Personal essays, it seems, have always been Vance’s bread and butter. Even at Yale Law School, he was busy writing personal essays instead of studying law. The first draft for what became Hillbilly Elegy was submitted as a 60-page paper for a class on international business transactions; what exactly it had to do with international business transactions remains unclear. He wanted to use his lived experience to do social-science analysis of the “ills befalling working-class white people”. Swap “white” for any other racial identity, or for “queer” or “trans”, and one is left with the sort of solipsistic, self-indulgent claptrap that conservative intellectuals, Vance’s modern-day cheerleaders, tend to castigate as “woke”.

Hillbilly Elegy was not simply the narration of an exotic and unusual life — as was, say, the memoir of another politically-ambitious 30-something Ivy League graduate, Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father. Vance’s book aspired to be serious political science. It held the key, it was claimed in 2016, the year in which it had the good fortune to be published, to understanding the rise of Donald Trump. Even in Britain, where nobody had ever heard of Jackson, Kentucky or tasted Mountain Dew, the lived experience of this cherubic Ohioan was believed to say something meaningful about Brexit and the “Red Wall”.

It is ironic that the people who most dislike the Vice President today, and whom he dislikes the most in return, were exactly the sorts who gave him his start. The Financial Times and the Economist were among Hillbilly Elegy’s biggest evangelists. His message, after all, appealed to them: the “autoethnography” was ultimately in service to an old-fashioned, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps liberalism. Some passages could have been written by Samuel Smiles or Margaret Thatcher. “We spend our way to the poorhouse”, Vance wrote of his hillbilly kinsfolk; “thrift is inimical to our being”.

Vance has been on quite a journey since then, documented in a trickle of personal essays. At long last, he has treated us to a fully-fledged sequel to the book that made his name. Communion is, its subtitle says, about Vance’s return to faith. In fact, it is a broader Apologia pro vita sua, presenting a self-flattering account of his many conversions since 2016. It therefore considers his conversion to MAGA and his conversion to a kind of anti-liberalism and anti-capitalism, alongside his conversion to Roman Catholicism. All these, he makes clear, are closely linked.

Communion is written in the same folksy, syrupy style as Hillbilly Elegy. Vance’s first book began with a faux-modest apology, and in Communion he likewise occasionally pleads for his readers’ clemency: “Keep reading”, he says amid one long-winded digression, “there’s a point here, I promise”. The main difference in style arises from Communion’s affected piety. The sweariness of Hillbilly Elegy is toned down. Mamaw, one of the great characters of modern American literature, used to curse like a sailor; at one point she asks a young JD, then questioning his sexuality, if he wants to suck dicks. In Communion, Mamaw has lost some of her edge: now she lamely refers to “effing crooks” and “effing perverts”. The word “bullshit” appears right at the beginning of Hillbilly Elegy. Clean-mouthed, Ned-Flanders Communion ends with a nauseating “Amen”.

Much of Communion narrates Vance’s shifting relationship with Christianity. It retreads the relevant sections of Hillbilly Elegy, occasionally quoting them at length. After some adolescent Bible-thumping, Vance saw the light of atheism, and combined this in his student years with a love for Ayn Rand. In this, he was fairly typical of young men of this milieu, “freethinkers” who found refuge online from the superstitions that stifled them at home. He still shows a nostalgic familiarity with their main totems, notably Christopher Hitchens and Reddit.

Why, then, did Vance convert? One of his reasons is that religious people are the most rational and sane. His evidence is his lived experience of the presidential election of 2016. He describes seeing people, elite media types, wailing and thrashing about as it became clear that Trump was on course to win. Quite understandably, he concluded that these people “need psychological help”. “If Hillary Clinton had won”, he continued, “my evangelical, Trump-loving father would have turned off the TV, prayed, and said, ‘Well, I hope she ain’t as bad as I feared’”.

That comparison called into question his prior assumptions: “I had thought that my father was an irrational religious man…, and that these newsroom criers were sensible, logical people.” There is a glaring problem here, however. When Joe Biden beat Trump in the election of 2020, the prevailing attitude among Trump’s followers was a far cry from “I hope he ain’t as bad as I feared”. Nor was this the attitude of JD Vance himself, then freshly emerged from the baptismal font. In 2021, as his political ambition was brewing, he described Biden’s victory as “unfair”. He was picked as Trump’s running mate in 2024 in large part because he cleaves to the dogma of his new faith: that the election was rigged.

Vance offers the President more than just obsequiousness. His youth and intellectual vigor are supposed to balance out his boss’s dotage. Vance hopes to be the first millennial in the White House. Indeed, Communion is a millennial book, through and through, its themes springing straight from the generation’s roster. Aside from “work-life balance”, there’s a jab at something an author of a different bent would call “mansplaining”: those “insufferable tirades by above-average guys who think they’re brilliant”. Vance details his own sub-Seth-Rogenite college years: “Dude”, he asks a friend, “are you in love with this chick?” Once it has moved to more serious political terrain, many of the book’s barbs are aimed at the “Boomer leadership” — a group from which President Trump is curiously exempted.

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Communion, as a result, preaches a millennial faith. It is telling that Catholicism ends up, in Vance’s life, as a substitute for therapy, a way for him to “deal with his past”. Its politics are of a similar vintage: generic post-Crash progressivism. That may be a strange ideology to impute to a Republican, but there it is. “I’m uninterested in making people servants to the economy”, he says, as though shouting into a megaphone at Occupy Wall Street in 2011: “the economy ought to be serving us”. The part of the book which sets out his political vision — a foretaste, perhaps, of the presidential campaign to come — is awash with such Sandersesque bluster. He repeatedly criticizes his own party for being “far too willing to worship the market”. He anyway seems just as eager to abjure his past Randian libertarianism as his New Atheism.

A Protestant ethic, the ethic of thrift, might have suited the liberalism of Hillbilly Elegy. His new Catholicism likewise suits this postliberal, anti-market shift. In Catholicism he has found some support for his semi-sarcastic, sophomoric suggestion that “maybe economics is just fake”. Vance extols the “skepticism of free market theory” which he finds in the “Catholic Church’s ancient social doctrine”. When he inveighs against the “gods of GDP”, he can cast himself as the inheritor to a venerable tradition of Catholic social thought, critical of “consumerism”, “individualism”, and other vices of modernity, in the mold of Pope Leo XIII, G.K. Chesterton, or Dorothy Day.

One can believe that Vance is a sincere Catholic, and a sincere postliberal, while also considering some of the more cynical motivations at play. One theme of Communion is the author’s obsession with status. He knows that this used to inform his beliefs and ideas. His past criticism for Trump gave him “social immunity”, allowing him, as a conservative, to get invited to all the right dinner parties. His Ayn Rand phase used to have a similar effect: “tax breaks and Social Security cuts were socially acceptable ways to be conservative among the American elite”.

What Vance never mentions is that Catholicism is a socially acceptable way to be conservative among the American elite — or, at least, that it grants entry to an elite of its own. At Yale Law School, even in its conservative circles, reversion to the hick evangelicalism in which he was reared would never have been an option. Evangelical churches, with their smoke machines and strobe lighting, their faith-healers and doomsday preachers, lack the gravitas that Vance was after. Protestants used to regard themselves as more serious, more intellectually rigorous, than those sensuous, emotional Papists. But now the stakes are reversed. Austere Presbyterianism isn’t really a thing anymore. Even where evangelicalism is on the up — as in Brazil — this is precisely because of its flashy aesthetics and “prosperity gospel”. Catholicism, on the other hand, provides its initiates with an intricate intellectual pedigree. It gives them the mantle of a storied tradition. It directs them to St Augustine (Vance’s patron) and Thomas Aquinas; it allows its adherents to seem “deep”.

The leading minds on the American Right, especially those which attended to its postliberal and communitarian turn in the late 2010s, are Catholic, whether converts like Adrian Vermeule or cradle Catholics like Patrick Deneen. The same can be said of the robustly Right-wing justices on the Supreme Court: Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. As with any prestigious club, the Catholic Church sets some barriers for entry. Anyone and his dog can become an evangelical Christian. But to become a Catholic means that a suitably learned priest has decided that you are up to it. Vance acknowledges this directly: “I really liked that the Church required you to work a little to join”. Having cleared that hurdle, conversion to Catholicism brought Vance into this more refined set. If he was once drawn to atheism and libertarianism because they offered him a certain cachet, how do we know his Catholicism is any different?

In America, Catholicism possesses another distinct advantage. It was never the dominant religion. It is separate from the elite WASP culture that Vance likes to spurn. In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance felt alienated from that culture on the grounds that he was “Scotch-Irish” rather than “Anglo-Saxon”; his conversion to Catholicism has since allowed him to also drop the P in that acronym. Catholicism gives him a certain fellow-feeling with other “white ethnic” hyphenated Americans, historically excluded from the WASP core — the Italians, the Irish, the Poles. Those groups used to be part of the Democratic coalition. The Catholic Al Smith ran for the presidency as a Democrat in 1928; anti-Catholic prejudice played a part in his defeat. Such prejudice was overcome in 1960, in the election of JFK, and had more or less evaporated completely 60 years later, when the Catholic Joe Biden beat Trump (fair and square). In 2024, buoyed perhaps by Vance’s presence on the Republican ticket, Catholics broke solidly for Trump. Latino Catholics still tend to vote Democratic, but even they are moving Rightwards. This growing alignment between Catholicism and American conservatism, along with its outsider status, doubtless eased Vance’s walk along his road to Damascus.

In a similar vein, Vance seems to like Catholicism because it is an Old World religion — he says that it was “quite literally a foreign religion to me, rooted in Roman influences that I had very little exposure to”. It gives him and his faith a certain sun-baked sophistication. In Hillbilly Elegy, he describes his identity growing up as narrowly American; he lacked what many Americans possess, that feeling of being bound to a “mother country”. But the Catholic Vance has a real stake in Europe; so now he is better-placed to polemicize fervently about its declining fortunes. He describes himself in Communion feeling haunted by an empty cathedral in Burgundy, and “what that said about Europe’s cultural decline and Christianity’s slow evaporation from the continent”. He was overwhelmed by a similar feeling of “dread” in England — where, in a detail that hardly lends credence to the strength of his recollections, he claims that something in his full English breakfast was “oozing blood”.

His general criticisms of Europe have much to do with his criticisms of European religion, or lack thereof: one of the causes célèbres in his famous Munich speech, after all, concerned the arrest of a British man for praying outside an abortion clinic. His criticism of Europe extends even to the Vatican: Communion makes ample room for the author’s frustrations with his Church. He gives an exasperated sigh over the Vatican’s “trite platitudes” about his administration’s immigration policy. The implication here is that Rome is currently doing a poor job of tending to her flock. The energetic Catholic sheepdogs of the New World are called to guide the listless, straying Catholics of the Old.

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JD Vance became a Catholic rather than a different type of Christian because Catholicism today is the thinking man’s Christianity. As Candace Owens — not, herself, much of a thinking woman — supposedly remarked to Charlie Kirk before he was murdered: “You’re too smart to be a Protestant”. In Communion, Vance describes a friend named Sam, another convert to Catholicism. He would go on “extended rants about the Reformation and immigration”, and thought America’s ills could all be traced to John Calvin. Here is a character familiar to anybody who has rubbed shoulders with young conservatives at elite institutions.

The problem for Vance now, however, is that he cannot only speak for those high-brow Catholic Right-wingers. He may wish, no less fervently than Adrian Mole, to be a Malcolm Muggeridge; but he is also the Hillbilly Vice President, the tribune of the plebs. He cannot leave his own people behind. He has therefore had to fuse his two personas into one. This is why Communion, a book about Catholicism, shows on its front cover a Methodist church. It is why its subtitle talks generically about “finding my way back to faith” — rather than the faith. It is why he describes his 2022 Senate campaign in Ohio — whose population is 46% Protestant, 16% Catholic — as an effort to make “more explicitly Christian arguments about the economy”, even though he says these arguments are what attracted him to Catholicism specifically. He probably can’t even play up his Catholicism now too much, lest there be persistent traces, in Middle America, of Protestant chauvinism. He cannot, like his friend Sam, launch into diatribes about Calvin. His political ambition requires him to be ecumenical.

What, then, does Communion mean for America, the country which, two-and-a-half years from now, its author may well be leading? Time and again, reading the book, it struck me that Vance’s ideal society, the America he hopes to build, is sleepy, southern, ancien régime Europe. He wants something like the Portugal of that other Catholic public intellectual turned statesman, Antonio Salazar: a country built on a foundation of Catholic social teaching, one sapped of prosperity and dynamism, but where everybody goes to church. He wants a society where people care less about work; he waxes nostalgic about the “blessings” of being raised in a “multigenerational household”. In Vance’s America, in his crusade against the Protestant Ethic, “GDP” is a dirty word, and the chief problem in Europe is declining church attendance rather than declining wealth. It is difficult to imagine such an America putting a man on Mars. It is also difficult to imagine such a schoolmarmish message resonating with most Americans.

The seeds for Vance’s conversions — both from secularism to Catholicism, and from liberalism to post- or anti-liberalism — were, he suggests in Communion, sown before 2016 and even further from Rome. Revealingly, they first took root in a general denunciation of American culture. As a soldier in Iraq, among Christian and Muslim Arabs, he encountered a “genuinely compelling critique” of that culture in the fear that, if Iraq grew too “Americanized”, it would become too “consumerist and hypersexualized”. He then paints a picture of a contrast between one culture, pious, austere, morally upstanding, and another one, wayward and decadent. “A woman in a niqab was reading the Quran”, he quotes from some fellow Catholic intellectual, “and a man was rocking while praying, and on the TV was Britney Spears dancing in her underwear”. Which of these cultures does JD Vance prefer? Catholic his answer may in fact be; but it does not strike me as very American.

Eight years later, the Republicans are suffering from the same mistake, although this time the fatal phrase emerged years before the campaign. In 2021, J.D. Vance (then a Republican candidate for the Senate) gave an interview to Tucker Carlson (then a Fox News host), in which he attacked what he had described as the “childless Left”. The USA, Vance told Carlson, was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too”.

Childless cat ladies. Regrettably for Vance and the Republicans in general, it is a great phrase: pointed, memorable — and ripe for the reclaiming. Which is why, when Taylor Swift declared her backing for the Democrats on Tuesday, she did it by posting a picture to Instagram of herself holding one of her three cats (the cat in question is Benjamin Button, a ragdoll). And she signed off: “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady.” Elon Musk responded on X with a gallant offer to impregnate her, which will do little to diminish accusations that Trump supporters are weird.

Her announcement was hardly surprising. Swift backed Biden/Harris in 2020 and has previously lent her support to liberal causes including gun control and abortion rights. But it was an anxiously awaited one. Other pop stars had declared their affiliation long ago: Charli XCX tweeted “kamala IS brat” almost as soon as the vice-president declared her run for the White House. And hours before Swift’s post, The Guardian published “Is Taylor Swift a secret Trump supporter?” The evidence for this was a photograph of her hugging a friend who had liked a Trump post on Instagram. (McCarthyism, apparently, can change its shape but never die.)

And it is a significant move. Swift’s cultural heft makes her a fearsome political force. When she shared a link to a voter registration site in 2023, there were 35,252 new registrations that day; notably, this included a 115% increase in 18-year-olds, who are more likely to vote Democrat. Swift’s audience also skews female, which is significant for an election held in the shadow of the Dodds Supreme Court decision which undid Roe vs Wade. Bluntly, the more women vote, the harder it becomes for Trump to win.

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But even though Swift has embraced her electoral power now, she’s historically been cautious. As a young singer-songwriter on the Nashville scene, she cultivated an apolitical stance. One of the country acts she had first been inspired by as a child were the Dixie Chicks (now simply called the Chicks): in 2003, their career was all but destroyed after a member of the band criticised George W. Bush during a concert. “They were made such an example that basically every country artist that came after that, every label tells you, ‘Just do not get involved, no matter what,’” said Swift in 2019.

Five years on, Swift is much more comfortable pinning her colours to the mast. But she still carries some of the burden of being — as the title of her 2020 film tagged her — Miss Americana. Nashville may be behind her now, but the similarly conservative-leaning National Football League is firmly in her present. That’s thanks to her boyfriend, the footballer Travis Kelce, who has become more established in her public life than any of her previous partners. They are a formidable team: between them, they cover the worlds of sports and pop music, male and female, Right-coded and Left-coded. A homecoming king and queen for the nation.

But Swift is more than an individual. She’s a business. Michael Jordan’s truism that Republicans still buy sneakers holds in the music industry too: Republicans stream songs and buy concert tickets and merch as well. For Swift, the art is to cultivate her own positions without alienating half her potential US market. It’s a problem that other, more explicitly political artists have been learning to navigate since Swift’s own political coming-out. Chappell Roan, for example, is all-in for LGBTQ causes. But in interviews, she has stressed her Midwest roots and compassion for people with opposing views: “I know where they’re coming from. It’s just not that black-and-white.”

For Swift, a crack along the lines of “basket of deplorables” would probably be even more calamitous than it was for Clinton — and absolutely devastating for her other half. Hence what looks like the careful orchestration of the announcement. That hug with her problematically pro-Trump friend, fellow NFL WAG Brittany Mahomes? The rune readers were wrong to see it as an endorsement of Mahomes’s politics, but probably right to see it as a deliberate announcement of something. The message of the hug is that friendship comes before partisanship. In Swiftworld, you can have your beliefs without needing to cancel people from life for having different ones.

I hesitate to read too much into a paparazzi shot, but maybe this is a good sign for American democracy. Back in Swift’s days of silence, there wasn’t much pressure for her to speak out on politics, because there wasn’t a strong expectation in the Noughties and early Tens that a teen pop star would have any politics to speak of. Their job was to look pretty and be air-headedly inoffensive: nobody expected to know how Britney Spears was going to vote.

That changed with the great politicising of everything that happened in the mid-tens. First, “feminist” went from suggesting an alarmingly confrontational woman to sounding new, exciting, even sexy: Beyoncé danced in front of the word in 2013. Slogans like “silence is violence” came into popular use, insisting that anything less than outright campaigning amounted to complicity with evil. More importantly, social media meant that silence had become perilously easy to detect. Lending your support to the Black Lives Matter cause, for example, was as simple as posting a black square to your grid — so how much of a closet racist would you have to be if you couldn’t even do that much?

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Personal relationships began to be treated as a battleground. Patronising Left-wing guides on how to handle Thanksgiving began to proliferate after Trump was elected: “It’s our responsibility to go home and have the hard conversations with our family members, because, in many cases, only we have the power to reach them and begin the long work of rooting out bigotry in our communities,” said one cringingly solemn article on the website Mic. But these had their match from the Right: the Daily Signal, an offshoot of the conservative Heritage Foundation, offered tips on “how to be persuasive about politics with your liberal relatives”.

As strongly as Swift’s history had compelled her to hold her tongue, the new order dictated that she should speak out. She described herself as a feminist for the first time in 2014. Just two years earlier, she’d answered a question about whether she was a feminist by saying “I don’t really think about things as guys versus girls”; perhaps significantly, between those two points, she was sexually assaulted by a DJ, against whom she later won a civil suit. From there, her political evolution evolved steadily, bringing us to the present day, when a Swift endorsement was coveted enough for Trump to share fake images implying he had her backing.

Vance’s jibe at “childless cat ladies” is the nonsensical endpoint of the era in which everything was politicised by default — even pet ownership, even whether or not you have procreated. Anti-feminist claplines might play well to a tame audience such as Tucker Carlson, but in the wild, a lot of women are going to hear this as the Republicans rejecting them: if being a “childless cat lady” makes them liberal, then so be it — they will cast their vote accordingly.

Swift’s response is mindful and demure and resolute. It shows a grasp of political messaging that Vance and co. have failed to get anywhere close to: pop stars have learned the power of the big tent, while right-wing politicians flail around for the pleasure of their fandoms. This is, of course, the opposite way round to how it ought to be, but there’s hope for the US in Swiftian politics. Maybe, it’s time to stop putting people into baskets.

It would be easy to look at the flailing state of Trump’s campaign and pin the blame on an erratic candidate, or bad advisers, or, as so many have done, single out J.D. Vance as the source of the misfortune. But the fault lies neither with Trump nor Vance, nor any single individual. Instead, we must look back to the foundations of the modern conservative movement, for it is arguably the persistence of a distinct political culture rooted in those formative years that holds back the growth of the Republican coalition.

Since its emergence in the industrialising America of the 19th century, the Republicans had been the party of the buttoned-down business and professional classes, embodying hegemonic political capital. The Democrats encompassed those opposed to this hegemony, be they populist farmers and organised labour, rival blocs of provincial capital, and after the Sixties, the new social movements with their subaltern identities and subversive lifestyles. By 1972, they were the party of “acid, amnesty, and abortion”. Yet even as the party coalitions rested on these coordinates, the first signs of a realignment began to take place — blue-collar workers started to show a propensity to vote for Republicans such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

There was a time, therefore, between the Seventies and the Nineties, when both the ascendant yuppies of America and working-class hardhats could be kept together in the Republican coalition. As long as they could be focused on a common enemy. In those years, thinkers on the Right found such an enemy in “the New Class”, not dissimilar from its conceptual counterpart in leftist discourse, the “professional managerial class” (PMCs).

The New Class trope has ever since played a central role in conservative demonology; they are defined by their college educations (usually in some airy liberal arts field) and extremely liberal (or “weird”) social views, but above all, by their perch as administrators and functionaries in bloated, non-competitive bureaucracies like government, academia, legacy media, and NGOs. These “verbalist elites” were a self-perpetuating caste of privileged mandarins; unlike the yuppies and the hardhats, they were insulated from risk and never got their hands dirty, residing instead in an immaterial realm of symbols and abstractions. The idea of the New Class was thus a convenient foil for conservative rhetoric on both free markets and social conservatism.

The American Right sought to organise itself around fighting this mandarin-dominated liberal establishment, whose control over public-sector and cultural institutions had to be overturned before the liberation of the still-virtuous private sector could be accomplished. Enter the rise of aggressive new conservative institutions meant to take back power in Washington: multimillion-dollar think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute looked not just to crafting policy but to credentialing whole cadres of conservative appointees who could fill executive and legislative offices; while journals like National Review set the moral tone of conservatism.

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For a time, it worked: the movement succeeded in shifting the policy agenda to the Right from the Reagan years onward. But it also came at a cost: hitherto, conservatism had largely relied on businessmen who got into activism to oppose measures they did not like. In the postwar era, businesses started to outsource this work to full-time activists. Where there had once been conservative professionals, there were now professional conservatives, represented by the likes of National Review editor William F. Buckley Jr. This shift had profound effects on the character of conservative politics, which would become intellectualised as never before. This left the movement vulnerable to real-world shocks which its theoreticians could not comprehend.

The first of at least two shocks took place in the Nineties: Democrats started to syphon private sector professionals from the GOP under Bill Clinton and the “New Democrats” who enthusiastically embraced the financial industry while remaining socially liberal; this jumpstarted the trend of educational polarisation. The next generation of yuppies thus had less reason to stick with Republicans when they could join the newly dynamic and glamorous Democrats. The Right was losing the battle for cultural prestige, thanks in no small part to the very same free market forces they unleashed, which greatly incentivised female labour market force participation and downgraded the social importance of families; hyper-financialised capitalism’s destabilising effect on culture had been wilfully overlooked. Around this time, the Republican Vice President Dan Quayle’s attack on sitcom character Murphy Brown prefigured Vance’s war on “cat ladies”, and for a time Quayle, too, seemed “weird” in light of that decade’s changing sensibilities.

A radically deregulated financial sector along with an over-hyped tech sector supercharged America’s transformation into a post-industrial and post-material simulacrum, precisely the kind of environment in which New Class-type functionaries thrive. Indeed, the line between the old New Class and the private sector PMCs of the new frictionless economy would become increasingly blurred. The sclerotic financial and tech sectors at the heart of the system ceased to be competitive in any classically capitalist sense and had come to resemble the same immovable Leviathan conservatives saw in the public sector, with an abundance of make-work “bullshit jobs”, overseen by authoritarian HR departments.

The failures of this status quo helped to put Trump in power, the second major shock. But the Trump administration suddenly veered away from its populist promise of 2016 and instead doubled down on free market fundamentalism, enacting policies that disproportionately benefitted the same corporate sectors responsible for the dysfunction. On top of this, it leaned heavily into social conservative causes, like abortion, even as popular attitudes have moved considerably towards a new centre-ground. What happened? The answer lies with the same professional conservatives, who staffed that administration and the Congressional GOP.

The Right’s apparatchiks had been frozen in the unchanging logic of their own stultified institutions, which upheld the inviolability of both free markets and social conservatism (while refusing to seriously acknowledge the tensions between them), independent of any changes in the larger social context. In effect, they became “Right-PMCs”. For the sprawling conservative think tank ecosystem in which they are bred is now no different from the rest of the New Class-dominated economy: NGO-like bureaucracies that live off donor generosity merely issue credentials and manage a vast symbolic economy of abstract ideas and officially sanctioned moral virtues. Conservatism Inc. became functionally identical to the same progressive academic establishment its polemicists routinely attack, only with one set of cultural and ideological signifiers swapped in for another.

And while these failures have de-legitimised many of the old think tanks in the eyes of younger intellectual conservatives, being college educated Right-PMCs themselves, their only response has been to come up with an alternative underground symbolic economy based on the circulation of edgy memes and reactionary ideologies. This so-called “dissident Right” merely wishes to reproduce the existing Right-PMC ecosystem but outfitted with Nietzschean and “based” dogmas instead of traditional conservative ones. But it is no less stamped by the same conceited intellectual culture that marked postwar conservatism: its advocates, like Buckley, tend to be effete, elitist, and eccentric; and many of the colourful “alternative lifestyles” (to use a euphemism) associated with the New Right arise from these reactionary online currents.

America’s cultural politics may thus be reduced to a struggle between two sets of symbol-worshipping PMCs: the overwhelming progressive majority of PMCs who coalesce around the Democrats and the Right-PMC minority who influence the Republican side. Both have beliefs that regular Americans would consider weird, but like competing sects of Brahmins in Vedic Age India, their battle is to settle whose religious doctrines and deities can appeal most to the masses of normies who toil in the fields; and the winner gets to call the other side weird. However, conservative attempts to beat progressive PMCs at this game of ruling through the maintenance of cultural-symbolic hegemony, while letting the material world decay, have come up short time and again. Probably because their rivals in the liberal establishment are far more disciplined, astute, and well-resourced.

