One of the most important representatives of that bygone PC era is back in the press: the African-American feminist critic Bell Hooks, (1952-2021) whose writing on art and politics has been recently reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic. Originally published in 1995, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics helped put in circulation a set of concepts that have since become, we might regret, part of both academic and middlebrow criticism. From “problematic” and “cultural appropriation” to “palimpsest” and “the politics of the visual”, her theoretical vocabulary remains current on the cultural Left, far beyond the specific intersectional feminism and anti-capitalist thought in which Hooks was most grounded. Even as the resurgent American Right, for all its supposed populism, reprises those signature economic policies of Reagan that Hooks railed against, her views on art and culture might now offer it some warning.

To get an insight into her contradictory desires and demands on art, it is helpful to start with her name. Hooks, who died in 2021, was born Gloria Jean Watkins and re-named herself in honor of her great-grandmother. For some decades in the late 20th century, a number of prominent African-American intellectuals and celebrities, such as Malcolm X (Malcolm Little) and Muhammad Ali (Cassius Clay), took on new names to express their sense of distance from the dominant white establishment. More generally, giving oneself a new, chosen name, even outside of any obviously political context, is an act of self-determination and experimentation that it seems rude for others to begrudge (even if the name is cringe). But Hooks also insisted on having her name spelled in lower-case, supposedly to draw attention away from herself and towards her work. This is, of course, an awfully ostentatious way to be humble.

While I think civility requires us to call somebody, say, called “Jennifer” “Jen” (or, for that matter, “John”) if that’s what she wants to be called, civility still has its limits. One of the reasons for both the overreach of and subsequent backlash against PC culture in the Nineties and wokeness today is that polite, well-meaning liberals prove again and again unable to admit this. Just as I’m not going through the grammatical inconvenience of using Judith Butler’s preferred “they/them” pronouns to refer to, well, her, neither am I going to irritate Spellcheck by decapitalizing “Bell Hooks”. We can refuse requests for attention, deference, and extra-delicate care, even minor ones, even ones made by members of disadvantaged groups, without thereby enrolling ourselves on the side of Reaction. Besides the truly political choices we have to make about who is included in our communities and what is owed to them, there are many decisions of far lower stakes in which our moral status is not at issue.

Hooks’ thinking about art, and much else besides, turned on her shifting, troubled thinking about the boundaries between these two kinds of choices. On the one hand, she wanted art to be many things that are not political, and that are indeed likely to appear incompatible, or at least in tension, with being political: personal, excessive, transgressive, and sensuous. “Political art” as a phrase, conjures up images of propaganda posters with simple, unambiguous messages, commanding audiences to buy war bonds, unite with workers throughout the world, or otherwise fall in line. Defending artists she admired, like the sculptor Alison Saar, from critics who found their work insufficiently engaged with representing the problems of African-American life, Hooks argued that providing expansive and enfranchising sites of pleasure is its own sort of political work. It’s an argument that at times seems convincing, and at other times seems no more than an alibi to protect unpolitical beauty. Her prose, too, could slip into lyrical self-indulgence and celebration of irresponsibility. An essay, “Women Artists: The Creative Process”, begins charmingly:

“I am a girl who dreams of leisure, always have. Reverie has always been necessary to my existence. I have needed long hours where I am stretched out, wearing silks, satins and cashmeres, just alone with myself, embraced by the beauty around me. I have always been a girl for fibers, for textiles, and for the feel of comforting cloth against my skin. When I have adorned myself just so, I am ready for the awesome task of just lingering…”

This lovely evocation of herself covered in blankets on the couch leads, improbably, to musings on what her writing and thinking owe to the white men of the Black Mountain school, one of the main scenes of 20th-century avant-garde poetry in the United States. One is reminded of Robert Duncan, who expanded the range of American poetry, linking the open, vatic rhetoric of Walt Whitman with the erudition and syntactical innovation of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky. It is one of those stirring, thought-provoking essays where the reader really cannot know what will come next, and even one thoroughly prejudiced against PC sacred cows will find himself surprised and disarmed.

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But Hooks, like almost all of us, wanted art to be something other than a domain where we can linger in pleasure and surprise. Only the most radical aesthete approaches the museum, cinema or magazine rack without some desire, conscious or not, to find among the images displayed something that will be good for a community of which he is a member (which might be as small as himself, or as large as humanity). We might, if we are liberals of a certain kind, hope for art that is so beautiful and so apparently unpolitical that it distracts its beholders from the clash of polemics that constitute our unending “culture wars” — but this too is really a wish for art to serve a political end (the end of suspending politics).

Hooks wanted art to be a political force by which desirable representations of minorities would be disseminated, and structural inequalities exposed and challenged. Throughout Art on My Mind, she praised artists who seemed to produce such images, and attacked those who she sees as trafficking in negative stereotypes or in giving too much attention to white, male, etc., artists, critics and institutions. Hooks had a political scorecard, and everything — really, everything — could be tallied on it.

She blasted, for example, the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat as a sell-out whose art and “life” she alleged amounted to a “minstrel show” for wealthy white art patrons. Still more deliriously, she criticized Black basketball star Michael Jordan for appearing alongside Loony Tunes characters: “In the commercials where he speaks to the cartoon figure of Bugs Bunny as though they were equals — peers — his elegance and grace of presence is ridiculed and mocked.” Whatever one might think about Basquiat’s art (to my mind, neo-expressionist crap making lazy “references” to history, worth throwing in the dumpster of Eighties mistakes with Julian Schnabel and Anselm Kiefer) or Space Jam, it seems at best highly debatable that their success was driven by anti-black racism.

