attached to the hand, there was only one thing for my friend to do, pull his phone and wallet from his pockets and hand them over. From their stolen Volkswagen in that moment, these dudes wielded sovereign power, and he was their subject. This is a lesson about the political dimension of crime, the retail tyranny of forceful acts of taking, that the progressives who oversee our permissive regime of law enforcement, and who view criminals as victims of invisible structures rather than as agents using arbitrary executive force to coerce their fellow citizens, could stand to learn as well.

My friend is a mellow guy, but I’m not. He took being the victim of a sidewalk hold-up in stride, glad to have escaped unshot from his encounter with armed lowlifes. But I seethed on his behalf, and my anger was a citizen’s anger. The dudes in that Volkswagen, in using an armed threat to steal his property, had violated his rights and, in forcing his submission, insulted his dignity as a person and citizen. My fantasies about chasing down that car and, yes, using the fantasy gun I magically had, retrieving the stolen wallet and phone and, in some of the angrier iterations, shooting those motherfuckers in the head as I did it, were those of a citizen wanting redress against an unjust exercise of arbitrary power. Of course those were just fantasies. There was no redress. He just had to take it. When my turn comes, I’ll just have to hide my citizen’s anger and take it as well.

In another recent local incident, a man walked onto his porch late at night to confront two guys trying steal his car, to raise an objection as the legal owner of the car, and they each pulled out a gun and began shooting at him. He just opened his mouth to protest an act of arbitrary taking by armed agents of a hostile political will — “What are you doing?” he said — and they made him know, by firing 30 rounds in his direction, somehow missing him on the porch and barely missing his daughter in her bed, that his protests were not allowed in the autocratic regime they’d set up on his property. These are real insults to the liberty of citizens, real acts of tyranny, frightening and sometimes lethal and undeniably political, that happen every day in this country.

I’m not even anti-gun, in any total sense. Some of my siblings and some of my best friends own guns. I think hunters should be able to own guns. I don’t think law-abiding citizens should be prevented from owning a gun to protect their homes. But, as a precept of political theory, the idea that it’s some kind of anti-republican tyranny for the central government, the actual sovereign, to exercise any control over the weapons of executive power — how powerful they are, how they fire, how many of them circulate in society — strikes me as insane.

It shows symptoms of insanity as political practice as well. You note these symptoms in the things politicians say when, after the newest Columbine, they’re forced by their absolutist gun ideology to finger a culprit that isn’t guns. After several school shootings, pro-gun activists and politicians have said that classroom teachers should carry guns. After the Uvalde massacre, Texas senator Ted Cruz said the problem was that schools have too many doors. After the Sandy Hook massacre, where 20 first graders and six adults were murdered by a delusional man, Wayne LaPierre, head of the National Rifle Association and purported opponent of tyranny and champion of limited government, decried the lack of “a national database of the mentally ill”.

But my favourite example of this phenomenon, in which the psychic prohibition on acknowledging the obvious importance of guns in America’s massacre problem yields a clearly compensatory sort of babbling nonsense, is when then-president Donald Trump faced questions about a hideous church massacre in Texas in 2017. “I think mental health is your problem here,” he said. “We have a lot of mental health problems in our country, as do other countries. But this isn’t a guns situation… This is a mental health problem at the highest level.”

We can leave aside Trump’s tacit concession about guns here, what the mental health problem we share with “other countries” says about the massacre problem they don’t share with us. Instead, we can just focus on the fact that it’s Donald Trump at the mic, telling us we need to get serious about mental health in this country, that the root cause of a grave public policy problem is something to be tackled not by the police, or by Donald Trump’s best guys, but by psychotherapists. To me he doesn’t sound entirely well in this moment. He doesn’t — as we sometimes say of people who are struggling emotionally or psychologically — sound like himself.

But Shanahan is only one of several wealthy Silicon Valley insiders to support Kennedy. Last June, when Kennedy was still a member of the Democratic Party, Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey (net worth: $4.9 billion) gave his endorsement, praising him for having “no fear in exploring topics that are a little bit controversial”. Meanwhile the venture capitalists David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya have also contributed to RFK’s campaign, while Elon Musk hosted Kennedy for a two-and-a-half-hour long conversation on Twitter last year.

This is a far cry from the heady days of the Obama presidency, when there was a revolving door between tech firms and the administration. I still remember the Google all-hands meeting that was leaked online in the aftermath of Trump election, where the company’s CFO cried as Brin explained to his employees that some people were just “low information voters”. And although the relationship between tech firms and the Democrats has grown more strained since those days, most political donations continue to go in one direction, while those who are Kennedy curious are denounced as reactionaries, and constantly reminded of his anti-vaccine stance and conspiratorial statements .

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But although Silicon Valley may have been largely absorbed into a monolithic political orthodoxy, this has distracted us from the quintessential strangeness of the region — that for decades it was a place where you could really let your freak flag fly. Far from an aberration, in many ways RFK constitutes the ideal Silicon Candidate, personifying a turbulence and weirdness that goes back to the very dawn of the valley.

The USA’s technology industry was not originally centred on the west coast. UNIVAC, the first commercial computer was developed in the east, while IBM, dominant in the industry for many decades, was (and is) headquartered in New York state. The man who put the “silicon” in Silicon Valley was William Shockley, one of the inventors of the transistor. Shockley founded his own company in Mountain View in the mid-Fifties, attracting some of the best and brightest to move there; when they discovered he was a terrible manager, some went on to start their own companies. But besides being a brilliant scientist, Shockley was  also a rampant racist and enthusiastic eugenicist decades after such ideas were regarded as being beyond the pale. While the battle for civil rights was raging, he argued for the sterilisation of black women, and in his 70s donated his sperm to a depository of semen collected from Nobel Prize winners. When interviewed by Playboy he complained that his children represented a “very significant regression” due to the lower intellectual capabilities of their mother.

Compared to the positions held by the father of Silicon Valley, then, RFK’s much criticised anti-vaccine stance is exceedingly mild as far as controversial ideas go. Meanwhile, as much as he is attacked by the media and members of his former party, it was not so long ago that some progressives didn’t mind a bit of anti-vax rhetoric. The Huffington Post was home to many articles by vaccine sceptics (including RFK himself) until they were memory-holed during the pandemic. Similarly, one of the great idols of Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, was sufficiently doubtful about medical science that when he  was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he opted to treat it with acupuncture, a lot of fruit juice and “spiritual consultations”. And a critical attitude towards multinational pharmaceutical companies would have been completely uncontroversial on the Left until a few short years ago. We should not be surprised therefore if some in Silicon Valley aren’t too bothered about RFK’s attitude towards vaccines.

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But there are plenty of other reasons why Kennedy might appeal to some of the more unorthodox thinkers in Silicon Valley. Although Jack Dorsey ended his tenure at Twitter by banning Trump from the platform, it should nevertheless be remembered that he is a strange guy with a big beard and a collection of psychedelic T-shirts who celebrated his 42nd birthday by going to Myanmar to meditate for 17 hours a day. Dorsey has been searching for alternatives to the dreary offerings of establishment Democrats for years, having previously donated money to the apostates Andrew Yang and Tulsi Gabbard. He is also a cryptocurrency enthusiast, and was likely impressed by the keynote speech RFK delivered at a Bitcoin conference in Miami last year, in which he described it as “the perfect base currency.”

David Sacks, meanwhile, is part of the so-called “PayPal mafia” that includes Silicon Valley dissidents Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Sacks has never been shy about holding dissenting opinions to the tech mainstream. At the tender age of 23 he co-authored with Thiel a book entitled The Diversity Myth, where he argued that many academic and cultural institutions were using “diversity” as cover for repression and a general stifling of intellectual culture. Like RFK, he is a strong advocate for free speech, and sceptical of the war on Ukraine. Although both positions are now supposed to be Right-wing, it was of course completely standard on the Left to be anti-war and pro-freedom of expression until very recently. And as for Chamath Palihapitiya  (who co-hosts a podcast with Sacks) he has previously donated a lot of money to the Democratic Party, but has also thrown a few dollars Ted Cruz’s way and supported Michael Bloomberg for president, while also hosting a fundraiser for Vivek Ramaswamy. Clearly this is a man no longer wedded to the status quo, but open to alternatives.

Of course, RFK isn’t going to win, so it might seem strange that a bunch of canny venture capitalists would throw away so much money on a lost cause. But wealthy people throw money away all the time, and for much less entertaining reasons. Nikki Haley burned enormous amounts of donor cash as she waged her futile campaign against Donald Trump, while in the US it is considered entirely upstanding for a rich person to donate huge sums of money to already extremely wealthy institutions such as Harvard or Yale. And what is a couple of million dollars compared to the strange phenomenon witnessed in the UK, whereby people dedicate their entire lives to supporting a political party that hasn’t won a majority at an election in over a century? Who knows what lurks in the human heart — maybe David Steel and Paddy Ashdown and Charles Kennedy all believed that they would pull off a revolution. Perhaps Nicole Shanahan believes that with the Kennedy name and her cash, they may be able to beat the system.

But equally perhaps it’s not about winning at all. RFK is sometimes described as a “chaos agent” and much of the bitterness aimed at him is fuelled by the fear that he will take away enough of Biden’s vote to let Trump back in. But rather than anything quite so anarchic, he represents a value that was once regarded as the highest virtue in Silicon Valley: disruption. In our newly tech-pessimist era, the internet is now awash in articles denouncing this as a delusional buzzword at best and dangerous at worst. But there was a time not so long ago when venture capitalists and their media stenographers were constantly looking for the visionary with the radical idea that would upend old ways of doing things. AirBnB, Uber, WeWork were all once feted as disruptors to the markets they entered (some admittedly more successful than others).

From one angle this is exactly what RFK looks like: he has liberated  himself from the dreary groupthink of his party, even the confines of his family. He says what he thinks and has created a platform with appeal to some on the Right, some on the Left and some who refuse to identify with either side. But beyond that, he is different from a conventional disruptor because there is no gamble involved: whatever capital is expended on him will definitely go up in smoke. In which case, the strategy must be to expand the realm of what it is possible to say, and to give a bloody nose to a party run by a detached elite that has embraced a whole new set of shibboleths, and yet which still demands fealty. Or maybe it doesn’t matter too much what RFK stands for, and when billionaires donate to his campaign it is fundamentally an existential act, burning money as a giant F.U. to people they despise. And if you can afford to do it, then is it really such terrible value for money?

How would this come about? The Constitution requires that a victorious president wins at least 270 Electoral College votes, which they must gather from some combination of the 50 states. It now looks possible that neither mainstream candidate will manage that. For a start, the “Never Trump” and “Never Biden” voters are on the rise. Americans are now keen to explore almost any alternative, and independents are offering one in the form of the “No Labels” movement as well as Robert Kennedy Jr’s campaign. Both have received relatively little coverage so far, partially because of the juggernaut status of the Democratic Party and the GOP, but also because third-party candidates rarely do well in American elections. But, given the staggering sense of frustration nationwide with Biden and Trump and the absence of a unifying figure, an independent candidate could have a historic opportunity.

If neither Biden nor Trump reaches the required 270 Electoral College votes, the Constitution dictates that the voting shifts into a “contingent election”. This means that the incoming House of Representatives will decide the winner based on whoever can form a coalition of red and blue states and win 26 of them first. The Senate would select the vice president. Given that most Republican or Democrat politicians are hardly able to look at each other, let alone agree any deals, it seems unlikely Biden or Trump could forge that coalition. But Kennedy or the as-yet-unnamed No Labels candidate, who actively cultivate the idea of returning to centrist bipartisan solutions, potentially could, should the presidency slip into the arcana of America’s 18th-century constitutional schematics.

This would represent a seismic rupture in American political culture, breaking the rigor mortis on Left and Right, possibly opening the door to European-style coalition politics and spelling the end of the current party system. Such changes may seem impossible. But there is considerable precedent in American history for such creative destruction. We forget that we are currently on our sixth iteration of the party system, which began in the Seventies with the demise of the New Deal era and the realignment of the Democratic and Republican vote. And before that, earlier in the 20th and 19th centuries, Progressives, Copperheads, Whigs and Federalists fought over American government, flourishing and vanishing with a dynamism unimaginable in the days of our sclerotic party system. Political parties can and do disappear in America.

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That said, the transition to a seventh party system would be nothing short of a revolution, and a potentially violent one. There would be a large gap between the election results in November 2024 and any contingent election, which only takes place after the new House members have sworn their oaths of office in the following January. That two-month void could descend into chaos, with contested results, claims of unreliable ballot systems, and wild threats made by reckless politicians. All this could make the hanging chads fiasco of the 2000 election, or even the riot of January 6, 2021, look like child’s play in comparison.

And yet such a scenario looms upon us, and the maths is clear. An independent candidate doesn’t have to win 270 Electoral College votes to win. They need only deny 37 votes to Biden and potentially even fewer to Trump. That would open the door to a contingent election. This would require hitting both Trump and Biden in their most vulnerable states, where each only had extremely thin margins last time around. But these tend to be the places that would welcome a moderating centrist voice, someone able to speak to the concerns of Left and Right.

Imagine if Kennedy were to win 45 Electoral College votes, just as George Wallace managed in 1968. This is conceivable given that polls show that a bare 27% of Americans now identify as either Republican or Democrat, and some polls show that 49% of Americans already identify as independent. It matters then that Kennedy looks set to announce that he is aligning his “We the People Party” with the Libertarian Party. That will automatically put him on the ballot in every state. He already leads the under-35 demographic, and attracts voters equally from Left and Right. His fundraising looks as strong as Barack Obama’s during his first presidential run.

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The alternative, No Labels, has a PAC to raise money, but no actual candidate at present, so it’s hard to judge what impact they will ultimately have. But they describe their mission as supporting centrism and bipartisanship through what they call the “commonsense majority”. And it is telling that Americans are drawn to such a vague promise even without a personality to pin it upon. Given sufficient momentum, and a measure of luck, either Kennedy or a No Labels candidate could perform well enough to deprive Trump and Biden of the prize, triggering a contingent election. Though unheard of in modern times, contingent elections have happened before: in 1801, 1825 and 1837. After all, it’s how Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams each became president and Richard Mentor Johnson became vice president. While it would be a shock to see this antiquated procedure revived, the independent movements of 2024 already far exceed the more recent third-party challengers seen in 1912, 1968 and 1992.

Could America elect a long-shot outsider? It’s not unlikely, because they usually do. The last three decades of American political history is a catalogue of unlikely upstarts turned victorious presidents. In 1990, Bill Clinton was a relatively anonymous state governor and President George H.W. Bush was thought to be unassailable. No Democrat dared run against him. But then Bush stumbled and Clinton was suddenly in. George W. Bush also defied the odds: compared to the “Shrub” (as he was known), his brother Jeb was seen as the shoe-in. Next up, a young senator from Chicago called Obama surprisingly beat Hillary Clinton and then the well-known establishment candidates John McCain and Mitt Romney. Then came Trump. Even he was surprised by his win. In American politics, upset has become the rule.

No-one is talking about these possibilities yet. Instead, we are still analysing 2024 through the frameworks of 2020 and 2016. We love predicting the future by looking in the rear-view mirror. But there is a better way to understand what’s happening. Technology plays a huge role in defining the presidency. How we observe the race determines who will win. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were the last presidents to win on TV. Obama won on YouTube at a time when few understood what the website could do. Trump mobilised a Twitter campaign when the platform was still a novelty to most Americans. Today, the media battleground has shifted once again, with most younger voters no longer watching mainstream media and instead relying on alternative platforms such as Joe Rogan. His podcast interview with Kennedy was seen live by 30 million people, dwarfing mainstream audiences. By comparison, less than 10 million people watched the second Republican debate on TV. We are witnessing the first podcast presidency, with Instagram in a supporting role. These are the best ways to follow this race.

Even if victory eludes them, there are other intriguing possibilities for these independent candidates. Trump and Kennedy are remarkably close on policy. Both are hostile to Washington; both want to stop the forever wars. Both support entrepreneurs and want to dismantle the corporate capture of the regulatory process. Both want to move power from Washington back to the states on all issues, including the biggest social issue of this election, which is abortion rights. They have some differences: Kennedy is a committed environmentalist while Trump leads the “drill, baby, drill” movement. But Kennedy already claims that Trump requested that he run alongside him. If Trump wins, it’s possible that he’d bring Kennedy into his administration, possibly to spearhead the attack on the regulatory process, a subject that is so detailed that Trump has little interest in it. Similarly, if Kennedy were to win a contingent election, he knows Trump supporters would challenge the legitimacy of his presidential mandate. A simple solution would be to invite Trump into the government, taking Trump up on his boast that he could “fix Ukraine in a day” and let him handle that ugly foreign policy issue.

As two ancient politicians arrogantly rumble their way to the presidential candidacy, American politics can seem more narrow and unimaginative than ever. But perhaps all the creative political energy is taking place on the fringes. Perhaps this year the date November 5 will gain a new moniker: are Americans quietly planning an “Independents’ Day”?

Perhaps these developments merely represent the swinging of the culture war pendulum back from the “Great Awokening” of 2020. But it’s worth exploring another possibility: that something larger is happening, outside the culture wars, motivating shifts in attitudes beyond the usual conservative audiences. It should not be forgotten that the incident precipitating the latest round of campus controversies — Hamas’s October 7 attack against Israel — was a foreign policy issue. In the United States, Israel-Palestine tends to be treated almost entirely as a figment of the domestic culture war, as has been in this case. But the latest round of violence takes place in a context very different from that of the recent past: America no longer has unquestioned military supremacy, primarily because of its declining industrial base. The Russia-Ukraine war has now lasted for two years, and replenishing US ammunition stockpiles used in that theatre could take up to seven. Estimates suggest that, in a military conflict with China, the United States would be out of critical ammunition in just a week. China built 21 submarines last year; the United States struggles to build more than one. In sum, America is not prepared for a major conflict anywhere, and in the face of coordinated attacks from Russia, China, and Iran and its proxies, US and allied forces could quickly run out of materiel.

These statistics may seem far afield from campus politics. But it is worth recalling that foreign policy issues — the Cold War battle for technological supremacy against the Soviet Union — were critical in shaping American higher education as we know it today. Now that great power competition has re-emerged, academic culture wars may take on new dimensions. This historical perspective might also offer some insights on reforming educational institutions, a revolution extending well beyond culture war sniping on DEI, and into the entirety of the American political economy.