Republicans ought to play a different game entirely. They should reclaim their historic role as the vanguard of entrepreneurial capitalism by cobbling together a coalition of economic self-interest between the two classes who are least vulnerable to ideological capture by college-educated elites: small-business elites (who tend to be very wealthy but uncultured) and the working class. In other words, an unlikely alliance who could help to reground the economy in the material realm, away from the rule of Brahmins. But this would require the Right-PMCs to restrain their own Brahmanical impulses: shifting their focus from waging endless culture war to forging a political economy that can serve this coalition’s practical interests, something they have so far proven incapable of doing. For the problem of the Brahmins on either side of the ideological divide is a classic one. As Right-PMC icon Reagan once said, it’s not that they’re ignorant, they know so much that isn’t so.

Of course, that’s not how things work out because the universe, with its usual serene indifference to all things human, refuses to play along. Crisis arrives when too many failed predictions turn rationalism into a laughing stock, and the whole enterprise grinds to a halt as people abandon it. That’s what happened in ancient China, in the twilight of the Chou dynasty, when its rationalist schools failed to bring good government; it’s what happened in ancient Greece in the twilight of the classical age, when its rationalist philosophy failed to inspire moral virtue. It is happening now, in the twilight of the industrial era, as our rationalist sciences fail to provide the Tomorrowland future we’ve been promised.

One of the ways you can tell that an age of reason is coming to an end is that magic comes back into fashion. Here again, we’re following the usual path at the usual pace. The revival of magic that began in a very quiet way in the 1850s, and first found a wider public in the 1890s, went into overdrive in the Seventies and hasn’t looked back. Earlier this week, the University of Exeter in Britain announced a new degree in “Magic and Occult Science” to reflect a “recent surge in interest in magic” among young Brits.

However, the popular revival of magic does nothing to guarantee that it will be done with any degree of competence. Quite the contrary, most of the people who take up magic in the twilight of an age of reason are still far too influenced by the ideologies of the departing era, and so they generally make a hash of things. This is especially visible in the realm of political magic.

Yes, there is such a thing as political magic. We saw quite a bit of it thrown about on both sides during the 2016 US presidential election, as I argue in my recent book, The King in Orange. A modest amount was competent, but most of it was either the fumbling of enthusiastic beginners or the blunders of people who thought they knew much more about magic than they did. This not only risks bringing the ancient and honourable art of magic into disrepute, but also has the potential to create a lot of collateral damage.

Doubtless, there will be plenty of magic deployed in next year’s presidential election too. With this in mind, I’m going to offer some instruction in the art of magical combat on the off chance that both sides in the upcoming electoral squabble might listen — rather than flailing around like drunken halfwits, trying to bash each other with weapons they don’t know how to use.

Let’s start with some necessary clarifications. If your exposure to magic consists of reading denunciations of it by ranting sceptics, you know nothing about it. If it consists of fantasy novels and Hollywood spectacles, you know even less. Let’s be even more specific and formulate a rule, which I hereby name Rowling’s Law: if it looks like the sort of schlock you’d see in a Harry Potter movie, it’s not real magic.

Magic is the art and science of causing changes in consciousness in accordance with will. It doesn’t affect matter directly, and it can’t be used to overturn the laws of nature. Within those limits, it can accomplish astounding things. If you examine your experience of the world, you’ll find that only a modest portion of it depends on the material realities that surround you: much more depends on what you perceive, feel and think about those realities and the subtler social, psychological and spiritual realities that also surround you.

These latter elements are the raw materials of magic. The tools of magic are will and imagination, whose power can come from many sources, of which human emotion is generally the easiest to access. The forms that give it direction and effect are symbols and symbolic action. Here, the basic principle can be stated simply enough: a symbol held in one mind, charged with will and desire, can affect another mind even when there’s no obvious way for the effect to take place. What this implies, of course, is that individual human minds are not as isolated from one another as most current ideologies like to insist.

Before we get into the rules for effective magical combat, however, I’m going to have to give two warnings. I’ve learned from long experience that I can say these things in so many words and people will blow right by them in their quest to misunderstand magic, but the effort has to be made. Here goes:

Warning No. 1: The rules that follow apply only to magic. They don’t apply to military or political strategy, say, or anything else that takes place principally in the material world.

Warning No. 2: The rules that follow have nothing to do with ethics or morals or who’s more virtuous than the other guy. I’m talking about what works.

With those in mind — and please do keep them in mind — we can proceed to the central principle of effective magical combat in the political sphere: “You win a magical struggle by formulating an ideal as strongly, precisely, and vividly as possible, while completely ignoring the other guy.”

Did you keep my two warnings in mind? To judge from my repeated experience, the moment they read those words, people immediately try to apply them to military and political strategy, probably having to do with the Nazis, who exert a weird gravitational attraction on people’s imaginations. What goes through their minds is this: that’s very sweet and moral and pure, but Churchill couldn’t have stopped the Nazis if they’d just formulated an ideal, blah blah blah. If you thought this, please re-read the two warnings above, and this time pay attention.

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How do you win by formulating an ideal as strongly, precisely, and vividly as possible? It’s quite simple. Magic can’t win a political or military struggle all by itself. What it can do is give a good hard boost to the more practical side of the struggle. It does this by generating energy, enthusiasm, loyalty, and love among your side’s supporters — by attracting allies rather than making enemies, and by making people on the other side start to wonder if maybe your side has a point. By doing that, magic can quite readily provide the edge that makes victory happen.

As it happens, the Nazis are a great example of how not to approach political magic. They were heavily into the notion that the rules of magic also applied to the material world, and they were just as into the idea that flinging high-intensity nastiness at their enemies was their ticket to victory. Adolf Hitler spends page after dreary page in Mein Kampf ranting about hatred as a source of power. That’s why he launched an invasion of Russia without issuing winter uniforms to the Wehrmacht: he hated and despised Russians so much that he didn’t believe they could resist his magic and his armies long enough to make that an issue. We all know how that worked out.

On the other side of the struggle was English occultist Violet Firth Evans, aka Dion Fortune, who put together a network of British magical practitioners to mess with the Nazis. One of the things that made the Wehrmacht so successful at first was that the leadership of the nations it invaded tended to suffer a sudden collapse in morale. Fortune, who recognised the role of magic in causing that collapse, set out to monkey-wrench that process and keep Britain from suffering the same fate. She firmly rejected the notion that they should attack the Nazis with magic; instead, her network ignored the Nazis and concentrated on formulating an ideal at home as strongly, precisely, and vividly as possible. Again, we all know how that worked out. (You can find the details of her method in The Magical Battle of Britain, edited by Gareth Knight.)

The same principle applies to any magical struggle involving groups of people. Say you support a political party, and you want to encourage other people to do so. Obviously that’s going to take activity on the material plane, which follows its own rules — but it also has a magical dimension. If you want other people to flock to your party, you need to formulate an ideal and make it as strong, precise and vivid as you can. That will catch people’s attention, inspire them, and encourage them to listen to your party’s speakers and vote for its candidates.

Those words “strong, precise, and vivid” are the key to the process. It emphatically will not work to focus all your attention on a vague buzzword — “justice”, say, or “freedom”. You need to formulate exactly what you mean by the concept: justice for whom, at whose expense? Freedom for whom, at whose expense? You need to know exactly what you’re trying to achieve, what it will cost, and who will pay the price for it, or you will not achieve it.

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Nor is it enough to leave that knowledge in abstract terms. In magic, an image is worth a thousand vague words; a “concrete thought form”, to use the technical term, is necessary to provide the energies with a pattern around which to coalesce. What do you want your party to achieve? What do you want your country to become? To practise effective political magic, you need to be able to give that answer in terms of vivid imaginative experiences. When you walk down the street in the future you want to achieve, what does it look like, sound like, smell like? When you happen to see your future mayor or president at work, what exactly are they doing? And is the image something that will attract the enthusiasm and idealism of a lot of people, or just of your little special interest group?

But what if you don’t want to do any of that, and spend your time instead focusing on how evil the other party and its candidates are, and flinging nasty magic at them? Your results will not be what you want, because the the principle given above has a hidden catch: the ideal you formulate doesn’t need to be appealing to you. In fact, it can be utterly loathsome to you. So long as you formulate it as strongly, precisely, and vividly as you can, you give it strength and encourage other people to flock to it.

The most obvious example here involves Donald Trump. The main reason he was able to come charging out of the political fringes to seize the Republican nomination, and then the White House, and the main reason he still dominates the American political landscape, was that so many people threw so much energy into hating him. They formulated a good clear image, all right, and they did it strongly, precisely, and vividly, charging it with every ounce of hatred and rage they had. It was an extraordinarily potent spell. Unfortunately for them, it had the opposite effect of the one they wanted: for many, it made Trump’s own spell more appealing.

Of course, Trump also had the help of a Western habit I call “the tyranny of mandatory niceness”. In the upper reaches of our societies, expressing negative emotions is taboo, and will get you the same kind of reaction that expressing sexual desire would have gotten you in Victorian England. As a result, there are a great many people seething with negative emotions who desperately want some way to vent them — some excuse to shriek their hatred and rage right out there in public. Donald Trump provided them with that service. In effect, they thanked him for it by pouring emotional energy into his image, and he proceeded to make good use of it.

The point to keep in mind is that fixations of this sort have practical consequences. For that matter, if something keeps Trump from winning the GOP nomination this year, the Democrats will be caught flatfooted. Blinded by their own animosity, they have yet to formulate an ideal of their own that can catch the imagination, the aspirations and the hopes of the voters.

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Old-fashioned occultists like me are wearily familiar with this effect. When we teach magic, we’re constantly having to remind people to focus on the thing they want, not the thing they hate or fear or want to get rid of. Of course, there’s a reason for that, which is that so few people figure out what they actually want. Nearly always, people want to think instead, “If only X happens” — and X, of course, can be anything from winning the lottery or losing £20 to marrying the right person — “my life will be wonderful”. Then they spend all their time thinking about the money or the spouse they don’t have, or the weight or the spouse that they do, and fail to focus their will and imagination on exactly what kind of changes they want in their lives. In this way, they cement themselves even further into their current misery.

As in the personal microcosm, so in the political mesocosm. For the last half-century or so, the main US political parties have spent all their time and energy ranting about the bad things that the bad people in the other party are doing, and neglected to offer any positive vision of their own. There are unpleasant reasons for that habit. Until the rise of the populist movement, both parties were pushing the same set of policies on most issues, while cultivating a handful of hot-button issues to keep their captive constituencies in line. Avoiding a positive vision was essential to that approach.

Democrats loved to preen themselves on their environmentalism, though somehow they never did much to benefit the environment, while Republicans loved to preen themselves on their support for Christian morality, though somehow they never did much to further that cause, either. For both parties, these and other niche issues allowed them to pretend to be idealistic and distract their constituencies from the fact that much more important issues were being ignored. Meanwhile, the politicians of both parties pandered to big corporations, fell neatly in line behind one clueless imperial misadventure after another, and lined their own pockets in a frenzy of kleptocratic greed. Holding up an ideal that meant anything to most Americans would have been a major misstep for either party, as the gap between even the most modest ideal and the sleazy realities of life among Washington DC’s political parasites would have quickly become a severe liability for all sides.

Yet the absence of any such ideal helps to explain the spreading cynicism and contempt that so many Americans feel for the people that govern them, as well as their willingness to turn to political outsiders such as Trump. To judge from the evidence of history, that’s just going to accelerate until somebody formulates a positive and appealing ideal strongly, precisely and vividly enough to seize the collective imagination of the American public. That could be done by a politician — but it could also be done by an ordinary person. It could even be you. As the political machinery of our failing republic clanks and lumbers deeper into what could become its terminal crisis, you might want to consider it.

But locals have long known that Democrats were due for a collapse. With his victory over perennial loser Charlie Crist, DeSantis transformed Miami from a cultural outpost to a diverse Republican haven heading into the 2024 Presidential election. It’s a fascinating turn for a city that has traditionally been considered more Latin American than American — one that highlights the ongoing political realignment stateside.

Miami has been trending red since 2016, when Trump made initial inroads with Hispanics, but last Tuesday’s “red wave” was a surprise. Most observers expected a modest DeSantis victory or a narrow defeat. But I was certain that DeSantis was poised for a big win. Miami has been steadily shifting rightward for years, and the city’s incompetent Democratic operatives have made matters worse by countering with woke talking points and a fake panic about “disinformation” in Spanish-language media.

The seeds of this shift were planted by the Orange Man himself. With his talk of “bad hombres” at the border and “making America great again”, Trump immediately connected with a sizeable number of working-class Hispanic Miamians, many of whom had previously been apolitical. In these early days, the county’s Right-wing crew was mostly a mix of youngish Miami bros and rabid Cuban anticommunists, who made their presence felt in the caravans that commandeered the streets and worsened already awful Miami traffic in the lead up to the 2016 election.

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This was a boisterous and fun crowd, enamored by the gaudier aspects of the Trumpian aesthetic, and it was not strictly Cuban. It was an intersectional crew of Hispanic dudes, and as the country was engulfed in flames in the summer of 2020, ladies began to join in on the fun. The Right-wing Latina was born. The caravans and boat parades leading up to 2020 were no doubt the best-looking, and most surgically enhanced, political events in American history — complete with one of the all-time great campaign songs. The city’s vibes were red hot. In 2020, Trump lost Miami-Dade County by only seven points, after losing it by 29 four years earlier. Miami was primed to go red, and soon.

As Miami began to shift Right, local progressive outfits, such as Cubanos Pa’lante, and Democratic Hispanic politicians, such as former US representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, doubled down on Latinx-style wokism and the “disinformation” gambit. Hispanic Miami, hypersexualised and constitutionally politically incorrect, is by its very nature an anti-woke city, but progressive Miami Democrats, captured and funded by the woke white Democratic establishment, cannot confront this reality head on. “Latinx” progressives, unable to deviate from the Democratic funding apparatus, could not speak up and say what they knew to be true: that the weird gender and racial obsessions of white progressives alienate working- and middle-class Hispanics.

Many Hispanics, as has been noted ad nauseum as the Rightward shift continues, are “socially conservative”. In Miami, however, such “social conservatism” often means a simple belief that men are men and women are women. The elevation of the trans woman as the embodiment of Democratic femininity was never going to play here — or with Hispanics anywhere.

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Some progressives have tried to explain the Rightward shift of Hispanics by pointing to the supposed “whiteness” of certain Latino demographics. According to woke dogma, Hispanics, especially Cuban Americans, think of themselves as white and are increasingly starting to vote that way. But this is a dodge, conveniently deflecting attention away from the fact that Democratic messaging is full of progressive extremism that appeals to the party’s elite base while alienating everyone else.

The truth is that progressives must focus on wokeness because confronting the reality of what many Hispanics believe on issues like the border, race, and gender would infuriate the elite white women who run the Democratic and media apparatus. This disconnect between the elite party brokers and working-class people of colour is most obvious in Miami, a city that prides itself on its intransigence. Due to their inability to speak honestly, Democrats ceded the most important issues for the city’s voters — crime, immigration, the economy — to Donald Trump and, later, Ron DeSantis.

If you hang around with working-class Hispanics in Miami, you’ll hear some of the most strident immigration policies imaginable: “We gotta close the border, bro. There’re too many people here already.” This isn’t a white dude from Omaha saying this, but a Hispanic guy who probably knows half a dozen people who crossed over illegally. This hardline talk has nothing to do with “whiteness” or Trumpism, but with the realities of living in a city where immigration is a constant. It’s no coincidence that Mexican-Americans living along the Southern border also flipped toward the GOP in 2020. As long as working-class reality is ignored in favor of woke talking points, a truth vacuum will be created.

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Into that truth vacuum walked DeSantis, who adopted and then refined the more popular aspects of the Trumpian brand. “Florida,” DeSantis says, “is where woke goes to die.” Like Trump, DeSantis understands that culture war issues can be winners for conservatives. Unlike Trump, he has proved that he has the focus and discipline to follow through on his rhetoric and win the ensuing battles. He went after critical race theory and gender ideology in public schools, banned medical transitions for minors, picked a fight with Disney over the company’s alleged political meddling, and passed the Stop WOKE Act, which has endeared him to traditional working-class Hispanics. According to NBC News exit polls, DeSantis not only won a supermajority of Cuban Americans but a majority of Puerto Ricans and half of other Latinos.

Of course, Hispanics aren’t the whole story here. Miami-Dade flipped in part because of their Rightward shift, but the influx of blue state lockdown refugees certainly didn’t hurt. DeSantis kept schools and businesses open, proclaimed “the free state of Florida,” and the rest is history. Tech bros flooded into Miami, as did regular Americans looking for freedom in what has traditionally been the most non-American big city in the country.

DeSantis’ strength on cultural issues, coupled with his pro-business and pro-freedom agenda, shows that big-tent Republicanism is still possible, so long as the man leading the charge is capable and competent. The expected national red wave didn’t happen, but if Republicans are smart, they’ll follow the Florida model employed by DeSantis, which will draw both working-class Hispanics and anti-woke, pro-America elites. The Trumpian approach was always going to attract the more rambunctious elements of the Republican base, but DeSantis has proven that his measured, workmanlike approach will retain the working-class types — Hispanic and otherwise — while attracting lapsed Democrats and traditional Republicans.

Miami Democrats will have to change course if they hope to retain the city, but their longstanding inability to deviate from woke talking points will make that extremely difficult. They must break from, or convince, the Democratic Party apparatus that Hispanics — the largest minority demographic in the country — are more traditionally American than they suspected.

I thought of Sharif while in Georgia this weekend, trying to get to grips with the Senate race between incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker. People outside the state seem incredulous that anyone in their right mind could vote for Walker, a former football star whose personal history is littered with the sorts of scandals that, while not so shocking for ex-NFL players, would normally sink a Senate candidate — abortions for multiple mistresses, a parade of illegitimate and unacknowledged children, gruesome domestic violence allegations, and claims that he once threatened a shootout with Texas police. According to a Quinnipiac poll from mid-October, a majority of Georgians agree that Walker is “not honest” and “does not have good leadership skills”.

And yet, polls in the state remain deadlocked, with the latest average from RealClearPolitics showing Walker leading Warnock by a margin of 1.5%. Everyone, it seems, agrees that Walker is a flawed candidate and a flawed human being, and that Warnock, a well-spoken preacher with a penchant for funny campaign ads, is charming and relatable. The result is that this is a remarkably “clean” campaign, at least from the Republican side — there is little effort to convince people that he is “suitable” for office. Voters know that Walker is a bit of a joke. But the GOP is asking them to ignore Walker’s personal characteristics and focus on the pure, friend-enemy core of partisan politics: do you want the Senate to be controlled by Republicans or Democrats? On the strength of this issue alone, Walker might win.

That’s because Georgia, despite having two Democratic senators, is still a Republican state. For at least a decade, Democrats have been hoping that migration into the Atlanta metro area, which has nearly doubled in size since 2000 and now accounts for more than half of the state’s population, would turn Georgia purple if not blue. That has been happening — the white share of Georgia’s electorate dropped from 68.7% in 2004 to 52.7% today — but not quickly enough. Donald Trump won the state handily in 2016, and it took the chaos of 2020 — the coronavirus pandemic, the “racial reckoning”, Trump’s alienation of affluent white suburbanites, and especially his instigation of an intra-Republican civil war in Georgia between the November 3 election and the January 2021 Senate runoff, which induced his supporters to stay home — for Democrats to eke out two Senate victories by margins of 1% and 1.8%. Before Walker won the Republican Senate primary, Warnock’s seat was expected to be one of the easiest for the GOP to recapture in the midterms.

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Added to which, our national electoral environment massively favours Republicans. As a general rule, the president’s party does poorly in midterm elections, even under relatively popular presidents. Biden is not popular, and the issues the election is being fought on all benefit the GOP. Inflation hit double digits in Atlanta this year, higher than the national average, and the city had more homicides in 2021 than in any year since 1996 and could end 2022 with even more. Asked about the most important issues facing the country, 36% of Georgians said cost of living or the economy, 14% said immigration, and 6.8% said crime. By contrast, the top “Democratic” issues were “threats to democracy” at 17%, guns at 10%, and abortion — widely expected to doom Republicans among college-educated women — at 5.2%.

It is a testament to Walker’s weaknesses as a candidate, and to Warnock’s relative strengths, that the race is close at all. I was in Athens, Georgia, on Saturday for the Georgia–Tennessee football game — the place Walker became a star, and where his name and college number hang on the inside of the stadium — and even there, signs of Walker the politician, as opposed to the player, were few and far between. I counted, easily, three dozen people wearing pins and stickers for Brian Kemp, the incumbent Republican governor, but most laughed or declined to speak to me when I asked about Walker. “He’s a Republican,” shrugged one woman in a Kemp pin who declined to give her name. I finally found a group of young white men wearing Walker pins, but when I asked for their thoughts on the race, they told me, in a vaguely aggressive manner, that voting was a private matter and that I shouldn’t be walking around asking those sorts of questions.

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Walker’s critics, on the other hand, were happy to talk. A black man in his early 30s named Rashad, who said he’d already cast an early ballot for Warnock, told me bluntly that he suspected Walker had brain damage from CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease that’s known to affect football players. Keith, a middle-aged white man working in corporate communications in Atlanta, told me that Walker could hardly string a sentence together and was clearly being used as a puppet. “You’re not even voting for him, you’re voting for whoever is controlling him. The whole thing is an embarrassment to the state of Georgia.”

For Georgia Democrats, the race largely comes down to voters like Keith — suburban moderates whose distaste for Trump and the Trumpian elements of the GOP helped deliver surprise victories to Warnock and Jon Ossof in 2020. There is constant talk of “ticket-splitting” — the hope is that enough independents and Republican-leaners will vote for Brian Kemp for governor but choose Warnock for Senate, or else vote third-party. In my parents’ own leafy Atlanta suburb, a Republican stronghold that flipped to the Democrats in 2018, and where the average home price exceeds $660,000, I counted perhaps a dozen houses with Warnock yard signs. There were a few for Kemp, but only one that I saw for Walker. Warnock radio ads urged listeners to vote for the candidate with “good moral character”, even if they didn’t agree with him on every issue — a concession to the fact that many of these voters would probably prefer a Republican senator in policy terms.

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But it seems increasingly likely that distaste for Biden and frustration with the state of the economy will be too much for Warnock to overcome. Over the summer, Democrats and many in the media entertained the idea that some combination of the Dobbs abortion decision, the January 6 hearings, and a brief bump in Biden’s approval ratings might save the Democrats from a wipeout. But in recent weeks, the mood — and the polls — have shifted hard toward the GOP. Once-tight races have turned into apparent Republican blowouts, and once-lopsided Democratic leads have become tight races. A story broke late Friday about how Democrats in New York are bracing for a potential loss in the governor’s race — a race that Andrew Cuomo won by more than 23% in 2018. In Georgia’s governor’s race, Kemp, a fairly generic Republican without any of Walker’s personal problems, went into election weekend leading Democratic media darling Stacey Abrams by 7.6%.

The major problem is that for all of Walker’s flaws, voters are angry at the Democrats for a whole host of reasons, and none of the Democrats’ messaging — which has largely focused on abortion and the dangerous extremism of the Republicans — is responsive to this anger. The chances are that Walker will win, and if he does, it will be because of people like the young, suburban Atlantan I spoke to who said, frankly: “Walker probably has an IQ of about 60. But at least he’s not a Democrat.”

The ideology of the mega-rich will shape our society for the next generation, in large part through philanthropy. The non-profit sector, the primary vehicle for inherited wealth to be laundered into political influence, has been growing rapidly; in the US, non-profits’ assets have grown nine-fold since 1980. In 2020, non-profits brought in $2.62 trillion in revenues, constituting over 5.6% of the US economy. Increasingly, much this money came from the new tech elite: among the most prolific donors were Jeff Bezos and his ex-wife, Mackenzie Scott; Bill Gates and his now-discarded wife, Melinda French Gates; Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan; and Laureen Powell Jobs, the Left-leaning publisher of the Atlantic and the widow of Apple’s founder.

This rise of non-profits is reminiscent of feudal times, when the rich and powerful donated to the Church to ensure that its message wouldn’t threaten their power. Indeed, our society is becoming more like the Middle Ages all the time, with entrepreneurial success becoming more difficult and property and wealth becoming ever more concentrated. “Inherited wealth”, notes Thomas Piketty, is making a “comeback”. In the US, according to the consulting firm Accenture, the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers will gift their heirs up to $30 trillion by 2030 and $75 trillion by 2060.

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Of course, the use of inherited wealth to push Left-wing causes is nothing new. As Heather Mac Donald demonstrated in 1996, big-money foundations in the US have been bankrolling far-Left politics for several generations. But the rise of the tech oligarchy seems likely to accelerate this move to the gentrified Left. Many of these billionaires are still in their 30s and 40s but have accumulated more cash than anyone since the Gilded Age. And unlike their early 20th-century counterparts, today’s robber-barons — with a few notable exceptions, such as Peter Thiel — are decisively aligned with the Left. In 2020, five of the top eight donors to Joe Biden came from people tied to tech firms.

This is partly explained by Trump’s toxicity, which engendered something of an oligarchical jihad to overthrow a man who was both needlessly crass and potentially threatening to their monopolies. Particularly critical in the 2020 election was the weaponising of the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, which poured over $300 million into state and local election administration to stoke turnout. Conservatives claim, with some justification, that these efforts were concentrated in highly Democratic areas of swing states, and therefore may have tilted the outcome. But what is beyond question is that Zuckerberg and the others participated in what Time — owned by yet another oligarch, Marc Benioff, co-founder of Salesforce.com — gleefully described as “a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes”.

But at least you could make a compelling argument that it was a good idea to get rid of Trump. On other issues, however, such as race, policing, education, and gender, oligarchs and their non-profits continue to agitate for what are often societally disastrous policies.

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The ultra-rich have been particularly attracted to draconian climate positions. By 2017, billionaires such as Tom Steyer — and powerful foundations like Rockefeller, Doris Duke, Walton, MacArthur, Hewlett, and George Soros’s Open Society — were sending hundreds of millions to leading environmental  groups. By contrast, the largest Right-wing foundation, Heritage, was attracting 50% or less than the biggest green non-profits. Jeff Bezos, amid his pandemic bonanza, announced $10 billion in gifts aimed mostly at progressive and green non-profits. The oligarchs’ philanthropy also provides a cushy home for climate bureaucrats, with the inheritor of the Jobs fortune now welcoming California’s chief regulator to head up her climate-focused $3 billion Waverley Street Foundation.

We can expect that this radicalisation will become even more obvious in the next generation of tech and finance heirs, such as the socialist offspring of the founders of Qualcomm, featured in a New York Times profile on “the rich kids who want to tear down capitalism”. Born into the gentry Left, these young trust-funders will be able to subsidise the most extreme elements of the progressive agenda without having to worry about how that agenda might affect a business they had nothing to do with building.

This rise of a small class of ultra-rich, yet non-productive, social influencers does not bode well for the future. In a profoundly dysfunctional political culture, the rich and their massive non-profits will enjoy an extraordinary power to set the public agenda by funding notionally grassroots activist groups and manipulating an increasingly gullible media, parts of which they already own or control.