Conservatives today who roll their eyes at such dubious, over-the-top analyses should keep in mind that there are thousands of YouTube video essays and tens of thousands of lengthy X threads in which hysterical white men denounce the super-abundance of racial minorities in advertisements and super-hero movies. Still more embarrassingly, Right-wing intellectuals such as Stephen Adubato desperately try to attribute political significance and “based” messages to the work of Andy Warhol and Bad Bunny, while Matt Walsh bemoans that the Left “hates beauty” (an accusation that unfortunately invites reflection on his own appearance). Even as cultural critics on the Right have bemoaned that a censorious, tediously insistent sort of progressive politics has stifled creativity in the arts, and fantasize that the “not Left” is a freer and more expressive space for beautiful, non-political art, the cultural Right remains mired in the contradictory logics of the old PC Left.

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This will make it, perhaps, difficult for the Right to grapple with its recent success. In the United States and elsewhere, whether by winning elections or shifting the terms of political debate, the Right has won a number of victories that may add up to a reconfiguration of common sense on matters ranging from immigration to gender. Recent sympathetic New York Times profiles of figures like Curtis Yarvin and Jonathan Keeperman demonstrate that just as powerful mainstream institutions once ushered into the spotlight black, feminist, and other culturally Left radicals, now they pivot to integrate spokesmen of the far-Right.

Much of Art on My Mind finds Hooks obstinately, seethingly, refusing to acknowledge that by the Nineties liberal institutions, and a broad American public, even amid the rollback of New Deal and Great Society-era progressive economic policies, were eager for black art and culture. And that even included works that seemed thoroughly oppositional, sometimes hostile, to the white audiences who loved them. Amid this confusing conjuncture of economic, political and cultural shifts, Hooks often held to a narrow, unenlightening opposition between sell-out artists and intellectuals who allowed themselves to be thus commodified, and stalwart resisters who refused the compromises success demanded. Yet often, in both the eras of PC and woke, what white critics and audiences most desired was black art (and writing — witness the success of Hooks herself) that declared itself to be in the latter category.

The spiral of denunciations against supposed sell-outs only disguises the fundamental dynamics by which the liberal establishment periodically wobbles from Right to Left by co-opting yesterday’s radicals. At least since Trump’s first election almost a decade ago, Right-wing intellectuals find themselves regularly attacked by former fans, and each other, not only as “sell-outs” but often as “feds”, “glowies”, and other terms suggesting they are only a controlled opposition actually serving the establishment. In this respect, and in its constitutive tension between a wish to save “beauty” from politics and a wish to politicize beauty on its own behalf, today’s Right is heir to Hooks. If only the boys at Passage Press shared her dream of leisure!

The terms we use to express this delusion vary depending on political persuasion. In the United States, progressives can see themselves as dissenting members of a “resistance” to Trump, while centrists oppose both the President and woke shibboleths by holding “heterodox” views. Rightward, those in Trumpworld denounce opponents as automata. Witness tech billionaire Sam Altman bending the knee to Trump on X, where he apologized for his earlier opposition to the President: “i wish i had done more of my own thinking and definitely fell in the npc trap.”

Thinking for oneself is perhaps most difficult among communities — Left, Right, and center — that celebrate ostensible dissent. Defining independent thinking in terms of outspoken opposition to dominant views, would-be dissenters often end up falling into either mere contrarianism or uncritical adherence to views popular in their own circles.

Few American thinkers have confronted this problem as unsparingly as the 20th-century cultural critic Harold Rosenberg (1906-1978). The central concerns of his wide-ranging life in letters were paradoxes of non-conformity in a society at once founded on individual freedom and dominated by clichés. He rose to prominence in a postwar United States where unprecedented national wealth and power combined with a growing unease among intellectuals about the stultifying effects of mass media and the incapacity of citizens to exercise independent judgment. Our collective repetition of clichés and inauthentic opinions, regardless of the subject matter, degrades the freedom of thought on which politics — and indeed ethics — depend.

Best known today for his advocacy of Abstract Expressionist painting, Rosenberg’s collections of essays — all of them now out of print — trace his struggles against what he saw as deceptive forms of pseudo-freedom in everything from the visual arts to politics. For decades, his career was marginal and precarious. He subsisted on a combination of freelance essay-writing and consulting work for the Advertising Council of America — a job that contradicted his public condemnations of American capitalism. After the publication of his first book, The Tradition of the New (1959), however, Rosenberg was not only famous, but a bona fide member of the establishment he had once criticized. He took a professorship at the University of Chicago and became an art critic for The New Yorker, where he often lamented whatever seemed to be fashionable in contemporary painting (he especially loathed Andy Warhol, whom he saw as a boring fraud). He became one of the country’s most influential critics from the Sixties until his death in 1978.

But it was at the magazines aimed at fellow intellectuals where Rosenberg emerged as an insightful and divisive, if relatively obscure, critic. He was long associated with the Partisan Review, one of the leading “little magazines” of the American mid-century. Its editors and writers prided themselves on their independence from both American popular culture and dogmatic Leftism. Throughout the late Thirties and Forties, their line had shifted from an anti-Soviet Marxism towards the political center, while retaining a small but influential readership and intellectual cachet. Although politically in favor of democracy, the Partisan Review was culturally elitist. It put into circulation early critiques of mass culture, and presented the intellectual in a capitalist democracy as obligated to reinforce his sense of superiority over the swine feeding at the trough of popular culture.

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By 1948, Rosenberg’s relationships with many members of the circle around the magazine were increasingly fraught. He hoped to attain a position at the magazine’s helm but personal qualities such as belligerent self-assurance and a habit of sleeping with other men’s wives handicapped him. Among the rivalries he nurtured during this period, his reciprocal hatred of fellow Partisan Review writer Clement Greenberg was particularly important. While both men were, along with the art collector Peggy Guggenheim, the earliest and most intelligent champions of Abstract Expressionism, they disagreed about why the movement mattered.

For Greenberg the work of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and others was the latest development in a centuries-long process of Western art moving away from literal-minded depictions of reality and towards the free play of form and color. Rosenberg, in contrast, saw what he preferred to call “Action Painting” as a decisive break with the past. He regarded these paintings as expressions on canvas of the postwar existential crisis articulated by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus: a response to what he took to be the collapse of traditional systems of meaning and the threat of nuclear annihilation. According to Rosenberg, a “good” work of art was an authentic one, by which the artist was able to register his own free, creative, personal grappling with the situations that imperil us all.