The Second World War and the Cold War shaped American education in profound ways, including in its most controversial and contradictory social valences — meritocracy and affirmative action. The need to educate the best and brightest from all backgrounds to ensure technological leadership featured prominently in Vannevar Bush’s Science, The Endless Frontier, the 1945 report which laid the foundations of the modern American research system, giving rise to institutions such as the National Science Foundation and similar bodies. Bush placed universities at the centre of national technology research, called for increasing their funding, and argued: “If ability, and not the circumstance of family fortune, is made to determine who shall receive higher education in science, then we shall be assured of constantly improving quality at every level of scientific activity.”

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Bush’s vision would be realised in the ensuing decades. The combination of the GI Bill of 1944 (which covered tuition for veterans), and the post-Sputnik National Defense Education Act of 1958 greatly expanded attendance at and funding for colleges and universities. And although the SAT originated in the Thirties under Harvard president James Conant, standardised testing became increasingly prevalent as higher education was “democratised” and “rationalised” during the Cold War. Thus, driven in large part by great power competition, university education went from a narrow, elitist pursuit — led by the Ivy League and “Saint Grottlesex” feeder schools, along with regional replications — to a national and meritocratic endeavour. In 1940, around 5% of the US population had college degrees; that number has increased in every decade since and approaches 40% today. Meanwhile, Cold War competition also played a role in the advent of affirmative action, which has since evolved into “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programmes and the broader phenomenon of “wokeness”. Although foreign policy was certainly not the primary motivation of civil rights legislation, national security arguments were frequently used to justify it. Conservatives tend to locate the origins of wokeness in the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, while progressives focus on centuries-old legacies of racism, as in the “1619 Project”. But perhaps neither side has given sufficient attention to the role of great power competition in the mid-20th century.

To summarise a well-known history, segregation quickly became an international problem in the Cold War context. Soviet propaganda exploited the persistence of Jim Crow among audiences in the Global South, which glaringly undermined America’s own efforts to present an image of freedom, opportunity for all, and human rights. For hawkish liberals, civil rights was very much a foreign policy issue. Furthermore, although the origins of affirmative action are controversial — there is still some debate over what President Lyndon Johnson meant by the phrase — administrations of both parties highlighted such policies for international audiences when responding to the Soviets.

To some extent, then, the modern American education system was built to defeat the Soviet Union, both in terms of science and technology leadership as well as moral authority. It is also not surprising that both meritocratic education and affirmative action would drift from their original intentions as the Cold War faded into the “end of history”.

In the decades since Vannevar Bush’s report, the idea of meritocratic universities, open to all, gradually metamorphosed into “college for all”, and even “Yale or jail”. In light of America’s deeply entrenched small-d democratic passions, it was perhaps inevitable that the notion of universities being open to anyone with ability would eventually come to mean that everyone should attend one. If college is open to anyone with ability, after all, then anyone who does not go to college must be lazy or an imbecile. So American primary and secondary education became explicitly oriented around “preparing students for college”, meaning a four-year liberal arts degree, which came to be seen as essential for simply entering the middle class. Vocational tracks were stigmatised as casting children into intellectual and professional oblivion — and, besides, why go to “trade school” when the trades were in decline?

The neoliberal turn further entrenched the “college for all” mentality. The Chicago school of economics notion of “human capital”, which conceptualised training as a form of input capital, gained prevalence as deindustrialisation progressed. In theory, human capital simply means that the knowledge, skills, and other attributes of workers have economic value. In practice, it promised that education could substitute for physical and investment capital, and conveniently rationalised the notion that “more education” would address the challenges related to deindustrialisation and the “fissuring” of the US economy (and seemingly just every other economic problem). For various reasons, politicians and business leaders on both Left and Right embraced the sectoral shift away from capital intensive “Fordist” production in the late-20th century. The story that they sold to voters — and told themselves — was that, although nothing could or would be done to “bring the factories back”, the government would support more education for “the jobs of the future”. Americans would do the brainwork in the new “information economy”, while “commodity production” was offshored. In this paradigm, of course, the apparent value of university education only increases.

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Unfortunately, many of these illusions have not survived contact with reality. The “information economy” jobs of the future never materialised at the levels promised. The tech industry, relative to its profits and market capitalisation, employs relatively few people — unless one counts driving an Uber — and has delivered notoriously underwhelming productivity gains. Perhaps simply by the logic of supply and demand, the value of college degrees appears to decline as they become more common. While still significant, the economic advantages of a college education have fallen over time, even as student loan debt has exploded. Furthermore, the record of universities — fundamentally medieval institutions — at preparing students for the workforce is questionable at best. Increasing university enrolment has not always meant that more students were meeting higher standards, but rather that academic rigor and quality were being sacrificed to accommodate more tuition-payers. At any rate, it would be hard to argue that the quality of American intellectual life has improved with the expansion of university education. Instead, the entire college apparatus has become a bloated system that seems to badly misallocate resources while heightening inequality. Meanwhile, the original objective for expanding the universities — competition with the Soviet Union — disappeared during the end of history.

The affirmative action component of education, likewise, quickly evolved beyond its original justifications. Initially conceived as an understandable if somewhat ham-fisted attempt to rectify legacies of slavery and segregation, the intended beneficiaries were African American descendants of slaves. This group was essentially the entirety of the black population in the United States in the Sixties, which was then a little over 10% of the total US population. But around the time of major civil rights legislation, new immigration laws were also passed, dramatically expanding immigration. The non-Hispanic-white share of the population fell from about 85% in the Sixties to 58% today (among American children, the share is now less than half). The black population has also shifted, including many African immigrants who were never victims of slavery or segregation; today, Nigerian immigrants have above-median earnings. Nevertheless, affirmative action continued to expand along with the non-white population: from a relatively targeted programme aimed at about 10% of Americans, who had experienced state discrimination in the immediate past, it became an elaborate system for managing “diversity” in an increasingly “majority-minority” country. As globalisation gained momentum, foreign students could also benefit from simplistic racial categorisation, with the added benefit, for universities, that many paid full tuition.

Other emanations from civil rights had unexpected effects on education. The Supreme Court decision Griggs v. Duke Power Co., known mostly for establishing that seemingly neutral employment practices could be in violation of the Civil Rights Act if they resulted in a “disparate impact”, directly concerned employment testing. With the decline of such testing, employers increasingly turned to college degrees (and the relative ranking of universities) as indicators of graduate ability. This solidified the economic importance of the university system and its hierarchies. Meanwhile, other court decisions (and some state referenda) barred hard racial quotas and other forms of affirmative action. Universities did not abandon these programmes, however, but pursued them through ever-more opaque methods (applicants were credited for “overcoming adversity”, or universities were allowed to consider the effects of diversity on the student body). The result was that the substance of the “diversity” regime remained intact, but its logic appeared increasingly obscure and arbitrary.

Decades of mission drift have thus left universities in an impossible position. On the one hand, they function as the main sorting mechanisms for employers at the high end of the economy. On the other, they are supposed to be the main sources of “human capital” for all of society, saving the middle class through “more education”. They also retain, at least in theory, the goal of advancing science and technology, and have added functions around applied, corporate-funded research with the disappearance of the large corporate labs (e.g. Bell Labs). Some consider themselves start-up incubators as well. At the same time, they have appointed themselves to manage the diversity of an increasingly fractured populace, even though they cannot explicitly articulate or openly pursue that purpose. It is probably not a coincidence that wokeness erupted amid this confusion, and after the original rationale for meritocracy — great power competition — seemed to have vanished. To be charitable to academia, one could argue that society expects far too much from universities today, and it is little wonder that they seem to be performing worse and worse at each task.

In light of this history, the reform proposals of both anti-woke liberal and conservative critics seem inadequate. Even if this provisional anti-woke alliance can rein in progressive excesses, the deeper confusion surrounding the universities’ purpose cannot be resolved entirely on the culture war battlefield — or even by reforms limited to the universities themselves.

Harvard professor Steven Pinker, a prominent representative of the liberal camp, illustrates the limitations of the liberal perspective in a tweet proposing five reforms. Some of his recommendations, such as bolstering free speech policies by prohibiting forceful takeovers of buildings and interruptions of lectures, seem like basic common sense. Others, such as disempowering DEI bureaucrats, should be. But two of them are inherently in tension: discouraging the groupthink associated with intellectual “monocultures” will at least occasionally require abandoning his call for institutional political neutrality. Left to its own devices, the Harvard faculty will almost certainly remain a political monoculture, as it already is. To remedy this, Harvard’s administration would have to undertake some direct or indirect affirmative action for conservatives. The question of ideological diversity, then, seems to recapitulate the liberal dilemma over racial diversity. Is actively promoting diversity merely levelling the playing field, or benefiting the whole university community through exposure to under-represented viewpoints? Or is it just unfair discrimination, enforced by, in Pinker’s words, “bureaucrats responsible to no one”?

At the level of intellectual diversity, discouraging monocultures becomes even more complicated. There are no phrenologists at Harvard, for example, and few, if any, climate sceptics, creation scientists, or “human biodiversity” scholars, not to mention orthodox Freudian psychoanalysts or Marxist economists. Should the administration intervene to employ professors with these views? The faculty would doubtless say that the science is settled on these topics, and inviting dissident voices would only promote error over truth. But who gets to decide? How does one determine which monocultures are pernicious and which ones happily represent the triumph of truth over falsehood. Liberals do not really have an answer, which is one reason why their institutions have all deteriorated in recent decades. Ultimately, liberal value neutrality is always a fiction. It may be a salutary and desirable fiction, and probably would be a beneficial one for universities to recover. But such neutrality only functions within a horizon defined by a shared purpose — its own monoculture. Vannevar Bush and the Cold War liberals had such a purpose; today’s liberals do not, or at least have not been able to articulate one.

Anti-woke conservatives, on the other hand, have a clear goal: they seek to use the universities to inculcate conservative values, whether by refashioning red-state universities, starting new ones, or other means. The problem is that this vision is too narrow; it ignores the structural sources of universities’ power and the system’s underlying problems. Although Democrats are the party of education, conservatives often have far more romantic notions of the power of universities and professors. Look no further than the common conservative critiques of wokeness, which emphasise the role of academia. Not surprisingly, then, conservatives tend to imagine that hiring more conservative professors is the main thing required to reshape American culture.

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In reality, however, most evidence suggests that professors have relatively little influence on students’ ideologies, and there is little reason to think that more conservative faculty or academic institutions would make much of a difference beyond the campus. It is worth recalling that conservative colleges already exist, such as Hillsdale College, and there are more outside-funded conservative student organisations operating at, say, Harvard today than there were 20 years ago. Yet while Hillsdale is important to conservatives, and its students are well-represented among congressional staff, the brutal fact is that its influence on larger elite opinion is negligible. Likewise, while conservative campus organisations may be important nodes of personal networking, they obviously have not done much to change the trajectory of elite universities.

Conservatives’ inveterate idealism tends to blind them to the real functions and sources of the power of elite universities. The status of top institutions is not derived from their stellar humanities departments or pedagogical commitment, but rather from the signalling value of their credentials, the wealth of their alumni networks, and their relative importance to corporate and government research apparatuses. Everything else is marketing. Thus, changing university culture without changing any of the system’s underlying dynamics, which seems to be the current conservative approach, seems unlikely to succeed. Moreover, even if such an approach were to succeed, it would offer little to those who are not cultural conservatives: substituting identitarian progressivism with Straussian political theory or some other conservative hobbyhorse would do little to create a better prepared workforce or advance science and technology.

Instead of an exclusive focus on superficial culture war issues, educational reformers today should recall the last major, intentional reorganisation of the American university system that occurred during the Cold War. We must be cognisant of how that legacy has contributed to current problems, but should also recognise its value. Reforms that meet the needs of great-power competition are more likely to be far-reaching and enduring than endless battles over the universities’ symbolic orientation.

The primary difference between then and now involves the shifting demands of great-power competition. After the Second World War, US manufacturing dominated the world, but American primary research and basic science needed to be strengthened. The reforms of Vannevar Bush and the post-Sputnik legislation thus increased the funding for and importance of universities. Today, however, the situation is essentially the opposite. Basic research is still important, of course, but America’s main vulnerabilities lie in its supply chain and manufacturing dependencies on China. Its leadership in pure research is also most at risk in capital-intensive sectors that have been commercially abandoned due to foreign manufacturing subsidies, such as shipbuilding, nuclear reactor components, and perhaps even commercial aviation. Further strengthening universities will do little to address these problems; the focus should shift to other institutions.

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Americans in the mid-20th century probably could not have imagined the country’s loss of manufacturing dominance. They also underappreciated the importance of corporate labs, which Bush considered too focused on incremental improvements rather than fundamental breakthroughs. But institutions like Bell Labs — whose scientists won 10 Nobel Prizes — RCA Labs, Xerox PARC, and others made immense scientific contributions. These labs were lost in the late-20th century as a result of increasing foreign competition, the growing capital intensity of research, and shareholder demands for short-term financial returns. Universities, by default, picked up many of their functions, but university research productivity has been on a declining trajectory for decades. Instead of funnelling ever more money into dysfunctional universities, government and corporate funders should look to recreate, at some level, the major corporate labs. Such labs are better suited to work that combines innovation with production and manufacturing, and they could allow for better collaboration between multiple universities as well as researchers from corporations and start-ups. Insulating this research from faculty politics as well as undergraduate admissions and credentialing could also reduce pressures against meritocratic hiring.

The Bell Labs of 1950 is not coming back, of course, because Bell Telecom is not coming back. Large corporations are no longer incentivised to invest in quasi-independent research labs, and start-ups lack the capital for such projects. Nevertheless, government could work with the private sector to pioneer new labs and research facilities that could fill the holes left by the lost corporate labs. Another model is offered by the Broad Institute, a collaboration between Harvard and MIT, which was a leader in the development of CRISPR technology. Such institutions could be co-located with universities, and share personnel, but institutions with their own unified and coherent research missions, along with their own independent governance and funding structures — separated from undergraduate admissions and credentialing — would be an improvement over housing more programmes within already sclerotic universities.

At the same time, policymakers should continue existing efforts to reduce the importance of universities in employment credentialing. States such as Utah and Pennsylvania have already removed bachelor’s degree requirements for state government positions; hopefully other states will follow suit. Moreover, contra Griggs, direct employment testing should be encouraged to open up pathways to hiring at top-tier companies outside of elite college recruiting. Allowing five or 10 universities to be gatekeepers of the highest echelons of the U.S. economy has hardly improved “equity” and “inclusion”. If universities were less central to elite credentialing, the importance of micromanaging the “diversity” of their admissions would also decline.

Finally, instead of focusing on replacing the faculty of liberal arts institutions, or starting new ones, such as UATX, reformers should seek to build institutions that meet workforce or other practical education challenges. Elon Musk has floated the idea of starting new K-12 math and science schools, and this approach also seems more likely to succeed at the higher education level than churning out more underemployed liberal arts graduates, whether woke or anti-woke. To be sure, politicians have lavished praise and funding on community colleges and vocational training for decades, to little avail. The existing community college and apprenticeship tracks, even if some students can go on to do relatively well financially, do not offer access to prestigious professions. But a new set of applied science training institutes might have a better chance, especially if they solve an actual workforce challenge and are part of a larger ecosystem for training and credentialing outside of the universities.

On the whole, “college for all” has been a disaster economically, intellectually, and politically. Too many people, too much money, and too many research functions have been pushed into universities that have no business being there. It may have been reasonable, in the Forties and Fifties, to believe that strengthening universities was necessary to maintain America’s technological and economic leadership. But today, the opposite course is required. We need the universities to do less, not more. A common objection to this argument is that technology has become so much more complicated and specialised that more education is simply necessary. But the connection between “more education” and the “information economy” has always been overstated. One does not need a four-year degree, much less a postgraduate degree, to become skilled at “coding”. Two of America’s most successful computer technology entrepreneurs — Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg — famously dropped out of Harvard. Many successful recipients of the Thiel Fellowship intentionally avoided college.

Conservatives and liberals who remain devoted to more Romantic conceptions of the humanities will doubtless object to this ruthlessly instrumental approach to education. But breaking the university monopoly on credentialing and applied science has benefits for liberal arts purists as well. The “right-sizing” of universities would allow liberal arts colleges of various ideological orientations, whether Hillsdale or Oberlin, to compete with Harvard and Stanford on more equal footing. All of society would benefit if universities lost some of their exalted status. They are not the preservers of civilisation, guardians of truth, or reservoirs of moral purity. The more they are seen as practical institutions with practical functions, the less we need to worry about their ostensible values.

Although today’s crisis of higher education manifests primarily as another culture war battle, the issues go much deeper. Decades of institutional drift have left that system with multiple, contradictory purposes, none of which are being served effectively. If it is to be successfully reformed, American higher education must be reorganised to address the exigencies of great power competition that are emerging in the present.

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.

Unlike the two World Wars, the rival great powers are not challenging the superpower directly — at least, not yet. Instead, American hegemony is being challenged obliquely, as its rivals nibble at the edges of empire, targeting weaker client states in the confidence that the United States now possesses neither the logistical capacity nor the domestic political stability necessary to impose its order on the world. In the Nineties and 2000s, at the height of its unipolar moment, the United States made almost all the world its client state, writing cheques for their security it now struggles to cash: like bankruptcy, decline comes slowly at first, then all at once. The overriding theme of 2024 then, like 2023, will be that of imperial overstretch precipitating retreat from global dominance. From the Red Sea to the Donbas, the jungles of South America to the Far East, America’s security establishment finds itself struggling to contain local blazes that threaten to become a great conflagration.

Yet bad as things are, they could always be worse. We perhaps too easily forget that only six months ago, in the immediate wake of Prigozhin’s dramatic and unexpected rebellion, Russia’s security establishment was engaged in vigorous and public discussion over whether it was necessary to conduct a nuclear strike either in Ukraine, as a warning against the West, or against the West itself. So endemic has the sense of crisis, both globally and domestically, become that the most dangerous nuclear escalation since the Cold War went largely unremarked. We should be grateful that this moment passed, yet the fact it did pass is itself evidence of America’s weakening global position. The brief episode of nuclear anxiety came at a time when Putin’s Kremlin faced both an unprecedented internal threat and the risk of battlefield defeat, on the brink of Ukraine’s much-anticipated summer offensive. But the offensive, as we now know, faltered into a costly defeat for Ukraine, upturning the expected outcome of the war. For our now-lowered risk of nuclear war, Kyiv will pay a heavy price.