Indeed, the power of these organisations could grow so great that the only real solution may be to check their influence through removing or altering their privileged tax status — non-profits generally pay 15% or less on their income than corporations — and forcing them to eschew politics. They may consider themselves, as progressive author David Callaghan suggests, the “enlightened rich”, but their bank accounts make them natural targets for redistribution. In some cases, the funded minions of the rich are morphing from grateful supplicants into something like the Jacobins of the French Revolution. Already, more Democrats support socialism than capitalism, with socialism particularly popular among the young. Much like their counterparts in the run-up to the French Revolution, our elites appear to be embracing revolutionary ideas that end up threatening, as Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “their own rights and even their existence”.

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The adoption of self-destructive ideologies by the idle rich is nothing new; in fact, it’s a recurring pattern in modern history. In the 20th-century, members of the upper classes often embraced communism and even worked for the Soviet Union, whose founding credo was the annihilation of their own class. But while Stalinism may be out of fashion, charges of hypocrisy are not — and agitated young activists won’t long tolerate billionaires who lament climate change but fly their private jets to discuss the “crisis” in places like Davos. After all, if the world is on the verge of a global apocalypse, how can the luxurious lifestyles of so many of the world’s most public green advocates be acceptable?

Fearing the potential whirlwind, some tech titans and Wall Street oligarchs are already making emergency escape plans in case of civil unrest. But the real danger may be confiscation, as people recognise the enormous gap between oligarchic posturing and the reality of class relations. As the World Socialist Website puts it: “Charity and philanthropic patronage are aristocratic forms. They are a symptom of an unequal society in which resources have pooled to an irrational degree at one pole of society.”

Yet while the current oligarchs deserve opprobrium, the ultimate danger posed by the non-profit tsunami lies in their feckless embrace of a policy agenda that undermines the very essence of competitive capitalism. Like feudal lords, this new elite, emboldened by a common ideology, may continue to thrive in a world of frozen social relations, but only by destroying the very system that brought them their own good fortune. And, just as with Oedipus, it’s only a matter of time before that backfires in a disastrous fashion.

Well, that was then. Today — after the Dobbs decision in late June, a better-than-expected inflation report in July, recent Democratic victories in Congress, and a Republican primary season that has seen Trump-backed candidates edging out their more conventional rivals — the terrain is looking a lot more favourable for the Democrats. While the GOP is still expected to take the House in November, the Senate has become a gigantic question mark. As RealClearPolitics election analyst Sean Trende put it in June, what we are looking at now is “a classic battle between an irresistible force and an immovable object”. The irresistible force is Biden’s unpopularity; the immovable object is the fact that GOP primary voters have reliably opted for weak, unproven, and at times cartoonishly bad Senate candidates to run against Democrats. Faced with one of the most favourable electoral environments in decades, Republicans are finding a way to blow it.

Take Georgia, which, on paper, should be as reliably Republican as they come. Although immigration to the metro Atlanta area is steadily shifting the partisan balance in the state, Georgia went for Donald Trump by 5 points in 2016, and, until 2020, it had not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 2000. In the last election, however, college-educated suburban whites moved heavily into the Democratic column, granting a narrow victory to Biden and to two Democratic Senate candidates, Jon Ossof and Raphael Warnock. Still, most observers at the time attributed the blue wave to Trump’s personal unpopularity and predicted that Warnock would be one of the most vulnerable Democrats in the Senate in 2022.

Georgia Republicans, however, selected as their challenger to Warnock the Trump-endorsed Herschel Walker. Walker is not a politician — he is a former college football star at the University of Georgia who played professionally for the New Jersey Generals, a Trump-owned team in a failed competitor league to the NFL. There was, to be fair, a certain logic behind the choice. College football is what white Southerners have today instead of a religious or regional identity. I come from a multigenerational Georgia family: I, my mother, my father, my brother, my grandfather, and the majority of my aunts, uncles, and cousins have all received degrees from the University of Georgia. Walker was a god in our household, and in many households across the state, for his leading role in winning the 1980 college football national championship, much in the way that Diego Maradona is still revered in Argentina for the 1986 World Cup. I can’t count on both hands the number of dogs named “Herschel” I have met in my life.

And yet, with all due respect to Walker, who has received countless blows to the head over his years as a football player and mixed-martial artist, he is likely among the dumbest men ever to run for Senate. Even to those jaded from watching Biden press conferences, his interviews are remarkable for their incoherence. When asked in March about gun violence, he answered: “Well, Cain killed Abel, you know, and that’s a problem that we have… You talked about doing a disinformation, what about getting a department that can look at young men that’s looking at women that’s looking at their social media?” He has cautioned against green energy investments on the theory that “when China gets our good air, their bad air gotta move. So it moves over to our good air space. Then, now, we’ve got to clean that back up.” Amazingly, these quotes sound even worse when you listen to them.

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But even if Walker did not sound like President Camacho minus the showmanship, he would still be plagued by a string of scandals. He has admitted to struggling with dissociative identity disorder and of having up to 12 different personalities, or “alters”, including one that prompted him to play Russian roulette with a loaded pistol and another that nearly led him to murder a man for failing to deliver a car on time. His ex-wife has accused him of threatening her with knives and of holding a gun to her head, meaning that whoever wins the Georgia Senate seat will have faced domestic violence allegations from their former spouse. Indeed, it’s a testament to the strength of Republican feeling in Georgia that Walker is running only two points behind Warnock. It’s also telling that he’s polling a full five points behind Brian Kemp, the GOP candidate for Georgia governor.

Walker is the most colourful Republican seeking election to the Senate, but he’s not the only one with problems. Pennsylvania, for instance, should have been a decent opportunity for the GOP. The Democratic nominee, John Fetterman, is another one of those American politicians who can barely talk — he suffered a stroke in May and has rarely appeared in public since. For that and other reasons, he would appear to be a soft target. A radical from the Bernie Sanders wing of the party, Fetterman attempts to project blue-collar authenticity (largely by wearing hoodies) but is in reality something more like a middle-class slummer. He received an MBA from the University of Connecticut and a Master’s in public policy from Harvard, and he subsisted into his 40s on the largesse of his parents, from whom he purchased an “industrial-style loft” for $1. He’s also got what, if he were a Republican, the media might call a “racially tinged” past. In 2013, Fetterman used a shotgun to detain an unarmed black jogger whom he (wrongly) suspected of criminal activity in his neighbourhood — behaviour that in other cases has been charged as the federal crime of kidnapping.

Fetterman’s Republican opponent, however, is Mehmet Oz, another Trump-backed political novice best known as the celebrity doctor from The Oprah Winfrey Show. While Oz, like all Republicans, has to deal with a hostile media, his big problem is that he’s been unable to shake the impression that he’s a wealthy carpetbagger with little organic connection to Pennsylvania. In a much-mocked video highlighted by the Fetterman campaign, Oz, who lived in New Jersey until recently, mispronounces the name of a Pennsylvania grocery chain before complaining that skyrocketing food prices are driving up the price of his wife’s “crudités”. And a recent attempt to attack Fetterman for sponging off of his parents ended up spiralling into a discussion about whether Oz owned ten homes or only two. (He clarified: two homes, ten properties.) With barely 12 weeks to go until the election, Fetterman has opened up a towering 11.5-point lead over his rival.

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But the Senate map looks bad for the GOP across the board. In Arizona, Democrat Mark Kelly has opened up a double-digit lead on the Trump-and-Peter Thiel-backed Blake Masters, who has been hammered for past comments calling abortion “demonic”. That might’ve been Republican boilerplate a year ago — meaningless red meat for Evangelicals and Catholics — but in a post-Roe world, voters are jumpy about what GOP politicians might do to abortion access once in power. And the other Trump-and-Thiel candidate, Hillbilly Elegy author and venture capitalist J.D. Vance, is struggling in Ohio. The state went decisively for Trump in both 2016 and 2020, which should be great news for Vance. But polling in that race, while sparse, has tended to show Vance narrowly behind in a close race, and his campaign has struggled to raise money. A Yale-educated populist whose real constituency is among D.C. intellectuals, Vance has had trouble connecting with Ohio voters. He still has a decent shot to pull it out, but Ohio shouldn’t even be close.

A friend who’s reported on American politics for decades once told me that parties take a few electoral cycles to get the message the electorate is trying to send them. Democrats weren’t convinced to abandon McGovern-style, tax-and-spend liberalism until after getting thumped in 1980, 1984, and 1988. Republicans held onto the Bush-era synthesis of religious family values and neoconservative foreign policy through the defeats of 2008 and 2012, abandoning it only after their base decisively rejected it in the 2016 primary.

A few months ago, it looked as if the Democrats might be the ones about to receive the message that their current flavour of elite-driven progressivism was out of step with the country. That outcome is still possible: Biden is only marginally less unpopular than he was earlier in the summer, and reports of his revival carry more than a whiff of wishful thinking. And the Senate map favours the GOP, even if the candidates are weak. Today, however, it’s starting to look as if the American electorate could be gearing up to deliver a very different sort of message. Trump was defeated in 2020. It seems increasingly likely that his hand-picked candidates could cost Republicans a Senate majority in 2022. And with each new report coming out of Mar-a-Lago, he inches closer to declaring his candidacy for 2024.

In a perfect world, it wouldn’t take yet another Trump defeat to convince the GOP to move past the man. But we’re not living in that world, so something tells me that it will.

In reality, though, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical didn’t premiere until early in 2015, just four short months before Donald Trump descended the Trump Tower escalator and inaugurated the age of populism. This means that Hamilton enthusiasm was partially a lagging indicator, and partially just something for stunned liberals to desperately grasp onto, a thread running backward to the cosmopolitan American future they had lost.

I do not come to bury this kind of fandom: the Miranda musical is terrific no matter its ideological baggage. But it still might have been more intellectually productive if the Trump era had inspired its fans to turn from Miranda’s version of the Founding to the one found in Gore Vidal’s 1973 novel Burr.

Burr already had one cultural moment, dropping originally amid the squalor of Watergate, when its dose of cold-eyed iconoclasm was well-received by critics and bookbuyers alike. But today the novel can be read or re-read with new eyes, outside the long shadow cast by its late author’s famous media persona, and in a landscape where its vision has just as much to offer.

That vision is cynical on the surface. Vidal retells the story of the Founding era from the perspective of what one of Aaron Burr’s biographers called the “Fallen Founder” — the almost-president of 1800, the slayer of Alexander Hamilton in their 1804 duel, the man tried for treason for a supposed scheme to detach the western states from the Union.

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The treason trial ended in acquittal but also ended Burr’s public political career; he bounced around Europe unhappily in search of patronage and then ended up back in New York City, where he lived quietly as a lawyer until a late marriage to a wealthy widow in 1837. That’s the point at which the novel picks up, through the agency of its narrator, Charles Schuyler, a young journalist on the make who befriends the aged Burr but also agrees to betray him, by gathering evidence intended to prove that the disreputable killer of Hamilton and famous ladies’ man is also the secret father of Vice President Martin Van Buren, whose pending ascent to the presidency Schuyler’s patrons hope to block.

With this hope in mind, the journalist induces the aging Burr to share his own unfinished memoirs, granting us first-person flashbacks to the Revolutionary War and early republic, in which Burr describes his own rise and fall while settling accounts with all his former friends and rivals.

Compared to the pieties of conservative founder-worship or even of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical, these portraits can seem savage. George Washington is an incompetent general who, as president, obsesses over his own quasi-royal dignity. Hamilton, of course, is everything that he accused Burr of being: A man of vaulting ambition, eager for aristocratic style and monarchical power, “capable of any illegality including a military coup”, who actually engaged in an attempt to steal the 1800 election. (Vidal’s Burr writes: “I suspect that when Hamilton looked at me he saw, in some magical way, himself reflected. And so if one is an embryo-Caesar, accuse the looking-glass of that high treason and divert thereby the wrath of the plebes.”)

Finally Jefferson, in Burr’s telling, is expedience and ambition personified — a man who had the gift “at one time or another to put with eloquence the ‘right’ answer to every moral question”, even as in practice “he seldom deviated from an opportunistic course, calculated to bring him power”. A man whose principles committed him to an agrarian and decentralised confederacy, but whose presidency settled “with suspicious ease” on empire-building and executive power. A better Napoleon than Napoleon himself, since his empire-building in the vast Louisiana territory actually endured.

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As readers we need not accept that Burr-the-narrator is reliable in all these details, or buy all of his extensive self-justifications. We only have to accept his unique observer’s position, as a man interested in his own honour and prospects but not especially keen on any grand ideological project, at a time when one of history’s grandest ideological projects — the age of revolution — was getting underway.

From that perspective, Burr’s account is cynical and deflating relative to mythmakers and ideological historians — and one of the points of setting the novel’s framing narrative in the 1830s is to see how quickly American mythmaking took hold. But even through the eyes of the Fallen Founder there is no escaping the fact that what he describes is a political success story: a republic established and then expanded, various disasters and civil wars avoided, the Caesarist appetites of even the most powerful figures checked and limited, and at least some revolutionary ideals put into political practice.

Indeed, the novel’s Burr often circles back to acknowledge as much. All his barbed comments about Washington culminate in the observation that: “He was the supreme creator of his union … [whose] powerful will and serpentine cunning made of a loose confederation of sovereign states a strong federal government graven to this day in Washington’s sombre Roman imperial image.” His war with Hamilton doesn’t conceal his partial liking for his rival, and his sneers at the self-made immigrant double as an acknowledgment of the Horatio Alger qualities celebrated on Broadway.

Even Jefferson, Burr’s final enemy and the instigator of his treason trial, is presented as, well, what he was — a dreadful hypocrite, with a tangle of competing motivations and ideals slicked over by self-interest, but also a remarkably effective politician who adapted himself to the new republic’s presidency rather than being carried into disasters by his radical inclinations.

So what is the novel’s un-cynical message? Perhaps that politics is an always unfinished and ambiguous vocation, whose moments of moral clarity are inherently exceptional, and whose normal workings require a constant balancing-act between idealism and realism, private probity and public vision, the necessary and the possible.

This balance needs to be struck within the individual statesman, first. The reader will observe that Burr falters and falls, relative to the other Founders, not because he’s worse and they’re better, but because he has the wrong proportions: too much concern for his private honour, which makes him miss crucial opportunities and also carries him into the fateful duel, and not quite enough concern for public ideals and great causes, which makes him an insufficiently inspiring leader for any of the new country’s clashing factions.

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But then, in good Madisonian terms, the balance also needs to be struck between competing statesmen. The great good fortune of America in the Revolutionary era, in Vidal’s portrait, was not that all its leaders were uniquely public-spirited but rather that their talents and rivalries interacted in such a way as to mostly stabilise and strengthen the young country. Which is to say, while everyone was accusing everyone else of being a monarchist or Caesar in the making, the republic took form and proved stronger than any individual or faction.

This brings us to the book’s relevance for our own political era, in which accusations of incipient autocracy fly as freely as they did in the United States of 1800. There is a certain relief in recognising this similarity. It’s a reminder, among other things, that periods of stable consensus politics are almost as exceptional as moments of total moral clarity, and that the people who have constantly asserted this-is-not-normal about some feature of the age of populism are mistaken. It’s quite normal for small-r republican politics to be shadowed by the fear of tyranny, corrupted elections, misinformation, destabilising foreign influence, the fate of Rome. (Before there was the reductio ad Hitlerum there was the reductio ad Rubicon — and perhaps the exhausted response: “A Catiline-conspiracy analogy, again, really?”)

These similarities also hint that the politics of the late-18th and 19th centuries may be more relevant to our own fragmented era than the mass movements and ideological tyrannies of the early 20th century. The category to which Burr belongs, the political adventurer — the none-too-principled but also none-too-ideological figure seizing opportunities as they come to him — seems especially relevant to the rise of Trump or, for that matter, Boris Johnson. And of course Andrew Jackson, hovering in the wings of Burr, remains the crucial antecedent for all American populism, past, present and yet to come.

But to the extent that aspects of our own era can be glimpsed in Vidal’s vision of the American Founding, the recognition also brings with it a sense of the depressing difference. We have the adventurers, the fears of Caesarism, the conspiracy theories and fake news, but the qualities of leadership and vision that Burr grudgingly acknowledges in his rivals seem altogether absent. Instead of vaulting ambition counteracting vaulting ambition, our adventurers stand out, clownishly, amid a landscape of greying mediocrity. This is far less dangerous than the alternative, but it is a sign of decay rather than life.

At this particular party, with guests still reeling from Trump’s victory, a professor at an Ivy League university began expounding on the flaws with American democracy — an outdated “18th-century technology” in our digital present. In a world of Russian Facebook ads and Cambridge Analytica, why put our faith in democratic processes? The winner gets the nuclear codes. Should we really leave it up to the manipulable US public? It’s nice giving everyone a vote, but so what? One individual’s vote among millions has little meaning. We need a better system, not sentimental ideas about the inherent value of voting.

Outdated 18th-century man that I am, I was outraged less by his arguments than by his underlying attitude, the blithe aristocratic assumption that democratic outcomes tell us nothing we need know, or nothing other than the hateful stupidity of American voters. That a better class of people should be in charge, the stakes being too high for such decisions to be left to the sorts of people… well… bringing our food in and our empty plates out of the dining room.

As Gordon Wood has noted, the American Revolution was not simply a matter of political change. It entailed a social revolution as well, emphasising equality as a social principle, undermining long-held hierarchies, and promoting an attitude of greater respect for ordinary men. Such attitudes are not always natural. The siren song of hierarchy, power, and authority captivates us even when we’re not recoiling from the monstrosities of populism. And if one would like to observe such attitudes at their most subtle and seductive, one of the best and most elegantly written books from such a perspective is George Kennan’s celebrated Sketches from a Life.

These are the assembled travel writings and letters written from 1927 to 1989 by George Kennan, diplomat and historian, key architect of Cold War containment and the Marshall Plan, a brilliant analyst and a beautiful writer, and an American patriot who long advocated for a less bellicose, less militarist, less hubristic foreign policy. ‘‘George Kennan came as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history,’’ said Henry Kissinger. It’s a marvellous book, with passages of such elegance and insight I was constantly photographing them and sending them to friends. It also filled me with the same outrage I’d felt at that dinner party.

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Those who have read Around the Cragged Hill, Kennan’s political and philosophical manifesto, will know some of the man’s oddities: his hatred of the automobile, his desire to split up America into 12 constituent republics, his belief that widespread use of domestic servants is essential for cultural health. And those familiar with the more unsavoury bits of his biography will know about his speculations that black and naturalised citizens should not be allowed to vote, about his self-declared “soft spot” for apartheid, about his State Department memo (that Dean Acheson refused to circulate) that partly blamed miscegenation for Latin America’s political troubles.

But it is in Sketches from a Life that we get his vision, most clearly and seductively, at the level of sensibility. And likewise, it is where we get almost unbidden notes of American optimism and egalitarianism occasionally polluting that vision. And so, rather than a sourcebook from “one of the wisest men in America” (as the New York Times put it when reviewing the book in 1989), this is a book best revisited as if it were a novel about a tragically limited, albeit brilliant, man who spent his life in service to a country whose spirit was at odds with his own.

Early on in Sketches, we learn that Kennan, 23 years old but already nostalgic for an imagined past, regrets not having been born 100 years earlier:

“Life is too full in these times to be comprehensible. We know too many cities to be able to grow into any of them, and our arrivals and departures are no longer matters for emotional debauches — they are too common. I should like to have lived in the days when a visit was a matter of months, when political and social problems were regarded from simple standpoints called ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’, when foreign countries were still foreign, when a vast part of the world always bore the glamour of the great unknown, when there were still wars worth fighting and gods worth worshipping.”

“Such beautiful bullshit,” I wrote in the margins. Kennan was born in 1904, so one wonders which wars he was thinking of (America’s Indian Wars? 1824’s First Anglo-Burmese War? The French Conquest of Algeria?), but specificity here isn’t the thing so much as getting wrapped up in the myth-making power of your own prose.

Indeed, the book is haunted by visions of a perfect past where suffering was justified by higher ideals. In St. Petersburg he notes that the Imperial Yacht Club, once the haunt of dukes, diplomats, and dignitaries, had been turned into a state administration building for internal waterways. He laments the loss of an old playground for the rich: did it not “actually add something of colour and variety to the city for the people of that day to know that here, in these premises, there was being prepared, even if they didn’t eat it, some of the finest food eaten anywhere in northern Europe, that here things were being done elegantly, impressively, to the connoisseur’s taste?”

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Monarchy gets a similar justification, since the trappings of monarchy are “the dream, the vision, the ideal of man as he might conceivably be — of man ennobled”, a theatre without which Europe supposedly couldn’t have produced “good taste”. Elsewhere he declares that men require “a moral order drawn up by those who are wiser and more experienced than the great masses of humanity and are capable of channelling into the body of spiritual law the ponderous experience of millennia of human progress”.

These beautiful visions of a refined world propped up by an impoverished populace are contrasted with Kennan’s disgusted reactions to widespread prosperity. In Scandinavia he sees, or thinks he sees, “the intellectual and spiritual vacuum which the European welfare state produces”. This happens when “the sacrifice of an attractive and gracious form of living on the part of a few is rationalised by the same arguments about better conditions for the many”. And in America, he speculates that when man is given “freedom both from political restraint and from want, the effect is to render him childlike”. In one of his more amusing asides, he compares California to “the popular American Protestant concept of heaven” since:

“There is always a reasonable flow of new arrivals; one meets many — not all — of one’s friends; people spend a good deal of their time congratulating each other over the fact that they are there; discontent would be unthinkable; and the newcomer is slightly disconcerted to realise that now — the devil having been banished and virtue being triumphant — nothing terribly interesting can ever happen again.”

There are some poignant moments, especially during and in the wake of Second World War, when he sees the faces of refugees, or the sites of mass slaughter. In the ruins of Hamburg, he’s struck by the conviction that no military calculus “could have justified this stupendous, careless destruction of civilian life and of material values”. On the border of Finland and Russia, he sketches a picture of birch trees growing above “the remains of some boy — be he Russian or Finnish — who gave up on this spot the privilege of leading a life through, like the rest of us, in all its satisfactions and disappointments”. This is the sensibility which spurred Kennan, in 1950, to write a State Department paper calling for an end to the use of nuclear weapons for offensive purposes, since they cannot be “reconciled with a political purpose directed to shaping, rather than destroying” adversaries, and since “they fail to take account of the ultimate responsibility of men for one another”.

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Admirable, indeed. Grand suffering clearly moves him. And yet, here too, I find something disturbing. A true humanism would afford common people dignity in life as well as in death. But in Berlin, “the great awesome ruins” of East Berlin stand in judgment of West Berlin, which seems “toylike and trivial: an officious little busybody of a civilisation, fussy and impermanent”. And he cannot look upon a suffering child, a young French girl on a cart, in a torn and soiled dress, with all the youth gone out of her face, without projecting his own notions onto her: “Just try to tell her of liberalism and democracy, of progress, of ideals, of tradition, of romantic love, see how far you get… Do you think she’s going to come out of it a flaming little patriot? She saw the complete moral breakdown and degradation of her own people…”

There are times, though, where the aristocratic lens cracks, and rather than smug if elegantly written dismissals of human beings we get to witness a fine mind grappling with the gap between his perceptions and his ideas about the world. The earliest comes in Hamburg, in 1927, when he encounters a huge Communist demonstration at the Dammtor Station. “For all my contempt for the falseness and hatefulness and demagoguery of communism,” he writes, “I had a strange desire to cry when I first saw those ranks of people marching along the street — ill-dressed, slouching, brutalised people.” Kennan being Kennan, he finds them “ignorant, unpleasant people,” but can’t deny the truth of their humanity: “They were after centuries of mute despair, for the first time attempting to express and to assert themselves.”

Later, while Ambassador in Moscow, he leads into powerful reflections on the stability of the communist regime with a set of observations about the hundreds of thousands of garden plots on the outskirts of Moscow. These plots open up for ordinary Russians “a veritable world of what you might call ‘miniature private interest’, a world in which people devote themselves to, and think about, everything under the sun except the success of communism.” Political discontent doesn’t breed in these spaces so much as a “spiritual breach between the rulers and the ruled…”

Here, after so much nostalgia for the old European order, we see Kennan’s Americanness inflecting his vision. What he sees is not anti-communism so much as human life, unruly and unreconciled to ideological systems seeking its suppression. “The Party has tried to rule out change.” he writes, “but the Party is hoisted here on the petard of its own lack of a genuine democracy, of the loss of organic connection with the emotional forces of the people themselves.” Nothing dramatic looms on the horizon, no coming revolt, but the excitement of the revolution has exhausted itself. Human beings, never quite as mouldable as elites imagine, move unexpectedly, uncontrollably, dangerously.

I must confess, I have a certain degree of nostalgia for the world Kennan inhabited. Hard-earned expertise, like the expertise Kennan had about Russia, is not to be scoffed at, the gutting of the State Department over the past decades is one of the America’s great self-inflicted wounds, and a less hubristic, less militaristic foreign policy of the sort he advocated is one I heartily endorse. But though experts have valuable, if partial truths we need to hear, they should be haunted by the notion that those “ill-dressed, slouching, brutalised people” might have access to their own partial truths as well.

Such progressive posturing may soon run out of steam: faced with a looming humanitarian crisis, the Democratic mayors of both cities, Eric Adams of New York and Muriel Bowser of D.C., are now begging the federal government for assistance.

Yet perhaps the most surprising element of all this chaos is the way the media have blamed the Right for this crisis. “Cold-Blooded Texas Guv Vows to Dump Asylum Seekers in the Middle of D.C.,” was how the Daily Beast covered the story. “GOP Governors Cause Havoc by Busing Migrants to the East Coast,” explained the New York Times. White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre called Abbott’s policy “shameful” and a “political ploy”.

The migrants themselves, however, are under no illusions about who deserves credit for their arrival in the US. “Biden promised us that everything was going to change,” one migrant told reporters back in March. “He promised the Haitian community he will help them,” a Haitian migrant told Fox News. “I just need [the US] to tell me when we can cross,” a Honduran woman told Politico.

Where did millions of migrants get the idea that Biden had invited them in? From Biden himself, naturally. During the 2020 primary debates, then-candidate Biden said that migrants illegally crossing the border should not be detained, and like nearly every other candidate on the debate stage, he said he would decriminalise illegal border crossing. Millions of migrants were listening, along with the human traffickers who extort, torture, rape and kill them.

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And Biden has more or less followed through as President. From Day One, he stopped construction of a border wall with Mexico, ended President Trump’s travel ban restricting travel from 14 countries, and dramatically reduced deportations — from more than 267,000 in 2019 to just 59,000 in 2021. The Biden administration also vowed to end Title 42, a Trump-era restriction that allowed migrants to be turned away due to the pandemic, though a federal judge in Louisiana has for now blocked Biden’s attempts to end the policy. Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security said this week that it plans to end another effective Trump-era program, Remain in Mexico, which allowed border agents to turn migrants away and have them wait in Mexico until their removal hearings.”