As he developed his interpretation of abstract painting as the visual equivalent of existentialism, Rosenberg became increasingly skeptical of the intellectuals closest to him. His sharpest essay in this vein, “The Herd of Independent Minds”, appeared in the Jewish magazine Commentary in 1948. As his biographer Debra Bricker Balken observes, he had intended to publish it in the Partisan Review, possibly hoping to offend his former friends at the magazine.

Thinkers associated with that era’s little magazines — the distant ancestors of n+1 on the Left and The Point or Liberties in the center today — wrote as if they were separate from American mass culture. But they were, he warned, only members of a subcultural bubble with its own clichés and jargon (these days, every little magazine seems to have its own merchandise as well), part of a “mass culture of small groups”.

This is bad enough, although perhaps smug, self-satisfied in-group coziness is the inevitable consequence of belonging to any set (and must be preferable to the alternative of having no interlocutors). As Joseph Keegin has pointed out, for example, Right-wing populists tend to repeat comforting political slogans identical in form (if opposite in content) to the much-mocked “In This House We Believe” signs of their progressive opponents. It could be added that even small groups outside the bustle of mass politics still depend on some measure of sloganeering and dogmatizing, however much smaller in scale.

We’re always bound to impose some allegiance to common beliefs in order to have a community at all, even a community of intellectuals. But there are some delusions, Rosenberg hoped, that we can avoid. He particularly admonished his Left-liberal free-thinking friends for imagining themselves to be educating the public by speaking, in authoritative tones, about the supposed features and needs of “our” moment or generation. This was, he hoped, a curable vice — although it remains a common one today. Commentators, as a glance at Substack will show you, still love to yap about the “vibes” in which we are all supposedly participating, delineating the purported qualities of ever shorter micro-periods of contemporary history.

Invariably such pundits, Rosenberg noted, write as if they were somehow not themselves caught up in the trends of the day. While acting as an anthropologist of the shifting folk beliefs of the masses — or of rival sets of intellectuals — one fails to notice how one’s own thought is shaped by peers, clichés, and the pressure to conform.

He called on intellectuals to follow the paths of the best artists, those who confront the confusing, disjointed, overwhelming aspects of their individual experience, which somehow “never belongs to the right time and place”. Instead of taking a bad faith stance by which you imagine that other people are caught up in vibes which you, as a free thinker, can analyze, Rosenberg suggests you start by tracking how your own experience comes into friction with the received ideas of your tribe and the limits of your self-categorizations. Only then can you hope to interact with others authentically, rather than giving just another twist to clichés currently in favor.

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Rosenberg, however, often despaired that neither in punditry nor painting was such authenticity possible (a fear he shared with Arendt). After all, as he was writing in 1948, existentialism had already become a fad, and abstract painting was about to become a top-selling commodity on the global art market. The arc of his own career may seem discouraging, taking him from independent little magazines to The New Yorker, perhaps the most condescendingly smug of America’s middle-brow publications. A typical New Yorker essay (such as this recent piece by historian Daniel Immerwahr), whether in the age of Arendt and Rosenberg or in the present, appeals to a supposed consensus view among urban, educated upper-middle-class liberals, while offering what the writer presents as a surprising twist on that common sense. Such writing confirms the reader in their sense of having the capacity to allow their opinions to be gently challenged by well-edited experts. It perpetuates a delusion of free thought.

Yet perhaps there is room for hope even here. If neither small readerships nor noisy pride in thinking for oneself makes for genuine intellectual freedom, neither perhaps does the opposite mean conformism. Arendt, after all, wrote her indictment of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, in which she made her most perceptive — and controversial — judgments on the power of cliché, in the pages of The New Yorker. Then again, amid the rancorous debates surrounding her reportage, few readers at the time were able to make sense of her now-famous arguments about the “banality of evil”. We cannot assure ourselves that we are thinking freely because we have unpopular opinions, or because our ideas seem to be misunderstood. We must conversely at least hope that sometimes genuinely novel, authentically held, and, more importantly, true ideas can be expressed even through the channels of mass media.

In accordance with his own emphasis on the difficulty of cultivating freedom of thought, Rosenberg had no direct intellectual heirs. His closest student and literary executor, Michael Denneny, abandoned a nearly completed PhD thesis on the history of aesthetic theory (under the direction of Arendt) to become a publisher of a gay men’s magazine that imitated the form and tone of The New Yorker. It was as if he were out to prove that a glossy commercial publication could both rally a community (or consumer demographic) and remain true to Rosenberg’s legacy. More recently, in a similar spirit, the art critic Travis Jeppesen, newly named senior editor of Artforum, has called for a revival of Rosenberg’s highly personal and engaged style of writing about art, by which works and artists were judged by the power (or failure) to incite spectators to think anew.

Artforum, rocked by debates about the war in Gaza, and operating amid a global arts market devoted equally to pseudo-political posturing and pseudo-intellectual sales pitches for expensive commodities of dubious aesthetic value, is surely an imperfect venue for independent thought. But the lesson of Rosenberg’s critique in “Herd of Independent Minds” is that there is, in fact, no publication, network, style, or attitude in which we can take permanent refuge from the danger of cliché, or the still more insidious danger of believing ourselves — and people like us — to have secured both intellectual independence and membership in a group.

Or take divorce. Even high-profile advocates for stable romantic relationships such as Rod Dreher and Andrew Sullivan have spoken about the breakdown of their marriages. Both writers disagree about a number of issues, gay marriage chief among them. But they both celebrate marriage, based on romantic love, as a stabilising force in a fraying society. Accordingly, it seems highly valuing love in one’s personal life, and even promoting it as a political force, is not enough to guarantee long-lasting desire. Romantic love, clearly, demands reconsideration.