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Will Bidenism outlive Biden?

By Gary Gerstle

Like an inscrutable game of chess, the battle lines in Ukraine have barely moved this year, but expectations for the war’s outcome have been totally reversed. This time a year ago, the consensus was that the invasion was already a strategic defeat for Putin: his armies had proved unexpectedly ineffective on the battlefield, and had crumbled before Ukraine’s rapid autumn 2022 northeastern counteroffensive. Rather than breaking apart through its internal divisions, the Nato alliance had found a new sense of purpose, consolidating itself against the Russian threat and devoting vast quantities of already-existing and soon-to-be-produced materiel towards military victory. That mood of triumphalism has already passed. The promised war-winning Western increase in munitions production simply has not materialised, while Russia’s transition to a war economy, and its seizing of Western companies in response to a sanctions regime whose effects have proved the opposite to those intended, have granted Russia both renewed offensive potential and an economic boom to pay for it. The West imposed on Russia a war stimulus it should have embraced itself. It did not, and as a result this winter is a bleak one for Ukraine; but the year to come looks to be far worse.

Through 2023, Kyiv and its Western backers gambled a successful conclusion to the war on a single armoured thrust in the country’s southeast, punching through Russia’s defensive lines and threatening its hold on the Crimea and Black Sea coast, forcing a humbled Putin into peace negotiations. That gamble failed, and there is now no viable path towards the expansive definition of victory adopted by Zelenskyy at a more buoyant phase of the war. Along the northern border and behind the current lines in the East, Ukrainian forces are hurriedly digging defensive lines, hoping to blunt Russia’s resurgent offensive power in the same way Russia’s fortifications chewed up its own newly-formed and Nato-trained armoured brigades. The “mountain of steel” donated for the offensive by the West will not be repeated; the wave of enthusiastic volunteers who initially manned the lines has been replaced by increasingly unwilling conscripts, with Kyiv planning a further mobilisation of half a million men just to hold the line.

When Zelenskyy’s over-optimistic prognoses of the war’s conclusion were punctured by his military chief General Valerii Zaluzhny characterising the current state of play as a “stalemate”, it revealed growing internal political strife within the Kyiv leadership. But the hard reality is that now offensive momentum has passed to Russia, Ukraine forcing the war into a stalemate that will lead to peace negotiations looks as close to victory as will realistically be achieved. But as things stand, an increasingly confident Moscow shows no inclination towards peace talks without Ukraine making territorial and political concessions indistinguishable from surrender. That Zelenskyy’s senior advisors are floating the possibility of Putin’s sudden overthrow in Moscow as a possible path to victory shows the scale of the threat facing Kyiv. Short of a revolutionary deus ex machina in the Kremlin, the challenge for Ukraine in 2024 will be to hold its defensive lines, degrade Russia’s offensive power faster than its recruitment and industrial production can replace, and maintain the necessary political unity in Kyiv to steer the war towards the least painful conclusion possible. Of all these, perhaps the last will be the greatest challenge.

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The truth about the ethnic cleansing in Gaza

By Aris Roussinos

But as Kyiv struggles, the hegemon is already losing interest in Ukraine, distracted again by its decades-long enfeebling entanglement in the Middle East. Israel is both diplomatically and militarily dependent on the United States, but that relationship is not reflected in Netanyahu’s prosecution of his punitive war on Gaza. When US envoys beg Israel to scale down its war, Netanyahu immediately promises to intensify it. Even as American planners fret over the erosion of their precious munitions stockpiles by the Ukraine war, Israel is burning through US-donated supplies at an alarming rate. Until the US can increase its munitions production and replenish its arsenal, which may take years, every shell fired on Gaza or in eastern Ukraine weakens America’s deterrent power. The result will be the arms equivalent of the “hungry gap”, as its available military resources become increasingly unequal to its global commitments. This shortfall presents America’s rivals with a rare and unexpected window to challenge the superpower directly, in the knowledge that it will struggle to fight a high-intensity war of any great duration.

But if the logic of armaments production, as well as the diplomatic isolation and domestic outrage fuelled by the Gaza war, drives the United States to seek a swift resolution to the conflict, the logic of events leads towards escalation. The risk of the conflict widening to Lebanon has not abated — if anything, Israel appears to be straining at the leash to extend its full-scale war across its northern frontier, as thousands of Israeli civilians have fled their homes as a result of the tit-for-tat exchange of artillery fire with Hezbollah. Yet the blockade of Red Sea shipping by Yemen’s Houthi movement has shown that Western countries face direct costs for their increasingly qualified support of Israel, and that regional powers are increasingly confident in challenging the United States directly.

Having triumphantly survived a years-long war against Saudi Arabia, devastating to Yemen’s civilian population, in which Saudi forces deployed US jets, bombs and intelligence support to little battlefield effect, the risk of a short-lived American punitive bombing campaign must seem a manageable one to the Houthis. Knowing that America has no appetite for a wider conflict that will be seen both internationally and domestically as having been dragged into a war on Israel’s behalf, the Houthis now feel emboldened to attack US naval escorts directly. So politically toxic is Israel’s Gaza campaign that even America’s closest Nato allies prefer to keep their distance from American security efforts in the Red Sea, while as a result of poor procurement decisions, the US Navy is struggling to marshal the resources necessary to keep trade routes open, the basic function of a global empire. Balking at fighting Hezbollah or the Houthis directly, the prospect of a US attack on Iran, deemed an over-ambitious goal even at the height of US power, is unlikely in the extreme, which in turn feeds Tehran’s appetite for risk. Overstretched, wearing down its ships through over-deployment, and suddenly showing itself dependent on weaker, unenthused European allies to make up the numbers, in the Red Sea we are shown a glimpse of America’s naval performance in a future Pacific conflict: the results will be heartening to China.

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Ridley Scott: our Anglo-Saxon Maximus

By Aris Roussinos

Like an ailing mammoth, weakened by a succession of individual spear thrusts, the hegemon staggers bleeding across the global scene. Though stronger than any individual competitor, America is not capable of sustaining three simultaneous major conflicts against powerful regional rivals, without mobilising for a war effort unfeasible within its current political dynamics. At the height of its power, when America’s rivals were cowed and isolated, the United States assumed global security burdens that looked easily achievable at the time, while running down the industrial base necessary to sustain them. Bad choices were made, which are now difficult to undo. As a result, the United States has already shifted into a defensive mode, attempting to preserve its gains of better times against resurgent challengers, and delaying the grand-political reordering of global affairs for as long as possible. Yet unlike Russia, Iran or China, America’s democratic system incentivises short-term planning, and offers its leaders the escape route of shifting responsibility for failure to the next, rival administration. Heading towards what looks like an inevitable political defeat in 2024, the Biden administration is already drained of political authority, as tired and absent-minded as the gerontocrat at its helm.

In an earlier phase of America’s history, the looming handover of power would be expected to happen smoothly, and continuity achieved in maintaining the empire’s strategic goals. No such continuity can be expected in 2024. America’s previous two elections were marked by the most serious waves of civil disorder and political instability in decades as each party and their factions within the state bureaucracy contested each others’ legitimacy, each deploying excitable civilians radicalised by their respective court press as proxy weapons. Over the course of the coming year, America will likely be roiled by its internal political dysfunction in a way we have never yet seen, and the rest of the world will live in the shadow cast by the contested imperial throne.

Not just the fate of Ukraine but also of the Nato alliance will be determined by the battle for power in Washington. For Netanyahu, the incentive of America’s election year will be to drag the war out for another year, or widen it into a regional conflict, gambling Israel’s future security on the presumed greater indulgence of the incoming Republican administration. Similarly, for Iran, Hezbollah and the Houthis, the waning days of a cautious Biden administration desirous to avoid a Middle Eastern conflagration presents the greatest opportunity for escalation. For China, waiting in the wings to deliver the final blow, the optimum time to act will be at the moment of Washington’s greatest distraction by internal disorder: perhaps this election season will present an opportunity too rare to pass up, accelerating the timetable to seize Taiwan.

The world is living through its most dangerous moment in many decades, and the logic of events, in every theatre, leads towards further escalation over the year to come. In 2024, America’s fraught domestic interregnum will create a feedback loop with the already bloody global interregnum for the spoils of its empire. Last year was a hard year, drenched in blood and human misery through global conflict: but in retrospect, we may view it as the last golden summer of our world order, with the troubling storms still distant on the horizon. The coming year will be a historic one: we are right to dread its approach.

Except where I live. Where I live, in Alameda County, California, the DA is Pamela Price, who says she sees herself as “minister of justice”, not “prosecutor”. Fair enough. America’s DAs could maybe exhibit less single-minded focus on winning convictions (and blocking bad convictions from being overturned), and more interest in simple justice. But Price has made her sharp turn away from prosecuting criminal offenders when crime is making a sharp turn upwards, especially in the county’s largest city, Oakland. For this reason, local groups are working to force a “recall” election, hopeful that crime-weary Oaklanders will vote her out.

This recall threat may have been why she staged a public event called “Know Your District Attorney” in late November. If so, how she staged this is extremely interesting. You’d think a DA under pressure for being soft on crime would make some gesture in the other direction, reassure her constituents that she does care about rising crime and its growing population of victims. Perhaps she’d have a high-ranking police officer on stage with her, a handful of crime victims supporting her as she empathises with them, an American flag somewhere in the background, because doesn’t everyone respect the flag, deep down?

But Price had no police officer enhancing her aura of toughness, nor victims on stage with her. Crime victims were in the building, but they were in the audience, and frowning. Two of them, whom Price made a point of ignoring, wore hoodies bearing an iron-on picture of a young relative who’d been murdered. Nor was there an American flag anywhere visible, which is notable, as American police and prosecutors traditionally have a flag in the frame when they face the public. Instead, as a photographer named Thomas Hawk documented on X: “The event started out with a cultural dance presentation and then a prayer to our ancestors where for some reason a Poinsettia plant was watered in front of the crowd while we bowed our heads in prayer.” Following this, according to Hawk: “We got a panel lecture from some of the non-profits advocating for her brand of progressiveness while complaining about more moderate district attorney’s [sic] in the past.”

This latter detail calls to mind the Oakland teacher’s strike I wrote about last June, when, in a high-stakes political moment, the teachers’ union’s progressive leadership pressed a seemingly impolitic slate of extreme demands having little to do with teacher pay or working conditions. This posture sent a revealing mix of signals into the political environment — close affinity with other progressive organisations and a sort of bold indifference toward school parents, traditionally a key constituency. Like the radical leaders of the teachers’ union, Pamela Price is responding to a moment of political challenge not by looking to the broader electorate for support but by turning to the activist NGOs that sit with her on the ideological fringe.

These cases are symptoms of a political phenomenon that my fellow Californian Matthew Crawford calls the “Party State”, which he describes in a pair of typically trenchant essays from last August. California is a Party State in that it is so dominated by the Democratic Party that political actors worry less about the mass of voters, who will vote Democratic even if they’re ideologically moderate themselves, and more about nodes of influence within the Democratic Party. These tend to be highly organised and ideologically extreme NGOs, issue groups that also exert a mimetic influence on each other that makes them both more similar and more radical. This logic is doubly powerful in those parts of the state — such as Alameda County — where Democratic dominance is even more lopsided and the activist NGOs even more extreme. If officials in a city like Oakland can seem strangely indifferent towards voters, in other words, that’s because they are. Their most valued constituents aren’t voters. They’re well-organised ideologues who staff and lead activist organisations, whose most valued constituents, in turn, are each other, the bunch of them locked in a bidding war of moral purity.

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California's criminals need an audience

By Matt Feeney

The Party State is a powerful concept. It helps explain why not just conservative but moderate and merely liberal Californians sometimes feel like they’re governed by a tuned-out aristocracy of lunatics. It’s no small thing to gain some insight into such a predicament, but I’d like to examine another aspect of the theatrics of the Pamela Price event — the odd ceremony by which it was baptised, via a a potted pointsettia, from a plastic bottle.

This sort of ad hoc ceremony has become a staple of political theatre in progressive circles in North America. In less official or governmental modes it has the familiar character of the “privilege check”, people securing their authority to work or speak on sensitive matters through an appearance of grovelling. You’re only worthy of having opinions about marginalised communities if you proclaim that you’re not worthy of having opinions about marginalised communities, because of your privilege. After that, you can have opinions (but only some opinions). Likewise, you’re not worthy of living in a house or having a college or running a fancy boutique on land where native tribes once lived unless you post a sign or put some text on a website announcing this fact of pre-colonial history. This is the increasingly popular “land acknowledgment”, which imbues the privilege check with spiritual meaning through the conjuring of other people’s ancestors.

But, as the Pamela Price event shows, this progressive spiritualism shows up in governmental settings as well, and when it does it takes on political meaning that is, in fact, profound and consequential. When Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao was sworn into office in early 2023, this civic event began with an elaborate quasi-indigenous dance ceremony — conducted in Spanish — and of course a land acknowledgement. Such gestures serve the political convenience of progressive officials while conveying a novel message about the broader legitimacy of the authority they’re elected to wield.

Thao has a job that traditionally involves supporting the police in the sometimes violent and controversial conduct of their jobs. Price’s office requires her to use the testimony and evidence police officers provide her to send people to prison for committing felonies. Unavoidably, then, Price and Thao are implicated in some ugly and troubling things. Arrests involving bodily force, even when both the arrest and the force are obviously justified, are un-nerving to see. A citizen being killed by police fire, even a violent citizen holding a gun and threatening others, is a shocking event. Owing in part to the violence of American society, in part to the insular and sometimes lawless culture of American police departments, in part to questionable practices being official procedure throughout American law enforcement, American police forces bear some pretty bad reputations for some pretty good reasons. And the local jails to which DAs ask judges to remand criminal suspects, and the prisons to which they work to send criminal defendants, are typically hideous places. For these reasons, the moral and political legitimacy of the entire apparatus of public safety in America is always unresolved, and, in progressive cities with large black populations, it generally rests on a knife’s edge.

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The corruption of California

By Matt Feeney

But all DAs and mayors in American cities with volatile racial politics and serious crime face this challenge. They usually handle it by standing up after an incident of police misconduct or a controversial police shooting, often with the Chief of Police at their side and an American flag somewhere in the frame, and conceding that improving police conduct is an ongoing project while also insisting that most cops are good cops and the work they do is indispensable. But the movement Oakland’s Mayor and DA emerged from is deeply rooted in the anti-police protests of the last decade, in which police reform has been largely displaced as an organising focus by police defunding and abolition. This movement has had to invent an entirely new set of crime-fighting methods — often based on the assumption that police cause crime and that social workers, therapists, and other unarmed helpers can do a better job of preventing it. It wants nothing to do with police and policing, in other words, except to agitate against them.

And yet sometimes activists from this movement get elected as mayors and DAs of cities that have not yet conquered crime by defunding and abolishing their police departments. The police are all they have for tackling crime, and crime — especially the wild and brazen daylight crime Oakland has experienced over the last year — is one area where progressive leaders must pay almost as much attention to unhappy voters as they do to progressive NGOs. They have to support the arrest and imprisonment of some people at least, sometimes, but in doing so they are tainted by association with institutions they made their political names by execrating. To remove this taint they enact ceremonies from traditions, real or invented, originating far outside the national traditions to which policing belongs. By publicly blessing themselves with the holy practices of America’s historic victims, they create a hygienic distance between themselves and the dirty institutions of American order they were elected to lead.

They’re also advancing a new mythos, an alternative official story of the American state and American nationhood. And this, potentially, is a big deal. As Benedict Anderson portrays them in Imagined Communities, his magnificent study of nationalism, national stories typically reflect and impose an aggressive presentism. In them the basic legitimacy of the nation-state in its present form is taken as unquestionable, and the history of massive violence and expropriation underlying that form is treated with a sort of useful incoherence — which Anderson calls “memory and forgetting”. The historical parts and constituent groups of a given nation, whose defining encounter may have been conquest or civil war or ethnic cleansing, are remembered in national myth as primordially bound, their bloody encounter the playing out of some deeper, indeed fraternal, unity.

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Consider Anderson’s treatment of the “old Norman predator” whom British children learn to call “William the Conqueror”. Hearing this name an impertinent child might ask, “Conqueror of what?” The obvious historical answer is “Conqueror of the English”, but that would put William, whose people stuck around and became an important part of the English nation, in the company of enemies such as Napoleon and Hitler, which won’t do. “Hence”, Anderson writes, “’the Conqueror’ operates as [a] kind of ellipses… to remind one of something which it is immediately obligatory to forget”. The mythic result of this mix of memory and forgetting is that “Norman William and Saxon Harold… meet on the battlefield of Hastings, if not as dancing partners, at least as brothers”.

The American national myth reflects an even more vigorous effort of memory and forgetting, in which America’s vicious Civil War was a “war of brothers”; in which the enslavement of Africans serves as mere prelude to their emancipation into civic brotherhood; and in which indigenous peoples America called “Indians” as it took over their continent are honoured as primordial brothers of the land, fearsome role models for its greatest frontiersmen, and thus worthy of having countless sports teams named after them. Such national stories are obviously ridiculous in their substance, but the fact that they persist despite this merely highlights the gravity of their purpose. Given the feared alternative — in which the fault lines erased in the myth are redrawn, the old hatreds refreshed into new ones, the old violence given new life — tellers and hearers of national stories have adapted themselves to their incoherence, committed themselves to forgetting as they remember. The feared alternative is quite bad enough, and the nation and state in their present workings are just good enough, to justify this strange commitment.

The new generation of governing progressives, and the curators of the new progressive mythos influential in American media and education, are fixing to test these assumptions. They can’t abide the unifying stories of America not just because they’re incoherent and historically dubious but because they’re unifying. The present regime they help justify should not in fact be justified. It is, after all, maintained in its semblance of public order by the police. And the only thing one should do with the police is work to abolish them, and, should one come in contact with their impurities in the course of one’s public duties, use certain prescribed rituals to remove the taint. As a way to reassure one’s progressive friends in the Party State, this effort of political storytelling and moral hygiene should work pretty well. How it works as a way to govern violent cities is different question.