What’s most peculiar about all this is how the administration’s de facto open-border policy represents a remarkable U-turn on the Left. Until very recently, free-market Republicans were the ones pushing for things like amnesty and easy access to migrant labour, while the Democrats were on the side of limiting immigration. Back in the Nineties, Barbara Jordan, the first black woman from the South elected to Congress and Democrat Chair of the US Commission on Immigration Reform, wrote that the commission found “no national interest in continuing to import lesser skilled and unskilled workers to compete in the most vulnerable parts of our labour force”.

“Open borders? No, that’s a Koch Brothers proposal,” socialist Senator Bernie Sanders scoffed as recently as 2015. “What Right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that.” Fast forward to that 2020 primary debate and Sanders, just like Biden, said he would support decriminalising illegal border crossing.

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This reversal is especially surprising given that the Democrats’ base — or what used to be their base — agrees more with Bernie 2015 than Bernie 2020. In 2019, a large majority of black and Hispanic Americans said they would vote for a presidential candidate who stood for strengthening border security to reduce illegal immigration. This shouldn’t be surprising: Illegal immigration has been tied to a 20-60% decrease in black working-class wages. Another recent study suggested that immigration accounts for a third of the decline in the black employment rate over the last 40 years. “Black Americans are more supportive of limiting immigration than any other bloc of the Democratic coalition,” the sociologist Musa al Gharbi reported. “And Hispanics actually tend to be more concerned about illegal immigration than are whites or Blacks.”

Why did the Democrats abandon these voters? Many who support mass immigration do so ostensibly because of the overall effect on GDP, which is positive. But they tend not to ask, positive for whom? As the economist George Borjas has argued, immigration primarily boosts the incomes of the immigrants themselves, while redistributing wealth from the native poor to the native rich. In other words, among Americans, it is the elites who benefit from open borders, people whose professional-class jobs would never be threatened by someone who doesn’t speak English. For the American working classes, good jobs are sacrificed on the altar of helping those from other countries.

Point this out and you can count on a member of the Squad to call you racist — a ridiculous accusation given who has paid the highest price for mass immigration. “The history of citizenship in the US is deeply woven with the history of racism,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said back in 2019. “It has been used as the legal enforcer of racism for most of US history.” When Vice President Kamala Harris told would-be migrants to stay home, Ilhan Omar tweeted: “We should not abandon our values and rights to far-Right white nationalists.”

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But these accusations of bigotry hide a class divide that has seen the Democrats choose educated white elites over the working class again and again. Remember that immigrants make up nearly 50% of America’s household servants, 42% of taxi drivers and chauffeurs, and 35% of grounds maintenance workers. It is these migrants’ employers, not the migrants themselves, who are the target audience for Democrats’ “anti-racist” moralising.

Of course, many of these progressives also have compassion for migrants crossing the border in search of a better life. I do, too. It’s impossible not to feel for people seeking a better life for their children. But what about America’s own struggling workers? Why no compassion for them? Like so much of what passes for political debate in America in 2022, the fight between Governor Abbott and Mayors Adams and Bowser is less about values and more about interests. Big-city Democrats want to flatter the moral vanity of their elite base by rhetorically supporting illegal immigration, but only so long as border states such as Texas and Arizona are the ones who foot the bill.

Moreover, the “compassionate” approach is incentivising truly dangerous behaviours, leading to parents drowning in the Rio Grande with their infants and to children riding La Bestia migrant train and watching as others fall off to their deaths. A third of women who make the trip across the border admit to being sexually abused, and nearly everyone is preyed upon in some way by the powerful cartels that now effectively control the border. Trump may have gone too far with his family separation policy, but his relentless approach to the border ended up preventing a lot of suffering, both to would-be migrants and to American workers. Since the start of 2022, authorities have found 609 bodies on the border, a record high that doesn’t even include those discovered further north in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

Some of these deaths made headlines, such as the 50 migrants who perished in the back of an abandoned truck in south Texas earlier this year, or the migrant from Nicaragua who drowned crossing the Rio Grande in May, or the 22-year-old who drowned in April. But most of these tragic and totally preventable deaths go unnoticed.

This is Leftist compassion curdled into cruelty. And it’s not Governor Abbott’s fault — it’s President Biden’s.

Yet McCarthy also appears to face a big problem. He already can’t control some of his wilder junior colleagues, including far-Right representatives like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, who are a constant source of embarrassing headlines. Now, a new wave of MAGA mavericks — including Mayra Flores, a “far-Right Latina” known for sharing QAnon hashtags — are on their way to join them. 

There’s no doubt that these new Republican members will be controversial. But the question for followers of the American political scene is, how much will they really matter? A quick look at the recent history of the GOP suggests that the answer is: not much. Loose-cannon legislators are nothing new, and while they might cause headaches for party elders, they almost always vote with mainstream Republicans on the issues that really matter to the party. In other words, for all the sound and fury about an emerging QAnon caucus, don’t expect the Congressional Republican Party to change much any time soon. 

McCarthy’s trouble with his party’s Right began in earnest earlier this year, when an audio recording circulated in which he could be heard discussing the need for Donald Trump to resign after the January 6 riot. Whereas most in the press derided McCarthy for his cowardice in only criticising Trump behind closed doors, some of the Trumpiest members of the House saw the recording as evidence of McCarthy’s disloyalty. The minority leader drew harsh criticism from the far-Right Freedom Caucus, a group founded in 2015 to advocate for an “open, accountable, and limited government” that now serves as the home base for many of the party’s most truculent young members. 

The Freedom Caucus is certainly a colourful group. Take Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who chanted “build the wall” in unison at President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address in March. Later that month, the pair found themselves in a heated argument about Greene’s decision to attend the America First Political Action Conference in February alongside Iowa Congressman Steve King. King, of course, was taken off U.S. House committees by McCarthy and the GOP leadership after asking when the term “white supremacist” became offensive. 

King, however, is a moderate compared to the conference’s host, Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier and veteran of the 2017 Charlottesville riots who claims that “having sex with women is gay”. Breaking bread with Fuentes was apparently too much for Boebert. But Boebert is no stranger to controversy herself. In addition to voicing support for QAnon, the Colorado Republican has recently come under fire for abandoning her then-sister-in-law after a 2020 off-roading accident that occurred two months prior to her victory in a Republican congressional primary. She’s also been fending off salacious — and seemingly spurious — rumours that she used to work as a sugar-daddy call girl.

The Freedom Caucus was also home to Madison Cawthorn, the troubled MAGA stalwart who recently lost his primary after falling afoul of the DC Republican establishment, which he had accused of tolerating orgies and cocaine use among its members. The establishment fought back with a classic “dirty tricks” operation, digging up salacious rumours and passing them on to sympathetic journalists. The same American Muckrakers PAC that is now attempting to smear Boebert released documents and videos suggesting Cawthorn was sexually harassing his male second cousin, and someone leaked to The Daily Beast that Cawthorn’s chief of staff had received tens of thousands of dollars in outside money beyond what is permitted by House ethics rules. Cawthorn, having made himself into an annoyance, was unceremoniously shoved out of Congress. 

As strange as that saga was, Cawthorn’s brief tenure speaks to the fundamental strength of party politics in the American system. Crazies may get elected, but they live and die based on their ability to make themselves useful to the party. Rising MAGA candidates such as New York’s Carl Paladino, who called Adolf Hitler “the kind of leader we need”, and Washington’s Loren Culp, a former police chief who tweeted his support for hanging a black man who could be seen on video pushing a senior citizen down the stairs, may generate bad press, but they will vote with the party much of time — and if they make more trouble than they’re worth, they’ll be kicked to the curb. Trump himself was a shining example of this phenomenon: Although he exasperated Republican grandees, he was able to secure their support by pushing party priorities like tax cuts and conservative Supreme Court appointments.

This isn’t a new problem. Every few years, a new generation of GOP radicals emerges to shock liberal sensibilities, but the party’s priorities remain the same. The “Republican Revolution” of 1994, engineered by Georgia Congressman Newt Gingrich, broke the so-called “conservative coalition” of conservative Republicans and “boll weevil Democrats” that had worked together since the New Deal. But while Gingrich’s “Contract with America” contained novel proposals like term limits, these never came to fruition. Instead, the party hewed closely to its post-Barry Goldwater identity: Bill Clinton was forced to move to the right on issues such as crime and welfare, and his Republican successor, George W. Bush, worked with the GOP to pass sweeping individual tax cuts, expand the surveillance state, and conduct military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some legislators elected in 1994 evolved into establishment figures and major power brokers, while others were quickly defeated following gaffes and controversies.

The Tea Party movement, which coalesced in 2009 following CNBC reporter Rick Santelli’s call for a “Chicago Tea Party” to chasten big government, underwent a similar evolution. It failed miserably in its goal of shrinking the US federal government, but it succeeded in launching new Republican political careers, including those of pundit Glenn Beck, Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, and the aforementioned Iowa Congressman Steve King. At the time, some commentators saw the Tea Party as the voice of America’s forgotten heartland, but political scientist Robert Putnam was nearer to the mark when he observed that the Tea Party’s activists were simply Republican voters who wanted increased border security, restrictions on immigration, and a renewed infusion of some elements of traditional Christianity into public life. They were, in Putnam’s terms, “super-Republicans”, even if the rhetoric they used sounded alarmist, extremist, or unorthodox.

Even Trump himself — the seeming bête noire of Jeb Bush and all the other corporate Republicans he crushed in the 2016 primary — was another outgrowth of the Tea Party era. His rise to fame was built on the back of a quixotic campaign to determine the national origins of then-President Barack Obama coupled with clever tweets about things like Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank’s protruding nipples. Trump’s own reputation as a charismatic, unorthodox speaker with a socially libertine lifestyle led many to believe he could be all things to all MAGA hat wearers. But controversies and crises aside, this avowed fan of “Two Corinthians” came through on taxes and abortion, the core Republican political issues since Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency in 1980. Despite his rhetorical disdain for Mitt Romney and other old-guard leaders, Trump, once in office, delivered the goods that the party had long promised its base.

At the end of the day, then, Kevin McCarthy need not worry about what Carl Paladino and Loren Culp will do to the Republican Party. It will keep doing what it does best, asserting issues of public morality and low taxation that resonate with its long-term base, which is gradually assimilating more Latino voters. In doing so, it will be reasserting the power of historical continuity and frustrating the hopes for a more genuinely populist course espoused by “post-left dissidents” and members of the “New Right”. But McCarthy, who has served in Congress through the Speaker of the House tenures of John Boehner and Paul Ryan, surely knows that failing to find the right mix of velvet glove and iron fist could empower challengers and cost him his own position of authority. Political fortunes are always rising and falling in America, even if the partisan song remains the same. 

The dominant narrative in the press is that Republicans, or at least a significant cohort of them, were participants in the Senate Watergate Committee’s search for the truth in 1973 and not strictly partisan or obstructionist. This narrative, of course, has enjoyed renewed popularity because of the obvious comparisons between Watergate and the serial high crimes and misdemeanours committed by President Donald Trump.

One question, uttered on June 28, 1973, supposedly exemplified Republicans’ bipartisanship. “What did the President know and when did he know it?” Tennessee Senator Howard Baker famously asked John Dean, President Nixon’s former White House counsel, who was now fessing up to his role as desk officer for the Watergate cover-up. For some reason, the context of Baker’s very first question to Dean has been forgotten. The ambitious senator was not engaged in a bipartisan search for the truth; rather, Baker was creating a firebreak that he hoped would protect Nixon’s presidency against what he realised had been three-and-a-half days of extremely damaging testimony. But there was one very large hole in Dean’s cool and detailed account. His first direct meeting of any consequence with the President had not occurred until February 27, 1973, more than eight months after the June 17th break-in. So while Dean believed he was carrying out the President’s wishes, he could not actually offer direct testimony about what Nixon knew and did in the earliest and most crucial phase of the cover-up.

Baker’s gambit gave every evidence of working — for two weeks. Then, in mid July, White House assistant Alexander Butterfield revealed the existence of an extensive, voice-activated tape recording system that promised to resolve what appeared to be an insuperable obstacle: who was telling the truth? As the late Stanley Kutler, the dean of Watergate historians, wrote, “discovery of the tapes undid Baker’s careful handiwork. The tapes made irrelevant his question to John Dean… [Because now] Richard Nixon himself could answer Baker, and in indelible words.”

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Kutler’s observation was an understatement. Baker’s question had transmogrified into a battering ram against Nixon, until he was ultimately forced to give up the tapes, and it was his own words, more than any other single factor, that forced him into a humiliating resignation.

And what Baker did after his strategy backfired should not be forgotten either. He did not give up on his aim of being seen inside the GOP as the senator who saved Nixon’s presidency, a reputation that he hoped would put him head and shoulders above his party rivals for a future presidential run. While the president fought his way through the courts for months, hoping to avoid having to turn the tapes over to the special Watergate prosecutor, Baker and the minority counsel, Fred Thompson (a future Tennessee senator), desperately attempted a rearguard action. They sought to implicate the Central Intelligence Agency in the break-in, rather than the White House and Committee to Re-Elect the President. It was one of the most cynical acts in a scandal brimming with them.

About two weeks before the Senate Watergate Committee released its final report, in mid-July 1974, Baker and Thompson leaked their findings of alleged CIA complicity to the press. They landed with a thud, and were completely forgotten once the president released on August 5 what instantly became known as “the smoking gun” tape: an Oval Office conversation between Nixon and his top aide Bob Haldeman discussing how to use the CIA to impede the FBI’s Watergate investigation. Baker finally had the answer to his question.

Baker’s reputation suffered no lasting damage, in or out of the GOP. When his devastating question was remembered, as it often was, it was taken out of its intended context. And Baker exhibited no abiding impulse to correct the misunderstanding after Nixon’s disgrace was complete. Indeed, as time went on he absolutely welcomed the erroneous interpretation.

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If rose-colored glasses and wishful thinking drive the false narrative about Watergate bipartisanship, the same cannot be said for the driving force behind the other misleading narrative. Here, vested interests, reputations, and a lot of money are at stake.

Philip L. Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post before Katherine Graham of Watergate-era fame, is frequently credited (albeit erroneously) with coining the saying that “journalism is the first rough draft of history.” That phrase is the problem in a nutshell. Those who wrote the first rough draft of Watergate have persisted in doing everything to ensure the first draft is also the final draft, aided enormously by the press writ large, eager to bask in the reflected glory.

The ubiquitous narrative about Watergate is still largely the one laid out in All the President’s Men, the 1974 book by Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, which became an eponymous Hollywood blockbuster starring Robert Redford in 1976. As the literary critic Wilfrid Sheed noted, Americans might be getting fuzzy about the details of Watergate, “but at least they remember the movie: a couple of nosy journalists and an informer, wasn’t it?”

No one much noticed the degree to which the book was a product of, and influenced by, a passing fancy at the time, the so-called “New Journalism.” Books in this genre employed literary devices normally considered the domain of novels and put them to work in books that purported to be nonfiction. “Woodstein” exploited their factual authority as journalists while simultaneously enjoying the license granted novelists. The result was a gripping newspaper procedural focused most intensely on the first eight months or so of the scandal — but one that was a very narrow slice of that history and bore only a faint resemblance to what had actually gone on inside the confines of The Washington Post.

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Most notably, All The President’s Men neatly sidestepped the truth that a troika — not a duo — was responsible for the Post’s coverage. Barry Sussman, a city editor who became the special Watergate editor in mid-July 1972, had been indispensable in producing the stories that won the Post a Pulitzer Prize. Indeed, managing editor Howard Simons believed that if any one individual, rather than the paper as a whole, deserved a Pulitzer, it was Sussman, not Woodstein. As Simons told Alan Pakula, director of the feature film, “Barry made acceptable the work of two junior reporters . . . [who] didn’t understand what they had often and couldn’t write it.”

Other principal actors slighted, if not maligned, in Bernstein and Woodward’s fabulistic account were the three federal attorneys assigned to prosecute the Watergate burglars; a slew of FBI agents doing the investigating; and the grand jury empaneled to hear the evidence, issue subpoenaes, and draw up indictments. The Watergate cover-up was not broken by the press, but by the legal pincers these actors built, which inexorably closed in on those who had committed perjury during the January 1973 trial of the burglars or otherwise conspired to obstruct justice. No one has ever conveyed a more balanced account of the press vs. the government’s role than Sandy Smith, a legendary reporter for Time magazine who broke as many important stories about Watergate as anyone in the Washington press corps, including Woodstein. After Nixon’s August 1974 resignation, Smith observed,

There’s a myth that the press did all this, uncovered all the crimes . . . It’s bunk. The press didn’t do it. People forget that the government was investigating all the time. In my material there was less than 2 percent that was truly original investigation. There was an investigation being carried out here. It may have been blocked, bent, botched, or whatever [at times], but it was proceeding. The government investigators found the stuff and gave us something to expose.

Finally, there is one last aspect that tells us more about the false narrative presented in All the President’s Men than any other element in the book. It involves the shadowy figure who became as inseparable from the book as the authors themselves, i.e., Sheed’s informer, aka “Deep Throat,” aka W. Mark Felt, the number two executive at the FBI when the Watergate break-in occurred. From 1974 to 2005, Bernstein and Woodward, wined, dined, and gave lectures for which they were handsomely paid, telling and re-telling stories of their reportorial prowess, with their cultivation of Deep Throat the apex of their Watergate reportage. Both journalists were hailed constantly for their supposed fidelity to their über-secret source. You could remove their fingernails and they still wouldn’t reveal Deep Throat’s identity.

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It was actually a phoney mystery. A wizened, razor-sharp retired newspaper editor named Frank Waldrop, who was said to be “absolutely wired [in] to the FBI”, told the Washingtonian magazine, when asked about the Deep Throat guessing game in the spring of 1974, “Read the February 28 [1973] and March 13 [1973] Nixon presidential transcripts and then try someone like Mark Felt on for size.”

Nonetheless, that Woodstein held fast to their pledge of confidentiality to Deep Throat was widely accepted at face value. And it was true that they had, more or less, abided by all the “deep background” stipulations Felt laid down when he agreed to be a source for newspaper stories. But it was also true that Bernstein and Woodward had glaringly violated these same stipulations when writing their book. The public became aware of Felt’s existence as a source; his instrumentality in the stories; what he told Woodward and when. His words were supposedly quoted verbatim, and information he supplied Woodward was linked to specific Post stories, even exact passages. The only fig leaves left for Felt to hide behind was his risqué code name, after a pornographic film popular at the time, and the fact that he was identified as having worked at an unnamed “executive branch” agency.

Eventually the guessing game grew so popular, but wearying and tedious for the authors, that in 1976, Woodward developed a gambit that relieved the pressure while doing nothing to lessen public interest. Now celebrities in their own right, the duo declared that someday, they were fairly certain, history’s most famous whistleblower would come out of the shadows, claim his just reward by writing a fascinating book, and receive the acclaim that was his due. But until then, they were going to keep their word — unless Deep Throat were to die before publishing his story. No one imagined this was an entirely unilateral decision, just as the decision to include him in the book had been. Felt was already furious over the book’s serial violations of the “deep background” arrangement. He was not asked, and certainly did not agree, to be identified in the event of his death. Yet Woodward and Bernstein acted if this were a signed agreement stowed away in a safe-deposit box.

The dénouement finally occurred in May 2005, when Felt’s family and his lawyer outed him in the pages of Vanity Fair, hoping to cash in on the untold story. Bernstein and Woodward grudgingly admitted that Felt was Deep Throat, and the identification finally allowed for careful analysis about what Felt’s design had been all along — or what the late Christopher Hitchens said “rank[ed] as the single most successful use of the news media by an anonymous unelected official with an agenda of his own.”

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Woodstein had long fostered, of course, their preferred interpretation of Felt’s motive: Deep Throat was a selfless, high-ranking official intent on trying to protect the office of the presidency from a criminal in the person of Richard Nixon. Felt “was trying to protect the office [of the presidency],” they wrote in 1974, “to effect a change in its conduct before all was lost.” Actor Hal Holbrook’s brooding portrayal of Deep Throat in the film version had then turned Woodstein’s portrait into something indelible.

But then a curious thing happened. In his own 2005 book about Felt, The Secret Man, Woodward backed away from Felt-as-principled whistleblower, and offered a far more pedestrian — and bureaucratic — explanation familiar to anyone who has laboured in the federal government. Felt leaked because he “believed he was protecting the [FBI]” from a corrupt, lawless president. Eventually Woodward reluctantly threw a third element into his admixture of motives: Felt was “disappointed that he did not get the directorship” following the untimely death of J. Edgar Hoover, who had died seven weeks before the break-in.

The sale of Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate papers to the Ransom Center in Austin, Texas for $5 million in 2003, however, along with the release of the FBI’s Watergate files, opened the door to an independent assessment. When Woodward’s raw notes from his conversations with Felt were finally opened, none of the above explanations made sense. But a new one did: that Felt’s actions were entirely and only consistent with the “war of the FBI succession,” a no-holds-barred, vicious, internal struggle to succeed Hoover that had been going on for years. Felt leaked not out of pique or bitterness, not to protect the FBI, and not out of any concern over the office of the presidency. His sole aim was to destroy Nixon’s confidence in the acting FBI director, L. Patrick Gray, smear presumed rivals for the job, and steer Nixon toward appointing Felt himself. Richard Nixon was Felt’s only ticket to the directorship and the idea that Deep Throat ever intended to bring the president to ruin was absurd.

It defies belief that two of the most celebrated investigative reporters of their generation did not understand Felt’s true design contemporaneously, or, say, no later than 20 years after Nixon’s resignation. That Bernstein and Woodward still pretend otherwise tells one everything one needs to know about their first rough draft.

It was a fable, almost as self-serving as Felt’s leaks.

That got my attention. At the time, I was a member of the White House staff. I ate lunch almost every day in the White House Mess with Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman, Deputy Chief of Staff John Erlichman, and a crowd of other political aides. I wondered if any of them were involved in this very strange political espionage operation.

Fortunately, my presidential appointment had nothing to do with domestic politics. Along with receiving a White House pass, I had been confirmed by the Senate as an ambassador and in practice was working as the president’s chief trade negotiator. Although I carried a diplomatic passport issued by the State Department, Nixon distrusted State. He often used me as his personal representative for sensitive discussions with foreign leaders and officials.

I had served Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson in several posts since 1962 and had decided, when Nixon was elected, to leave my assignment in the Office of the US Trade Representative. But shortly after Nixon was sworn in, a stranger wandered into my office, whom I soon discovered had been sent by the White House personnel office.

The stranger said his name was Murray Chotiner and that he had been Nixon’s campaign manager in California and during his first run for president in 1960. Murray said Nixon had originally planned to give him a presidential appointment after entering office, but the press had characterised him as Nixon’s “dirty tricks manager”, making Senate confirmation problematic. So he was assigned as general counsel in the USTR.

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Murray said he had been advised by several members of Congress that I was the best informed official on political and trade disputes with European nations. Could he accompany me on my visits to foreign capitals?  I told him I was planning to resign but would stay three months to bring the incoming Nixon team up to speed. Murray travelled with me for about 10 weeks. After a while we became travel buddies, and I came to like his humour and deep insights into politics.

Two years later, in mid-1971, Murray called me to ask if I would be willing to be a consultant to Nixon on international issues, and I agreed. At the start of 1972, Murray called again and said “the President needs you”. I agreed to join his staff full-time and my name was sent to the Senate for confirmation. When I met the president alone, he said he had several international tasks in mind that would likely be subject to political controversy in Washington. When I needed his approval for my decisions or initiatives, he said I could bypass the Haldeman bureaucracy and just tell Murray, who would notify him. “Just don’t tell anyone you have direct access to POTUS.”

In the early days in my new post, Murray took me aside, “Be careful when you speak in or near the Oval Office”, he said. “Recording devices are keeping records of everything said.” This was Haldeman’s idea. A control freak, he wanted to know whatever Nixon was saying or doing with other visitors whenever Haldeman was not present. Murray said he had warned the president that the recordings were a bad idea that would bite him eventually, but Nixon shrugged it off.

As the months rolled on and the Watergate scandal broadened, more and more White House officials and Cabinet officials seemed to be caught covering up inappropriate or even illegal actions.

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During this turmoil, I was busy doing my own job. In 1973, for example, Nixon and French President Georges Pompidou agree to hold a Summit in Reyjavik, Iceland, to address US-French tension following Nixon’s 1971 decision to abandon the gold standard. Nixon asked me to accompany him alongside Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, Treasury Secretary George Shultz, Treasury Undersecretary, Paul Volcker, and other key officials. A special side meeting had been planned for Shultz, Volcker and I to speak with French Finance Minister Giscard d’Estaing. To my surprise, Nixon asked me to do the talking. Later, Shultz explained that Giscard deeply disliked Volcker but seemed to respect me.

When Kissinger and Shultz scheduled a trip to Moscow to meet with Leonid Brezhnev and other high Soviet officials, Nixon asked me to tag along. He also asked me to go to London to assist the Prime Minister’s Cabinet Office in their negotiating UK joining the European Common Market in 1973. After Kissinger laid out a new Pacific security policy framework known as the “Guam Doctrine”, Nixon suggested I go to Canberra and Tokyo to begin dialogue on a potential US economic arrangement with Asia-Pacific nations, which I did.

During 1974, most of my time was spent shepherding Senate approval of the Trade Act of 1974. During this period of Congressional bargaining, Nixon gave me personal authority to sign off with Senate leadership the final drafts of that historic law.

As I was busy doing my job, I saw a building series of actions and cover-ups among the political appointees, resulting in the resignation of the Attorney General, and then successor Attorney Generals and their appointees. A Senate Committee was finally established to investigate the question: was Nixon personally involved in the cover-up? As Senator Howard Baker asked, “What did the President know, and when did he know it?”

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It turned out that the president knew a lot. On 16 July, 1973, one of Nixon’s aides, Alexander Butterfield, revealed the existence of the White House taping system in a televised interview, elevating the scandal from a curiosity to a national obsession. Senate investigators demanded the tapes; Nixon resisted, prevaricated, and dragged his feet, but eventually, in 1974, the Supreme Court ruled that the president had to make them available, and he complied. It then became clear that Nixon had long been complicit in the elaborate cover-up. Given the choice of impeachment or resignation, Nixon resigned in order to avoid further damage to the institution of the presidency.

Looking back, I saw catastrophic damage done to a president by a bunch of inept thugs bent on undermining his political adversaries. Sadly, I could not ask Murray for his opinion because he had been killed in a car crash in 1973. I thought Nixon should have fired everyone involved in the Watergate break-in as soon as the illegal raid on the DNC came to light. I remembered Murray’s warning to me that the White House recording system would come back to bite the president someday.