There is no better guide to this urgent task than Eva Illouz, the world’s leading sociologist of love. Her first study of the topic, Consuming the Romantic Utopia (1997), explores how, over the past century, Westerners have tried to reconcile their characteristic jumble of conflicting wishes and goals: to “fall in love” and be swept away by passion, to meet a proper spouse and share a stable household, to be equal to and independent of one’s partner while preserving certain eroticised elements of the older inegalitarian system of gender (we may expect men, for example, to ask women out, and initiate sex, while punishing awkward or ill-timed advances as masculinist aggression). We put incredible, even impossible, demands on love — and on our lovers.

Our pre-modern ancestors would have found it odd to imagine romantic love as the basis of stable relationships in which children are raised and property transmitted. They tended to see passion as a force that was perhaps exalted, even divine, but certainly out of the ordinary, and most probably a threat to the rational management of such important matters as marriage. We, in contrast (and with some self-contradiction), often consider love to be both a powerful, disruptive emotion that falls on us out of the blue and also a connection between well-suited individuals who can build a common life. We think of families no longer as lineages that perpetuate themselves through alliances, but as small units founded on love. Love is now expected to accomplish a lot.

But many individuals do still manage to have reasonably happy romantic relationships today — especially in the middle and upper classes. The class character of contemporary romantic success — that is, the collapse of marriage among the working classes —suggests that the ability to fulfil romantic aspirations, like economic ones, is increasingly dependent on “soft skills” from which too many individuals are excluded. Sustaining relationships despite the multiple, contradictory demands that we place on them, requires that romantic partners have a sophisticated capacity to recognise, articulate, and respect their own and other people’s emotions. Perhaps the central skill transmitted in couple’s therapy is the ability to say “I’m feeling” this or that.

Illouz’s cautious optimism about contemporary love, tempered with a Leftist critique of satisfying relationships becoming the privilege of the well-off like steady work and healthcare, has collapsed over the following decades. Across hundreds of interviews conducted throughout the world, she has studied the effects of the internet on dating and desire, and come to troubling conclusions.

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In this she is hardly alone. A number of contemporary philosophers, such Byung-Chul Han and Alain Badiou criticise online dating. They take the popularity of apps like Tinder to be symptomatic of the loss of concrete, particular forms of attachment in an increasingly atomised and virtualised world. They observe that people on such platforms encounter each other, and present themselves, as commodities.

Illouz echoes some of these concerns, but goes beyond the backward-looking lamentations of critical theorists. Her first sustained analysis of internet-based romance, appearing in Cold Intimacies (2007), points to the ways that dating online resembles shopping. More originally, it also attends to the disillusioned resignation of her interviewees about the “dating market”, which they saw as simultaneously hopeless and inescapable. As she said, “this cynicism marks a radical departure from the traditional culture of romanticism”, and seems to arise, in part, from “the routinisation produced by the sheer volume of encounters”. After flipping through 500 profiles on Tinder, one is naturally cynical about love. And one keeps flipping.

In her next sustained study of how the internet is changing practices and ideas of contemporary romance, Why Love Hurts (2012), Illouz took her thinking a step further. Our desire today is shadowed not only by cynicism, produced by the predictable, endlessly re-iterable character of online dating, but also by the internet’s lure of information. Whether we match with someone on an app, or fall for them first by encountering their social media profile, we can gather a great deal of information about them without ever meeting them in person.

In the past, falling in love with a stranger would mean first seeing a beautiful body, which would incite idealisation and fantasy. For some famous lovers, like Dante or Petrarch, such a vision of the beloved might be an end in itself. In more ordinary cases, the lover could, with effort, learn more about the person whose beauty had so dazzled him or her, and gradually that knowledge would allow the sometimes overwhelming passion of love to become a stabler foundation for a lifelong match.

Today, however, we can accumulate a great deal of knowledge about someone prior to seeing them as an embodied person. It is easy, and common, to “cyber-stalk” a crush, or to become a “simp” fixated on a person whom one has never met, but whose tastes, travels, friends, etc., one knows in apparently intimate detail. Illouz argues that when we do this, our “emotions are largely self-generated… anchored in technological objects that objectify and make present the virtual person”. Rather than being directed towards the person with whom we are apparently obsessed, this form of internet-based romantic imagination allows us to manipulate a series of virtual objects (profiles, posts, information gleaned from searches) to sustain pleasurable feelings in solitude.

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Much like the consumption of pornography, these practices do bear witness to desire, but desire in a peculiar form, one that Illouz argues is poorly suited to be a foundation for the pursuit and continuance of romantic connection. Where thinkers such as Han and Badiou see our increasingly internet-based society as an emotional wasteland from which desire has been banished, Illouz perceives that the internet fuels an intense, unusual kind of desire that we struggle to integrate into our traditional ideas about love.

Quasi-pornographic, self-generated desire, like pervasive cynicism, arises almost inevitably out of our experience of encountering other people through the internet. Both, in different ways, disrupt the possibility of moving successfully from an initial idealisation of the other person to a real, sustainable relationship with them. This strange form of desire incites us to see the other as a set of data points to be manipulated for the purpose of private fantasising; while cynical thinking leads us to see the other as one of a vast number of interchangeable such sets available online, behind none of which is a real person to love us. Gooner-ism and doomer-ism go hand-in-hand, combining a pornographic form of yearning and a pessimistic vision of the world to reinforce already lonely individuals’ isolation from each other.

The mismatch between our historically unprecedented experiences of internet-driven, self-generated, cynical desire, on the one hand, and, on the other, our received ideas about how erotic longings can connect us to other people, seems to be confirmed in, for example, the writing of literary critic Becca Rothfeld. In a disturbing essay, she describes her cyber-stalking of an ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend as a paradigmatic case of falling in love, and a lesson on the apparent impossibility of truly knowing another person — rather than, as Illouz might help us see it, a peculiarly recent form of playing with one’s own feelings, a kind of emotional and intellectual masturbation, against which critics might do well to start their own “No Fap” movement.