In this regard, the US has far more in common with its southern neighbour than it would ever like to admit. For more than 70 years, Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (the “PRI”) controlled the largest Spanish-speaking country in the world. Ostensibly, the country was a democracy except for one problem: the PRI won — literally — every national election from 1929 to 2000. During this time, serious challengers to its hold on power would be found not-so-mysteriously murdered. Even social and political reformers working within the PRI itself would end up dead.

Together, the Democrats and the GOP have ruled the US since the country’s Whig Party dissolved in 1854 — more than twice as long as the PRI’s reign in Mexico. Admittedly, the twin towers of the American party cartel do not murder their opponents as the PRI did in Mexico. However, US politicians and their fourth-estate minions have other means of preserving social control. In the most Anglo-Protestant of ways, US elites use shame and public humiliation as their central tool in maintaining power.

Like small-time criminals, deviants are placed in the stocks of the national media to have their reputations tarred and sullied. A message for all to see: stay off our corner. If you want power, play by our rules — or else. It’s no accident that the most commonly used words and phrases associated with Robert Kennedy, Jr. by the mainstream media this last year have been “conspiracy theorist” and “anti-vaxxer”. Any challenge to the two-party cartel will be met with immediate character assassination and sustained attempts to rally opprobrium.

Henry Wallace, George Wallace and Ralph Nader were all treated by the American establishment as nothing more than deviant lunatics after their third-party runs. The reputational destruction process has been so thorough that it took 70 years for even the country’s academic Left to reconsider the legacy of Henry Wallace after his 1948 Progressive Party bid against Harry Truman —who Democratic Party bluebloods replaced Wallace with as FDR’s heir apparent in a shadowy backroom deal. Wallace was expected to accept that betrayal and fade quietly into the night. When he refused, cartel leaders unleashed their dogs. As with the PRI’s iron rule of Mexico, challengers to the US two-party cartel are technically allowed. However, the twin towers of American politics have established barriers to third-party recognition so high as to make the effort almost pointless.

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By John Michael Greer

After Nader’s 2000 Green Party presidential run witnessed dozens of arena-sized rallies — including a packed Madison Square Garden — the two-party cartel sensed danger. In the years that followed, whether “red” or “blue”, nearly every state in the union began exponentially raising the threshold of voter signatures legally required to gain ballot access.

Nader’s presidential bid received less than 3% of the national vote in 2000. However, he was universally blamed by Democratic Party apparatchiks and their national media allies for Al Gore’s narrow defeat. With tremendous message discipline, the Left-wing of the country’s fourth estate has held to its “spoiler” narrative for nearly a quarter of a century. And in exchange for respecting the cartel’s territory (i.e. the state), Americans have historically received a prosperous middle-class existence with affordable homes, automobiles, higher education, and general upward mobility. But in the 21st century, that compact has broken down, without the emergence of alternative political avenues.

Today, the views of average citizens and “mass-based interest groups” have almost no impact on legislation. A recent study — with more than 1,700 variables — found that economic elites dominate the policy process in the US so thoroughly that average citizens and activist groups ultimately have “little or no independent influence”. Put another way: people without wealth and connections no longer have any representation in American politics. Party politics is little more than elaborate theatre formulated to make proles believe they have a voice.

It has been fascinating to watch celebrity presidential candidates — Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Cornel West, Marianne Williamson — all having to face up to the fact that there’s no effective method of challenging this cartel. Independent US media is stronger than ever, but older generations (who vote in the largest numbers) still have almost no exposure to it. Even if outsiders are willing to sacrifice their reputations on the altar of “speaking truth to power”, all avenues to getting new ideas into full national circulation are barricaded. The positive media attention Bernie Sanders’s insurgent 2016 presidential campaign received was a fluke. Trump and Senator Sanders were provided with hundreds of hours of “earned media” on cable news, and even mainstream talk shows, only by virtue of party elites’ vainglorious overconfidence in Hillary Clinton. That mis-step will not be repeated any time soon.

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By John Masko

Polls show a majority of Americans have no desire for either Biden or Trump to represent their respective parties again. Regardless, in both cases an edict of T.I.N.A. has been proclaimed — there is no alternative. Neither party’s breadwinner displays any willingness to participate in their organisation’s own democratic nomination process, and maybe not even in inter-party debates next year. This represents another ignominious trail-marker in the country’s slow-motion dissolution. Elites have become so self-consumed — and their political machines so cynical — they don’t even bother keeping up with the charade of a democratic process.

Biden will be one candidate despite the majority of Americans (including Democrats) believing he is too old. To avoid embarrassing their king, even RFK, Jr. — heir to party royalty — was not granted access to the Democrat’s presidential debate stage. Meanwhile, Trump does nothing but insult his competitors for the GOP nod. Like a modern-day emperor, the orange man looks on from his balcony while the patricians carry out a stage battle for the nomination below. Plebes can enjoy the momentary drama, but everyone knows how the story ends. Trump vs. Biden — the rematch.

Since Trump arrived, factional battles between the country’s political towers have turned reckless, if not entirely unhinged. Russia-gate and “Stop the Steal” represent a foolish first for American politics — both towers of the US political system publicly challenging the integrity of the electoral process; something Al Gore did not dare, even after the Supreme Court handed George W. Bush the election in 2000. At this point, the cartel’s entitlement to rule is so great, neither side believes it should ever leave power — no matter their record in office. Not coincidentally, Americans’ individual identification with both parties is at an all-time low (and the desire for new ones at an all-time high). Those numbers will only rise as Boomers begin to pass away.

Never in the country’s history has anyone used a third-party presidential bid in an intelligent and, dare I say, Tory way — patiently building a 50-state party step-by-step and conceptualising the project, not as a two-year publicity campaign, but a multi-generational endeavour. Taking on, arguably, the most powerful political cartel in world history isn’t going to be so simple as running someone for president and hoping they somehow trick-shot their way into national leadership. It reflects the general insanity of American politics that reformers refuse to acknowledge this obvious fact. RFK, Jr’s support is currently showing at over 20% in some polls — a staggering figure for a candidate operating outside the two-party cartel’s dictates. However, without a sustained third-party apparatus intent on playing the long game, the only thing independent presidential bids in the US can accomplish is providing false hope that democracy exists.

What could finally snap Americans out of their stupor, and force them to demand release from their century-and-a-half-long political prison? The PRI’s reign in Mexico held until reformers were delivered a final straw in March of 1994 — the murder of presumed next PRI presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio. Many believed the beloved social development secretary, might not only reform the PRI but become the “next Lázaro Cárdenas” — president in the Thirties and a beloved national figure, something akin to the Franklin Roosevelt of Mexico. Could Colosio replicate Càrdenas’s programme of popular reform? Millions of Mexicans were excited to find out. Then, after a speech in Tijuana — with his takeover of the PRI appearing imminent — Colosio was found shot in the head by a .38 Special.

In the aftermath, legions of national and international reporters searched for evidence of a conspiracy. Altogether, it was enough to push for real institutional reform, leading to the breakup of the PRI’s monopoly on power. Less than six years later, Vincente Fox became the first non-PRI president of Mexico in the modern era. Last month marked another key moment in the country’s healing process. Current Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador publicly admitted that Colosio’s murder was in fact a “state crime”.

Could it be that all the mounting corruption, dysfunction, and geriatric bogarting of political leadership in the US culminates in such a violent tragedy, utterly tarnishing voters’ perception of the integrity of their electoral system? Probably not, though the summer riots of 2020 and January 6 are evidence of violent discontent brewing on all sides. Despite the country’s love affair with its mythical 1776 revolution, the US two-party cartel will not end with another “tea party”, nor a proverbial storming of the Bastille (as the Left fantasises). More likely, it will end with states breaking off from the union in an attempt to escape the country’s monstrous federal debt — more than $100,000 for every American.

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The bleak financial future Gen Z and Millennials face combined with yet another obscenely expensive war — paid for on the national credit card — will trigger a series of events that delivers the final blow to 50-state America and the two-party cartel that rules it. The impact of the coming war in the Middle East — both in terms of lives lost and the trillions borrowed to fight it — could be higher than any conflict the US has fought since the Second World War. At the current rate, interest payments alone on the money borrowed to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are estimated to total $6.5 trillion by 2050. Add to that the cost of a potential new conflict including forces from Iran, Turkey, and even Russia? The effect will be devastating and irreversible.

There is simply no money for another lengthy military engagement in the Middle East. Britain, in essence, lost its 13 American colonies along the Atlantic coast by taxing the colonists to repay debts incurred to fight the French and Indian War. Financing wars, even necessary ones, often topples regimes. No empire is too large to ignore its debts. And the United States is long overdue.

On 29 June 1971, in the midst of the uproar, the FBI sat General Edward Lansdale down for an “interview”. Lansdale was the godfather of US counterinsurgency warfare, often (falsely) believed to be the inspiration for The Quiet American by Graham Greene. He had supervised Ellsberg during their time in Vietnam and, asked about their relationship, Lansdale began to philosophise about the relationship between intellectuals and the leaders they advise. “Intellectuals are sometimes strange people,” he mused, adding that Ellsberg worked in a “cloistered atmosphere”. The FBI agents concluded that, in Lansdale’s view, Ellsberg “failed to realise the life and death of United States troops were involved” in the questions he dealt with. That last accusation might have come as a shock to Ellsberg, who had carried a rifle and walked into many life-and-death situations himself.

Lansdale’s interrogation notes formed part of Ellsberg’s FBI dossier, released after Ellsberg’s death under the Freedom of Information Act. And, read today, the files shed considerable light on the changing relationship between academia and power in the West. Ellsberg was one of the first generation of “think tankers”, originally freewheeling intellectuals drafted by the government to solve difficult problems. His line of inquiry would ultimately lead him to break the law and publicly oppose the government.

Today’s think-tank scene, for good or for ill, is far more conformist. A Lansdale figure, if he were alive today, would find little to rhapsodise about among the think-tankers who crowd Washington and Westminster. The all-purpose intellectuals of the early Cold War have been replaced by narrow specialists and single-issue activists, while the kind of principled bravery Ellsberg displayed is gone entirely. His life is an instructive parable from an age when the citizen-scholar was able and willing to serve his country — and brave enough to face being called a traitor.

Before becoming public enemy number one, Ellsberg had been the perfect example of a government-affiliated intellectual. Educated in economics at Harvard and Cambridge — and with a brief peacetime stint in the Marine Corps — he started working for the Rand Corporation in 1958, a think tank funded largely by the US Department of Defense. At first, Ellsberg’s job was to study nuclear command-and-control systems through the lens of decision theory. In 1964, the Department of Defense brought on Ellsberg as an official adviser. The Gulf of Tonkin incident, the beginning of large-scale US military involvement in Vietnam, happened during his first day on the job. A year later, Ellsberg transferred to the US Embassy in Saigon, where he worked as an analyst under Lansdale.

Nixon, then a mere political candidate, even paid the embassy a visit when Ellsberg was there. Lansdale tried to convince Nixon that free and honest elections were necessary to win Vietnamese support. “Oh, sure, honest, yes, honest, that’s right,” Ellsberg remembered Nixon saying sarcastically, “so long as you win!” Lansdale’s staff were unsettled, according to Ellsberg’s 2002 memoir, Secrets.

Ellsberg, like many liberals of that generation, believed in “Cold War liberalism”. He wanted a muscular United States to confront the enemies of human freedom abroad and at home, just as it had during the Second World War. Although Vietnam’s civil war was “very hard on those people”, Ellsberg later said to a journalist: “I told myself that living under communism would be harder, and World War III, which I thought we were preventing, would be worse.” Lansdale, paraphrased in the FBI document, understood this to be the general attitude of his advisers: “there was much criticism among the various agencies concerning the ways in which the various organisations were implementing United States policies, but all of this criticism was administrative, within the United States establishment there, and was for the purpose of doing a better job there”.

Ellsberg’s job sounded anodyne: “checking on specific problems in pacification work”, especially “economic problems”, according to the FBI notes. And Lansdale paints Ellsberg as something of a naïf who didn’t even realise that Vietnamese tap water was unsafe to drink. But according to Ellsberg’s memoir, he was a much more worldly employee than Lansdale let on. Ellsberg toured the countryside with “old Vietnam hands”, jaded American advisers who led him through guerrilla-infested provinces that other embassy staff refused to even visit. “These people were far from being cool, detached problem solvers. Unlike other Americans, they mostly spoke Vietnamese, and they had close Vietnamese friends,” Ellsberg wrote. “They had grown to love Vietnam and its people and wanted to believe, and did believe, that our presence there could be helpful to them.”

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Despite seeing the dirty underside of the war up close, these veterans had “retained a sense of the legitimacy of this effort because of knowing a few Vietnamese… who had seemed to have faith in our mutual efforts”, Ellsberg wrote. And, much like contemporary figures who invested years in Afghanistan and the Middle East, they must have felt that letting up the war effort would be a betrayal of the West’s loyal supporters in the region. But Ellsberg’s own faith in the project — and its benefits for the Vietnamese — were profoundly shaken by his experiences on the ground. He saw villages bombed to rubble for no good reason and apparent bystanders shot dead from the sky. Tanks crushed Buddhist altars. A drunk South Vietnamese major talked about how humiliating the American presence was and threatened to shoot his advisers. When Vietnamese children smiled and waved at visiting Americans, another South Vietnamese officer told Ellsberg that he used to greet Japanese invaders the same way during the Second World War.

Then Ellsberg’s girlfriend Patricia visited Vietnam. As a journalist, she had access to contacts that government officials did not, including refugees driven out of the countryside by US bombing. And she told Ellsberg that his colleagues, rather than brave crusaders for Vietnam’s freedom, were “desperate men, enamored of danger and the war, risk takers who didn’t feel they had a lot to lose”, as he remembers in Secrets. Speaking to the FBI in 1971, Lansdale correctly guessed that Patricia had been a big influence on Ellsberg’s worldview. While visiting her boyfriend, Lansdale said, Patricia made “academic arguments” against the war, even if she were not quite the “burn the draft card type”.

Opposing the war in theory is one thing. Leaking classified documents is another. Lansdale told the FBI that “ELLSBERG’s apparent change of feelings concerning the United State’s [sic] is something entirely new to him,” but “he is not too shocked by this change because ELLSBERG is such an intense man”. The general sighed to the FBI agents that Ellsberg did not really understand the “need to keep his lip zippered”, but added that a “hell of a lot of Americans” were loose-talkers as well, both in Vietnam and at home. But few of these loose-talkers would have the impact of Ellsberg. Even if he is now regarded as a hero, the leak would almost destroy his life. The government put Ellsberg on trial under the Espionage Act, and the case was thrown out only because a judge discovered that Nixon’s lackeys had tried to steal Ellsberg’s psychiatric files.

The modern world will not produce another Ellsberg. Conservatives activists waged an intense campaign against “Vietnam Syndrome” in the Eighties, and liberals hawks fully re-embraced the idea of military intervention by the Nineties. Although the pro-intervention arguments are basically the same — locals want Western protection and the alternative is worse — the apparatus for delivering them is much more sophisticated. In Ellsberg’s day, there were a few large think tanks mostly attached to governments, like the Rand Corporation in Washington and London’s Royal United Services Institute, or those sustained by mega-philanthropists, such as the Brookings Institution and Chatham House. Since then, political parties and business interests have set up hundreds of boutique think tanks, all competing for access to and attention from governments.

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With a few exceptions, their work no longer resembles the rough-and-tumble frontline action that Ellsberg participated in. One researcher found that around half the “Iran experts” at American think tanks had never been to Iran, and a similar number could not even speak Persian. Instead, today’s think-tankers spend much of their time flattering and being flattered in Western conference rooms. Brookings expert Jeremy Shapiro described the ritual of think-tank events in a biting 2014 essay:

“After 15 minutes of stilted chit-chat with colleagues that the thinker has the misfortune to see at virtually every event he attends in Washington, the senior government official strides calmly into the room, plops down at the head of the table and declares solemnly what a honour it is to have such distinguished experts to help with this critical area of policy… A brave thinker raises his hand and speaks truth to power by reciting the thesis of his latest article. From there, the group is off to races as the thinkers each struggle to get in the conversation and rehearse their well-worn positions.”

According to Shapiro, officials rarely find the think-tankers’ suggestions useful. Instead, these meetings are an exercise in flattery. Think-tankers, convinced that they were part of the decision-making process, are more inclined to either defend the government in public or grant it the benefit of the doubt. In turn, the think tanks can tell donors that their money is buying them influence. Ironically, the private status of these newer think tanks has therefore made them more dependent on the government, since their access to officials relies completely on those officials’ goodwill.

Back in 1971, according to the FBI notes, Lansdale “said that ELLSBERG was a very intense person, very excitable, and always very eloquent in his view”. This characterisation, or rather the dynamic characters who merit it, is precisely what is missing from government today. People like that get dangerous ideas, like airing the government’s dirty laundry in public. Better and cleaner to have a thousand dull sycophants than one Daniel Ellsberg.

Navarro, even more than his former boss, Donald Trump, represented the Janus-faced aspect of the Trump movement. On the one hand, he was an often-brilliant maverick economist who correctly diagnosed the fallacies and imbalances of the pre-2016 globalised world order, calling out America’s dependence on China and warning of the consequences of an eroding domestic industrial base. On the other, he was the partisan hatchet-man par excellence who just as well embodied the hard-edged conspiratorial lunacy that’s consumed the energies of the American Right. How the economic prophet and the political sycophant co-existed, before the latter overshadowed and eventually consumed the former, is the tragic story of the Trump movement writ large.

Of course, the story isn’t over and Trump himself, if not Navarro and his other former advisers, could very well emerge politically stronger from his legal battles. But the story of Navarro should nonetheless provoke some reflection: for it can serve as an instructive warning about what happens when politics is severed from its policy content or, indeed, from any larger moral objective — and becomes simply about the prosecution of feuds based on pure friend-enemy distinctions. Indeed, the many media reports of Navarro’s trial make little mention of his prodigious policy background: he is simply described as a Trump adviser, but digging deeper into his record and publications reveals a thinker ahead of his time.

After earning his doctorate in economics at Harvard, Navarro held a number of teaching posts at the University of California in the Eighties, from where he authored dozens of books and articles on everything from trade and energy policy to the fortunes of the working class and the capture of Congress by lobbyists. He often wrote in a strident, headstrong style, assailing the political class and its takeover by special interests. At this time, however, Navarro was still very much a free-trade advocate, lending his authority to the general Washington consensus about the desirability of further global market integration, and warning against the use of tariffs and trade protectionism.