In some sense, history has been unkind to Nixon. Recently, Watergate has been compared to the raid on the US Capitol on 6 January, 2021, no doubt because both involved a presidential scandal followed by high-profile Congressional hearings. But Nixon was no Trump. His decision to cover up the break-in was a regrettable lapse in judgment, but when confronted with evidence that he was personally involved, Nixon chose his country over himself, resigning to avoid the impeachment of a sitting president. Trump, by contrast, sought to overturn a national election, and at no point since has he been willing to admit responsibility or even acknowledge reality.

In my experience, Nixon was an excellent foreign-policy president. He was actively involved in foreign policy and demonstrated more strategic thinking in this regard than most of his successors, even pulling off a handful of impressive diplomatic coups. His domestic policy decisions, on the other hand, were often questionable. But in that — going by the record of America’s more recent presidents — Richard Nixon was hardly alone.

The conventional inflation narratives are both flawed, however, and are increasingly deployed to cover a retreat to the comfort of traditional ideological divides. Summers and Furman, for example, are aggressively pushing to eliminate tariffs to counter inflation, even though Trump’s 2018 tariffs cannot account for accelerating inflation in 2021, and their repeal would offer at best small and temporary relief. Likewise, Democratic rhetoric against “corporate greed” and “price gouging” mostly takes the form of moralistic posturing and only obscures more serious concerns about industry concentration and lack of competition.

Moreover, each side’s preferred explanations for inflation seem at odds with their perceptions of its severity and staying power. If, on the one hand, a one-time spending bill is the main culprit, then the Fed should easily be able to manage inflation through interest rate hikes (already underway), and there is little reason to fear an out-of-control inflationary spiral. In an April 2021 interview, Summers argued that a one-off stimulus would alter long-term expectations and lead to persistent inflation because it signaled the advent of  “a new era in progressive policy”. But a year later, any such progressive paradigm seems dead and buried, and unless Democrats pull off a miracle in the midterms, it is likely off the table through at least 2024.

On the other hand, if “corporate greed” — read charitably as underlying structural problems in the economy — is the main driver of inflation, then it seems unlikely that the Fed will be able to contain it, except perhaps at the cost of a severe recession. If that is the case, then any future progressive fiscal expansion would have to be ruled out, given its devastating inflationary consequences, unless those problems are addressed.

Indeed, the question going forward is whether there are structural issues — aside from idiosyncratic supply chain problems — that will cause inflation to remain elevated and lead to stagflation (high inflation and low growth). Here, there are reasons for concern, although they do not fit neatly into either conventional narrative and so have received relatively little attention.

The most intriguing and potentially alarming trends are visible in the oil market. In December 2019, before Covid, global oil consumption was about 100 million barrels per day, and the price of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude hovered around $50-$60 per barrel. At that time, the US operating rig count was around 800 (around 2,000 globally), according to Baker Hughes. After the pandemic hit, in 2020, global oil demand fell to about 90 million barrels per day, prices collapsed and briefly went negative, and the US rig count hit a low of around 250. Oil demand recovered about half the lost ground in 2021 and is expected to return to 2019 levels of 100 million barrels per day this year. In December of 2021, WTI spot prices were around $75, rose significantly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and currently sit around $110. Yet the US rig count is still around 700 (of 1,600 globally). The last time oil prices were above $100, before the crash of 2014, the rig count was over 1,800 (3,600 globally).

This trajectory is difficult to square with inflation accounts based on excessive demand. Oil demand has still not exceeded pre-pandemic levels; it is supply that has lagged. Meanwhile, far from being “too greedy”, companies seem to not be greedy enough — at least in the conventional sense of maximising profits. Instead of reinvesting their earnings in drilling new wells, even at profitable oil prices, companies have returned cash to shareholders.

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Some have argued that oil companies are not drilling because of the Biden administration’s environmental regulations. As a critic of those policies, I am sympathetic, but they cannot account for the larger phenomenon, including international drilling. Others have suggested that ESG investing requirements have prevented the oil and gas industry from accessing capital. While there is no question that ESG as presently constructed is a disaster, this does not explain why companies are not reinvesting their own earnings. There are some time-lag issues — wells cannot be drilled overnight — but prices have now been elevated for months. Oil futures are also over $80 through most of 2024, meaning companies can hedge future production.

The best explanation is, therefore, the simplest one: shareholders prefer that companies return cash rather than invest, a preference widely discussed among industry participants and observers. Oil companies, to quote Bloomberg’s reporting on this issue, have “responded to investors’ persistent insistence that they return cash to shareholders and not spend their cash flow on capex. . . . That means that we have under-invested in oil, which helps to lead to a higher oil price, but it also means that those companies do have much more free cash flow.”

Any serious analysis of today’s inflation must recognise the different dynamics at play across various sectors. The oil industry is not the same as the housing market, semiconductors, shipping, and so forth. Nevertheless, across industries, the trend of shareholders preferring cash returns over investment has been prevalent in recent decades. Corporate share buybacks, which dropped from previous highs during the pandemic, returned to record pace in 2021 and 2022, according to Goldman Sachs.

The oil industry is actually a late adopter of this cash-return model. Previously, exploration and production companies were typically managed to maximise their “net asset value”. This meant that, in the American shale boom of the early 2010s, companies were investing in drilling at levels far above their operating cash flow, using debt financing to fill the gap. After the crash of 2014, however, Wall Street gained additional influence over the sector. Ever since, the industry has maintained “capital discipline” and avoided negative cash flows.

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Economic theory assumes that companies are managed to maximise individual firm profits and, therefore, that they will invest to expand operations as long as expected returns exceed the cost of capital, and that they will compete with each other until profit margins approach zero. But economic theory has refused to grapple with the fact that maximising shareholder returns is not identical to maximising firm profits.

Financial market incentives may discourage competitive investment in favour of shareholder returns, as seen in the oil industry; indeed, the gap between firm hurdle rates and cost of capital is a distinguishing feature of recent economic history. In short, what economic theory presumes to be “rational” for a single firm may not be “rational” from the perspective of a diversified institutional portfolio manager. If anyone is too “greedy”, in other words, it is not corporations but shareholders. Or, more precisely, the incentives of financial managers may not be consistent with maximising overall output. This trend has led to an erosion of productive capacity and supply buffers, which has become painfully evident in recent years.

The same forces also encourage industry concentration through mergers and private equity “roll-ups” to preserve pricing power, as well as the separation of high-value intellectual property rents from capital and labour costs. The result is a bifurcated economy with high-margin “superstar” firms on one side and low-profit “commoditised” firms on the other. In an inflationary environment, this means that firms with large profit cushions, like superstar firms built on intellectual property rents, probably have the pricing power to maintain high margins. Firms without pricing power, like small-business restaurant franchisees, often have no profit cushions and must raise prices out of necessity.

Fears of stagflation have focused on a Seventies-style wage-price spiral, but the above considerations suggest that a greater concern today may be the threat of a “profit-price” spiral. In the Seventies, investment was discouraged by high taxes, strong unions (which directed profits to labour), and relatively robust antitrust enforcement. With low investment, increasing demand only led to more inflation rather than growth.

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Today, we have low taxes, weak unions (although tight labour markets), and high industry concentration. These conditions, combined with shifts in corporate governance and financial management, have also discouraged investment — by facilitating extractive financial engineering, as in the case of the oil industry example. A scenario in which companies maintain returns in a stagnant economy by preserving margins while avoiding competitive investment is also more consistent with recent empirical findings. Corporate profit margins achieved a record in 2021 (though they seem poised to retreat somewhat in the coming quarters), and studies have found that rising corporate profits have contributed significantly more to inflation than labour costs. Employees may be able to manage some concessions in a tight labour market, but the data hardly suggest that is the dominant factor.

This sort of firm behaviour has a telling precedent: the modern tobacco industry. Since cigarette consumption began dropping in the Eighties, the basic model of tobacco companies has been to offset sales volume declines with price increases. This strategy works because tobacco companies face little competition due to industry concentration and regulations prohibiting advertising. Thus cigarette price inflation has averaged about 7% per year since 1997, while overall inflation during that time has been slightly above 2%.

The example is revealing because tobacco companies’ high cash returns and low capex requirements have historically made them attractive to financial investors, despite modest growth or innovation. Because of its dividend, Philip Morris was the highest performing stock of the 20th century, beating out far more technologically significant rivals. Guided by the incentives of financial markets, it would not be especially surprising to see more industries adopt the “stagflationary” behaviours of Big Tobacco.

To the extent that is the case, monetary policy alone will not be sufficient to heal the economy. Low rates since the financial crisis have supported asset bubbles but not high investment. Nor will demand-side policies work. As the last several months have shown, further stimulus payments are likely to allow companies to take profits without supporting sufficient investment or wage growth.

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Given the immediate-term salience of monetary policy debates, it is often forgotten that escaping the stagflation of the Seventies required not only a sharp rise in interest rates but also the “supply-side” reforms of Ronald Reagan. In this respect, an overlooked element of Summers’s critique of the Biden stimulus bill — that it was not simply too large but too weighted toward transfer payments — is especially apt, as is his call for “a kind of progressive supply side economics that emphasizes . . . public investment.”

Conventional supply-side policies like tax cuts, typically associated with Republicans, fall prey to the same financial dynamics described above, and have led primarily to increased shareholder returns and asset bubbles rather than increased investment in recent years. New supply-side approaches are required, such as the proposed funding for manufacturing investment contemplated in the COMPETES/USICA conference bill. The administration has also proposed other supply-side measures in areas such as housing, but previous efforts along these lines were weighed down by unpopular progressive wish-list items. Rumours that the administration is considering a cancellation of some student debt — with no accompanying reforms to higher education policy — suggest progressives still remain trapped in old welfarist paradigms.

Contrary to neoliberal disdain for tariffs and “hipster antitrust”, however, prudent competition and trade policy reforms will be necessary to boost domestic investment in a highly concentrated economy whose industrial base has eroded. And although progressive proposals for a windfall tax on profits would do nothing to solve supply-side problems, a tax on “windfall buybacks” may make corporate earnings reinvestment more attractive.

Even if inflation subsides more rapidly than expected, a new policy focus on the supply side is necessary. Avoiding stagflation simply by returning to “secular stagnation”, as Summers would put it, would only lead to further decline and likely a repetition of the same cycle in the future. Also required is the recognition that fundamental assumptions of economic theory — and the ideological approaches they inspire — no longer match the realities of America’s financialised economy.

That such woes should afflict one of the richest cities in the country, with a median household income of over $100,000, cannot be blamed on economic decline. Yet much of Seattle’s core looks like a pockmarked ghost town. Businesses on both sides of Third Avenue, a major thoroughfare, are boarded up. Blocks from the Four Seasons hotel and the Fairmont Hotel, tents crowd the sidewalks, and drug users sit under awnings holding pieces of foil over lighter flames. Traffic enforcement is minimal to nonexistent. The year 2020 saw a 68% spike in homicides, the highest number in 26 years, and the year 2021 saw a 40% surge in 911 calls for shots fired and a 100% surge in drive-by shootings. Petty crime plagues every neighbourhood of the city, and downtown businesses have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund their own security.

What happened to Seattle? The answer, of course, depends on your politics. In the news section of the Seattle Times, for instance, a reader is unlikely to see any consideration of a link between policing and public safety. “No single cause for 2021’s surge in gunfire in Seattle,” declared a typical recent headline over an article that points only to possibilities such as the pandemic or an unlucky cycle of “retaliatory violence”. But the majority view in Seattle appears to have shifted toward an acknowledgement that the unrest and destruction that occurred after the killing of George Floyd in 2020 marked a turning point and that the city’s policies toward its police force, whose ranks are now depleted, are relevant to understanding the story. What follows, based on interviews with a number of past and present police officers — five of whom are on the record in this article — is an attempt to offer an obvious but unheeded perspective. It is a cop’s-eye view of Seattle’s undoing.

On Monday 25 May 2020, in Minneapolis, a man named George Floyd died after police officer Derek Chauvin pinned Floyd face-down on the pavement with a knee to Floyd’s neck for over eight minutes. Video footage of the incident circulated around the world in the days that followed. One of those to watch it was T.J. San Miguel, a canine handler who had moved from the Big Island of Hawaii to join the Seattle police in 2008. “I thought it was disgusting,” she says of Chauvin’s actions. “You don’t do that to somebody. That’s just basic fucking stuff that we knew and learned and had trained on for years and years. It became pretty apparent that there’s a big difference in training and tactics and procedures in the West Coast versus East Coast and other places.”

The knee to the neck also surprised J.D. Smith, a Marine veteran of the first Gulf War and a Seattle police officer since 1998. Smith had spent years pursuing drug dealers, killers, and pimps and had subdued a lot of people. “That’s not even a proper technique,” says Smith. “We put a knee in between the shoulder blades, and it never chokes anybody out.”

Matthew Kruse, a young patrol officer who had joined the force in 2018, was struck that a handcuffed man would fail to get immediate medical care. “Especially in Seattle, we really emphasise once they’re in handcuffs and they’re under control you turn to the medical attention,” he says. “It’s kind of ingrained, but it’s also just doing the right thing. Do you need something? Do you want to get checked out by medical? If I have water on me, do you want some water?”

But any potential differences between the police in Seattle and those in other places mattered little to the mood of the city in the late spring of 2020. Protests spread from Minneapolis across the country, and the first large-scale demonstrations took shape on Friday night, 29 May, in Seattle’s Chinatown district. Matthew Kruse was among the cops standing guard. “We go down there, and we’re in the riot gear, and people were pleasant,” he says. “For the first three hours, I was just having a conversation with people.” After 10 o’clock, though, the mood shifted. “People were throwing stuff,” Kruse says. “They were starting to shine flashlights in our face.”

On Saturday, the crowds grew destructive. Groups of protesters shattered windows up and down the retail corridors of downtown and emptied many of the stores of their merchandise. Some of those in the crowd torched police cruisers parked outside of the Nordstrom flagship store at Pine Street and 6th Avenue. Protesters also pulled firearms, including M4 rifles, out of the abandoned vehicles. Mike Magan, a robbery detective who had been on the force for over three decades, was home that evening, watching the mayhem on a screen. “I was beside myself,” he says. He recognised the abandoned van of a co-worker, whom he phoned. The colleague, a forensics video specialist, answered in a whisper and said that he and other colleagues were taking shelter in the Nordstrom’s and videotaping what they could of the violence outside.

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The following morning, Magan got called into the office to start investigations of 30 to 40 people who’d been arrested for crimes such as trespass, burglary and property destruction. Five or six hours in, he began to suspect they’d given the police false names. But there was no point looking into it further. “We found out they’d all been released from custody prior to even being questioned,” he says.

The bedlam in Seattle caused police leaders to institute a so-called “blue/gold” schedule, meaning that officers had to work 12-hour shifts up to seven days a week. Christopher Young, a detective in the investigative support unit (previously named the criminal intelligence unit), who has been on the force since 1994 and never experienced such a schedule, calls June 2020 “the most stressful month of my life”. Young found himself working 16-hour days for weeks straight. “Even our homicide detectives were sitting at their desks working their cases in battle dress uniforms with their helmets ready to run outside to protect their own office building,” he says, adding that an eight-hour day is already demanding in the world of policing, where split-second decisions are the norm. “There’s been plenty of criticism of how we handled it, but people don’t realise how stressful it was just from the sleep deprivation alone.”

Of the hundreds of businesses that reported being damaged or looted over the weekend, Nordstrom’s flagship store was the most prominent. There had been an attempt by someone to set it aflame. On 1 June, Mike Magan and a colleague from the Seattle bomb unit entered the site to look for possible video footage. The first floor, he says, was destroyed. “All the jewellery cases had been smashed,” he says. “All the cosmetics were gone. All the makeup was gone. Shoes were gone — bags. Everything.” As for tracking down the looters, that wasn’t on the agenda. “We were told: you will not investigate any of those things,” Magan says. “The city attorney wouldn’t file charges on them.”

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That night, Magan, who had been out of uniform for decades, had to don riot gear to guard the East Precinct on Capitol Hill. Demonstrations began peacefully but changed after dark. “We were getting pelted with bricks, rocks, frozen water bottles,” says Magan. “There were shots fired. Here I am, 33 or 34 years on the department and I’m like: why am I on the front line here?”

The 12-hour shifts exhausted everyone, including the younger officers. Matthew Kruse was working from 7pm to 7am, mostly on his feet, and if he was out on patrol he had to have riot gear with him in the car in case he was needed for crowd control. Once a week or fortnight, he’d get a day off and spend it all sleeping. “Some nights I slept at the police station,” he says. “And I remember at least a couple of times I just slept in my car, because I was like, if I try to drive home I’m going to kill myself or someone else.”

J.D. Smith, stationed at the West Precinct near the turmoil, was spared a direct confrontation with the violence. His job at the time was to process online crime reports, which were now rolling in faster than ever. But he could see the toll being taken on his coworkers when they returned to the station from the protest sites day after day. “The looks on their faces — it just reminded me of the Gulf War,” he says.

When the protests grew violent, police officers began to use various non-lethal weapons to control the crowd, including pepper spray and tear gas. This led to complaints, lawsuits, and stinging condemnation in the local press. On 5 June, Seattle’s mayor, Jenny Durkan, declared that officers “do not need to be using tear gas at protests as a crowd management tool” and banned the use of it for 30 days. Many officers felt they were being asked to maintain order in violent crowds while surrendering all of their crowd-control tools. “People were throwing bottles and rocks, and we had to split this thing up. God forbid after multiple, multiple, multiple warnings that we’re gonna throw gas, guys, you better disperse, we throw gas,” says J.D. Smith. “So then what? Oh, Seattle PD, look how heavy-handed they are.”

Seattle has never been as police-friendly as some other cities, but outright hostility to law enforcement had until 2020 been confined to a minority of residents. Lots of officers on the force had even been accustomed to positive public attention. T.J. San Miguel and her German Shepherd, Pele — named after the goddess of volcanoes in Hawaii, San Miguel’s native home — had been featured on “America’s Top Dog,” a series putting dogs through obstacle courses, and had cheery write-ups for her work. Mike Magan received regular cards from people he’d helped and, when Covid hit, even a crate of cleaning supplies from one grateful Vietnamese-American family whose jewellery store he had saved when he tracked down four robbers and got all of the stolen goods returned. J.D. Smith became a brief celebrity in 2016, when while off-duty he pulled over on a mountain pass on Interstate 90 to rescue an unconscious woman from a flaming car. All of the cops could point to times when they’d helped save a victim from a bad guy.

Prior to the summer of 2020 the department had been receiving encouraging communications from the mayor’s office, and city officials were planning to ask the federal government to lift a consent decree that had been imposed on the Seattle police in 2012. In 2016, Barack Obama had even invited the department’s then-chief, Kathleen O’Toole, to the State of the Union, and a federal judge had ruled in 2018 that the city was in “full and effective compliance” with the decree. T.J. San Miguel expected that city officials would take a moment to let the worst of the public anger pass and then speak up for their police force. “I’m like, okay, it was horrible and people absolutely need to say what they need to say,” she says. “So we’re going to give it a minute here in our department, but then our city is going to say: Hey, that was horrible. It was disgusting. It was bad. And guess what? You’ll never see that in the Seattle Police Department.”

That statement did not come. Mayor Jenny Durkan announced on 3 June that the city would no longer seek to lift the consent decree. Seattle city council member Teresa Mosqueda vowed to lead an “inquest” into the budget of the Seattle police and said she wanted to cut funding by half, a view echoed by fellow council members Tammy Morales and Kshama Sawant. City Council president Lorena Gonzáles blamed the police response to the protests for turning “our densest neighbourhoods” into a “complete war zone”.

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“In May of 2020, our political leadership considered us a necessary evil,” says Chris Young. “In June of 2020, they started to think that we were an unnecessary evil. Every cultural institution in the city turned on the police.” That included educational institutions. In early June, Young, as a parent of children in Seattle Public Schools, was one of thousands of recipients of an email from school superintendent Denise Juneau announcing that cooperation with the police would be suspended in light of “the perpetuation of systemic racism, the murders of Black people by police officers across our country, [and] the violence displayed by some law enforcement officers here in Seattle”.

The perspective was palpable on the streets, too. T.J. San Miguel would hear jeers out of open windows on Capitol Hill. “You have people in an apartment several stories high just yelling and screaming at you as you’re out there walking down the block,” she says. In one case, a crime victim had called for police help, only to start showering the responding officers with anti-cop abuse when they arrived. “It was very shocking,” she says. “And it’s just like: Okay, bye, have a nice night.”

“We were hated,” says J.D. Smith. “We were literally hated overnight.”

On Sunday 8 June, Matthew Kruse and coworkers from the North Precinct got an order to go down and help back up his colleagues in the East Precinct on Capitol Hill. The plan, he says, was to let crowds march past the precinct unimpeded, unless there was criminal activity, and Kruse and his colleagues were stationed a couple of blocks away, watching the area on camera. No one was trying to break into the precinct, says Kruse, but people started to pitch tents near it. At that point, according to Kruse, a police captain went over to talk to the protesters. “He started talking to protesters and telling them, hey, you guys have got to move along, and they got in a verbal altercation,” says Kruse. “Then they [senior officers] came back to us and said we’re just going to let them stay there and do their thing.” The East Precinct, already boarded up, was now abandoned.

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News of the surrender of the East Precinct hit cops hard. “I just felt sick,” says Chris Young. “It was humiliating.”  Matthew Kruse found the about-face on holding the fort versus leaving it insulting. “At first they had said: no, we’re not going to let them take the precinct,” says Kruse. “The next day it’s being cleared out.” J.D. Smith remains incredulous. “I’m still embarrassed,” Smith says. “We gave away a precinct.”

What followed for the next few weeks was an impromptu test site for improvised maintenance of public order in what came to be called the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ. A few days into the CHAZ, the New York Times described it as “an experiment in life without the police — part street festival, part commune.” Donald Trump weighed in from the Oval Office to condemn it. “Domestic Terrorists have taken over Seattle,” he tweeted. Seattle’s mayor, Jenny Durkan, responded, “It’s not terrorism. It’s patriotism.” Asked by CNN’s Chris Cuomo how long the CHAZ would last, Durkan quipped, “I don’t know. We could have the summer of love.”

For police stationed out of the East Precinct, there was no base of operations anymore. “They couldn’t deploy from there,” says Matthew Kruse. “They had to deploy from the West Precinct or North or South or Southwest or any other precinct. So response times got slower, and that affects everyone from a shop owner to a person who lives there.”

Where some observers saw a harmless street fair others saw something more menacing. “All these businesses are failing and they’re asking for help,” recalls J.D. Smith. “There is nothing, and I mean zero, we can do because the mayor is saying summer of love.” Chris Young says that officers received an email instructing them not to enter the six-block zone of the CHAZ, although he made his way into the off-limits area after some unsuccessful arson attempts against the precinct building. “I was sent with a fancy camera to take pictures of the crime scene of where they tried to burn it down,” says Young. “You had to go by a checkpoint with guards, and God knows what they’d do with me if they found out I was a cop. I had to basically go undercover to sneak in and look at my own precinct.”

On Saturday 20 June, about 12 days after the East Precinct was vacated, T.J. San Miguel got called in to respond to a shooting of two men in the CHAZ, one of whom was now in a serious condition. “So everybody just goes rolls down there and then, you know, they have to come up with a plan,” she says. “Like, how are we going to get in there?”

By the time a group of officers made it into the CHAZ, they were told the most endangered victim was already being taken to the hospital by activists on the scene. Over the radio in her car outside the CHAZ, San Miguel heard that the victim was being driven in a plain white van toward the Harborview Medical Center, and she happened to look up. “There’s this van driving just crazy,” she says. “The back doors are open and swinging. There’s a bunch of people in the back of the van working, I guess, on this person that was just shot, and I’m just like, oh my god.” San Miguel decided to alert Harborview and escort the van there. “I just jumped ahead of it, lights and sirens,” she says, “and I blocked all the intersections as it went, so it safely got there and no other cars got in the way of it.” In the end, the victim, 19-year-old Horace Lorenzo Anderson, made it to Harborview but didn’t survive.

The CHAZ lasted another ten days after that, until Wednesday 1 July, when officers reclaimed the precinct without a struggle. In the meantime, a 17-year-old had been shot in the arm on 21 June, a 30-year-old male shot and wounded on 23 June, and two black teenagers, 14 and 16, shot and wounded on 29 June as they drove into the CHAZ. The older of the two, Antonio Mays Jr., died of his wounds. Witnesses have stated that members of CHAZ security were the ones who opened fire on them, but police have never tracked down the responsible parties.

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Despite the retaking of the East Precinct, the city continued to be racked by protest and strife throughout July, with further vandalism and looting by a subset of the protesters, few of whom ever faced charges. City officials continued to direct their ire toward the police department instead, and on 10 August the Seattle City council voted to cut the pay of senior police staff, including Chief Carmen Best, who enjoyed widespread respect from officers on the force, including all of those interviewed for this article. “It was demoralising,” says Chris Young. “She was a great chief and a very progressive leader who happens to be black. But she still got run out of town on a rail because she wouldn’t agree that her department needed to be abolished.”

Carmen Best immediately announced her resignation. At that time, T.J. San Miguel, who calls Best “excellent, just excellent,” was already deep into looking for an exit. A move like that, when she’d spent years to secure the job of her dreams, working in the K-9 unit, would have been unthinkable in the recent past. She considered herself one of the biggest cheerleaders of the department. But the hostility from the city in June and July changed her outlook. “I realised I could do everything completely right, and if the optics aren’t good, then they’re going to hang me out to dry,” she says. “Once I came to that realisation, it was like a bad breakup where you just shut somebody off.” San Miguel left the force when Best did.

A change in public safety began to be noticeable across the city, not just in protest zones. Seattle’s city attorney, Pete Holmes, and King County’s prosecuting attorney, Dan Satterberg, had always taken a lenient approach to so-called quality-of-life crimes, but after June 2020 they began to ease up across the board toward a range of other offences. Most of those who committed vandalism or looting during the protests escaped any punishment. Matthew Kruse said that storeowners would call the police about shoplifters, not realising that prosecutions of that offence had effectively ceased. On one occasion Kruse and his partner watched a man walk into a store, shoplift about $20 in goods, and walk out. “He was like, what are you guys going to do — arrest me?” says Kruse. “And we knew we weren’t going to arrest him, because with any misdemeanour stuff, we had to go through the prosecutor, and stuff like that wasn’t going to get prosecuted. You could I.D. the suspect and could get a full confession, and they were going be like, ‘We’re not gonna take it.’”