Taking love seriously as a political issue, as something critical to private and collective life that is over-burdened with conflicting demands, eroded by economic inequalities and perverted by the internet, demands more than the wankery of personal essays or the impotent exhortations of Dreher and Sullivan. It would require a new ethics of erotic life. While therapists can teach us how to name, regulate and govern our emotions, and moral traditions teach us to channel our sexual desires, we are now entering an uncharted territory in which our feelings and longings increasingly orient us away from, rather than towards, other people.

But, amid all the morbid aspects of internet-based pseudo-sociality, people do, in some cases, meet online and successfully transition into real relationships. Some people are, in spite of everything, still happily in love — and all of us have a stake in understanding how they manage to do it. If we build on Illouz’s work, adapting it to an extremely online era, we can ask what skills (management of emotion, desire, and perhaps especially, attention) permit love to survive, and how they can be taught to the seemingly growing and large number of people who lack them.

In the 1990 reissue of The Culture of Narcissism, he called on Americans to rediscover the tradition of “populism”. Based on values of “competence”, “discipline” and “work ethic”, the populist tradition in America was associated with aspirations of economic self-sufficiency and social stability. It had often found expression in apparently backward-looking political movements aimed at protecting small farmers and artisans from the encroachments of industrial capitalism.

Lasch’s defence of populism, however, contradicted key aspects of his analysis of postwar American society. He recognised, for instance, that the vanishing worldview of Middle America was primarily an ideology by which elites of the 19th and early 20th centuries manipulated the masses. Instilling in ordinary people a love of work and aspirations to property ownership was not necessarily in their interests, but it did reflect the needs of the American economy at the time. By the mid-20th century, as the US transformed into a consumer society, elite ideology shifted towards an emphasis on “authenticity” and an obsession with self-image. Lasch understood this, but nevertheless insisted that the ideology of the “old order” would be indispensable in escaping the present. This amounted to the sort of “Ghost Dance” mode of resistance Kurt Vonnegut parodied in his early novel Cat’s Cradle — the elevation of nostalgic pieties into a political programme.

Lasch’s sympathy for populism also conflicted with his psychoanalytic perspective. He emphasised in The Culture of Narcissism that our capacity for rational collective action — that is, for decent politics — is being degraded by our increasingly thin and inward-looking sense of selfhood. We have withdrawn from associational life (political parties, unions, clubs, churches) and immersed ourselves in short-lived, increasingly virtual pseudo-relationships. And so we are less and less able to see the public sphere as an area for substantive debate and action toward common ends, rather than as a stage for narcissistic self-expression.

We are, in turn, enthralled by a new kind of elite who rule us through their celebrity. We have replaced the traditional patron-client structure of politics (we follow elites because they advance our material interests) with a kind of cheerleading (or simping) for figures who represent our “values” in a political theatre. Our populist politicians, from Donald Trump to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and their supporters exemplify this narcissistic new politics.

It is, in a sense, both too late and too soon for populism as Lasch envisioned it. Populism was the expression of an economic order that no longer exists. Nor can we revive or replace it until we have escaped our infatuation with the self. What we need, to escape this vicious cycle, is a politics that makes us capable of politics.

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In 1984, Lasch wrote a sequel to The Culture of Narcissism, The Minimal Self, which remains relatively neglected. In it, Lasch explored this paradox. He points beyond the shallow populism with which he is sometimes identified, and towards a politics aimed at the restitution of our psychological integrity. Arguing that the division of the political field along a Left-Right axis was outmoded, he tried to replace it with a new typology organised around different approaches to what he called the “politics of the psyche”.

Lasch saw three camps in this emerging psychopolitical spectrum: the “party of the superego”, “the party of the ego”, and the “party of Narcissus”. The emblematic figure of the first was Philip Rieff, who, in The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1967), had articulated a powerful critique of our norm-less and atomised society. His 1973 follow-up Fellow Teachers, unjustly overlooked today, was a powerful defence of the Freudian superego — the part of the psyche that enforces personal moral responsibility and respect for the “inhibitions” that make culture possible. In a rather cruel mischaracterisation, Lasch portrayed Rieff as a cultural conservative whose morality was based on conformism and “fear”, rather than a properly individuated awareness of one’s obligation to help others.

The “party of the ego”, by contrast, sought to empower individuals to survive in a competitive, isolating society by bolstering their capacity for self-interested competition. The watchword of its adherents — mainly members of the psychoanalytic tradition of “ego psychology” that dominated the United States in the decades following the Second World War — was “adjustment”. This tradition can be seen as the predecessor of the therapeutic movements of today, aimed at helping patients avoid emotional dependence on others, anxiety over the future, guilt over the past, and other barriers to being dynamic, “well-adjusted” economic agents.

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The trouble with this advice, as Lasch notes, is not so much that it is ineffective as that it reinforces the social dynamics that create our psychological problems in the first place. Whether framed in more feminine and pseudo-progressive terms as “self-care” or in more masculine and Social-Darwinian terms as “grindset”, the “party of the ego” invites us to become more of what we already are: self-absorbed competitors who imagine that we must overcome our last shreds of decency to achieve happiness.

Lasch had the most sympathy for what he called the “party of Narcissus”, which may seem ironic, given his critique of narcissism. This group emerged out of the New Left of the Sixties, and particularly its radical feminist and ecological strands. It saw the basic problem of contemporary psychology not as a deficit of moral authority or the vulnerability of the ego, but as the alienation of the self from others and the world, driven in large part by our reliance on technology.

This rhymed with Lasch’s own critique of the 20th century as an era in which the technological domination of nature was now redounding on humanity itself — which had become, in the hands of doctors, psychiatrists, marketers and bureaucrats, a manipulable object. Through the critique of technology — and what, in the jargon of that period, was sometimes called the “technostructure” of government by unelected experts — the party of Narcissus, like Lasch himself, expressed its hopes for a new, more humane form of society oriented towards harmony rather than progress.