He said as much in his 1984 book, The Policy Game: How Special Interests and Ideologues are Stealing America, sounding every bit like a faithful devotee of Ricardian economics: “If the world is, in fact, sucked into this spiral, enormous gains from trade will be sacrificed. While such a sacrifice might save some jobs in sheltered domestic industries, it will destroy as many or more in other home industries, particularly those that rely heavily on export trade.” These sentiments would later be cited by his media critics to embarrass him when he radically changed course and became a militant trade hawk.

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In these years, Navarro was a political transient, alternating between Republican, Democratic, and Independent registrations. He ran for Congress in the Nineties as a Clinton Democrat, garnering the endorsement of the First Lady, and highlighted his liberal stances on the environment, abortion, and gay rights, while authoring a primer for investors to take advantage of global trade networks. His support for the Clintons lasted, at least nominally, until 2008, when Hillary first ran for president — at which point he became disillusioned and drifted away from the centrist mainstream, feeling that conventional liberals and conservatives alike were letting America down just as the globalised economic system was beginning to crack. He would find a new political home and a new presidential patron soon enough.

It was a couple of years after this that Navarro co-authored a book called Death by China: Confronting the Dragon – A Global Call to Action, which read like a manifesto for a future populist-nationalist agenda. Building off on an earlier title, The Coming China Wars, Navarro gave rhetorical voice to his long-running economic critique of Chinese duplicity and American complicity in the then-still sacrosanct globalised world order, marshalling his research into an aggressive, almost pugilistic attack. The book especially catalogued the many abuses that had become common practice for the Chinese government after its American-sponsored accession to the World Trade Organization 10 years earlier: currency manipulation, unauthorised trade subsidies, use of slave labour, and intellectual property theft.

US policymakers, however, chose to turn a blind eye to these already well-known Chinese policies, under the illusion — still guiding both parties — that China could eventually be tamed and habituated into liberal norms through progressive integration into the US-led global order. The book was turned into a documentary (narrated by Martin Sheen) and one review from the New York Times acknowledged that Navarro’s claims were worthy of examination but criticised it for its “alarming and alarmist” style, with its “an abundance of inflammatory language and cheesy graphics”. If liberal outlets like the NYT had taken Navarro’s arguments more seriously, perhaps they wouldn’t have been caught off guard by the political backlash that came in 2016, when Donald Trump’s campaign took these grievances on the road.

Navarro’s prescience made him a logical choice to serve in a trade portfolio in the new administration. And from within his perch as Director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, Navarro set to work altering America’s trade strategy, applying the same bluster he had displayed as a commentator, and clashing as much with traditional Republicans as with the White House’s Democratic and liberal media opponents. His goal was to displace the free-trade orthodoxy he had once championed. Navarro’s influence could be seen in the administration’s break with the Trans-Pacific Partnership on day one, the trade war with China, and the renegotiation of Nafta (after which Navarro said there would be a “special place in hell” for Justin Trudeau for retaliating against Trump on steel tariffs).

A proposed $1 trillion infrastructure plan Navarro had worked out with then-Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross could possibly have allowed the Trump administration to deliver on its promises to rebuild America — had Republicans in Congress not scuttled the scheme. (Now, Trump’s failure on infrastructure is routinely mocked by Biden, who has effectively aped the same strategy.) Overall, Navarro’s role had been to interpret and distil Trump’s broad directives into actionable policies and he had excelled in it. The moment of truth came with the early 2020 outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, in which the best and worst of Navarro’s instincts came to the fore.

In response to early reports of a Chinese-originated virus, Navarro was quick to argue for providing massive new fiscal appropriations to keep the country safe along with restricting travel to and from China (just as Trump’s other advisers were calling for giving out visas to wealthy Chinese investors). Aside from being an early vocal advocate for supply-chain resiliency, Navarro played a leading role in coordinating Operation Warp Speed, which utilised the Defense Production Act to mobilise resources toward the development of a vaccine.

But even as he took charge of the administration’s central policy response, Navarro endorsed quack cures like hydroxychloroquine, while repeatedly blaming Anthony Fauci, not just for initiating lockdowns, but for being responsible for the virus itself, alleging that he had funded the Chinese lab that bred the disease (and, therefore, was “the father” of Covid-19). This strange combination of the qualities in Peter Navarro, the confident and the paranoid, the substantive and the conspiratorial, the clear-eyed policymaker and the schoolyard tough guy, just about sums up the legacy of the Trump era. Its greatest executive achievement had been Operation Warp Speed — a project that would have marked any other presidency for political greatness — but due to the Right’s aversion to showing support for anything resembling “Fauci-ism”, Trump himself later came to disown Warp Speed, downplaying the importance of Navarro’s policy masterstroke.

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Navarro himself didn’t seem to mind. He was loyal to his boss and backed Trump to the hilt in his vainglorious scorched-earth attempt to claim victory in the 2020 election — a delusional struggle that had nothing whatsoever to do with any specific policy or governing programme. At this point, whatever larger policy goals had caused Navarro to support the former president had become entirely subordinate to his personal loyalty to the man himself.

Indeed, whenever, he appears in public nowadays, Navarro never speaks about such mundane things as the balance of trade or steel tariffs or industrial policy anymore. It is only ever to replay and endlessly litigate the election of 2020, which the vast majority of American voters have already moved on from. Navarro the economist had been completely devoured and digested by Navarro the courtier. Policy had become utterly meaningless before the friend-enemy distinction. As Slavoj Žižek would say, it is the Lacanian “surplus enjoyment” of intensifying partisan antagonism, far more than any serious ideological content, which has come to largely sustain American politics.

Peter Navarro could have earned a place in history as the brain trust of the Trump presidency, what the New Deal intellectuals had been to FDR, or what John Kenneth Galbraith had been to JFK. Along with fellow trade hawk Robert Lighthizer, he provided enough vision and academic heft to mount a genuine economic transformation. But he was always outnumbered by traditional Republicans such as Paul Ryan and Larry Kudlow, which is why the administration’s great legislative achievement was instead a George W. Bush-style tax cut. And he never had enough discipline to stay focused on the long game. In the end, largely due to the uneven and haphazard qualities of advisers such as Navarro, the Trump years will, to misquote Leon Trotsky, be remembered not as a revolution betrayed but as a revolution fumbled.

In 1947, the mercury here plummeted to -62.8ºC, so cold that reportedly frozen droplets of moisture in exhaled breath tinkled to the floor like shards of broken glass. In the summer of 1915, meanwhile, temperatures reached 37.8ºC, a record that stands to this day. Over the past 40 years, as the Arctic has warmed at a rate anything up to four times faster than the rest of the planet, the Yukon Flats, which straddle the Arctic Circle, have recorded the biggest temperature increases of all. Winters here are now on average 4.9ºC warmer than they were in the Fifties. In summer, the vast forests of spruce which span the Gwich’in territory are routinely ablaze.

Edward Alexander, a 46-year-old co-chair of the Gwich’in Council International, grew up in Fort Yukon and now lives in the Alaskan city of Fairbanks. For the past eight years, the father-of-four has worked as a volunteer firefighter, helping to tackle the devastating wildfires ravaging the Arctic and boreal north. This year, Canada has already registered its worst wildfire season on record, which has destroyed more than 52,000 square miles of the country — an area greater than the size of England. In Alaska, meanwhile, the frequency of wildfires exceeding one million acres in size has doubled in the past 30 years.

Alexander estimates that wildfires have claimed around four million acres of Gwich’in land since the Fifties, and in summer a thick band of smog often blankets the Yukon Flats. “We have had a front row seat to the beginning of the Pyrocene, as they are starting to call it,” he says. “The burning of the world.” Rain now falls instead of snow, caribou herds on which the Gwich’in rely have changed their patterns of migration, the rivers have warmed and salmon populations collapsed. And as the ice recedes, outside interests have started eying up the natural resources underneath the melting permafrost. After a deal was struck in 2019, oil and gas prospectors are currently scoping out the Yukon Flats.

A similar story is being recorded right across the High North. “Arctic amplification” is the term meteorologists use for the accelerated rate of global warming. But the same amplification is occurring with the geopolitics of the region. The Arctic is melting — one scientific study, published in June, claimed that the first summer in which all sea ice disappears could occur as early as the 2030s — and, from China to the US to Putin’s Russia, suddenly everyone wants a piece. The era of “Arctic exceptionalism” declared by Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 is resolutely over, his entreaties for the Arctic to remain a “zone of peace” free from conflict and exploitation forgotten. As climate change accelerates and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has cleaved apart the international order, the Arctic has emerged as the potential theatre of the next global conflict.

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Alexander, who also represents the Gwich’in on the Arctic council (which includes the eight Arctic states, Canada, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, the US and Russia) warns that the global race to plunder the Arctic could have devastating consequences. “If you don’t co-operate on the Arctic and we don’t get these things right, then I’ll tell you this, my friend: the world can change very rapidly.”

Russia, whose territory spans around 53% of the Arctic Ocean shoreline, and China are rapidly developing plans to expand the Northern Sea Route. The maritime passage between the east and west of the Arctic Ocean is regarded by the Kremlin as vital to avoid Western sanctions. It is already possible to navigate the route for anyone with several briefcases full of dollars to pay for the mandatory Russian ice breakers which accompany any transit as patrol vessels. In 2024, the Kremlin is planning to commence year-round navigations of the route, through which it hopes to increase the amount of cargo shipped from around 30 million annually to 80 million.

China — which has ominously declared itself a “near-Arctic state” — also harbours ambitions to transform the passage into a silk road of the far north, while in March, a Russian delegation to India held talks over new co-operation over the route. The West is similarly flexing its muscles, with Finland (and the expected accession of Sweden) extending Nato’s borders into the Arctic. In June, the US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken announced that the US would be opening an outpost in the far-north Norwegian town of Tromsø, stressing the need to have “a diplomatic footprint” above the Arctic Circle. “The war in Ukraine has really torpedoed this idea of Artic exceptionalism,” explains Dr Neil Melvin, Director of International Security at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). “The whole focus of northern Europe has basically now shifted to building security against Russia.”

As Melvin points out, the heavy losses sustained by Russia’s land army in Ukraine will force it to become increasingly reliant on its nuclear forces stationed in the Arctic, where the UK and US have also long operated their own attack submarines. Russia’s Northern Fleet comprises of a dozen or so nuclear-powered attack submarines as well as surface vessels, including two heavy nuclear-powered missile battle cruisers. In recent years, Russia has also reoccupied old Cold War-era Arctic bases to bolster its presence. “They will feel more vulnerable as a result of not having a strong army, and I think we are likely to see them threaten nuclear options much more as part of national defence,” Melvin says of Russia’s designs in the Arctic. “They are going to be much more explicit and threatening.”

Beneath the ice, the Arctic possesses untold riches. The region is estimated to contain a fifth of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas reserves and rare earth elements such as gold, nickel and zinc. While most of these are present within the largely undisputed land borders of the Arctic nations, it is the increasingly navigable international waters that present the most likely flashpoint. An ongoing process led by a United Nations commission is considering sovereignty rights to the central Arctic Ocean between Russia, Denmark and Canada. While Putin is cooperating with the process so far, he has also planted a flag in the most literal sense — dropping a titanium standard of the Russian Federation two miles beneath the ocean on the North Pole seabed in 2007. Fishing rights are also key; as southern oceans heat up, species will migrate ever further north, causing estimated catches in higher latitudes to increase by up to 20 per cent by 2050.

According to Professor Klaus Dodds, an expert in geopolitics and ice studies based at Royal Holloway and author of the recent book, Border Wars, the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard could prove another area of conflict. Under a treaty originally signed in 1920, a host of countries including China and Russia have rights to engage in commercial activities across Svalbard. Moscow conducts coal mining operations on the island of Spitsbergen (and insists on referring to Svalbard by the same name, to emphasise its historic claim on the land). In settlements such as Barentsburg, Russian is the predominant language.

“The concern is we know we have potential flashpoints like Svalbard which, having caused agitation and tension in the past, might be escalated very quickly,” Dodds says. Aggression could be anything from attacks on underwater cables (last year, a Russian trawler was linked to the severing of a sub-sea fibre-optic cable which linked Svalbard to the Norwegian mainland), to an outright attack on oil and gas infrastructure. “The Norwegian European Arctic will be the space where, if anything, this is most likely to happen,” Dodds says. “That would also be the ultimate opportunity for Russia to test Nato’s resolve.”

Regardless of the potential for nuclear conflict, a burning Arctic poses grave threats for humanity. The Arctic permafrost contains peatland soils which are the world’s most vital carbon sink. Globally, peatlands store twice as much carbon as all the forests combined. When this burns, it releases the carbon back into the atmosphere creating something of a doom loop. According to the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, wildfires across Canada have released 290 megatons of carbon into the atmosphere between January and August, more than 25% of the global total for 2023 in the year to date. 

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Thawing permafrost is also exposing chemical and radioactive waste and millennia-old “zombie viruses”. In 2016, around 100,000 reindeer were culled in the Russian far north after an anthrax outbreak that killed a 12-year-old boy. Plague bacillus, smallpox and other historic diseases are also feared to soon re-emerge from the melting earth. The discovery earlier this summer of 46,000-year-old roundworms lying dormant in Siberia, which are happily reproducing once again, may hold clues for adapting to climate change — but they also raise questions about what else might venture forth in a thaw. And herein lies the great lesson of the far north, Professor Dodds explains: nothing here ever happens in isolation — there will be wider ramifications across the globe. “Change in the Arctic is never restricted to the Arctic itself,” he says. “It is almost as if the Arctic strikes back.”

The time is long gone where we could think of the Arctic as a great pristine wilderness. Instead it has become the burning crucible of our climate crisis. But, as the towering glaciers melt and the seas of the Earth’s fifth largest ocean are revealed to us at last, their future looks even darker still, reanimating the biological threats of our deep past, and providing yet another site for human competition and conquest.

With its attacks on both the political elite and the idle poor, Anthony’s “Rich Men” has proved uniquely conflicting for today’s political class, both a provincial cry against the urban elite and a working-class rebel yell, raging against poverty wages. Despite its attacks on corporate exploitation, it has quickly been adopted as a conservative anthem, while many on the Left have found it difficult to support its attacks on welfare and less-than-subtle allusions to paedophile conspiracy theories.

And so we’re told we shouldn’t take Anthony seriously. To sympathise with his lament about modern life is little more than “liberal genuflecting to astroturf roots politics” the process by which Right-wing conservatives create the impression of a conservative grassroots fightback, when it is actually a carefully cultivated attempt to preserve the status quo. 

There is, of course, some truth in the Left’s criticism of “Rich Men” and, indeed, the general perception of country music itself. Oliver does indeed “punch down”, as Billy Bragg wrote in The Guardian, taking aim at what we might once have called the undeserving poor. But why shouldn’t he, if that’s his opinion — he’s certainly not the only one to hold it. Country music is a strange, conflicting and deeply American phenomenon, somehow both anti-elitist and conservative, backward and modern. For those of us here in Europe, it also manages to be both instantly understandable and completely foreign at the same time. 

And herein lies its appeal.  

Indeed, its very foreignness was what first got me into Country. My wife and I were at The Calgary Stampede, a mad jamboree of rodeo, fried food, fairground rides and live music when we first began to take note. While we didn’t really pay much attention to the music at the rodeo — a festival called Nashville North — as we headed out of the city on our way west to Vancouver, we found a “Country” playlist and began to listen. At first, we were doing so almost ironically, enjoying the songs for their corny Americana. This was redneck music and we were European city folk travelling towards the Pacific.

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One of the first songs that came on in our playlist was “My Girl” by Dylan Scott. “Man, her eyes really drive me crazy,” he sings in his deep, country drawl. “You should see her smile when she holds a baby.” My wife and I could not stop laughing every time we heard that line. Or to Luke Bryan’s “Most People Are Good”: “I believe most people are good and most Mamas oughta qualify for sainthood.” Can you imagine Liam Gallagher singing that line? We played these songs on repeat as we climbed over the Rockies on the road west — like drinking ouzo in Mykonos, an affectation. 

And then something happened: we began discovering Country songs that were completely different; songs with hard, sad lyrics sung by raw, gravelly voices. Songs like “Rich Men”.

At first, these were still on the pop side: Morgan Wallen’s “Whiskey Glasses”, say. “Poor me… pour me another drink, cause I don’t wanna feel a thing.” Not quite so corny. Or Scotty McCreery’s “Five More Minutes”, pleading for a little more time with his grandfather. “At 86 my grandpa said, ‘There’s angels in the room’ / All the family gathered ’round, knew the time was comin’ soon; With so much left to say I prayed / Lord, I ain’t finished / Just give us five more minutes.” The words might be all-American, but the feeling is universal. In retrospect, though, these Country songs were just gateway drugs to the hard stuff.

In Ken Burns’s extraordinary documentary, Country Music, he talks of a “music about people who thought their stories were not being told”. The more I learned about the genre, the more this truth revealed itself — the connecting thread from Hank Williams to Oliver Anthony, the music of a down-at-heel people sharing their stories.

We are introduced to the early founders of the music, the hillbillies of Appalachia, before being taken through all of its various iterations along the way. A young Dolly Parton tells the story of a pregnant girl abandoned by her lover who kills herself on the bridge where they met; singing of another girl of her creation forced to endure a stillbirth alone, abandoned by her family. Or take Loretta Lynn’s 1975 declaration of female liberation in “The Pill”: “You wined me and dined me when I was your girl, promised if I’d be your wife, you’d show me the world / But all I’ve seen of this old world / Is a bed and a doctor bill / I’m tearin’ down your brooder house / ’Cause now I’ve got the pill.” These are not the songs of a simple band of reactionary rednecks looking to rebuild a lost world. They are the songs of ordinary Americans about ordinary American life, often shockingly modern and even progressive. As Lynn explains in the documentary: “The songs were just life.” 