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One case in which prosecutors did take action proved to be the last straw for Matthew Kruse’s partner. It involved a shooting that, according to Kruse, everyone involved in investigating believed to be obvious self-defence. A 40-something white Seattle male with no criminal record had shot a homeless Hispanic male who had attacked him in a parking lot at night. The directive from the prosecutors’ office was to jail the man in preparation for pressing murder charges, Kruse recalls, “because of the optics.” Kruse says the case went to trial and ended in swift acquittal, but Kruse’s partner, disgusted by what he viewed as politicised decision-making, quit his job.

With an incentive structure that made officers feel they had little to gain and much to lose from taking the initiative on crime prevention, cops began a dramatic — and some would say resentful — pullback in enforcement. Patrol officers no longer drove or walked about looking for suspicious behaviour like someone climbing a fence but stayed put and responded after the fact. Mike Magan said that one of his colleagues got investigated and punished for responding to a call of shots fired without logging into his computer first. “It was like we were biting our own necks, and you began to see that a lot of these officers would go park their cars at certain location and not go out and patrol,” he says. “You could track the cars and you could see that these officers were parking in parking garages.”

Kruse wanted to keep patrolling, even if it was in a more low-key way, but one day his supervisor advised him to avoid it. “I was told straight to my face: don’t leave the precinct unless you’re going to a call,” Kruse recalls. “He says: I’m looking out for you, still fresh in your career. I don’t want you to get in trouble for doing the right thing.” Kruse says a lot of his coworkers began to rely on an imaginary colleague they dubbed “Officer Time,” so named because most criminal behavior stops on its own after a while. “If it’s a shoplift, the building is going to close, or if it’s someone that’s just trespassing, they’re eventually going to leave,” says Kruse. “So just let them off and let Officer Time handle it.” Kruse quit in October of 2020. The following month, the city council voted to cut the budget of the department by 20%.

For Mike Magan, the pullback in enforcement spread even to his fellow detectives, causing him to hit breaking point. “One of the robbery squads just decided they weren’t going to work anymore,” he says. “They wouldn’t leave the office, they wouldn’t help you on search warrants, they wouldn’t come out and conduct interviews with you. They wouldn’t come out and track video. It was heartbreaking.” Magan couldn’t stand it and decided to retire early. He had banked eight months of sick leave that he intended to exhaust prior to his official departure date, but his ordinary work hours ended after February of 2021.

An exodus of officers led to a manpower shortage that prompted J.D. Smith to quit as well. As someone whose interactions with the public were mostly online at this point in his career, Smith was relatively cushioned from classic hazards of the job. The severe shortage of officers, however, made him certain that he’d be put back into uniform and on street patrol, which he believed spelled trouble for someone out of practice. “It’s tough even when you’re out there every day,” he says. “But you take somebody who has been off the streets for 10 years — they’re rusty.” Returning to the work of chasing down violent criminals in a time of hostile public scrutiny seemed untenable. Smith picked April Fool’s Day of 2021 as his date of retirement. “I had eight more years,” he says. “I needed to stay, financially, but I decided no, I’m going to quit.”

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The departing officers left a severely diminished department. Even before the unrest of 2020, the number of officers in the Seattle Police Department was low by the standard of other cities. With about 1,400 police officers in 2019, or 18.5 officers for every 10,000 residents, policing in Seattle could never be as comprehensive as in New York City, where the ratio is 43.6 officers for every 10,000 residents, or Washington, D.C. where it is 54 per 10,000. But with 186 separations from the department in 2020, nearly three times the historical annual average, and another 150 or so in 2021, Seattle started 2022 with well under 1,000 deployable officers department-wide.

Almost all of the officers spoken to for this article seemed to be in low-key mourning over their alienation from the city they served. “I loved going to work every day, and I had a fantastic career,” says Mike Magan. “It’s a beautiful city, but I watched it go from really good to really bad.”

“The mayor and the city council were telling us, basically, that we’re the bad guy,” says J.D. Smith. “The truth is 99% plus of us are amazing people that are only there for the reason that I was there: I don’t like people in fear, and I don’t like people in pain.”

“I’m actually a Left-wing guy on just about every issue,” says Chris Young. “I want the United States to be a Scandinavian-style welfare state. So I’m very sympathetic to people’s concerns.” Forming a complementary department of 100 people comprising community service officers, social workers and others who could do the sort of enforcement that doesn’t require a gun would have been a worthy experiment, Young feels. “But they didn’t do that,” he says. “They just demonised the police and chased good people out of town. It was, let’s slash budgets and hope something good happens.”

Today, T.J. San Miguel works for the police department of Marysville, a town about 30 miles north of Seattle. She had to take a $10-an-hour pay cut, she says, and abandon her work with Pele, starting over as a patrol officer once more. (She did get to keep living with Pele, who is now a full-time pet. “She’s fat and happy,” San Miguel reports.) But the first day of patrol among Marysville residents was a revelation. “People told me face-to-face: We love you. We support you. Thank you for doing your job,” she says. “People were waving. You couldn’t buy your own coffee.”

Matthew Kruse found a job in the police department of Lynnwood, a suburb about 15 miles north of Seattle. Like San Miguel, Kruse was astonished by the contrast between his new workplace and the one he left. In Lynnwood, he says, cops crack down on illegal drug paraphernalia. When someone gets a warrant to show up in court and fails to show, police will arrest the person for ignoring the warrant. When someone shoplifts, that person gets arrested and charged. “I ask people when I catch them shoplifting up here in Lynnwood, ‘What are you doing up here?’” he says.

J.D. Smith moved to Idaho, near Priest River, not far from the Washington border. “It’s affordable, and it got me out of the area,” he says. “I have a chance to start a new life and not be a police officer anymore. I’m hanging the badge up.”

Mike Magan moved to Bozeman, Montana, where he is building a house. In the months that followed his departure from the office, he continued to show up whenever he was needed to wrap up a serious case and make sure the perpetrators were prosecuted. But most of that work has wound down. “I look forward to the transition,” he says. “But I do miss it.”

Remaining on the force is Chris Young, who has seen repeated changes of role as more and more of his colleagues leave. “A few months ago I was just a detective. Now I’m a permanent acting sergeant,” he says. “Half the people in my unit are gone.” Any lull in enforcement that might have existed in the fall of 2020 has long since been replaced by a frantic rush from call to call, as ever fewer officers confront ever higher numbers of crimes.

Part of Young’s job now is to keep more people from leaving, even as the city steps up efforts to repopulate the force. Last October, as vaccine mandates caused even more officers to leave, the mayor put in place an emergency order offering $25,000 bonuses to new hires. But the mindset of the city seems to have mattered just as much to the officers in this story as financial considerations. “My young rockstar detectives are sniffing around these other departments where they’ll get treated like royalty,” Young says. “How do I compete with that?” The answer to that may depend on how much Seattle cares.

Certain reflexes remain irresistible in Washington, not only among politicians but in the media, too. One of these is a tendency to see every conflict as a new Second World War. Another is to believe that sufficient force and “resolve” can achieve any objective, whether that is our objectives in Iraq or Afghanistan or Vladimir Putin’s objectives in Ukraine. And a third is the habit of regarding those who fail to fall in line during times of crisis as traitors, appeasers, or the useful idiots of America’s enemies.

These reflexes have been on full display with the crisis in Ukraine. “This is Sudetenland,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said of Russia’s attempt to justify its war as a defence of separatist “republics” in Luhansk and Donetsk. It is a grave act of aggression, certainly; but great power irredentism has other precedents besides those of Nazi Germany.

Automatically comparing every crisis with the Second World War is a dangerous habit. It’s a reflex that helped stampede the United States into a needless war in the Middle East 20 years ago. Iraq was an “Islamo-fascist” dictatorship with “weapons of mass destruction”, a threat on par with a nuclear Nazi Germany. Most of America’s policy and media elite bought into the idiotic idea, with disastrous consequences — most of all for the people of Iraq.

Putin’s Russia is a much more serious threat than Saddam’s Iraq. But it’s a new menace, not another Nazi Germany. So President Biden deserves credit for refraining from hyperbole in his remarks this week. He rightly noted — with Cold War lessons and perhaps with America’s own rueful experience in Afghanistan in mind — that “history has shown time and again how swift gains and territory eventually give way to grinding occupations, acts of mass civil disobedience, and strategic dead ends”.

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Biden was then asked whether Putin’s ambitions extended beyond Ukraine, and whether nuclear war was a possibility. Would Putin attack Nato countries — and was the United States ready to fight? While Biden’s answers were measured, the questions show the apocalyptic mindset that the Washington media easily slips into. It’s a mentality that many an ideologue or vested interest is ready to exploit — for arms sales, energy deals, or domestic political advantage. The latter can be seen in the way that liberals and NeverTrump pundits have used the crisis as an opportunity to question the patriotism of conservatives.

“Dear media: Ask Republicans why they are normalizing support for Putin,” the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin implored. Lawrence Tribe of Harvard Law School went considerably further, suggesting that certain conservatives and Fox News pundits urging the US to get more deeply involved in the Ukraine-Russia conflict might be guilty of treason.

“Led by Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson, the GOP’s Trump wing appears to be throwing its weight behind Putin. If Putin opts to wage war on our ally, Ukraine, such ‘aid and comfort’ to an ‘enemy’ would appear to become ‘treason’ as defined by Article IIl of the U.S. Constitution,” Tribe wrote in a since-deleted tweet.

Please be advised that any questioning of US policy or. the prevailing US narrative during this sensitive time constitutes the crime of treason, according to Harvard Law Professor @tribelaw. Treason is punishable by death, so it's probably best to tread *very* carefully. pic.twitter.com/VZHuAqFIlr

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 21, 2022

An editorial in the Kansas City Star likewise claimed that Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley “has clearly provided aid and comfort to Putin and hard-liners in Russia”. As the article acknowledged, Hawley has stated that “America has an interest in Ukraine’s independence and territorial integrity. And we have a strong interest in deterring Russian adventurism.” But because Hawley does not believe Ukraine should be part of NATO or that America should “fight Russia over Ukraine’s future”, he is morally libelled in the language of treason.

In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, those who doubted the wisdom of George W. Bush’s war were subjected to similar obloquy. Then as now, conservatives counseling restraint were denounced as less than truly American. Today Tucker Carlson is the enemy of all right-thinking votaries of liberal democracy. Twenty years ago conservative columnists like Pat Buchanan and Robert Novak were the enemy, branded by David Frum as “unpatriotic conservatives” in the pages of National Review on the eve of the Iraq conflict.

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This narrowing of American political discourse did not wind up doing the Iraqis or Afghans any favors two decades ago, and it is not doing the Ukrainians any favours today. Now, as then, there is a need for something other than Washington’s reflexive apocalypticism. Realism, cool-headedness, and scepticism are more important than ever in a time of emergency. This is not the moment for Republicans, in particular, to discard the hard-won wisdom of the last two decades, purchased at great price after the follies of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Far from being unpatriotic, many on the right who insists on clear limits to America’s commitments to Ukraine (and to Nato) are in the best tradition of their party’s foreign policy — and America’s too. Republican realism was in fact the most successful of America’s Cold War strategic philosophies, and it merits a revival in the face of Putin’s challenge.

During the Cold War, Republicans and Democrats alike understood that America could not solve every crisis. When the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in 1956, and again when the Soviets used Warsaw Pact forces against Czechoslovakia in 1968, American leaders acknowledged there was little they could do. That did not mean the West was weak, and it certainly did not bespeak a moral indifference to the suffering of the Czechs, Slovaks, and Hungarians. The West simply knew that it was not all-powerful, and it had a strategy to follow regardless of whatever new abuses the Soviets perpetrated.

And even worse crimes than those of the Soviets did not prevent Republicans from engaging in necessary and successful diplomacy, as when Richard Nixon aligned the United States with the People’s Republic of China in order to drive a wedge between the world’s two major Communist powers. In the Eighties, Ronald Reagan was willing to work with Mikhail Gorbachev (a far less bloody tyrant than Mao Zedong) to bring the Cold War to a peaceful close, even as some neoconservatives excoriated him for negotiating with what the President himself had dubbed the “evil empire”.

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Even George H.W. Bush, who was not averse to foreign adventurism, was guided by sober realism in his actions toward the Soviet Union in its final months. In August 1991, Bush warned Ukrainians to proceed cautiously in contemplating independence from the Soviet Union. Writing in the New York Times, the neoconservative and former Nixon speechwriter William Safire damned Bush for his “Chicken Kiev” speech.

But for once, Bush was right: his words did not dissuade the Ukrainians from declaring their independence from Moscow. But they did minimise the risk that the United States would be perceived as engineering the USSR’s dissolution. A speech that would have pleased Safire would have jeopardised Ukraine, and the entire process of the Soviet Union’s mostly non-violent decomposition.

With China looming as the century’s greatest challenge, Americans must be wiser than they have been in the past two decades. Just as we discovered our limitations in the projects we attempted in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have good reason to believe that Vladimir Putin will meet a defeat of his own making in Ukraine. Russia is much more than Putin — it is a great power that will never disappear from the earth, and one that may never be altogether benign toward its neighbours. The Ukrainians deserve the freedom that they claimed for themselves in 1991, and the West’s horror at Putin’s aggression is righteous.

Yet we must be not only good, but wise, if we want to help the Ukrainians and ensure that Russia does not become a greater and deadlier North Korea. Only realism, and confidence in the enduring power of nations, will lead us to make better decisions than those our leaders have made since the Cold War ended.

This rhetoric seemed unlikely to spook any of the vaccine-hesitant into getting jabbed. After all, they have already been exposed to plenty of dire warnings about the virus, and are unlikely to be receptive to the admonitions of an administration they have already ignored. Rather, the real addressees of Zients’s sermon were the vaccinated, who could assure themselves that they are on the side of the good.

Early in the Covid era, many believed the virus had made clear that “we’re all in this together”. The pandemic, we were told, would instil a sense of collective responsibility premised on our biological interconnectedness. Yet the reality, starkly revealed by Zients’s proclamation, is that we have entered a new age of biopolitical balkanisation, evident not only in the drastic policy divergence between red and blue states but also in the latter’s attempts to exclude the unvaccinated from public life.

Zients’s boss, Joe Biden, campaigned on the idea that technocratic competence and faith in expertise would end the pandemic. He also promised to scale back the culture wars of the Trump era. “We can,” he said in his inaugural address, “join forces, stop the shouting, and lower the temperature.” This may have been standard political pablum, but it reflected a genuine hope that a less divisive — even pleasantly boring — four years might follow the tumultuous Trump era.

Instead, a year into the Biden administration, we have seen a ratcheting up of the propagandistic weaponisation of “science” and a series of self-inflicted blows to the credibility of experts. Much has been said about the CDC’s inconsistent messaging, and during the current Omicron surge, as during previous surges, the administration has been criticised both for being overly aggressive and overly timid. But underlying these inconsistencies is a new mode of liberal technocratic governance, driven by moralising fervour and partisan animus rather than calm neutrality and rational calculation.

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This new strategy of rule places Biden’s administration in contrast with Barack Obama’s, in which he served as Vice President. Although the soaring rhetoric of his 2008 campaign sometimes suggested otherwise, Obama was motivated by a conviction that competent management, not visionary speeches, could unite the nation. The former law professor’s wonkish impulses and academic connections led him to the burgeoning field of behavioural economics, in particular the work of his erstwhile University of Chicago colleague Cass Sunstein, who served as his regulatory tsar between 2009 and 2012.

Sunstein pioneered the approach known as the “nudge”, which gave the title to the 2008 book he co-authored with Richard Thaler. Instead of mandating or proscribing behaviours, Sunstein suggested, governments might alter “choice architecture” to tacitly incentivise desired behaviours and discourage undesired ones. An oft-cited instance is making opt-in the default on certain decisions, like signing up for retirement contributions or the organ donor registry. These apparently small changes, “nudgers” believed, could re-engineer mass behaviour in a prosocial direction. Sunstein and Thaler, David V. Johnson notes, claimed to have “found the Golden Mean between Reagan free-market conservatism and FDR state-guided liberalism”. Their ideas had a natural appeal to a president who had promised to overcome the divisions between red and blue America.

During his second term, Obama signed an executive order committing the government to “using behavioural science insights” and launched a Social and ‘Behavioral Science Team’ that put “nudge theory” into practice. The results of these initiatives were modest. For example, the administration attempted to use text message reminders to increase college matriculation among low-income high school graduates. Such efforts, a reminder of the pre-2016 period when tinkering around the edges of the possible was still seen as a noble and vital mode of governance, seem quaint today.

In his writings, Sunstein directly contrasts nudge-type efforts with mandates, and argues the former are preferable because they are “choice-preserving”. For example, making green energy preferences on utilities the default option predisposes consumers towards environmentally favourable choices, but still gives them an escape. To those chafing against Covid mandates, this “libertarian paternalism” might seem preferable to the current style of Democratic governance.

But behavioural economics also received its share of criticisms at the peak of its influence. Critics argued that nudge-type policies are often attempts to bypass collective deliberation on issues of common concern. Yet this was one of the sources of their appeal: after the 2010 midterms, the White House faced a hostile Congress that thwarted Obama’s ambitions. For an executive boxed in in this way, as Johnson remarked in the final months of the administration, “a nudge can secure policy success without requiring Congressional approval”.

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In the Covid era, the Biden administration and its state-level allies have made a hard pivot away from the nudge approach towards an embrace of mandates. The presumed justification for this shift is that the severity of the Covid crisis required more drastic measures. But something else differentiates Covid technocracy from its predecessors: a remarkable incuriosity about whether the strictures it imposes actually work. This incuriosity has become all the more glaring in recent weeks, as Omicron has brought cases to unprecedented levels in cities like New York, where both vaccine passports and mask mandates are in effect.

The nudge approach, on the other hand, is at least ostensibly outcome-oriented: it assesses interventions on the basis of their measurable impact. So one of the problems with mandates, from the nudgers’ perspective, is that they risk conflating intention and outcome. Mandates are often difficult to enforce and generate backlashes, and thus may prove counterproductive. But they may remain in force, despite failing to achieve their objectives, because they demonstrate a moral commitment to a desired aim.

And as Zients’s holiday announcement demonstrated, when mandates fail to achieve the desired results, it is the fault of those who don’t follow the rules, not those who imposed them. A more empirical approach would treat the reality of noncompliance as part of what needs to be measured in order to assess the efficacy of a proposed policy. But such a strategy would imply that the technocrats themselves, rather than the anti-vaxxers or anti-maskers, should be held accountable for policy failures. Small wonder it has fallen out of favour.

Before last year it might have seemed obvious that the guiding ethos of technocracy was cold utilitarian calculus, but in the past two years it has become something like the opposite: moral fervour. Various factors brought about this shift, but the reaction of the technocrats and their constituency to Trump, with his “war on the administrative state” and love of the “poorly educated”, was arguably the crucial one. Tinkering behind the scenes, as was favoured in the Obama era, was no longer a viable approach for a class that felt its interests threatened.

Early on in the pandemic, the writer Alex Hochuli described the pandemic as “technocracy’s end-of-life rally”. At least temporarily, it had put the experts maligned over the previous half-decade back in the drivers’ seat. But the populist fervour that had driven the Trump movement re-energised itself in reaction to lockdowns and mask and vaccine mandates. Initially, this seemed to place the technocrats in an unassailable position, since they could impugn their allies as aiders and abettors of disease and death.

However, this high ground is illusory: the track record of their mandates has proven middling at best. For instance, Los Angeles county, with vaccine and mask mandates, fared no better after implementing them — slightly worse, in fact — than neighbouring Orange County, which had neither. Furthermore, vaccine mandates for health care workers, many of whom already have immunity from prior Covid infection, have led to staffing shortages nationwide as reluctant workers have resigned or been fired, leaving hospitals worse-prepared to confront the Omicron case surge. The refusal to acknowledge such failures and tradeoffs is even more self-discrediting.

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But there is also a more profound issue at play: while technocrats’ rule by moral fiat has allowed some critics to be bludgeoned into submission, it also exacerbates the deeper problem of governance by unelected bureaucrats in a system nominally premised on the consent of the governed. Sunstein and his Obama-era acolytes were aware of this risk even if their project was informed by anti-democratic assumptions. This was why they were so concerned to preserve at least nominal freedom of choice on the part of citizens.

Biden, however, seems to have forgotten this. His administration’s devotion to mandates, regardless of the evidence piling up against them, looks more and more like a punitive backlash against political enemies. Far from a means of transcending hyperpartisan antagonism, as both Obama and Biden once promised, technocratic management has become another means of pursuing it. Public health messaging has become another opportunity for partisan pep rallies — and America will suffer for it.

But even those who disapprove of BBB’s fate must surely see that this is America’s political system functioning as it is supposed to function. Biden’s legislation can’t even get the support of half of the Senate — and so it won’t become law. This is standard Washington fare. It is politics as it always has been.

However, to listen to Democrats in the days since Manchin delivered his fatal blow is to be left with a very different impression. According to their version of events, the senator’s decision is tantamount to a crisis for American democracy. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said that “our entire democracy is on the line”; to fix this, she wants to “crack down” on the “very privileged, very entitled and very protected” Senate. Chuck Schumer, notionally in charge of Senate Democrats, responded to Manchin’s decision with a promise that the upper chamber will vote on a bill that would overhaul US voting laws as soon as it is back from a Christmas recess.

Even before Manchin doomed Biden’s agenda, calls for changes to the rules governing America’s system of government — some small, others profound — had grown louder as the prospects of Build Back Better faded. Last week, Elizabeth Warren introduced a bill to pack the Supreme Court with additional justices. “The current court,” she argued, “threatens the democratic foundations of our nation.”

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In Democratic-supporting parts of the media, the tone is no less alarmist. Jennifer Rubin, the West Wing’s favourite columnist, argued in the Washington Post that the failure of Build Back Better puts “democracy itself in a precarious position”. She emphasised: “the Democrats’ hopes for 2022 and the fate of our democracy depend on the President’s ability to reconstruct an agenda he can actually deliver.”

In one sense, she’s right. Their legislative disappointment is a chance for Democrats to face a banal, if frustrating, reality: that Biden was not elected with a mandate for transformative legislation, that the party has only the loosest grip on the legislative branch, and that America simply isn’t crying out for the progressive reforms that most of the party favours.

But facing unpleasant facts isn’t fun. Hence why Democrats appear to be slipping further into their own delusions, processing Manchin’s obstinance as a crisis that imperils not just their own electoral fortunes but the future of the republic. And hence why what should be a moderating moment looks likely to have a radicalising effect: their own legislative impotence persuading a party already comfortable with an apocalyptic register to dial up the doom and gloom to eleven.

Such a response can, of course, be understood on an emotional level: you’re more likely to complain about the quality of the refereeing when you’re losing. But it is also worth appreciating on a political level. The Democrats’ 2020 victory was built on the unpopularity of Donald Trump. Without that, it is far from clear they can put together a coalition of voters broad enough to hold on to both chambers of Congress and the White House. And so, with a legislative agenda foundering, it’s time to return to something they can all agree on: the wickedness of the other side.

None of this is to say there aren’t threats to American democracy from the Trumpist Right. The last President spent the months between the election and Biden’s inauguration doing everything he could to stay in power. Any sensible reforms to the rules governing Washington would safeguard against something similar happening again.

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But that danger to America’s electoral system only makes the Democrats’ focus on the largely unrelated question of voting rights — and their overblown rhetoric of voter suppression and “Jim Crow 2.0” — more baffling, and less excusable. Instead of tailoring their pro-democracy agenda to the dangers that surround post-election certification, the party is ploughing ahead with a bill that would federalise voting rules in response to some mostly inane changes at a state level.

Elsewhere, Democrats want to overturn the rules that govern the Senate and, if Warren is anything to go by, take the extraordinary step of rebalancing the Supreme Court simply because progressives aren’t satisfied by its current composition. As the centre-left commentator Matthew Yglesias has observed, Democrats certainly aren’t acting as though they believe that the future of democracy is in peril. If they did, they’d surely shelve party-political concerns and build as broad a coalition as possible to combat the Trumpist threat.

The dark irony of the Democrats’ predicament is that they could end up being right for the wrong reasons. There’s a chance, after all, that the failure of Build Back Better really is bad news for American democracy — but only because it radicalises their own side.

A universe in which Biden and other Democratic lawmakers listen to Manchin’s complaints about the legislation, attempt to understand the concerns of the voters he represents (without whom the Senate would be in Republican hands), and steer themselves back towards the centre feels a long way away. Biden, for his part, has taken a tough line all along: according to the Washington Post, the White House rejected an offer from Manchin that included the vast majority of the bill’s provisions.

Now the West Virginian has walked away, they appear to be pursuing a vindictive, scorched-earth strategy. Faced with Manchin’s exasperation, Democrats cry foul, accusing him of being a corrupt coal boss and choosing to ignore the obvious fact that the legislation would have been very unpopular in his home state. Again, the clear, normal, predictable explanation is spurned in favour of a more alarmist narrative.

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Biden himself is certainly capable of overblown rhetoric about the future of American democracy. But so far he has mostly resisted calls from Democrats to go nuclear and change the rules that govern Washington to favour his own party. That refusal grows harder by the day.

Many in his party are rightly concerned that their country is stuck in a downward spiral, but they cannot see their own part in the process. Increasingly, both sides view anything other than victory for themselves as illegitimate. A party that responds to its own perfectly normal legislative woes by doubling down on an all-out battle to rewrite the rules of the system in its favour is not serious about ending that descent into anarchy. And so, the more impotent the Democrats feel, the more dangerous they become.

Unsurprisingly, Lightfoot’s consequent identification of “systemic racism” as the cause of these disparities provoked derision among her critics. The city, after all, is governed by a black mayor with an almost entirely Democratic city council, where the majority of aldermen are black or Hispanic. At the state and federal level, Chicago is represented by a group of multi-racial, left-of-centre politicians. The city even has the longest, unbroken tradition of black political representation of anywhere in the United States.

This paradox is at the heart of the city’s problems with race, and demonstrates the limitations of a political agenda focused primarily on descriptive representation. Chicago has long had “black faces in high places”, but too often this did not translate into substantive change. Indeed, the health disparities identified in the CDPH report are the consequence of a complicated political history, which reveals not just the dilemma of black electoral politics in one city but the problem of using the city as the vehicle for social reform.

As Barack Obama — whose foundation boasts of his “deep Windy City roots” — once described, Chicago is regarded by many as “the capital of the African American community in the country”. Founded by an African-Caribbean explorer in the eighteenth century, black people have lived in the Chicago area longer than any group except for Native Americans. Their long history of residence and spatial concentration, due to residential segregation, made Chicago the epicentre of black political life in the United States. Given this backdrop, the historian Timuel Black insisted, the first African American president could only have come from Chicago.

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It was, as the authors of the classic 1945 work Black Metropolis describe, the “city of refuge” for African Americans; first, as the terminus of a line on the Underground Railroad and, later, as the place of settlement for hundreds of thousands fleeing the tyranny of the Jim Crow South during the Great Migration in the first half of the twentieth century.