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It is perhaps on the political Right that such ideas are most forcefully expressed today. Lasch emphasised that his new typology superseded the political binary, but fantasies of simple agrarian living, unprocessed food, and escape from modern technology now strike many as “conservative”. But whether its politics are coded as “Left” or “Right”, Lasch warned that the “party of Narcissus” aims at an impossible ideal. Seduced by the image of a self free from the contradictions of post-modernity, it is drawn into a retrograde fantasy politics.

What we need, Lasch insisted in the conclusion to Minimal Self, is not a doubling down on outmoded moral strictures, nor the shoring up of our brittle, anxious egos — nor, for all its desirability, the pursuit of a self wholly integrated in a post-technological society at peace with nature. Rather, we need to develop the psychic strength to bear the tensions of post-modernity: the searing gap between what we desire and what we can accomplish at present. The kind of person capable of political action in this environment is someone who can endure, without illusion, the growing desert — and looks beyond superannuated political identities for friends with whom he might find a way out.

The education of such individuals was in fact Rieff’s own project, as articulated in Fellow Teachers. It remains the task of some critical theorists on the Left, such as Benjamin Fong, who calls in his Death and Mastery (2016) for a pedagogical “politics that makes politics possible”. If we look past the dead-end of populism, we can see the road Lasch did not follow after Minimal Self — the search for a new kind of meta-politics aimed at the restoration of the psychological resources necessary for normal life. That search, one presumes, will bring us into company with strange fellow travellers and teachers.

What I got were more questions. “Is this ok? And this?” Soon I began to wonder: “Is it ok?” I’d thought it was when I’d told him to come over. But it’s one thing to want someone in an unspecified way, quite another to start itemising what it is you actually want from them. With my own desire in doubt, I started to feel the very thing this line of interrogation had been meant to avoid. Instead of making consent as simple as saying “yes”, these questions had plunged me into a deeply unsexy uncertainty.

In reading me his sexual questionnaire, my partner was showing me that he’d internalised the ethic of “consent”, which over the past decade has emerged as the dominant liberal framework for distinguishing between moral and immoral sex. At the core of this ethic is explicitness. The purpose is to make sex — and all of its constituent acts — something one can and should directly say “yes” or “no” to, a contract negotiated between individuals.

This model of consent has been roundly criticised for deflating erotic tension, leading to sometimes-cringeworthy campaigns to insist that “consent is sexy” (“If asking for consent ruins sex you’re what? A rapist who sucks at talking dirty?”, reads one viral Tumblr post). But the deeper problem with this model is that it produces, or rather reveals, exactly what it is meant to avoid, which is the ineradicable ambivalence at the heart of sex. In other words, while we can and should maintain a distinction between consensual and non-consensual acts, there is an important sense in which we are never able to say “yes” to sex. Indeed, enjoying sex seems to involve a certain suspension of our usual relationship to ourselves, one in which we are overtaken not so much by the other person as by sex itself.

The original sexual relation — prior to the one we have with any particular person — is our relation to sex itself. This relation is not consensual but something we experience as a given. We are born, we mature, and at some point in this process we discover that we our prisoners of our sexuality. Sex, after all, makes us uncomfortable. It can conjure feelings of disgust and embarrassment. It can be a distraction, an excruciating deprivation, even a source of catastrophic humiliation. We notice how attractive the “wrong” person is — a boyfriend’s brother, an ex, a colleague, a student — and feel violated by our own urges. Sex with a partner works, when and to the extent that it does, in part by letting us suspend our inhibitions and want things without having to admit to ourselves that we want them.

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There are several ways in which we try to ignore the non-consensual core of sex. One is to separate “good” sex from “bad” sex, a strategy familiar to both conservatives and progressives. Growing up in an evangelical community in the American South during the Clinton and Bush years, I was often told by teachers and pastors that sex is a wonderful, beautiful experience — for married straight couples. They’d quote the Song of Solomon or, worse, talk about how great sex with their spouses was. It was more effective pro-abstinence education than all the videos of STDs and abortions they showed us. They’d warn us, however, that sex outside of marriage is degrading. Once after chapel, they organised a skit in which a girl held a rose. Its petals were plucked off one by one by a line of boys, leaving her with a bare stem. The lesson: that’s what will happen to your soul, and possibly your genitals, if you don’t wait until marriage.

Progressives in their churches — universities — also believe in a magical boundary that transforms the degrading into the delightful. For them, this boundary is consent. But consent is a more difficult concept than it seems. Already in 1981, feminist legal theorist Catherine Mackinnon argued that any sex after which a woman feels “violated” is rape, whether she consented to it or not. She extended this point in Towards a Feminist Theory of the State, where she claimed that women, as a group, lack “power” relative to men and thus cannot ever consent. Here, the search to give consent a solid foundation, to divide good sex from bad sex, tips over into a totalising conflation of sex with rape.

Taking up this conflation another way, more ostentatiously radical thinkers have agreed with Mackinnon that sex is inherently abject and violating. Unlike Mackinnon, however, they take this to be a good thing. Sex shatters our egos, and the acts that are most revealing of this fundamental truth are the most apparently degrading ones. Kinky, violent, and otherwise non-normative sex is, according to this view, not only more theoretically interesting than, but in some sense morally superior to, the merely “vanilla”.

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This is the position taken by a strain of American queer theory. Grasping the truth that sex is messy, ambiguous, and difficult to “consent” to, these thinkers ironically make it into a falsehood by eliminating that very ambivalence with their strident declarations.

The disturbing pinnacle of this kind of thinking is the work of Andrea Long Chu, who in such writings as her 2019 pamphlet Females affirms that sex makes us pathetic, debased, and powerless, or as she puts it, “female”. Perhaps Chu, a transgender woman, has changed her gender in order to affirm grotesque “truths” about women’s condition that she would not have been allowed to state otherwise. Indeed, Chu’s work invokes the range of contemporary fetishes — such as sissy hypnosis, bimbofication, and cuckolding — by which men and women eroticise powerlessness. We do so perhaps because we are uncomfortable with the actual, but never total, powerlessness that is inherent in all sex. But the truth is that we cannot simply lie back and wallow in domination or debasement, since we can never fully escape the self. This is as much a misguided fantasy as the idea that we can be completely in control.