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From Townes Van Zandt’s “Pancho and Lefty” to Reba McEntyres’s “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia” and Bobby Gentry’s “Fancy”, Country music is tragic storytelling made raw — a kind of hillbilly opera in one act; a fully worked out story from start to finish. In “Fancy”, for example, Gentry tells the story of a young girl from “poor white trash” encouraged into prostitution by her dying mother to escape poverty. “We didn’t have money for food or rent / To say the least, we were hard pressed / Then Mama spent every last penny we had / To buy me a dancin’ dress.” Eventually Fancy escapes after meeting a “benevolent man”, who introduces her to “a king, a congressman and an occasional aristocrat”.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the songs that move me today are those that connect with my new feelings as a middle-aged parent — Rodney Crowell’s reflection on mortality, “It Ain’t Over Yet”, or Tanya Tucker’s take on “The House That Built Me”, released in 2019, telling the story of an older woman who feels lost after her children leave home. There are plenty of odes to fatherhood, too, which similarly pull at the heartstrings: “A Father’s Love (The Only Way He Knew)”, by Bucky Covington; Reba McEntire’s “The Greatest Man I Never Knew”; or even “She’s In Love With The Boy”, by Trisha Yearwood.

Oliver Anthony, then, is not new. He fits easily into Country’s long history, singing about ordinary life and ordinary feelings. Take a look at Anthony’s other songs. “Now some people write songs on livin’ just right,” he sings in “I’ve Got to Get Sober”. “But I write mine on just getting by.” This is what Country music has always been. In Tanya Tucker’s “Two Sparrows in a Hurricane”, she sings: “There’s a baby crying and one more on the way / There’s a wolf at the door / With a big stack of bills they can’t pay.” Or take Anthony’s “I Want to go Home”: “Seven generations farming the ground / Grandson sells it to a man from out of town / Two weeks later, the trees go down / Only got concrete growing around.” Again, this is both deep Americana and universal. It could be the lament of the Dutch Farmer Citizen Movement — or Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi”: “They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.” Anthony is singing about the things people always worry about, only in a contemporary manner: “an old soul in a new world”, as he puts it.

His success, then, is surely down to the way he so obviously reflects the real world — he is a mirror of the zeitgeist, not a creator of it. “I’ve been selling my soul, working all day,” he sings with evident emotion. “Overtime hours for bullshit pay.” In both the United States and Britain this is just plainly true. Since 1979, the top 1% in the US have seen their wages grow by 138%, while wages for the bottom 90% grew by just 15%. In Britain, living standards have been stagnant since 2007. Why shouldn’t people rage against these failing systems?

Like Country itself, Anthony is both à la mode and old-fashioned, conservative and anti-establishment, provincial and universal. He has very obviously grown out of the soil that gave us Trump and Brexit, and now RFK Jr. What makes his music doubly powerful is the fact that much of today’s Country is as corporate and safe as everything else, churning out endless cheesy songs about love and small-town life that often meld into pop and rock, only with twangier sounds and romantic deviations into faith and family. 

In early Country music, songwriters gazed deep into the heartbreaking reality of life as it was back then, singing about everything from dead babies to dead dogs. In Johnny Cash’s recording of “The Engineer’s Dying Child”, for example, he sings about a railwayman whose child is sick but he has to go to work. Before he sets off, he tells his wife: “Just hang a light when I pass tonight, Hang it so it can be seen / If the baby’s dead, then show the red / If it’s better, then show the green.”

Today, Country music is far more sanitised, in large part because life itself is more sanitised — or, in other words, better. Our lives today tend not to be touched by quite as much tragedy. Child mortality is rare, so too deadly disease. Even our pets live longer. Very few of us face such an unimaginable scene as the railway man in Cash’s song. And the result is that Country music has become more generic. “Modern country music speaks less of such desperate loss and has become shiny and rich and rather shallow as a result,” Cash’s daughter Rosanne reflects in her memoir, Composed. “The dead have all but disappeared, though they do occasionally surface. The family has likewise faded in country, as sexual heat has begun to obsess most singers and songwriters, just as it does in pop music.” 

And yet, there are more modern emotions than heartbreak and sexual attraction. Tragedy and pain and poverty still exist: drug abuse, family breakdown, death and disease. And so does the sense of political and economic powerlessness, as Anthony’s “Rich Men” proves. Country music is born to express this frustration: “Music about people who thought their stories were not being told,” as Burns put it.

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To me, Anthony is proof of the continued vibrancy and diversity of American culture, something that seems lacking in Britain today. We have many of the same conditions as the US: regional poverty, terrible wages, cultural dislocation. Compared to America — and even those parts of America where Anthony lives — Britain is poorer with worse wages. We have millions of people living far from the capital who feel that their instincts and beliefs are ignored by those in positions of power. Where is the music that tells their story, that reflects their rage?

We have Oasis and Blur, Pulp and the Manic Street Preachers, each of whom touch on the ordinary lives of ordinary people in their stories, but not quite in the same way. In Oasis’s “Cigarettes and Alcohol”, there is a lament about modern life equivalent to Anthony’s: “Is it worth the aggravation / To find yourself a job when there’s nothing worth working for? / It’s a crazy situation / But all I need are cigarettes and alcohol.” In Jake Bugg’s “Trouble Town”, he’s stuck in his home town where “all you’ve got’s your benefits; And you’re barely scraping by”. There are plenty of songs which could be Country ballads: The Streets’ “Dry Your Eyes”, even The Spice Girls’ “Mama”.

There is anger in modern British music too of course. Casting around for examples to disprove my lament about the lack of Oliver Anthony-style rage in Britain, alternatives were offered — from bands like IDLES and Sleaford Mods to Stormzy. In each case it’s reasonable to argue that they meet Burns’s definition of Country music, telling the stories of those who do not otherwise get their stories told. And yet, taken together, they still do not amount to a genre of their own. The rage in modern British music is more diverse and scattered — and often metropolitan. Grime, for example, is still a predominantly London genre, not the music of provincial “left behind”. Where is the music that connects the Red Wall and Great Yarmouth, Morecambe and Boston — the places that helped give us Brexit and Boris (and Blair, of course)?

The truth is we do not have the same vibrant, distinctive tradition of provincial British music as a genre of its own. In part, I think, this represents the total domination of London in our national life as well as our own cultural norms. In Britain, you don’t revere your town, you mock it (even if that is really a particularly British form of self-effacing affection); you don’t wear your heart on your sleeve, share your pain, or give away your feelings. You don’t rage against life; you quietly grumble. 

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But also, I don’t think you rage against London — you move there. In Britain, we don’t have alternative centres of commerce or culture. London is our New York, Washington, Los Angeles and Nashville. If you make it somewhere else, you move to London — or, indeed, the US. The Arctic Monkeys swapped Sheffield for California, the Gallaghers traded Manchester for London. In Bugg’s “Trouble Town”, he is “stuck in speed bump city / Where the only thing that’s pretty / Is the thought of getting out”.

The irony, of course, is that we are so dominated by the rich men of the South East that we’re not even able to produce a vibrant cultural alternative. Instead of producing our own Country music, we import it. Today, Americana seems to be more popular than ever. The annual festival of all things Country in London — Country to Country — is regularly sold out. The biggest Country stars now regularly pass through London: Luke Combs, Shania Twain, Ashley McBryde, Maren Morris. There is clearly an appetite for what Country is selling, even if what it is selling is distinctively American. 

But here’s the problem: rather than mock Oliver Anthony and the redneck America he represents, then, we should worry about why our docile culture so dominated by one all-encompassing city does not produce enough Oliver Anthonys of our own. We have bailed out the banks, imposed austerity, left large swathes of the country impoverished and imposed a trade border within our own country; corporate profits have gone up while living standards have gone down, and the state seems barely capable of doing anything but the most basic of public service provision. The country is a mess. We have channelled our fury about the situation into political rebellion, but what about cultural rebellion? We deserve more populist fury than we’ve got. Where is it?

These were the good old days, especially if you were Hillary Clinton. By 1997, the First Lady of the United States had published It Takes a Village — “a textbook for caring” for America’s children — and followed it up with a conference on “What New Research on the Brain Tells Us About Our Youngest Children”, at which only one neuroscientist spoke and didn’t say anything new. There, she gushed about how experiences during the first three years “can determine whether children will grow up to be peaceful or violent citizens”. Rob Reiner, who had devised a recent national public education campaign (also not a neuroscientist), claimed that what we know about brain development during the first three years of life was “the key to problem-solving at every level of society”.

If only that were the case; if only healing America’s broken electorate had simply been a matter of socially engineering a new one. Instead, in the three decades since, the country’s atomisation continued to fester, compelling Clinton to once again return to the frontline. Eight years (and another book) since Trump ruined her presidential party, this time her weapon of choice is a 3,500-word essay for The Atlantic, in which she laments the rise of “loneliness” and its manipulation “by dark forces that are threatening American democracy”.

Once again showing a stubborn penchant for reducing social problems to biology, Clinton believes that an “epidemic” of “loneliness and isolation” not only explains the rise of the “alt-Right”, but is also infecting American society to its core, threatening citizens’ “personal health and also the health of our democracy”. Turning her “basket of deplorables” into a “basket of the debilitated”, she confirms that America’s political elite is inclined to view the politically dispossessed in two ways: risky or at-risk; swarming or sick; dangerous or disordered.

What this forgets, though, is that treating voters as vulnerable, malign loners rather than disenfranchised political agents is part of the problem. Just as in the Nineties, Clinton seems incapable of reckoning with people as conscious actors. For her, problems are not solved by negotiating with the affected, but by prescribing expensive social programmes that seek to alter their behaviour. Yet being treated as passive recipients of “behaviour change programmes” will backfire unless the political class that Clinton represents addresses the political vacuum once filled by representation and contestation.

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No one needs to be reminded of Clinton’s “deplorables” comment, or her warning about the risks posed by “low-information voters”. But few seem to recall the brief stunned moment following Trump’s election win when political pundits and social-media experts were bursting with performative self-reflection (though admittedly not a little emotional incontinence). Maybe we needed to reflect; maybe we needed to listen a little more to the “left behind”. It didn’t take long for soul-searching to be replaced by waves of condemnation towards those “ignorant” voters who were duped by Facebook, Google and Vladimir Putin into allowing the “darkest impulses” of the human psyche out into the light of day.

Like the flick of a switch, this new narrative became “the truth” about 2016. No, no — it was nothing we did. People had been swindled out of doing what was good for them, lured into the deep, frog-dwelling recesses of the internet. It’s not that we failed — it’s that the forces of evil were too powerful. Defeating them became an all-consuming passion. Suppress free speech. Curtail freedoms. All so that the greater good can triumph.

In this narrative, the disenfranchised became both victim and villain: they are duped and they are malign. Neither, however, places any importance on political agency. Clinton’s latest reflection on “loneliness” is only the latest manifestation of this. As she describes, before these voters became dangerous, they were just vulnerable young men, the offspring of broken families in broken communities: “There have always been angry young men alienated from mainstream society and susceptible to the appeal of demagogues and hate-mongers,” she writes. “But modern technology has taken the danger to another level.” And, crucially, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Throwing herself behind the lofty political aim of finding the electorate (adequately vetted) friends, she echoes other campaigners who liken loneliness to obesity and “smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day”. She takes this medicalisation of the problem further, comparing it with the public-health threat presented by HIV/AIDS, arguing that it is time to “sound the alarm”. The rationale here is straightforward: by medicalising loneliness, it can be safely transformed into something much more isolable and soluble than something such as real democratic representation. Indeed, it medicalises democracy as a whole, diagnosing it as infirm and in need of a cure.

Here, the political enemy becomes sick, not an object of hatred but of empathy. “Researchers also say that loneliness can generate anger, resentment, and even paranoia,” she writes. “It diminishes civic engagement and social cohesion, and increases political polarisation and animosity.” She cites the US surgeon general to argue that unless this crisis is addressed, “we will continue to splinter and divide until we can no longer stand as a community or a country” — the implication being that voters didn’t distrust Clinton or her ilk; they were just “lonely”.

To this effect, she complains of Steve Bannon’s conspiracy to turn isolated “rootless white males” of the online gaming world into the “shock troops of the alt-right”. But is transforming them into patients-in-waiting and seeking to quarantine their discontents really any better? For Clinton, there is no other choice: “Like many others, I was too slow to see the impact this strategy could have. Now the surgeon general is telling us that social disconnection is not just a problem at the margins… but is in fact an epidemic sweeping the country.” The language of “epidemic” leaves readers with no doubt that this is not a political but medical problem.

What is the treatment? She suggests that governments bring opportunities back to hard-hit areas, stem the need to leave communities to find work, and put the family first — none of which would be disagreeable if it weren’t an excuse for more intervention with the aim of creating the right sorts of citizens. Just as her demonisation of “deplorables” makes her promises to support the same voters ring hollow, treating people as objects of behaviour management techniques is hardly a winning formulation. Across Europe and around the world, people are voting less for the ascendent populists than against the condescending political mainstream that Clinton has come to represent. Every insurgent political movement of the past decade shares one thing in common: its members want to be subjects instead of objects.

Still, there is a kernel of truth here. A growing number of voters in America, and the West more broadly, feel alienated. Today’s society is characterised by ongoing individuation and social fragmentation and a loss of collective projects beyond the self. Union membership has collapsed and what is left of them is just as sceptical of political agency, often expressed through the infantilising rhetoric of health and safety.

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Yet there clearly remains something distinctly sanitising about grouping problems together under the umbrella of health. This is not a phenomenon that can be solved by completing a checklist and finding the appropriate intervention. People are politically dispossessed: more important than the feelings that result from alienation is the disenchantment, political or otherwise, that follows.

In other words, loneliness isn’t the problem, but disenfranchisement. The political sphere has been emptied of all meaning and mainstream politicians are happy to keep it that way, perhaps even longing for the comfortable, stabilising political apathy of the Nineties. For a time when “getting people excited about politics” didn’t involve Steve Bannon, but a “rock the vote” talk at a local high school; when a policy can be marketed with a PowerPoint presentation and people are passive recipients of your charitable interventions.

But they won’t get that. There is no going back. Political frustration will inevitably reappear elsewhere — in conspiracies and populist figures who promise to tell it like it is. Trump had his moment, and most will not be blind to his embarrassing inability to accept a backslide from his presidency. Yet until those in power reckon with the need to see people eye to eye, Trump-like figures and movements will replace him. Trump didn’t cause the circumstances that made him and, at least if Clinton is listened to, those circumstances won’t be changing soon.

He had started his Washington career working for the Right-leaning Weekly Standard magazine. In a town of grey suits and cement blocks, he wrote with cleverness and style. I covered local crime for a small newspaper in Alabama. But I wanted to write like he did, so I asked: to work for the Weekly Standard, did I need to buy into a whole ideology? Or could I write for the Left-leaning New Republic, too? I wanted to tell all kinds of stories.

I’ve returned to his answer many times since. “Just pick a side,” he said.

In the years that followed, Carlson rose, then fell, then rose higher again, and often I wondered how he did it. I believe among the millions of words he employed — the thundering waterfall of words; the warring, imprecatory, wheedling words — only one mattered most: “you”.

This was his great insight. Instead of describing events from around the globe with detachment, he invited viewers into a conspiracy of knowing. It was a modern Gnosticism, a rebellion outside the gates of information. And his audience — an ageing, shrinking middle class — found that call irresistible. It was ingenious television.

Never mind that he was one of the most influential figures in the ruling party. Never mind that the most powerful news network paid him $20 million per year for that influence, on the highest-rated cable news show in history. It wasn’t about him. The mobs are coming for you.

Then, a few months ago, Carlson suddenly lost his lofty seat. In a book published today, he claims Fox News fired him as part of a $787.5 million deal with Dominion Voting Systems, after the network broadcast Donald Trump’s lies about election fraud. “They agreed to take me off the air, my show off the air, as a condition of the Dominion settlement,” Carlson says in Tucker, a biography by Chadwick Moore. “They had to settle this.” (Dominion’s lawyers flatly deny this: “Dominion made no requests or demands whatsoever regarding Mr Carlson’s employment with Fox.”)

In the days after his downfall, Carlson posted a video to social media in which he described how most of it — the whole televised political battle — was a sham, but that he would soon reveal the truth. And he concluded with a final, second-person invitation: “See you soon.”

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Now Carlson truly does find himself cast outside the gates, maybe for the first time. He’s been an insider since his magazine stories turned into occasional television appearances, which became regular guest spots on CNN, then a hosting job on the show Crossfire, which pitted him against the liberal commentator Paul Begala. Carlson’s most famous moment on that show was a catastrophic encounter in 2004 with the comedian Jon Stewart, who accused Carlson and Begala of faking their outrage. “You’re partisan — what do you call it? — hacks,” Stewart said. He had drawn back a curtain to reveal the machinery of television debate, and the show never recovered. CNN soon cancelled it.

Carlson moved to MSNBC, where he hosted a show called Tucker. It never really caught on, and after its cancellation Carlson retreated to start a website called The Daily Caller, a conservative tabloid that gained popularity but never much respect as a real source of news. Then, in 2013, Carlson began his true upward trajectory, joining Fox News to co-host the chatty Fox & Friends. In 2016, he took over his own primetime show.

His timing was serendipitous, coming in the churn of Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign. But Carlson didn’t win an audience of millions by accident; he was exceptionally effective at the job, in ways small and large. His pacing, for instance, is impeccable. Speaking on television is hard — too slow and you’re plodding, too fast and you seem nervous — but Carlson had perfect timing. More importantly, he understood historical timing; as white Americans shifted from majority towards minority, many hardened into a political bloc and eyed institutions with distrust. Carlson recognised the power in their grievance and made a shift alongside them, casting himself as a populist voice for the forgotten and downtrodden.

It was a deft dance with his audience. It required them to forget that he rose to prominence wearing a bow tie, an affectation he began at preparatory school; that he lunched at The Palm on DuPont Circle in Washington, deep inside the Beltway; that he embodied the very Republican establishment against which he raged. It required him to rage for you.

Carlson and his producers pioneered a new style of commentary. Instead of bowing to Jon Stewart’s accusations of manufactured outrage, they built a full-scale factory. It worked like this: producers would scour the American landscape for someone — anyone — behaving in outlandish ways. Hyper-wokeness worked best, but sheer nuttiness served at a pinch. Then they presented this fringe behaviour as central, as representative of them, the un-Americans who would supplant you.

It started with mere exaggeration about issues that genuinely, legitimately, do matter to Americans. Immigration, for instance. In 2017 in Pennsylvania, a Roma refugee child couldn’t make it to a bathroom on time, pulled down his pants, and defecated outside. By the time Carlson injected the story into the national consciousness, “gypsies” had overrun the town and left “streets covered — pardon us now, but it’s true — with human faeces”.