But while life in Chicago was perceived as a better alternative to life in the South, formal and informal restrictions on black employment and housing, as well as racially motivated violence, ensured that African Americans operated separately and unequally from the city’s white population. When Martin Luther King came to protest the city’s residential racial segregation in 1966, he commented: “I have never seen, even in Mississippi and Alabama, mobs as hateful as I’ve seen here in Chicago.”

And yet it was precisely this racial segregation that provided African Americans with electoral power. Their size and spatial concentration within the city due to severe racial segregation created powerful blocs of African American voters, who were the plurality in numerous city, state, and even federal districts. The First Congressional District (IL:01), anchored in the South Side, elected the first northern black member of Congress in 1928. It has been represented by African Americans ever since. Barack Obama, incidentally, unsuccessfully sought election to this seat in 2000; former Black Panther, Bobby Rush who defeated Barack Obama — the only candidate ever to do so — still represents the First District.

For decades, however, black politics in Chicago was dominated by white-led political machines. These were informal political organisations, usually dominated by a charismatic leader, engaged in patronage in exchange for votes.

The most notorious was the machine of Richard Daley, known euphemistically as the ‘Organization’. Daley père et fils governed Chicago for 43 of the years between 1955 to 2011. At his height, it was said that the elder Mayor Daley could appoint 45,000 patronage positions — roughly ten times the number appointed by the President of the United States. Daley’s primary constituency was the city’s Irish-American population, and he did little to alleviate the conditions of the city’s African American population.

In these years, many black leaders were complicit with the Organization, albeit always as junior members. During the elder Daley’s mayoralty, the six black aldermen on Chicago City Council were so total in their loyalty and quiet in their criticism that they were known as the ‘Silent Six’. They operated what became known as the black ‘sub-machine’, whereby the Organization devolved some degree of patronage power to black leadership in exchange for their loyalty. Such was Daley’s control of the city’s black leadership that the entertainer Dick Gregory once remarked: “You have to respect Daley. He has a big job being mayor, governor, prosecutor, and president of the Chicago Branch of the NAACP.”

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In response to the machine’s malevolence, from the Sixties, reformist black leaders stood as candidates independent from the Organization. The Black independent movement came out of the civil rights imperative, and the heart of the movement was in Chicago’s multi-racial enclave of Hyde Park on the South Side.

One of its leading figures was Richard Newhouse, who was elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1967. Over the next quarter century, Newhouse operated independently of the machine, often threatening to abstain on key votes in the closely divided state senate until the machine conceded to his demands. Through this strategy, he was able to secure the passage of the Illinois Fair Housing Practices Act. In 1975, when Richard J Daley ran for a sixth term as mayor, Newhouse stood against him, making him the first African American candidate for mayor of Chicago.

Don Rose, who was active in Hyde Park politics during Newhouse’s tenure, remembers that in the 1960s and 1970s Newhouse ‘was often cited as [one day] our first black president’. Newhouse never achieved this accolade, but his state senate district did produce the first black president. In 1995, four years after Newhouse’s retirement, Barack Obama declared his intention to fill the seat. At his announcement event, the outgoing incumbent gushed: “Barack Obama carries on the tradition of independence in this district, a tradition that continued with me and most recently with Senator Newhouse.”

In the state legislature, Obama pushed for a reformist policy agenda while largely resisting the patronage of City Hall. He even asked his wife Michelle to quit her job in the Daley administration as he was preparing to run for the state senate. Michelle’s family had been supporters of the Organization, and her late father had been a precinct captain for the Daley machine in the 5^th Ward.

Obama, however, understood the importance of maintaining good terms with black machine ‘regulars’, such as the State Senate President Emil Jones. He was willing to work with the machine, who provided him with favours in return, not least the freedom to redraw his legislative district boundaries after the 2000 Census in his favour. Obama was a reformer but a tactical one.

In 1969, the Northwestern University political scientist Paul Friesema predicted that in the coming years, African Americans would win more mayoralties across the United States. Cities, which had once been overwhelmingly white, were becoming more diverse, and in some places African Americans could command a plurality of the vote. Friesema warned, however, that black political power at the city level would constitute a “hollow prize”.

Part of the reason why African Americans were becoming more numerically dominant was due to the departure of white, middle-class residents to the suburbs. As whites moved out, they took their wealth with them, and city property values declined. Local government is dependent on property tax for its funding: the fewer high value properties, the less revenue to spend on the city’s social priorities. It is a constant dilemma of urban politics. With tight borders and relative ease of transport in and out of the city, it is easy for a high wealth resident to relocate to a lower-tax jurisdiction yet still enjoy the benefits of proximity to the city. Zoning laws are then used to ensure that only high value properties can be built in these localities.

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As Friesema predicted, in the Eighties, Chicago elected its first black mayor, Harold Washington, who emerged from the Black independent movement around Hyde Park. Washington attempted to pursue policies which would benefit the city’s African American population, such as creating job centres in the South and West Sides. He even met a young community organiser named Barack Obama at one of them in 1987, shortly before his sudden death. Yet, for all of Washington’s charisma, courage, and vision, his efforts were stymied by an uncooperative council and constant lack of resources, as the Reagan administration asked cities to take on more responsibilities with less funding.

Mayor Lightfoot’s public health declaration, on the other hand, was unusual in that she was able to accompany it with substantive resources, but this was entirely a product of one-off $1.2 billion Covid-19 relief allocated to the city by the federal government. The vast majority of this money had to be used to plug operational funding gaps, including, controversially, $280 million to the Chicago Police Department.

To tackle the public health emergency of racism, Lightfoot announced $9.6 million to be allocated to the establishment of six Equity Zones across the city which are meant to “create community-based stakeholder coalitions to develop targeted strategies to improve community and individual wellness”. These may be warm words, but unless accompanied by wider reform and much greater resources, it is hard to see how such initiatives can be any more than a sticking plaster.

Black politics in Chicago, as in the rest of the United States, is not a monolith. Black nationalists, socialists, and reform-minded liberals contended with transactional black leaders, who too often accepted the status quo in exchange for political status.

Yet, even after more radical black leadership gained control of the city, change has been difficult to achieve due to the limited resources available to city governments. As Chicago has learnt, victory in municipal government is too often a hollow prize.

So it is that Pete Buttigieg — mayor of South Bend, Indiana, turned surprisingly competitive, first openly gay presidential candidate, turned transportation secretary — finds himself a popular answer to Washington’s favourite guessing game.

But is Buttigieg 2024 really the answer?

If you squint, you can just about see the outlines of a case for President Pete. Viewed from his most flattering angle, Buttigieg might look like the perfect candidate to save the hopelessly out-of-touch Democrats. Hailing from a rust-belt city in a red state, he can construct a better claim to broad appeal than Harris, for example, who has never won an election outside California. His 2020 presidential pitch was more sympathetic to Trump voters than his rivals’; to liberal astonishment, he is even capable of appearing on Fox News. Indeed, Buttigieg’s appeal to “heartland values” has caused some on the Left to accuse him of deploying racially coded language.

But far from providing an answer to the Democrats’ succession quandary, the chatter surrounding Buttigieg only reveals the seriousness of the party’s talent crisis: the Democrats’ line up of top-tier politicians looks hopelessly thin. Yet this personnel problem — and the promotion of Buttigieg as the solution — points to a more profound shortcoming: the Democratic Party’s increasing inability to appeal to blue-collar voters.

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Will California ever be safe?

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

First, let’s be clear about the problem. Educational polarisation — the process by which Democrats have been losing non-college-educated voters and gaining college-educated ones — is starting to look like a very bad electoral trade for Democrats. For years, the party has been haemorrhaging support among working-class whites. According to Pew, white voters without a college degree accounted for a quarter of Joe Biden’s support in 2020. In 1992, nearly 60% of Bill Clinton’s supporters were whites without a college degree.

A coalition of college-educated whites and non-white working class voters was supposed to more than make up for those losses. As the political scientist Ruy Teixeira has noted, this was always a questionable bargain for Democrats, with losses among white working-class voters outpacing the racial diversification of the electorate that the party has been banking on. But it now threatens to be a truly disastrous deal.

Why? Because the long-promised rainbow coalition is proving elusive. And the firewall of non-white non-college-educated voters that Democrats have relied on is crumbling. Since 2012, the Democrats have lost 18 points off their margin among non-white working-class voters. A recent Wall Street Journal poll put the parties on level pegging among latino voters. This all adds up to a significant blue-collar problem for Democrats. And if they fail to solve it, they face electoral disaster.

In this context, Buttigieg, the son of an English professor and a linguist, is a strange candidate to be the man who can reconnect his party to their traditional voting bloc. A bookish meritocrat who calls South Bend home because that is where his father had tenure at Notre Dame, Buttigieg is best understood as an elite credentialist who did all the things an ambitious early millennial was supposed to do: Harvard, a Rhodes scholarship, a stint working on John Kerry’s presidential campaign, a lucrative job as a consultant at McKinsey. All of this before 29, at which point he was elected mayor of his hometown.

While Buttigieg certainly eschews the Squad-style radicalism that is electoral kryptonite outside the bluest neighborhoods, the self-styled moderate is nonetheless an enthusiastic apostle of woke capitalism. He may not be the activist on the street who wants to defund the police. But he’s the suit in the boardroom insisting that everyone sign up for their DEI training.

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For all his stated empathy for the Trump voter, Buttigieg oozes technocracy. In truth, he is made by and for the elite. As should be obvious by now, the idea that, armed with the right policy programmes, politicians can respond to the populist challenge by addressing “economic anxiety” misreads the moment. His is a trade-off free politics, all managerialism, no clear communication of the simple but essential message: I am on your side.

No wonder his brief moment as a contender in the Democratic primary was built on support among college-educated whites. He struggled with non-white voters, but also white, non-college-educated voters. In other words, he is uniquely ill-equipped to solve the Democrats’ two biggest demographic headaches.

To underscore just how bad an option Buttigieg would be, we need only contrast his Rhodes scholar slickness with a rising star in another midwestern state. Lucas Kunce isn’t a big beast; the 39-year-old former marine is running for the Democratic nomination in a US Senate race in Missouri, a red state. But he’s a curious species. He describes himself, first and foremost, as a populist.

Watch a recent TV ad for Kunce. It is strikingly different in tone to most Democratic politicians’ pitches, with the sort of soundtrack that makes you think you’re being sold a truck. He attacks Missouri Republicans for “stripping Missouri for parts, selling land to China and bowing down to Chinese state TV”; he promises to be a “warrior who will fight” for Missourians.

Or compare Buttigieg to Eric Adams, the Mayor-Elect of New York. The black working-class former cop won the keys to Gracie Mansion with an uncompromising pledge to crack down on law and order and resuscitate the New York economy after Covid. Adams is an ebullient, party-animal vegan. But in his own oddball way, he is authentic.

He stormed to victory in a crowded Democratic primary with huge margins among New York’s minority middle and working-class voters. On the pandemic, he sides with those for whom remote work isn’t an option, rather than a neurotic laptop class sheltering in place two years after the first lockdowns. And, unlike Buttigieg, Adams is unencumbered by the progressive speech manners — “faculty lounge bullshit,” as James Carville calls it — that have come to dominate the Democratic elite.

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In their own ways, Kunce and Adams communicate something very simple: I am with you. On election night, Adams told New Yorkers: “I am you. The life I lived is the life many are living right now. We are the same.” Buttigieg cannot tell blue-collar Americans that — an unavoidable fact which will ultimately be his undoing.

The Democrats’ biggest problem isn’t a flyover-state problem, or a white-voter problem. It’s a class problem. Ordinary Americans look at the party in power and see politicians who talk a language they don’t recognise. If Democrats think Buttigieg is the answer, they don’t even understand the question.

But comparisons to Weimar are a dime a dozen in the West, and their explanatory power is incredibly questionable. Our modern historical lexicon often seems to be a book with all the pages ripped out, save for one or two badly smudged chapters on the European interwar period. And this is a shame, because there are many other historical periods that could do more to advance our understanding of current political events, both in the US and elsewhere. History is, after all, quite expansive.

More than any other, one particular moment, mostly unknown today, may have a lot to tell us about where the US is headed next: Japan’s bakumatsu period — the polarised and chaotic end period of the old Tokugawa shogunate.

To understand the bakumatsu, one should know what came before it. In 1600, Japan’s ‘warring states era’, or the sengoku jidai, came to a close with the Battle of Sekigahara. Soon afterwards, the victorious Tokugawa clan implemented a policy of almost total national lockdown, known as sakoku (literally: locked country). Generally, foreigners were forbidden from entering the country, and Japanese commoners banned from leaving on pain of death. Though there were some minor exceptions, Japan essentially closed itself off to the rest of the world.

There were a host of benefits to this, including more than two centuries of internal peace, economic growth and innovation in the fields of arts and culture. Under the surface, however, contradictions in Japanese society slowly built up. The samurai were now a caste of warriors without any wars left to fight, while low-born merchants grew in wealth, slowly undermining a society that assigned status according to birth.

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Moreover, the divisions that led to the battle of Sekigahara were never really mended; Japan’s most powerful samurai magnates, or daimyo, were split into two different camps: the tozama, and the fudai. The former were descendants of magnates who had been neutral or against the Tokugawa in 1600, while the latter came from families that had been on the winning side. Still, the tozama remained quite rich and powerful, even later in the 19^th century, but they were barred from almost every important post in the Government. Their resentment at this never dissipated, but merely simmered on a low boil for centuries, waiting for an opportune moment to roar back to life.

This brings us to the bakumatsu period itself. In 1853, the US Navy forcibly entered the bay of Edo (modern day Tokyo), and demanded that the country open itself up to trade. The Japanese, after their centuries of isolation, could do very little to defend themselves against Commodore Perry’s Black Ships. At gunpoint, the Japanese were forced to abandon a policy that had been the cornerstone of their existence for the last two centuries.

The immediate result of this shift in policy was the start of an extreme social and political chain reaction; abandoning isolationism at the hands of foreign barbarians upended not just Japanese public opinion, but the very basis of legitimacy for the Tokugawa shogunate. Meanwhile, uncontrolled foreign trade also led to a collapse of the Japanese currency system, which only inflamed public opinion further. Suddenly, Japanese society went from (a somewhat deceptive) placid calm, to rapid, uncontrollable polarisation. Street violence became common; there were attacks on foreigners by patriotic mobs, and armed violence between supporters of the Shogun and increasingly organised opponents of the status quo.

Sound familiar? Of course, elite consensus in 2016 America turned out to be, if anything, built on an even more precarious foundation than Tokugawa’s peace in 1853. Beneath the surface, all manner of social and economic ills had already built up; deindustrialisation was slowly choking America’s working and middle classes, while the wars in the Middle East were poorly run, costly, and corrupt. And, just as with Commodore Perry, the election of Trump merely served to topple the first domino, unleashing a chain reaction that was already primed into the system, inaugurating a period of intense polarisation that exists to this day.

What bakumatsu Japan and modern America share is a straightforward problem: that smashing an old, non-functional system to the point where it can no longer be repaired is not the same as building anything new. On the American Right, people today refer to the ‘dead consensus’ when they talk about political positions that everyone in the GOP had to hold to be taken seriously pre-2016. They do not talk about a ‘new consensus’, however, because no new consensus exists. And that doesn’t look like changing anytime soon.

To return to the bakumatsu, Japanese society eventually polarised into two broad factions; those who were loyal to the Shogunate, and those who supported the Emperor returning to political power (at this point, the Japanese royal family have been powerless figureheads for about 800 years). What followed was a civil conflict defined by its confused and contradictory nature.

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The backers of the Emperor attacked the Shogunate for being too friendly with the West. But many of the most powerful backers of this putatively xenophobic, anti-Western faction had also been the most eager importers of foreign instructors and weapons, who had then managed to defeat opposition forces with their smaller, far more Westernised armies. And indeed, once they won the ensuing civil war, their post-unification agenda turned out to be… the abolishment of the feudal caste system, the disarmament of the samurai, and the rapid industrialisation and modernisation of Japanese society. Whoops!

While ideology always plays a part in civil conflicts, the bakumatsu is not so much a story of traditionalism versus progressivism as simply what happens when a large political vacuum is created almost overnight, and there’s no good alternative on hand. The result is a very chaotic period of political free-for-all, as old coalitions rapidly collapse and new ones form, and centuries-old grudges suddenly come rearing back to life. And the creation of that vacuum, and the polarisation that fills it, is precisely what we are seeing in America today.

In the case of America, the empire is clearly in a very deep, systemic crisis. The military machine is deeply broken, the policy of spreading liberal democracy is a total failure, and the globalised economy has now frozen and seized up. Nobody, whether they’re on the Left or the Right, really has any solution to these problems. The vacuum is simply too big. And thus, we are slowly beginning to see the same sort of political dynamic manifest in America as it did in Japan during the bakumatsu. In America, just as in Japan, political street violence proliferates, and people form into armed and organised political gangs.

Yet, if 19^th century Japan offers some interesting parallels in terms of what has already happened in the last five years or so, it also gives us some hints of what is in store in America’s immediate future. First, the chaos that defined the bakumatsu suggests it’s probably foolish to expect American polarisation to cool down or improve anytime soon. If anything, it is likely to get a great deal worse, as nobody really has any sort of practical solution on hand to address the fundamental rupture introduced into the American political economy by deindustrialisation. This problem is especially acute, given the supply crisis that is now slowly choking producers and consumers. The current model is broken, but that breach is the result of decades of active policy choices. It can’t be unbroken in a week, and like a rotting tooth, it’s a problem that will keep spreading pain until it is finally dealt with.

Second, one of the most serious potential flashpoints in the years ahead is going to be the relationship between the federal government and various recalcitrant states. In the bakumatsu period, the Tokugawa government slowly lost control over the tozama magnates, who increasingly came to either ignore orders from Edo, or explicitly worked to undermine the Shogun.

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In America, this sort of political brinkmanship is starting to play out. Recently, Oklahoma’s Governor, Kevin Stitt, brazenly defied Washington by firing the commander of the Oklahoma National Guard, replacing him with a man whose first order of business was to free Oklahoma’s guardsmen from any obligation to comply with the Covid vaccine mandates. Though its effect didn’t extend beyond state borders, it’s a fairly ominous sign of where things are headed; the weight of federal writ is clearly not what it once was in America, and if the country continues to polarise and experience economic crisis, these sorts of conflicts will become increasingly common, and increasingly serious. In a couple of years, for example, if federal agents are ordered to arrest or imprison a popular state governor such as Ron DeSantis after some vexing display of Floridian insubordination, nobody really knows what could happen as a result.

More than anything, the most important lesson of the bakumatsu is simply to expect the unexpected in the days and years ahead. Political hypocrisy, back-stabbing, the embrace of exceedingly strange bedfellows, rapidly changing alliances, and much more; these things are not just likely but more or less guaranteed in times like these.

Just like the Japanese weren’t actually fighting merely for or against modernisation, or for or against the Emperor, the figurative (and increasingly literal) battles inside America today aren’t really about race, or taxes, or personal autonomy. They are about the heart, soul, and future of the nation, about what gets to fill the hungry vacuum left behind by the Black Ship that conquered the country in 2016.

But the blocs aren’t monolithic. Hairline cracks at the margin of each coalition foreshadow the defections that often decide elections.

That, at least, is the implication of a new report from the Pew Research Center. According to its findings, the Democrats are divided by cultural issues such as critical race theory — look at how many of them flocked to Glenn Youngkin in Virginia — while the GOP are split over economic questions. Indeed, it’s all too easy to forget that an important minority of Democratic voters is patriotic, worried about cancel culture, and wants border control and strong policing. Likewise, a significant bloc of Republican voters is sceptical of banks and large corporations and wants them to pay higher taxes.

These observations echo the analyses of David Shor, Michael Lind, Lee Drutman and others: that the median voter leans Left on the economy and Right on culture. The serious challenge for both parties, then, is whether they can resist influential factions in their respective parties: for the Democrats, that’s the AOC-Elizabeth Warren progressive caucus; for the Republicans, the Paul Ryan-Mitch McConnell corporate tax-cut wing.

Drawing on a large representative sample of Americans, Pew has developed a nine-cluster typology of voters, including four Republican and four Democratic categories, in addition to one in the middle. Clusters group people’s answers to a large number of questions by the degree to which their responses correlate. For example, if people who support Black Lives Matter tend to support higher immigration and higher taxes, then those three questions can be reduced to one measure. If, however, there is a group of people who support the first two but not the third policy, that becomes a separate cluster.

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Ignoring the less distinctive middle three clusters of the Pew report yields six groupings: three for each of the two main parties. For Republicans, ‘Faith and Flag Conservatives’ are on the Right of pretty much every question. ‘Committed Conservatives’ are more moderate, with a final category, ‘Populist Right’, who are conservative on immigration, progressivism and race, but moderate on economics and somewhat centrist on religion. ‘Faith and Flag Conservatives’ tend to be older, while ‘Populist Right’ voters are distinguished by lower levels of education and religiosity.

Among Democrats, the ‘Progressive Left’ are very Left-wing on essentially all issues, while the ‘Establishment Liberals’ are a more moderate group. ‘Democratic Mainstays’ are Left-wing on economics, but centrist on cultural issues such as immigration or cancel culture. The ‘Outsider Left’, meanwhile, is largely made up of voters who opted for Biden but are frustrated with the party and its leaders. Of these, the ‘Progressive Left’ make up just 12% of Democratic voters and are the whitest Democratic cluster, at 68%. They are also younger: the share of Progressive Leftists among Democrats under 30 is 18% compared to just 8% among the over 50s.

On the face of it, splitting the two parties into these groupings reveals where the two parties are most strongly united. Across the four Democratic clusters, for example, 75% or more generally support higher taxes for high earners and say big business earns too much profit, while 85% support Black Lives Matter. On the other hand, more than 80% of Republicans oppose BLM; a similar proportion believe that government assistance to the poor does more harm than good, creating welfare dependency. These are the issues which unify each party’s coalition.

More interesting, however, are the fissures that divide them, presenting opportunities for the other party to poach supporters and win the tight contests that mark the current electoral era. This is most clear with the ‘Populist Right’ Republicans and ‘Democratic Mainstay’ Democrats.

Figure 1, above, adapted from Pew’s report, illustrates the responses to two statements. The first highlights threats to free speech: “People being too easily offended by things others say is a major problem in the country today.” The second concerns hate speech: “People saying things that are very offensive to others is a major problem in the country today.”

Notice that all four Republican groups lie inside the red circle in the top left quadrant. This means that most Republicans, more than three-quarters of most GOP clusters, think there is a problem with free speech while only a minority think there is too much offensive speech.

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On the other hand, the blue circle includes clusters in both right-hand quadrants; they are less closely aligned. Indeed, despite what a number of progressive politicians would have you think, some 81% of the ‘Democratic Mainstay’ cluster believe people are too easily offended, aligning them with Republican opinion. Nor is this a small minority: this group makes up 28% of the Democratic coalition — and is older, less educated and relatively Black and Hispanic. It voted heavily for Biden in the primaries, but is much cooler toward candidates like Sanders or Warren.

It represents, therefore, an important target group for the Republicans. As Glenn Youngkin’s victory in Virginia revealed, culture war issues can act as an important wedge issue for the GOP, making it imperative for the Democrats to put distance between themselves and unpopular progressive causes. And the ‘Democratic Mainstay’ group diverges from the small ‘Progressive Left’ wing in more ways than one. On increasing legal immigration, 63% of Progressive Leftists agree, but only 28% of Democratic Mainstays do; 71% of the first group think American institutions are systematically biased and must be rebuilt, but only 38% of the latter agree.

Meanwhile, the Right is also riven with its own divisions. The biggest outlier is the ‘Populist Right’ cluster which makes up a sizeable 23% of Republican voters. Its members were more likely to say Trump was the best president in recent times rather than Reagan, whereas other Republican clusters either split or favoured Reagan. 87% of this relatively less educated and less religious group say “the economic system in this country unfairly favours powerful interests”, and more than half want higher taxes on people earning over $400,000 a year.

Crucially, this puts them at odds with most Republican voters — and in the company of most Democrats. Here, then, lies an opportunity for the Democrats: if they can peel away populist Right-wing voters turned off by country-club Republicanism, they can split the GOP and flip some Trump voters while uniting their own ranks.

Similarly, the relatively old and evangelical ‘Faith and Flag Conservatives’ cluster is also distinct in its religious Americanism. Among its members, 75% say the “Government should support religious values and beliefs”, whereas fewer than 30% of Republicans outside this cluster agree. On same-sex marriage and abortion this group is more than 20 points more socially conservative than other Republican groups.

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So if Republicans shift too far toward religious conservatism, they will open an opportunity for Democrats. But while Pew’s findings reveal that the Republicans are more fragmented than many would expect, it is still the case that the Democrats should be more concerned. For ultimately, Pew’s research reinforces the conclusions of More in Common’s recent Hidden Tribes report. Using data from 2018, Hidden Tribes identified a heavily white 8% ‘Progressive Activist’ segment of the population that was Left-wing on identity issues, unconcerned with free speech and highly active on social media. Pew’s report finds a similar segment: the 6% ‘Progressive Left’ group, who share the same elite, young and white social profile that David Shor and James Carville warn is too dominant among Democratic staffers.

In both surveys, a much larger group of moderate Left-wing voters — often non-white, older and less educated — reject the activists’ progressive politics. And since cultural issues in recent western elections appear to be more important in motivating voters to switch than economic questions, the activist Left could prove a distinct electoral liability. This was the story told by recent elections in Virginia, New Jersey, Wisconsin and Seattle. And as long as the Democrats fail to realise this, it’s only a matter of time before more of its support base is lured across the political aisle.

It’s pure propaganda, of course — but illustrates the core theme of the incoming presidency: restoration. After the rupture of the last four years, the President-Elect wants to “restore the soul of America”, as he put it in his victory speech: “Let us be the nation that we know we can. A nation united, a nation strengthened. A nation healed.”

These are not the words of revolutionary. Biden is a restorationist, he wants things back as they were — before the virus and before Trump. The kind of people who were in charge under Barack Obama will be back in charge now. And the wider economic and cultural establishment — whether in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, the Ivy League, Wall Street or the Washington beltway — they’ll be back in charge too. It’s not that they ever went away, of course. But they can rest easy now.

Or can they?

Most revolutions fail. But a further lesson of history is that most restorations also come to grief. Team Biden would do well to learn from those that failed — and from the few that didn’t. Here are ten to be getting on with:

1. The Bourbon Restoration

When Louis XVI was guillotined in 1793 it wasn’t the final end for the kings of France; more like a very rude interruption. With the final defeat of Napoleon, the monarchy was restored, and the murdered king’s brother ruled from 1815 to 1824 as Louis XVIII. He was succeeded by another brother, Charles X. Unfortunately it wasn’t just the Bourbons who came back, but the reactionary attitudes of the ancien regime. There were vindictive persecutions, a rolling back of democracy and a general failure to learn the lessons of 1789.