What would a decent approach to sexuality look like — one that acknowledges that sex undermines our attempts to maintain pristine egos without tipping over into a celebration of the grotesque? There may be a clue in Hatred of Sex, a recent book by Tim Dean and Oliver Davis. Looking at widespread paranoia about bad sex, from #MeToo to QAnon’s conspiracy theories about child sex-trafficking, Dean and Davis argue these cultural phenomena, like our efforts to sanitise sex through consent or marriage, show how intolerable we find the combination of freedom and unfreedom inherent in any sexual experience. Afraid to acknowledge our own conflicted yearnings, we hunt for villains — men, in the case of #MeToo; global elites like Hillary Clinton in the case of QAnon — who we blame for ruining what would otherwise be a safe and pleasurable experience.

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We can escape the constitutive tension of sex, Dean and Davis warn, neither by trying to cordon off good sex — that is, sex within contractually defined relationships — from the bad and dangerous outside, nor by trying to affirm and reclaim the aspects of sex that we cannot help but experience as degrading, disgusting, or disappointing. What we can perhaps do is ease some of the pressure off of sex by refusing to allow such an inherently contradictory thing become the platform for so many political, ethical, and identitarian projects.

Absent such a reprivatisation of sex, Dean and Davis argue, we will continue to allow emerging “sex bureaucracies” to regulate previously intimate aspects of our lives. These bureaucracies, which in the United States include university Title IX offices and corporate human resources departments, acquire power by framing an ever-increasing array of sexual acts and speech as “harmful”. They insist sexual relationships need to be based on the model of the contract, with swift punishment for anyone who violates the contract’s terms.

To resist this encroachment, we must accept that there is a wide domain of what Dean and Davis call “benign sexual inappropriateness”. This is behaviour, such as unwanted flirtation or mildly obscene display, that violates politically correct or conservative propriety but does not merit formal sanction. To deal with such behaviour, they argue, we must abandon our urge to go running to the manager and instead begin to recover the informal tactics of “discretion and dissent”. No bureaucracy can save us from the inherent ambivalence of sex, but we can, perhaps, still save sex from bureaucracy.

First imprisoned, then internally exiled from 1945 to 1956, and finally expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974, Solzhenitsyn seemed a living testament to the injustices he exposed. But while Western intellectuals and politicians acclaimed this aspect of his message, they largely ignored another side of it. Solzhenitsyn warned that a Russia free of Communism would not become Western. Russia would continue to oppose liberalism, and pursue geopolitical ambitions that would bring it into conflict with other powers.

In his famous 1978 commencement address at Harvard, Solzhenitsyn warned that Westerners, with a combination of naïveté and arrogance, assumed that the world was moving towards a standard set by its capitalist liberal democracies. They could not understand that Russia, although currently “in Communist captivity”, was the heir to an “autonomous world” that would never be assimilated to the West. Indeed, the problem with Communism was that it, too, was a cosmopolitan ideology with ambitions for remaking the world, destroying Russia’s autonomous cultural traditions in the process.

Solzhenitsyn’s speech is fondly remembered by conservatives in the West as a stinging critique of cultural liberalism. With his call for a return to traditional values, he appeals to the contemporary Western Right as a useful figure in our own culture wars. But his conjoining of liberalism and Communism as two aspects of a common assault on traditional non-Western cultures goes much further than a repudiation of ‘political correctness’. Asserting that the world is divided into distinct cultural zones, and opposing any ideology that on whatever premises puts our common humanity before their preservation, Solzhenitsyn implied that liberals would have little to look forward to from a post-Communist Russia.

Most Western observers at the time were too taken with Solzhenitsyn’s critique of the Soviet system to pay adequate attention to his views on the Russian past and warnings about the Russian future. However, some of his fellow dissidents and Western critics observed saw that Solzhenitsyn — and the Russian nationalism that he represented — represented a dark cloud on the horizon.

In 1974 the dissident Russian scientist Andrei Sakharov noted that Solzhenitsyn argued against Communism less out of a desire for freedom at home and peace with the West. He believed that the author wanted more than to promote supposedly traditional values; Solzhenitsyn wanted to focus Russian energies on the military threat (which he took to be existential) posed by China, entering a new Cold War with its neighbour. The future Russian regime, for Solzhenitsyn, could not be a liberal democratic one imported from the West, but one shaped by an understanding of Russia’s dangerous geopolitical situation and particular history. The latter, Sakharov bitterly summarised, seemed to have taught Solzhenitsyn that “when accompanied by respect for law and by Orthodoxy the authoritarian system was not all that bad.”

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It was on this heading that, in a 1980 issue of Foreign Affairs, a group of American scholars criticised Solzhenitsyn for his rosy image of pre-revolutionary Russia — a vision that elided, or falsified, many historical facts. Where he had argued that the Tsars tolerated dissident intellectuals and religious minorities (including Jews), historians observed that this was a fantasy.

The Russian empire under the Tsars organised massive surveillance programmes, and routinely imprisoned and executed suspects without trial. Far from tolerating minorities, it subjected Jews to humiliating restrictions and implicitly sanctioned pogroms. In the year 1905 alone, there were 690 documented pogroms (with over 3,000 reported murders) during the two weeks following the declaration of the October Manifesto. Nicholas II, according to one historian, regarded this violence as a form of “justified revenge” against subjects he considered to be politically suspect. The Russian revolution, although intended to overturn the old regime, perpetuated many of its signature domestic policies, from secret policing to anti-Semitism.