Viewers reacted with anger and fear. And soon Carlson’s show grew so big it competed less against other news programmes than the internet itself. But rage is a market with inflation. By the end of his tenure at Fox, Carlson railed against candy: “Woke M&Ms have returned. The green M&M got her boots back, but apparently is now a lesbian maybe?”

For a time, a conscientious viewer could overlook the widgets tumbling from Carlson’s outrage assembly line because they mattered so little. “You know the official story about pandas. They’re cute but adorably helpless, which is why they’re almost extinct,” he told viewers in 2018. “But like a lot of what we hear that’s a lie.”

Then, in 2020, the country suffered a presidential election so fractious it tore at the fabric of American society. The author Mark Bowden and I wrote a book about the effort to overturn that election, and much of our attention went to the literal machinery of democracy: the vote tabulators made by Dominion and Smartmatic. As we pieced together accounts from county-level election officials — themselves almost all conservative Republicans — reality diverged ever-further from the version put forward by Carlson and his colleagues on Fox News. And we wondered: how are they getting away with this?

Carlson had retooled the factory, and instead of cranking out horny pandas and woke M&Ms, the show offered viewers conspiracies about matters of life and actual death. The apparatus of democracy. The January 6 attack on the US Capitol. The war in Ukraine.

Segments from Tucker Carlson Tonight started appearing in Russia’s internal propaganda. And suddenly he wasn’t getting away with it. Dominion weighed in with a gargantuan defamation lawsuit against Fox News, a suit so strong that Fox scrambled to apologise, repeatedly and in prime time. Then, thanks to the suit, the private text messages of Fox’s biggest stars went public, revealing that they didn’t believe the lies from Trump’s team. “Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane,” Carlson wrote of Trump’s lawyer, to a colleague. “Our viewers are good people and they believe it.” Carlson didn’t believe any of it. But he had picked a side.

Uglier, if less consequential, revelations followed. The day after the January 6 attacks, for instance, Carlson had sent the following text to a producer:

“A couple of weeks ago, I was watching a video of people fighting on the street in Washington. A group of Trump guys surrounded an Antifa kid and started pounding the living shit out of him. It was three against one, at least. Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously. It’s not how white men fight.”

All of it — the Dominion reporting, the hypocrisy about Trump, the racist messages — led Fox News in April to pull their highest-rated host from the air. In Tucker, Carlson’s biographer describes Carlson’s downfall not as the consequence of his own actions, but instead, naturally, as the result of a conspiracy with foreboding consequences for the reader: “What’s most stunning was the brazenness. A major network had caved to political and regulatory pressures, and the leftists behind it didn’t even feel the need to pretend otherwise. This is the way healthy societies die.”

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Carlson remains under contract with Fox — still receiving a paycheck according to the new book — although he has created a showdown with the network since then by broadcasting on Twitter (since renamed “X”). The videos portray Carlson in exile, and there’s an element of truth to it. He’s still fabulously wealthy and famous, but he no longer sits on the Fox News throne. Instead, he broadcasts from a less polished set, where he uses his hand to scroll his own teleprompter, and his shows feel like an attempt to grab a piece of a younger, online zeitgeist. Take the two-and-a-half-hour interview with “alpha male” influencer Andrew Tate, which Carlson began by claiming public schools in America are removing urinals from boys’ bathrooms because “masculine qualities are oppressive” and boys should “sit down when you pee, like a good little girl”. Carlson used a different set, for that episode, as Tate is under house arrest in Romania, awaiting trial for rape and human trafficking.

It is impossible to say where Carlson will go next. Maybe he’ll find a larger, younger audience. Maybe, like Howard Stern, the former broadcast radio shock jock who turned to satellite radio, he’ll shift to a narrower but even more lucrative format. Only one option seems unimaginable: that he could simply fade away.

At the end of the new biography, Carlson muses on his future, and makes what he intends to be a jab at television. One last conspiratorial offering for you. But for years he was the leading voice on the format, so instead it comes across as unintended confession: “You can tell when someone’s lying to you or when someone’s shading the truth or trying to spin you,” he says. “And there’s a lot of artifice in television.”

It is easy for those watching DC’s gratuitous street violence from a safe distance to kibitz that the city’s residents have voted for this. They elected leaders whose policies have led to high crime, short-staffed police, bad schools, and a housing crisis. But such smug dismissal misses a larger problem.

DC is home to nearly 700,000 residents who, since Congress passed the District of Columbia Home Rule Act in 1973, have elected their city council, mayor and public officials in the way Americans do across our nation. But DC is also the seat of our federal system. Since its founding in 1790, the same year as the ratification of the US Constitution, its main purpose has not been residential or commercial, but governmental. It is home to our President and most of the executive agencies, our congressional representatives, and our Supreme Court. Its city government — unlike that of any other state or city — serves at the pleasure of Congress.

DC’s residents, while vital stakeholders in their city government, aren’t its only stakeholders. The widely-reported urban decay in, say, San Francisco, reflects only on San Franciscans. But mismanagement of Washington DC reflects on all Americans. A federal government seeking to project power and moral authority worldwide cannot headquarter itself in a failed city. The fact that our government is currently based in a city where, by the admission of its own City Council Chair, “you can get away with murder”, is not only embarrassing, but threatens our national security. It’s time for Congress to do something about it.

Let’s start with the raw data. As of July 2023, Washington’s homicide rate was the sixth highest of any US city, and the highest rate in a city of its population or greater. DC logged 203 homicides in 2022, and that number is on tack to grow by 20% in 2023. Violent crime more broadly is up 30% this year. A resident’s probability of being the victim of a violent crime in a given year is around 1 in 75, and if property crime is included, that rises to 1 in 17 — among the highest in the nation. There is a stereotype outside of Washington (and even among some in it) that crime in the District is confined to certain “bad neighbourhoods” — particularly the city’s South-East. The implication being that the wealthier residents of the leafy North-West and increasingly fashionable North-East are insulated from it all. This contention, apart from its callous dismissal of much of the city’s population, is flat-out wrong.

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Neighbourhood Scout identifies the campus of Catholic University of America, just north of Union Station, as the safest neighbourhood in the city. But just last week, a 25-year-old Kentuckian teacher visiting for a conference was shot and killed there. The same day, Alison Cienfuegos, a 21-year-old college student who wanted to become an anaesthesiologist, was murdered in South-East DC. The day before that, Nasrat Ahmad Yar, a former interpreter for the US Army in Afghanistan who then worked as a Lyft driver, was murdered by a group of passengers in North-East. In May, a 12-year-old girl in South-East was hit in the leg by a stray bullet from a shootout outside as she lay in bed. In February, a man shot several random passengers on a city bus and slaughtered a Metro transit worker near the city’s popular Eastern Market neighbourhood. And last month, we marked one-year since the mass shooting of four people at a Juneteenth party in Northwest.

This crimewave extends beyond gun violence. Since early 2023, North-West DC has increasingly fallen victim to organised shoplifting; nowadays it’s hard to find a tube of toothpaste for sale that isn’t under lock and key. On 30 April, two CVS Pharmacies in North-West were targeted within half hour of each other by the same group of five suspects, who stuffed large trash bags with goods before fleeing in a stolen car. And stolen cars themselves are increasingly easy to come by. In 2022, there were 485 carjackings in DC, up from only 140 four years earlier — an increase The Washington Post described as leaving authorities “baffled”.

And then there are the unclassifiable crimes of civil disorder, chaos and squalor. Three North-East businesses were targeted with explosives last week. There have been eight documented arson attacks in the past six months. And there are the mobs of illegal ATV and dirt bike riders roaring down DC’s main arteries while endangering and verbally abusing pedestrians, who cannot be apprehended due to the city’s “no chase” police laws. Washington also has the biggest per-capita homelessness problem on the East Coast (over 1% of its population), and the third-highest opioid drug mortality rate in the nation. I could go on.

It is unfair, of course, to blame crime and disorder solely on city government. But it is more than fair to expect a crisis of such magnitude to be met with a vigorous, unified and effective government response (particularly since these problems, while currently on the upswing, are far from new). The District’s response has been none of those things.

Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) is currently understaffed by almost 20% (around 800 officers) and is nearing the lowest number of active officers in its history. According to Police Chief Robert Contee, it is DC’s policy climate that has made the city such an unattractive place to be an officer. Unlike in almost any other city, Contee explains, MPD officers must be able to prove a reasonable belief that no one will be injured as a result of a vehicle pursuit before initiating it — an impossible demand. Other laws, such as a prohibition on officers reviewing their own bodycam footage before writing an incident report, and the removal of time limits on internal conduct investigations — have made it more difficult for officers to defend themselves when accused of misconduct. With a hollowed-out MPD, Contee predicts that the department will be unable to reach necessary staffing levels for “at least a decade”.

But DC’s maladministration of criminal justice does not end with the police. Its mismanagement of corrections bears equal responsibility. A 2022 city report found that out of all homicides committed in the District in 2019 and 2020, 46% were committed by people who had been previously incarcerated, with an additional 29% by people who had spent time on probation or parole. The report also found that a mere 500 individuals already known to the criminal justice system (0.1% of the city’s population) perpetrate 70% of the city’s gun violence.

How did the City Council react to this sobering data? Infamously, they responded by passing a crime bill earlier this year (despite Mayor Muriel Bowser’s opposition), seeking to eliminate mandatory minimum sentences and reduce maximum sentences for violent crimes such as robbery and carjacking. In response, the US Senate was forced to exercise its right to veto the Council’s bill.

Interestingly, these self-sabotaging crime policies have been enacted by a City Council that pledges its utmost dedication to the cause of racial equity. It created an equity office in 2020 whose homepage reads: “Everything is a matter of racial equity.” But from the Council’s behaviour, it would seem that “everything” does not include crime. For while the pettier subcategories of DC’s crimewave have become increasingly equitable in their impact over recent years, gun crime has not. In a city with a 45% black population, 95% of the victims of gun violence in DC are black. And somehow, the Council’s instinct is to ask: what about the criminals?

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Public safety is the most basic mission of a municipal government, but it is far from the only one. Unfortunately, DC’s performance in other important areas is little better. Its public education system is one of the worst in the nation, with the city’s students scoring in the bottom five of American states and territories in both reading and mathematics. This has not budged in decades. Considering DC’s high poverty rate and the fact that it is one city being compared with entire states, it might be unreasonable to expect these test results to exceed the national average. But nor should residents expect or tolerate zero progress over three decades.

And then there is the housing crisis. DC has a huge home affordability problem and a high homelessness rate, with 20,000 low-income city residents on a waiting list for low-rent or zero-rent public housing from the city Housing Authority (DCHA). And yet, 25% of the DCHA’s 8,000 units lie unoccupied at any given time, and they remain so for an average of two years before the DCHA gets around to renting them to a new tenant (nationally, the average public housing vacancy rate is 5%). According to The Washington Post, vacant housing units not only attract crime, but cost the city $10 million in rent and federal aid per year.

Reading this, one might wonder whether DC is cash-strapped. Far from it. DC’s effective individual tax rate is 12%: the 11th-highest combined state and local tax rate in America. And its tax base is large. Over the past two decades, the city has experienced a huge wave of wealthy immigration for lucrative government, contractor, consulting and lobbying jobs, resulting in a much-bemoaned wave of neighbourhood gentrification. Add to this a healthy 27% of city revenue supported by federal aid (on the high end for combined federal and state aid in other US cities), and DC frequently runs a budget surplus. But what does that federal largesse buy residents? Far less than they would get living somewhere else, which is why Wallethub awarded DC first place in its “worst-run cities in America” in 2022.

Admittedly DC had stiff competition from such formidable foes as New York, Cleveland, and San Francisco, all of which consistently struggle with their own crime, liveability and maladministration problems. But Washington DC, unlike those other cities, is the capital city of a world superpower. By virtue of this, it ought to provide a positive model of how government can serve its citizens, not a negative one. It should provide safe streets for visitors and residents alike, and a police force sufficiently staffed and trained to keep the peace. It should provide public schools to which a struggling single mother and a visiting diplomat alike would be proud to send their children.

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And then there are the national security implications of DC’s disorder. In the event of war or national disaster, the federal government must be able to secure the city of Washington and lock it down for the protection of our government officials. Considering this need, the fact that the streets only a mile away from the Capitol Building and White House are essentially uncontrollable, even during peacetime, is unacceptable.

There is, though, a potentially swift solution. Under the 1973 Home Rule law, the Senate has the power to review and veto laws of the DC City Council (as it did with the Crime Bill). But it also has the right under the Constitution to take bigger steps, such as abolishing or suspending Home Rule itself. Article 1 of the Constitution gives Congress the right to “exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever” over the federal district — a provision that, according to Georgetown University constitutional law professor Louis Michael Seidman, clearly means that “Congress could abolish the city government and establish whatever governmental system it chose, including direct rule by Congress”. (Indeed, this was how DC was governed before Home Rule.)

Today, Congress should strongly consider exercising that right once again. It should place Washington DC under a temporary federal conservatorship. This would mean suspending the City Council and Mayor and replacing them with federally-appointed city managers, perhaps drawn from more successful municipal governments around the US, until standards for public safety, administration, and education rise to an acceptable level.

Washington DC’s struggles are not unique among American cities. But the solution I propose here is necessarily specific to DC. It would be fundamentally undemocratic and un-American, not to mention unconstitutional, for the federal or state governments to go around disbanding or suspending municipal governments simply for giving their people what they have voted for. But our federal district, as our founders knew, is not a normal city. It represents all of us, which is why the Constitution gives Congress the final say over its affairs.

DC’s officials seem to have forgotten this. Indeed, any effort Congress makes to exercise supervision over the District’s affairs typically elicits hysterical reactions from those city officials whose incompetence has necessitated those interventions. When Georgia Representative Andrew Clyde brought up the possibility of direct federal supervision during a Congressional debate over the idea of DC statehood last year, DC Congressional Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton accused him of seeking to turn the city into a “colony”. What Holmes Norton forgets is that, unlike any other city on the American continent, this one belongs to us all, just like the federal government that inhabits it.

Perhaps reading the writing on the wall, Mayor Bowser and Brooke Pinto of the City Council just this week passed an emergency crime bill that would make it easier to track and detain violent criminals. While I applaud the effort, it is too little too late. We have now seen enough to know that the current city government of DC is not capable of providing our nation the safe, orderly and dignified capital it deserves. Perhaps another democratically elected government a decade or two down the line will be — a conservatorship need not be permanent. But right now, Washington DC requires major emergency surgery, not a mere change in diet. Congress — while an imperfect surgeon — is the only one available.

In the context of Cormac McCarthy’s new novel, this long harangue about America’s decadence at the close of the Seventies is slightly tongue-in-cheek, the barroom prattle of an ageing rake complaining about the strange new world emerging in the aftermath of the sexual revolution. But just because it’s a joke doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take it seriously. If there’s one consistent message in The Passenger, McCarthy’s first novel in 16 years, and its companion volume, Stella Maris, it’s that things are much worse than you think.

Such pessimism, of course, is not new ground for the 89-year-old McCarthy. Today, he’s probably best known as the author of No Country for Old Men, in which the most memorable character is a psychopathic killer who lectures West Texas hayseeds on fate and free will before puncturing their skulls with a cattle gun. Even that was relatively light fare, however. The book that got him on Oprah, 2006’s The Road, featured a father protecting his son from marauding bands of cannibals in the aftermath of what appeared to be a nuclear war. And his masterpiece, 1985’s Blood Meridian, which follows a band of American scalp-hunters murdering and pillaging their way through the US-Mexican borderlands, is one of the bleakest, goriest books ever written. Its central character is a gargantuan, hairless albino child rapist known as Judge Holden, who eggs on the group’s mindless bloodletting with Nietzschean speeches about the divinity of war.

The darkness of McCarthy’s subject matter, combined with a high-flown style that earns him comparisons to William Faulkner and James Joyce, has contributed to his legend as perhaps the greatest living American author, and certainly as one of a small handful who could accept a Nobel Prize without embarrassment. At a time when the dominant strain of American writing is still “autofiction” — claustrophobic frog-marches through the psychic landscape of the graduate-educated bourgeoisie — McCarthy’s epic, blood-drenched tales of the American South and Southwest are a throwback to a time when novelists wrote big books about big questions and had the temerity to think they could answer them. McCarthy has said he admires “gutsy” writers such as Dostoevsky and Melville, and elsewhere he has dismissed Proust and Henry James as “not literature” because of their failure to “deal with issues of life and death”. No one could level the same accusation against McCarthy. Death and violence are his great subjects, which he approaches with philosophical rigour and theological depth.

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McCarthy is also many other things that most of our present-day writers are not. He is second only to his contemporary Thomas Pynchon for his reclusiveness, rarely granting interviews and almost always refusing to talk about his own work. His fictional worlds are overwhelmingly masculine in a way that might provoke critical scolding were he 40 years younger. And the worldview of his novels is decidedly reactionary, which is not to say that they are crudely political or interested in anything so vulgar as a defence of the bourgeois social order. Rather, his books are coloured by a sweeping scepticism toward all the improving efforts of mankind, which can never rescue us from the fundamental brutality of our nature. “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” McCarthy told the New York Times in 1992, and the naïfs who allow themselves to believe in progress on this score “are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom”.

Given this history, McCarthy’s latest novels are, for him, relatively subdued — in neither book is anyone shot through the head with a dragoon revolver or disemboweled by Apaches and hung upside down from a tree. There’s very little violence at all, and quite a lot of conversing about quantum mechanics and Kantian epistemology and mathematical topology, which McCarthy makes only half-hearted attempts to render comprehensible. (I confess I have a high tolerance for McCarthy’s brand of high-concept speechifying, but even I found myself wondering whether it was worth the trouble to look up “S-Matrix theory”.)

The Passenger and Stella Maris follow a pair of Tennessee-born Jewish siblings, Bobby and Alicia Western, whose father was a nuclear physicist who worked with J. Robert Oppenheimer on the construction of the atomic bomb. Alicia, whose conversations with her psychiatrist make up the entirety of Stella Maris, is a beautiful, schizophrenic math genius who commits suicide on page one of The Passenger. When we meet Bobby, it is 1980, eight years after Alicia’s suicide, and the former physicist is living an ascetic existence in New Orleans, socialising with roughnecks and barflies, still paralysed with grief over his dead sister. We soon learn that Bobby and Alicia were in love.