Unsurprisingly, it ended badly for the ultra-royalists, with a second revolution in 1830 which forced the abdication of Charles X. A third revolution would finish off the monarchy for good in 1848.

The lesson for Team Biden is this: take a hint. In many ways, the Trumpening was a freak event, but the underlying anger of those who voted for him in 2016 and 2020 is still there. If the Democrats think it can be ignored, or even taken revenge upon, then they risk further revolutions down the line.

2. The Stuart Restoration

The restoration of our own monarchy in early 1660s was marked by an act of revenge as petty as it was gross: the body of Oliver Cromwell was dug up and posthumously hung, drawn and quartered, and, unbelievably, his head wasn’t reburied until 1960, having spent most of the interim in private collections.

There where other grisly executions, both posthumous and prehumous, but afterwards the reign of Charles II took on a more tolerant character. Arguably, he had no choice but to try and reconcile the various political and religious factions, because his rule was far from absolute. He faced entrenched opposition in Parliament and under constant suspicion as to his Catholic sympathies.

Charles’s personal charm and popularity allowed him to keep the plates spinning until his death in 1685, but unfortunately he was succeeded by his brother, James II — a tactless oaf. The result was the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 — in fact, a coup that deposed the wrongheaded, but rightful, king and installed an iffy Dutchman in his place.

Genial Joe Biden, like Charles II, is well-liked, but he won’t be around forever. His designated successor, Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris, has yet to prove her personal popularity. She bombed in the debates for the Democratic nomination and quit early. Despite the size of Biden’s victory (a margin of more than seven million votes), the race for the White House in 2024 is wide open.

And so successions are a dangerous time for restorations.

3. Twilight of the Roman Republic

In the most powerful state in the world political tensions rise as two parties are engaged in a bitter struggle for the Senate and indeed the very future of the Republic. Nothing much changes, but in this case we’re not talking about Democrats and Republicans, but Optimates and Populares in the first century BC. The former represented the aristocratic establishment of Rome, the latter “the people”. After a period in which the populists gained power, they suffered a decisive defeat at the hands of Lucius Cornelius Sulla — a veteran Optimas.

But while firmly restoring the old order, Sulla made a mistake — he allowed the son-in-law of Cinna, the defeated populist leader, to escape with his life. The name of the young man? Gaius Julius Caesar.

You probably know what happened next. Caesar goes on to bring the Republic crashing down. There’s nothing that the Optimates, including brilliant intellectuals like Cicero and Cato the Younger, could do to stop him; and Caesar’s assassination only leads to the rise of his nephew, Octavian a.k.a. Augustus, the first in a long line of Roman emperors.

The lesson here is simple. Just because you’ve defeated one populist, it doesn’t mean that another, more capable one, isn’t waiting for you down the line.

4. The last pagan emperor

Here’s another Roman example — this one from the fourth century AD. Flavius Claudius Julianus became emperor in 361, a fervent anti-Christian who was determined to restore Rome to its pagan ways. He’s better known to history as Julian the Apostate — which gives you an idea of how well he succeeded.

Julian’s campaign against Christianity was met with opposition, but that wasn’t the immediate reason for its failure. Rather, the cause of the Apostate’s downfall was something less subtle — namely, a Persian spear in his guts.

The moral of the tale is that if you want your restoration to succeed then a) don’t die two years into your reign and b) don’t start ill-considered wars in the Middle East.

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5. The Meiji Restoration

The Japanese monarchy is old, really old. It stretches back at least 1,500 years and may be centuries older than that. However from 1185 to 1868, the position of the Emperors was effectively subordinate to that of the Shoguns — Japan’s hereditary military rulers.

In 1868, the Shogunate collapsed and the emperors were restored to a position of pre-eminence. However, what looked like a reversion to the (very) old order, was in fact intended to pave the way for something new. The Japanese had realised that they would have to modernise or be colonised, and so feudal isolationism gave way to rapid industrialisation and free trade.

As a restoration it both succeeded and, in first half of the 20th century, went horribly wrong. And yet, in modified form, the monarchy continued after the Second World War — presiding over another great burst of modernisation.

If nothing else, this story shows that restoration can be a dynamic force — and indeed must be if it is to endure.

6. Ed Miliband and the return of Old Labour

When the younger Miliband brother became Labour leader in 2010 it marked a formal end to the New Labour project. Labour would just be Labour again — as if the Blair-Brown era had never happened.

Miliband tried to create some sense of forward momentum with talk of a “new generation”, but no one was fooled. It was Neil Kinnock who blurted out the truth: “we’ve got our party back”.

But not for long. While Old Labour had routed the Blairites, they hadn’t accounted for the Hard Left — for whom Ed Miliband was a mere gateway drug to Jeremy Corbyn.

I don’t suppose that Joe Biden cares to be reminded about Neil Kinnock (their fates have tangled before), but what happened to the Labour Party is of relevance to the Democrats. While veteran socialist Bernie Sanders may be too old to run for President in 2024, his ideological heir, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, will be just old enough. A Left-wing takeover of the party would be a disaster for the Dems, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

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7. Russian democracy

This next example barely counts as a restoration because the pre-Communist history of Russian democracy was so short. Nevertheless, following the final collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russians gave it another go.

The first Russian President, Boris Yeltsin was a heroic, but deeply flawed, leader. The dissolution of a totalitarian system was always going to be chaotic, but what the Russian people couldn’t forgive was that so much of Russia’s remaining wealth ended up in so few hands. In 1999, Yeltsin stood down, to be replaced by Vladimir Putin — who would restore order, but very much on his terms. Russia’s second experiment with democracy had come to end.

Allegations of corruption could also prove toxic to the Biden administration. The controversy surrounding his son’s business dealings isn’t going away, but there’s a wider issue too. The rise of Donald Trump was fuelled by public anger against the elites. The people who had driven America into war and then crashed the economy were still rich and powerful despite eight years of Barack Obama’s “change” presidency. Trump was an instrument of long-overdue punishment.

If, over the next four years, America’s oligarchs are still flourishing  while ordinary Americans suffer through a painful post-Covid recovery, then expect the voters to send the elites another message. Only louder this time.

8. German democracy

Here’s one restoration that was — and is — an indisputable success: the restoration of (West) German democracy after the Second World War. From the ruins of 1945, the leaders of the Federal Republic rebuilt a prosperous economy and a rock-solid democracy.

Of course, they’ve had help: the Allied occupation; the Marshall Plan; the protection of NATO; and the advantages of a European Union designed around German needs. But the most important factor underpinning German democracy is the complete contrast to what came before: total military defeat and the incontestable evidence of Nazi evil. Whatever the failings of the modern German state, and there are many, there is simply no comparison to the position from which it started.

So, what’s the read-across to the US today? None whatsoever, is the answer — and that’s precisely the point. The opposition to Trump may have styled itself “the resistance”, but while he was a uniquely bad president, he was not, in fact, Hitler.

Whether they like or not, the Democrats must remember that their values and those of the cultural establishment are not uncontested. The anger that millions of ordinary Americans feel towards the ruling class has been horribly exploited by charlatans, but that does make it invalid. Free from the likes of Trump, there is a chance that it find a better and more powerful expression.

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9. The return of the Tory grandees

In 1990, Margaret Thatcher was toppled after 15 years as Conservative leader (and 11 as prime minister). As soon as the grocer’s daughter was gone, the old Tory establishment took back control of “their” party.

There were some ups and downs along the way, not least the landslide defeat in 1997. The election of Iain Duncan Smith in 2001 was another hiccup — however he was soon deposed and the power of the Tory Optimates re-asserted. With David Cameron, they found a patrician leader in modern garb. Furthermore, his designated heir, George Osborne, was all set to continue the new dynasty into the 2020s.

But the patricians had miscalculated. Losing the Brexit referendum in 2016 was bad enough, but by 2019 it was clear that they’d permanently lost the party to the Tory Populares, led by Boris Johnson. This was more than a matter of factional to-and-fro, but rather the result of a fundamental shift in the electorate. The populist, pro-Brexit coalition was much bigger than anything that the Cameroons could cobble together.

Political realignment is something that the Biden Democrats should watch out for too. Thanks to Trump’s irresponsibility, they won the Covid-year election, but the details of the result — in particular Republican gains among younger non-white voters — ought to worry them. A patriotic, pro-worker GOP could win the popular vote by building a populist, multi-ethnic coalition.

If the Dems think that such a thing could never happen they should have a word with Labour ex-MPs across the North of England.

10. Reconstruction

Let’s finish where we begun — in America. The most important restoration in American history was the Reconstruction era that followed the Civil War. It was a success in that the USA was put back together again, but a failure in that the South remained a place apart, its black population subject to new forms of oppression.

Could things have turned out differently? The dehumanising evil required to sustain slavery over so many years was always going to be hard to uproot, but the economic marginalisation of the South helped it regrow and take hold again.

Thankfully, the geographical divides today are less extreme than those 150 years ago, but the Biden administration still faces a struggle to heal America. If opportunity and influence remains concentrated in the privileged parts of a few cities, then country will stay divided.

A rebalancing needs to take place in all spheres, cultural as well as economic. Putting a country back together again does not depend on its citizens all agreeing with one another, but it does require mutual respect.

So far, Joe Biden has set the right tone. Following through with right actions won’t be so easy.

As furious crowds flooded on to streets across the country, Robert Kennedy landed in Indiana on the stump to win the Democrat’s presidential nomination. He was, of course, a man who had suffered personal loss in another terrible political murder. Police advised him to cancel his event but instead he spoke from the heart for a few minutes. “What we need in the United States is not division,” he said. “What we need in the United States is not hatred. What we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness; but love and wisdom and compassion toward one another. And a feeling of justice towards those who still suffer within our country whether they be white or they be black.”

Some listeners cried. Others stood still in shock. But elsewhere rioting broke out and cities burned. It was start of the country’s worst unrest since the Civil War, with dozens killed, hundreds of shops destroyed, thousands of citizens injured and tens of thousands arrested. Two months later, Kennedy himself was shot on the campaign trail in California. It felt as though American society were falling apart as cultural, political, social and racial fissures beneath the surface of the nation erupted. African-Americans, anti-war protesters, hippies and women were fighting for profound change. Yet that summer of fire and fury ended with election of Richard Nixon as president.

Now look across the Atlantic. Once again, the US is horribly divided, its cities burn with rage and the curse of racism continues to corrode the world’s richest nation in an election year. Nixon, the former vice-president who had slunk away in 1962 after defeat in his previous presidential campaign, won through overt appeal to white anxiety as he promised to restore order and played into fears of his ‘silent majority’. Today we see Donald Trump pursuing the same strategy but in far less subtle style. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he tweeted, reviving a phrase popularised by the segregationist George Wallace in 1968 as he sent troops on the streets.

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History never repeats itself exactly, even when it ricochets through time. Now there is rioting over the murder of another black man taking place against backdrop of a public health battle rather than bloody conflict in Asia. Yet there is one clear political continuum that links these two turbulent years half a century apart. For 1968 was the year in which the Right took firm control of the Republican Party, driving away the liberals in a strategy that has reached its dark apotheosis in Trump.

Nixon won as a populist, using the language of law and order to lure fearful white Southern, suburban and working class northern voters into the Republican fold to create his conservative majority. This was nasty party politics: brutal, divisive but effective. He repudiated a liberal consensus that had held sway for four decades, speaking directly to some citizens’ anxieties on crime, economic status and racial integration. The success of this strategy, four years after the crushing defeat of conservative champion Barry Goldwater, confounded many analysts.

Nixon’s coalition was solidified by Ronald Reagan as he seduced Southern Democrats with sunny optimism and cemented by the Bush dynasty, then the politics of fear revived by Trump to win narrowly in 2016. The narrative remained much the same: that government is bad, spraying around cash on anti-poverty programmes and threatening traditional values. There was a clear racial subtext. And this contempt for consensus and its ultimate embodiment through the state ended up with the fanaticism seen on the American right today, resisting controls on anything from firearms through to a new disease even as they cause carnage.

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It seems strange to recall when we look at today’s America that it was once — and within my lifetime — southern Democrats who defended segregation. Wallace, the repellent Alabama governor called “the most dangerous racist in America” by Martin Luther King but now quoted admiringly by a president, ran three times for the White House as a Democrat. Meanwhile there was a strain of liberal Republicanism that sought to use the state for progressive ends. Their last standard-bearer was Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York who sought to prevent developers such as Donald Trump’s father, Fred, from practising housing discrimination. King once said that inequality might have ended in months if the south had leaders like ‘Rocky’.

Instead these progressive Republicans were driven out to the delight of centrist Democrats. That seminal election of 1968, with defeat for Rockefeller’s belated bid for the Republican nomination, marked the extinguishing of liberalism in their party. It died when John Lindsay, the New York mayor and another prominent liberal, finished speaking at the convention with an appeal for unity — as noted by Lawrence O’Donnell in Playing With Fire, his fine book on the campaign. Some hoped Lindsay might have become Nixon’s pick for vice-president. Instead, he ended up running for the White House four years later as a Democrat.

This Republican strategy proved electorally successful, winning eight out of 13 presidential races since 1968. But it has ended up handing the party to Trump, backing someone obviously unfit for office while descending into the cesspit of his hate-fuelled populism. Bear in mind that Trump’s first political action in public was paying for full-page newspaper advertisements demanding the execution of five ethnic minority teenagers accused of rape who were later exonerated. Like father, like son. Typically, he has never apologised. Yet the Republican Party remains in thrall to him, even when he advocates the injection of disinfectant to beat a disease that has killed more Americans than the war in Vietnam.

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There is a straight line from Nixon in 1968 to Trump in 2020, a pair of rogues who ended up as president, and it runs straight through the heart of the Republican Party. Shortly before winning the party’s nomination four years ago, Trump even praised his predecessor, a disgraced crook yet a far more serious political player than the reality television star. “What Nixon understood is that when the world is falling apart, people want a strong leader whose highest priority is protecting America first.” His team embraced Nixon as a role model with his appeal to those citizens alarmed by conflict, disruption and racial unrest.

Nixon was a big admirer of Benjamin Disraeli — yet could the US have moved any further from the concept of One Nation politics? Trump has taken that populist appeal to the silent majority and, pushing it to the limits, infused it with Wallace’s bigotry and his own vanity to appeal to a shrinking demographic. Even the right to protest, hailed as a key part of America’s greatness in King’s last speech, seems in jeopardy. So a party that talks of faith and freedom is undermining democracy by colluding with a president who teargases peaceful protesters so he can pose for a publicity stunt with a bible. And a political force that wraps itself in the flag ends up assisting in destruction of America’s global leadership while China uses a pandemic that erupted within its borders to extend its influence.

There are still some liberal conservatives trying to resist the Republican descent into darkness, including prominent governors and members of Congress — although the loss of the combative and widely-respected John McCain leaves a big gap. There are groups such as Defending Democracy Together, founded to fight nativism infecting their party as “antithetical to what it means to be a Republican and what it means to be American”.

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The decision of the former president George W Bush to speak out this week on racism is signifiant on several levels, not least since he has been battling behind the scenes for the soul of his party. If the Democrats can travel from supporting segregationists to backing the first black president over four decades, there must some hope the party can pull back from its far-Right flirtation before it is too late.

Among the most prominent Republican voices against Trump has been David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter and author of Trumpocalypse, a savage indictment of his party’s current leadership. Frum wrote in 2018 about how class and racial divisions enable demagogues. “For two political generations, Republicans have proclaimed the purity of their conservatism. But in a democratic society, conservatism and liberalism are not really opposites. They are different facets of the common democratic creed. What conservatives are conserving, after all, is a liberal order. That truth has been easy to overlook in the friction of partisan politics. It must be reaffirmed now, in this hour of liberal peril.” His wise words ring even truer today.

Far from settling the issue, though, Mueller’s findings merely represented the culmination of just one phase in the interminable Russiagate journey. Now, Trump has apparently endeavoured to rebrand the “scandal” instead as “Obamagate” — so as to almost invert its contours, and depict the true “scandal” as always having been principally about shameful malfeasance on the part of Obama-era security state officials.

The hope, presumably, is that this will tarnish the Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, by association. Whether or not the tactic is actually in Trump’s best political interests is questionable, as it seems doubtful that anyone but the most plugged-in partisans and hobbyists are invested enough in the intricate, often confusing details to even know what he’s talking about. Nonetheless, Trump’s complaints — while characteristically over-simplified and bombastic — do have some substantive merit.

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To understand why, one must turn back the clock a bit. In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s shocking victory in 2016, huge portions of the left-liberal US political and media class collectively decided that the executive branch of the federal government — soon to be headed by someone they regarded as unthinkably grotesque — had lost all legitimacy.

In desperation, they vested their hopes in unelected members of the executive branch, namely the national security bureaucracy, to constrain or even overthrow Trump — because they saw him not just as a demented fascist madman, but as an active conspirator with a hostile foreign nation in Russia. Josh Marshall, the publisher of the liberal blog Talking Points Memo, encapsulated this mentality when he wrote in November 2016: “Let’s hope there’s a deep state, and if there is that they have their shit together.”

It was in this frenzied climate that the upper echelons of the security state apparatus, buoyed by the eager assent and even conscious participation of the elite media, seized the power to launch unprecedented encroachments into domestic political affairs. By now, many of these astonishing encroachments have been well-documented.

One of the most egregious is the spellbinding saga of Carter Page, a middling “adviser” with only the most tangential connection to Trump, who nonetheless found himself subjected to massively invasive state surveillance on the basis of the so-called “Steele Dossier” — the infamous collection of preposterous rumours and gossip alleging vast conspiratorial collaboration between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

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Page’s ordeal is just one example of many. As progressively more information trickles out about how these absurd security state machinations took shape in the hysterical days of 2016 and 2017, by way of newly revealed court filings and Congressional transcripts, Trump is being granted more ammunition to batter his Democratic opponents with, simply because those machinations were so patently ill-founded. Hence the logic of the “Obamagate” rebranding effort.

Armed with the fact that no conspiracy took place, Trump can justifiably claim to have been targeted for unwarranted punishment by members of the previous administration. And the latest developments bolstering Trump’s case involve new information relating to his beleaguered former National Security Adviser, Mike Flynn, who was forced out of office in February 2017.

Flynn’s great crime was to take part in phone conversations with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, during the presidential transition period in December 2016, and urge him not to overreact to punitive measures imposed by the outgoing Obama administration. That’s it. That’s the affront that impelled high-ranking FBI officials to conduct an entrapment-style interview with Flynn in the White House, which resulted in him telling them a purported “lie” about his innocuous conversations with Kislyak, which then created enough political pressure for Trump to capitulate and fire Flynn. That this should be the action that resulted in his firing is doubly ironic, given Flynn’s predilections toward extreme hawkishness in other foreign policy domains. Because in this rare instance, he was actually seeking to ameliorate tensions — with a nuclear-armed power, no less.

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Eventually Flynn pleaded guilty to “making a false statement” to the FBI, even though just-released documents show that the FBI officials who conducted his interview “had the impression at the time that he was not lying”. While there is still some ambiguity as to the exact chronology around if and when these security state officials had caused Flynn’s identity to be “unmasked” — a concept heavily promoted by Trump and the Republican commentariat — there is no doubt that Flynn became the object of bizarrely vigorous federal law enforcement attention during late 2016 / early 2017, on grounds that increasingly appear fraudulent. Underscoring the absurdity of the affair, FBI officials even eagerly conjured up a half-baked theory that Flynn may have violated the Logan Act — a comically obsolete statute enacted in 1799 under the administration of President John Adams — in order to justify their wild goose chase.

Flynn’s eventual sacking as a result of this FBI-manufactured controversy — aided by strategic leaks to the Washington Post — marked a turning point in the development of the early portion of the “Russian collusion” narrative that would subsequently engulf Trump’s first several years in office. Now there was tangible proof that such manufactured controversies could tangibly impede Trump’s ability to govern. Trump himself was evidently oblivious to this dynamic, as an anecdote relayed in Volume II of the Mueller Report illustrates:

On February 14, 2017, the day after Flynn’s resignation, the President had lunch at the White House with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. According to Christie, at one point during the lunch the President said, “Now that we fired Flynn, the Russia thing is over.” Christie laughed and responded, “No way.”

The anecdote portrays Trump as clueless that Flynn’s forced departure had signalled only the beginning of the unfurling political hysteria caused by the “Russia issue” (its exact contours seldom well-defined in the press, Congress, or really by anyone.) Indeed, the “issue” escalated dramatically over the next several months, with the Special Counsel investigation headed by Mueller initiated in May 2017.

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Trump’s seemingly blasé attitude at the time was informed by his belief that there was no Russia conspiracy to be uncovered, therefore there was nothing for him to worry about. He did not sufficiently appreciate the extent to which security state officials (as well as the opposition party and much of the media) would pull out all the stops to generate the impression of a conspiracy, by furiously hyping every incremental “bombshell” development, none of which actually pointed to a conspiracy but did create a general sense of sinister wrongdoing — accompanied by breathless speculation that the next domino was ready to fall at any moment.

But as we now all know, and as should have been obvious all along, there were no more dominoes. Over a year after Mueller’s final Report, though, there still has been no serious reckoning with what really happened. Recognising that Trump’s recurrent complaints about the matter are correct has long been essentially impossible for most Democrats, liberals, and leftists. Conceding that Trump could be right about anything, or even that his grievances contain the smallest kernel of truth, is widely seen in these quarters as tantamount to endorsing fascism, Nazism, the Kremlin, or some terrifying combination thereof. “Obamagate” is Trump’s attempt to force just such a reckoning — one that is indeed long overdue.

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However, Trump does not necessarily aid the process of coming to an accurate collective understanding of “Russiagate” by describing it as “Obamagate”. This imputes an excessively partisan motivation to the security state officials who manufactured the drama.

Figures such as the former Director of the FBI, James Comey, the former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan, the Deputy Director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, and the former Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein — all of whom connived to one degree or another against Trump — could not be reasonably said to have acted on the basis of pure partisan animus. Comey and Brennan, for instance, were initially appointed to high-profile positions by George W. Bush. Rosenstein, a Republican, was himself appointed by Trump. What united them was not partisanship per se, but their immersion in the peculiarly bipartisan ideology of the American national security state.

Trump wasn’t viewed with such frantic alarmism by these figures simply because he was a Republican. Rather, they viewed Trump — incorrectly, for the most part — as an agent of subversion. And so the term “Obamagate”, with its tedious invocation of the legacy of Watergate, obscures the real culprit of this fiasco: the myopic and irrational pathologies of the American security state, which continue under Trump unabated.

On a freezing January night in Chicago – while a polar vortex was sucking degrees away from the normal winter cold – an actor called Justin Smollett was walking home from a Subway sandwich shop.

Smollett is black and gay and, in America, quite famous: he stars in a TV hip-hop drama called Empire. He hates Donald Trump and often says so.

What happened next made him even more famous. Smollett was beaten up by two men wearing Donald Trump ‘Make America Great Again’ hats. “This is MAGA country,” they screamed. Then they poured bleach over him and put a rope around his neck. And ran off.

Smollett went home, called the police, issued a statement, and the machine took over.

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First, the media machine. Relatively mild stuff from the Washington Post: “To many, the Smollett incident — and the political nature of the assault — is yet another reminder for many black gay Americans that this president’s vision of a ‘great America’ does not appear to include them.”

Then it really got going. Jamil Smith of Rolling Stone tweeted, “The brutal attack on him in Chicago appears to be yet another example not just of further moral decay, but of the brand of terrorism that still doesn’t seem to spark enough response by Americans.”

ABC did an interview with Smollett in which he cried. They asked him who he was angry with and why. Could he ever properly recover?

Then the politicians waded in. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, two Democrats running for the 2020 presidential nomination, called it a “modern-day lynching.” The Democratic party’s biggest star attacked one of the media outlets that had vaguely suggested the facts of the case were not yet proven or might be merely a mugging with a racial overtone. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez tweeted:

“There is no such thing as ‘racially charged.’ This attack was not ‘possibly’ homophobic. It was a racist and homophobic attack. If you don’t like what is happening to our country, then work to change it. It is no one’s job to water down or sugar-coat the rise of hate crimes.”

Perhaps you can guess what happened next.

The initial story – seized upon with such passionate certainty by the mainstream media and by senior politicians – turned out to be, well, less than solid.

Smollett is now accused of making it up. Or, even odder, hiring people to attack him. Sources allege Smollett paid a couple of Nigerian brothers, one of whom is his personal trainer, $3,500 — and gave them a bit extra to buy the rope. They were arrested and released without charge.

And then someone gave the game away – the wider game that goes so far beyond this troubled young man and speaks more of the troubled country he inhabits. Nana Efua Mumford, of the Washington Post, wrote this:

“If Smollett’s story is found to be untrue … The incident would be touted as proof that there is a Leftist conspiracy to cast Trump supporters as violent, murderous racists. It would be the very embodiment of ‘fake news.’ And that reason, more than any other, is why I need this story to be true.”

“I need this story to be true.”   

Wow.

Does nobody at the Washington Post, or anywhere else, care any more about what is true? I mean, in the old-fashioned sense, the Watergate sense? Is that not a thing anymore? At the Post? At ABC News? At CBS or CNN?

Or indeed at Fox News. The Right-wing online brigade – and the Fox team – have fallen on the Smollett story with great gusto, having, of course, ignored it at first. In other words, they too are not exactly innocent parties in this train-wreck.

But that is not the fight that matters. What matters is that, in Trump’s America, those who used to be guardians of civility and judiciousness have deserted their posts. It’s arguably the president’s greatest achievement. He has turned everyone into an image of himself.

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The reason why l’affaire Smollett matters so much is the clarity of the disaster. It will lead to searching questions in the Democratic party about the nature of the campaign they want to run in 2020. Up to now, victimhood has been the new apple pie on the American Left. Poor Justin Smollett – wealthy and well-connected and successful – seems to have been trying, albeit in a bizarre manner, to get himself a piece of the action.

As the truth emerges (and Smollett could face charges himself if the incident is proven a hoax), the centrist Democrats will be keeping those ill-judged tweets and statements from their woke opponents up their sleeves. The question, they will pose, is: does the party want to be the home of faux-victims? Can it stand for more? It is possible that Smollett has done real damage to the Left. But is is also true that he has provided what Americans call, ‘a teachable moment.’

The centrists will say: do not fall for victimhood stories from trendy folks from Los Angeles. Do not squeal at Americans about their homophobia or racism (both of which are real of course) in a way that drowns out messages about health-care and employment.

In this, Justin Smollett has done some folks a favour.

UPDATE: Justin Smollett has now been arrested on suspicion of filing a false report.