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Early on, it seems as if The Passenger will become a thriller along the lines of No Country for Old Men. But a conspiracy concerning a mysterious plane crash and visits from government agents turns out to be a MacGuffin, serving only to create a persistent atmosphere of weirdness and threat. Most of The Passenger consists of Bobby going about his work and talking with family and friends about a range of chewy subjects. In Stella Maris, the action is dropped entirely — the book is a long series of dialogues between Alicia and her doctor about subjects like pure math, the philosophy of music, the ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the nature of mental illness. The recurring theme of these conversations, in both novels, is the impossibility of knowing anything — the unavoidable conclusion that, as Alicia puts it in a discussion of Richard Feynman’s over-sum theories, “human consciousness and reality are not the same thing”.

Given that McCarthy has apparently been working on these books for close to 20 years, one can’t help but wonder if the author at some point lost interest in his own premise in favour of the mind-bending scientific questions that consume Bobby and Alicia’s attention, and which are clearly objects of fascination for McCarthy. Some of Alicia’s dialogue in Stella Maris, for instance, is lifted in only slightly altered form from a 2017 essay, in which McCarthy suggested that language is a kind of parasite, transforming our unconscious into, as Alicia puts it, “a biological system under successful assault by human reason”. “In the end this strange new code must have replaced at least part of the world with what can be said about it”, she says. “Reality with opinion. Narrative with commentary.” It’s fascinating stuff, but it doesn’t particularly feel like something a 20-year-old girl would say in 1972, even if she were a math genius.

What ultimately holds the books together, in the absence of more conventional narrative structure, is a pervasive feeling that time is running out — for the doomed lovers Bobby and Alicia, and for America and Western civilisation. At one point midway through The Passenger, McCarthy writes that Bobby, whose parents met in 1943 at the nuclear laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, “fully understood that he owed his existence to Adolf Hitler. That the forces of history which had ushered his troubled life into the tapestry were those of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the sister events that sealed forever the fate of the West.” McCarthy has long toyed with the idea that history moves in cycles, that civilisations reach a zenith and then decay, and that there is something self-undermining in man’s conquest of nature — consider the man-made apocalypse of The Road or the nuclear test explosion that closes The Crossing. “The noon of man’s expression signals the onset of night,” says Judge Holden in Blood Meridian. “His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement.” Here that same exhaustion appears as righteous judgment on our own civilisation’s “peak”, the industrial slaughterhouses and nuclear infernos of the 20th century.

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There is a curious passage in Stella Maris where Alicia’s therapist asks: “What do you think is the one indispensable gift?” Alicia answers: “Faith.” No elaboration. I skimmed over this exchange the first time, more interested in the ensuing discussion on Schopenhauer’s theory of music, but now I think it might be the key to both books. For McCarthy, at least, faith is a spur to life, and like life, it is fundamentally irrational. Reason kills faith only to reveal that it cannot replace it, that it is in the end nothing more than a tool, like the physical theories that can build an atomic bomb but cannot explain themselves, let alone tell human beings how to live.

One of the epigraphs to Blood Meridian is a quote from the poet Paul Valéry: “Your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time.” It comes from an essay called “The Wisdom of the Orient”, in which an Asian “scholar from the land of Thin” rebukes a European for his civilisation’s rationalism. The line immediately before it: “You are in love with Intelligence, until it frightens you.”

That novel, and in particular the character of Judge Holden, is often read as a “deconstruction” of the myth of Manifest Destiny, a judgment on the genocidal violence behind the white man’s westward expansion. But read backward through The Passenger and Stella Maris, it is also possible to see the judge, a man of science for whom “whatever exists in creation without my knowledge exists without my consent”, as an indictment of the whole Faustian thrust of Western science and progress. “We are,” McCarthy once told Der Spiegel, “like primitive tribes that have been driven from their culture and have lost their orientation, their identity, their capacity to live.”

It’s a grim vision, sure, but perhaps not as grim as it seems. “When this world which reason has created is carried off at last it will take reason with it,” Alicia tells her doctor. “And it will be a long time coming back.” One suspects that for McCarthy, this outcome is nothing to fear, and indeed might mark a kind of rebirth. Or maybe not. If there’s one lesson to be learned from his fiction, it’s that the world cares precious little what we think of it.

This article was first published in October 2022.

Like the United States during the Second World War, Rome in the course of the Punic Wars became an empire. The First and Second Punic Wars saw Roman power established over Sicily, Sardinia and a good part of Spain — all former areas of Carthaginian influence. Rome also gradually extended its sway over greater Greece and Numidia, the latter coinciding with modern Algeria, to the west of Carthage on the North African coast.

Again, somewhat like the United States, imperialism helped lead to a dramatic increase in wealth in Rome itself, as a class of nouveau riche in the capital benefited from war booty, overseas trade, money lending and the like, according to the late British classicist S. A. Handford. Eventually, the Roman legions would evolve from a mass conscription military to a more professional, volunteer fighting force in order to regulate the vast territories under its influence as an imperial behemoth. The rough parallel with the development of the United States as a great power is hard to ignore, given how Washington itself has developed into a money-culture of well-heeled think tanks and flashy lobbyists, even as the mass conscription army that fought Second World War and Vietnam has morphed into a highly professional volunteer force of working-class youth, culturally divorced from the well-bred policy nomenklatura in the capital.

But the comparison becomes especially eerie when one considers that following the Punic Wars and Rome’s becoming an empire, it immersed itself in small wars against tribes and other chieftains that brought little glory and much political complications to Rome, and were a factor in its gradual decline. Of course, that is the common fate of empire, since to influence large and varied regions of the Earth naturally requires military as well as economic and political involvement. In the oft-quoted words of the mid-20th century American theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr:

“The same strength which has extended our power beyond a continent has also interwoven our destiny with the destiny of many peoples and brought us into a vast web of history in which other wills, running in oblique or contrasting directions to our own, inevitably hinder or contradict what we most fervently desire.”

The young Winston Churchill was reading into the worst nightmare of Niebuhr’s and America’s imperial future when, in 1897, he described Afghanistan in The Story of the Malakand Field Force: “a roadless, broken and underdeveloped country; an absence of any strategic points; a well-armed enemy with great mobility and modern rifles, who adopts guerrilla tactics. The result… [is] that the troops can march anywhere, and do anything, except catch the enemy….

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“The impractical”, the young Churchill wisely continues, “may wonder why we, a people who fill some considerable place in the world, should mix in the petty intrigues of…border chieftains”. Some, whom Churchill calls “bad and nervous sailors”, would simply cut and run, even though that would be impossible under the circumstances, whereas others call for “full steam ahead”, that is, a dramatic increase in military resources until the frontier valleys “are as safe and civilized as Hyde Park”. But, as Churchill intimates, there are usually neither the troops nor the money nor the will to do any such thing. Therefore, “the inevitable alternative” is a system of “gradual advance, of political intrigue among the tribes, of subsidies and small expeditions”.

Subsidies and small expeditions? Now we are at a point of concision that defines the ancient Roman imperial past and the modern American one. Arguably the signature Roman imperial expedition, which vexed Rome and contributed to much political turmoil in the capital, was the so-called Jugurthine War, which lasted for seven years near the end of the second century BC. We owe our account of it to Sallust, who was born a few decades later in the first century BC, a time when this war fought by the Romans in Numidia against its king, Jugurtha, was still recent and presumably hotly debated. The geopolitics of the Jugurthine War were straightforward. Numidia, to the west of Carthage, had been an ally of Rome and their common hostility to Carthage had cemented their alliance. Yet, following Rome’s destruction of Carthage, Numidia suddenly no longer required Roman protection. That set the context for Numidia’s efforts at erasing Roman influence from its sprawling and difficult geography.

Jugurtha was a brilliant and devious king who fought against his adopted siblings over the spoils of Numidia, and bribed his way to victory time after time by his intrigues with Rome. He corrupted Rome and concomitantly gained power in Numidia. At first he was Rome’s ally. Then he became Rome’s enemy. By the time the Roman power structure realised he had to be destroyed it was too late to avoid a major war in a faraway territory. Sallust describes the war as “a hard-fought and bloody contest in which victories alternated with defeats”. The struggle, he goes on, “played havoc with all our institutions… For Jugurtha was so crafty, so well acquainted with the country, and so experienced in warfare, that one never knew what was the most deadly — his presence or his absence, his offers of peace or his threats of hostilities.”

There are shades of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, and Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in Jugurtha, in terms of the unconventional threat posed to Rome and the United States. In some cases the imperial power was ultimately victorious, as was Rome against Jugurtha; in some cases not. But the overall effect over time was to subtly and not so subtly weaken the empire.

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An analogue from British imperial history was in Waziristan of the Thirties and Forties, when British troops tried and failed to capture the Faqir of Ipi, a radical cleric who, because of his narrow tribal base, appealed to pan-Islamic ideals in the struggle against colonial occupiers. The Faqir, or holy man, whose real name was Mirza Ali Khan, hid out for years in the caves straddling the Afghanistan and Pakistan border, inspiring his troops with sermons on religious war. Despite British aerial bombardment, the Faqir died a natural death in 1960.

Churchill’s comments ring loudly here. A great power cannot often cut and run, nor can it achieve total victory in these small wars. Britain, whose days as a great empire are over, no longer faces this dilemma. But the United States surely does. America is not a country like Sweden or Belgium. It would be simple if it were. Instead, it is, to repeat, a great power. Despite Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States cannot merely withdraw from the developing world, whose very size, political and cultural variety, and general instability guarantees that Washington will regularly face wrenching choices about how to proceed.

The problem is compounded by the nature of the foreign policy establishment in Washington, often disparaged as the “Blob”, because it often thinks according to a single, well-rehearsed mindset. The Blob wants to do great things in this world, because its heroes — those it particularly wants to emulate — were “present at the creation”, as the saying goes. I refer to the American inventors of the post-war order: men such as George Kennan, John McCloy, Averell Harriman, Dean Acheson and so on. The alliance structure that these men built would eventually, over the course of the decades, win the Cold War. The Blob wants to do something similar: create a new and long-lasting American order.

The difficulty with this grand ambition is that the United States is not the country it was in the Fifties. During that period, America was the only major industrial power in the world whose infrastructure was not severely damaged by the Second World War. This gave the United States a comparative advantage that would last for decades. Back then, it completely dominated the world economy. Its robust middle class underwrote a great navy. It was a real nation-state with a military draft. This was long before the American middle class divided into an upper-middle global elite and a lower-middle trending toward poverty. Moreover, this middle class had just gone to war in Europe and the Pacific, and was consequently understanding of rebuilding Europe and Japan. And the foreign policy elite that guided America, the elite that was “present at the creation”, had themselves just gone through the Second World War, holding key positions. They had a comprehension of the world and the tragic choices involved that the American elite of today often lacks.

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There is a pattern in all of this: great power wars strengthen a nation and relatively smaller expeditionary wars dissipate it. In our age, a small war means a professional military in fierce combat and a nation at the shopping mall, oblivious to what is going on overseas. When the population at home cannot relate to the fighting overseas, it is probably best if possible not to do it.

The question becomes: can great power conflict over Ukraine and Taiwan rejuvenate America, as it did after 1945? In that way, America would avoid the fate of Rome. Possibly. Of course, there is no mass conscription military anymore and President Joe Biden — despite all the military aid he has been sending — has wisely not committed American troops to the defence of Ukraine. Nevertheless, the national interest in defending Ukraine and Taiwan is clearly much more obvious than toppling an Iraqi dictator or staying militarily engaged in Afghanistan for two decades.

And yet, the Biden Administration is going beyond merely defending Ukraine and Taiwan with arms shipments. It is actually demanding that all countries in the world become democracies, something that the great secretaries of state of the late-Cold War Era, Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, and James Baker III, never would have done. Those diplomats were more interested in reconciliations than with issuing ultimatums. Issuing ideological ultimatums is a sign of decadence, that befits a country that is splitting at the seams politically and with an out-of-control national debt.

The Jugurthine War helped presage the end of the Roman Republic. Will America recover from the stain of its Middle East adventures? It’s an open question. Yet, great power rivalry that will likely continue for years, by engaging the whole society and economy, may change America in unpredictable ways, possibly leading to more political and social cohesion. Meanwhile, possessing a memory of Rome and what it went through can only help.

But pride before a fall has an ancient lineage, and only the arrogance of the historical present could treat American imperial decline as a novel phenomenon, let alone mere metaphor. Some 16 centuries before Clinton, in an uncannily similar setting of domes and colonnades, a Roman orator stood before the imperial Senate to deliver an equally triumphal speech. It was 1 January 399, inauguration day for the latest in a millennium-old line of consuls, the most prestigious Roman office. This year’s candidate was Flavius Mallius Theodorus. After rising to praise his audience — “here I see gathered all the brilliance of the world” — he went on to proclaim the dawn of a new Golden Age, celebrating the unparalleled prosperity of the Empire.

Rome’s rapid comeuppance is now a historical parable that America can learn from in real-time. Because the rhetoric of Clinton and his ancient predecessor was spoken from atop the crest of the same wave: an identical process of rise and decline which Peter Heather and I, in our new book, call “the imperial lifecycle”. Empires grow rich and powerful and attain supremacy through the economic exploitation of their colonial periphery. But in the process, they inadvertently spur the economic development of that same periphery until it can roll back and ultimately displace its overlord.

America has never thought of itself as an empire, mainly because with the exception of the few islands in the Pacific and Caribbean, it has never accumulated a large network of overseas territories. But this modern European model, in which colonies were (and in a few cases, still are) administered by governors who answered directly to the imperial capital, was but one of many. The late Roman Empire, for instance, functioned as an “inside-out” empire — effectively run from the provinces, with Rome serving more as a spiritual than administrative capital. What held it all together was the shared culture of the provincial nobility that ran it, most of whom has provincial origins but had been socialised into what Peter Heather has called the imperial culture of “Latin, towns and togas”.

The American Empire — or more accurately the American-led Western empire — mirrors this confederal model, with an updated cultural-political glue that we might call “neoliberalism, Nato and denim”. Under this regime, the nation-state was primary, borders were inviolable, relatively open trade and capital movement prevailed, governing elites  were committed to liberal principles, and bureaucracy was based on increasingly standardised education systems (with economics training assuming an increasingly central role as the century progressed). But since its establishment in 1944 at the Bretton Woods conference, its fundamental economic model has been in the timeless imperial mould: exploitation of the periphery to the benefit of the imperial core.

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The great wave of decolonisation that followed the war was meant to end that. But the Bretton Woods system, which created a trading regime that favoured industrial over primary producers and enshrined the dollar as the global reserve currency, ensured that the net flow of financial resources continued to move from developing countries to developed ones. Even when the economies of the newly-independent states grew, those of the G7 economies and their partners grew more. And while the treaty arrangements that cemented this system were periodically updated at international summits, even then the US and its main trading partners would typically draft a deal for sign-off by everyone else. As a result, the gap between rich and poor countries grew bigger than ever.

Clinton was speaking at the all-time peak of this American imperial order. Two years earlier, a financial crisis that had begun in Asia had ricocheted across the developing world. And when protesters filled streets and governments across the Global South collapsed, the rich in developing countries panicked and sent their money into the safe haven of US Treasury paper. That influx of cash sent the late Nineties US economy into overdrive, creating the abundance that Clinton took to be endless.

In fact, as he was speaking, the overall flow of global capital had already begun moving the other way. By this time, quietly but steadily, developing countries like China and India had shaken off the torpor of earlier decades and were starting to grow in leaps and bounds. The brief recessions induced in developing countries by the Asian Crisis and the consequent boom in the West obscured the fact that the really dynamic economies of the world were now in what was called the Third World. Once the protests died down and normal business resumed there, investors in the developing world — followed by fund-managers in Western countries — sent their money back to the growing economies of the global periphery.

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In the Roman Empire, peripheral states developed the political and military capacity to end Roman domination by force. In the modern case, the conflict was fought through diplomatic, economic and political channels. The year of Clinton’s panegyric now looks pivotal — not only for the changing capital winds, but because of what happened at that year’s World Trade Organization summit in Seattle. After decades in which they’d more or less signed off on done-and-dusted deals, delegations from some of the big developing countries got together, refused to go along and brought the negotiations to a halt. As their diplomatic and political capacity rose to match their economic heft, developing countries were now demanding, and getting, better deals.

The Third World was rising, and it quickly showed in the economic data. On the eve of the millennium, the cusp of its supremacy — a supremacy no other empire in history had come remotely close to matching — the West accounted for four-fifths of the global economy. Today, that’s down to three-fifths, and falling. The fastest-growing economies in the world are now all in the old periphery; the worst-performing economies are disproportionately in the West. These are the economic trends that have created our present landscape of superpower conflict — most saliently between America and China. A once-mighty empire is now challenged and feels embattled. Taken aback by the refusal of so many developing countries to join in isolating Russia, the West is now waking up to the reality of the emerging, polycentric and fluid global order.

These trends are only set to continue. But this is where America and Rome diverge. The Roman Empire existed at a time where there was one fixed factor of production: land. The economy was therefore necessarily steady-state and overwhelmingly agricultural. For the periphery to rise, the core had to fall, as the barbarian invaders seized physical Roman real estate. But in the modern world, where continued technological progress means economies can keep moving forward, if more slowly, decline may only need to be relative. The West can continue to grow, and to play a pre-eminent role in global governance.

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But meek acceptance isn’t what builds empires in the first place. The danger is that, obsessed with past glories and tempted by a desire to turn back the clock, Western countries attempt to restore their greatness. Since its own imperial marginalisation, Britain has been possessed by a manic and counter-productive declinism, most recently responding to the 2008 crash with a programme of austerity that has sunk its economy into what may become a permanent decay. America’s interminable annual wranglings over debt ceilings could, if they continue, diminish the attractiveness of the dollar, at a time when developing countries are looking for alternatives.

The fate of the West hangs in the balance, and it must stop drawing the wrong lessons from Roman history, not the least of which is a stubborn refusal to accept a diminished role in its world. After all, the Roman Empire might have survived had it not weakened itself with wars of choice on its ascendant Persian rival. By finding a way to coexist peacefully with its own rival China, however uncomfortable that may be, the US could do itself and the world a favour.