Solzhenitsyn was also criticised for exaggerating the differences between Tsarist and Soviet foreign policy. Eugen Loebl argued that he downplayed the continuities between the imperialist policy of the Tsars and that of the Soviet leadership, which both sought, under the pretext of Christianity or Communism, to extend Russian power over subject nations. Loebl had a personal stake in this critique. He had been a member of Czechoslovak Communist government in the Sixties, an era of liberalising reform — cut short when the Soviets invaded the country to restore Communist orthodoxy and obedience to Moscow. From Loebl’s perspective, this invasion was continuous with Russia’s nineteenth-century expansion into Eastern Europe and violent suppression of nationalist and democratic movements throughout the region. The Tsars and Communists justified their policies in terms of apparently opposite ideologies, but their common aim was Russian power.

Countering Loebl, Solzhenitsyn argued that Communism was an “international or even metaphysical entity”. To understand it as something akin to Nazism — an ideology of national self-aggrandisement — would lead to disaster. In the West, opponents of Communism, especially on the centre and Right, often linked the Soviet regime and the Third Reich as examples of ‘totalitarianism’, a concept popularised by Hannah Arendt. Solzhenitsyn, however, stressed that there were important differences between the Nazis and the Communists.

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After the Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941, many in the Soviet Union had believed German rule might be preferable to Communism — particularly to the murderous purges, famines, and population transfers that characterised Stalin’s reign in the Thirties. Soldiers deserted the Red Army in huge numbers during the first weeks of Operation Barbarossa. It was not only oppressed peoples, such as Balts and Ukrainians, who did so, but Russians as well.

In spite of sympathy from Russians and non-Russians alike, Nazi policy towards the region was openly genocidal, founded on a project of eliminating local populations to make room for future German colonisation. Hitler, Solzhenitsyn argued, “had declared war on the Russian people as such, leaving them no way out”. Russians thus rallied to the Soviet regime not out of any loyalty to Communism, or sense that it represented their ‘national’ interests, but because they had no other choice.

There was an important lesson for the West in Germany’s defeat, Solzhenitsyn argued. The Nazis had conflated Russia and the Soviet Union, and thus forced Russians who would have accepted German rule to rally around Stalin. Advised by figures such as Loebl, the West risked making the same mistake of seeing “the threat now looming over the world as Russian rather than as Communist”. This would have a “devastating outcome”. While Russians despised their Communist government and yearned for liberation, they would oppose any power that threatened their existence as a people.

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Solzhenitsyn was warning the West that if it hoped for friendly relations with a future, post-Communist Russia, it would have to accept Russian nationalism — and attendant demands for ‘security,’ often understood in expansionist terms by successive Russian governments. Loebl, meanwhile, warned that Russian nationalism, whether it disguised itself as Communist or anti-Communist, would inevitably mean Russian imperialism in Eastern Europe. Both warnings, perhaps, were true.

Already in 1980 Western leaders reading the exchange between Solzhenitsyn and Loebl might have foreseen that there was a dangerous tension at the heart of their hopes for the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. If Russian anti-Communists like Solzhenitsyn sympathised with their ideological opposition to the Soviet regime, they did not agree with Eastern European dissidents such as Loebl that Russian power was an inherent danger to peace. A common hostility to Communism, however, could conceal for a time fundamentally different geopolitical visions — which have been brought into terrible clarity in recent weeks, as Russia began its assault on Ukraine.

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The West’s enthusiasm for Solzhenitsyn, celebrating his anti-Communist resistance while ignoring his rehabilitation of Tsarist illiberalism and imperialism, is of a piece with two signal failures of our collective political understanding during the last decades of the twentieth century. First, the United States supported Islamic terror networks to oppose the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the Eighties, only to find itself their target after the collapse of the USSR. Still more to its detriment, the West pursued in those years, and since, a strategy of economic engagement with China, in the hope that integration in the global capitalist economy would lead to political reform in Beijing.

As with Solzhenitsyn, Western leaders failed to perceive that sharing temporary tactical goals with non-Western intellectuals, militants, and regimes was only a short-lived suspension of the always-present possibility of renewed enmity, based on enduring, and perhaps irreconcilable, visions of the world. Liberal democracy, based as it is on a cosmopolitan understanding of human rights, often misperceives a world which does not share its assumptions about those rights. For the duration of the present crisis in Ukraine, at least, such misperceptions will be impossible to sustain — and their resumption will make a disastrous situation even worse.

Watching the mainstream accept, or even welcome, such incivility, in defiance of public health directives that had banned even the smallest of public gatherings, was a dizzying experience. After months in which Americans had been cajoled and sometimes ordered into staying isolated and indoors, the script had suddenly changed.

It changed yet again after January 6, 2021, when “riot” no longer meant an eloquent expression of the “language of the unheard”, something to be championed or at least sympathetically understood, but a despicable betrayal of the nation, akin to treason or terrorism. For the establishment, norms around civility seemed to matter only as a weapon against the Right.

For the political scientist Alex Zamalin, however, the problem with America is simply that there is too much civility. A self-defeating desire for moderation and compromise at the expense of radical-Left politics, he argues in Against Civility: The Hidden Racism in America’s Obsession with Civility, is “everywhere you look”.

According to Zamalin, “a consensus narrative” has emerged in American elite political discourse. While he avers that without civility, our “everyday life” would be impossible, he argues that “politics is not everyday life” — it is a distinct “arena of power and struggle”. And our obsession with finding “common ground” with opponents and preserving “nonpolitical” spaces in our society is holding back anti-racist movements.

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Zamalin is certainly right that politics shouldn’t be everyday life. Preserving the political character of politics — that is, making sure that it remains an enclosed arena of competition over power — is as necessary as protecting everything outside that arena from politics’ crushing intensity. We might describe civility, rightly understood, as the formula that lets us keep politics in its proper place — as an intense but limited contest among rivals who see each other as belonging to the same community.

For Zamalin, however, civility is a central theme of American history, and it has always been an arm of white supremacy. In its historical sections, Against Civility offer a wearingly familiar story that pits villainous white racists and misguided black moderates like Booker T. Washington against virtuous radicals like W.E.B. Dubois and Malcom X.

In Zamalin’s telling, the failures of America’s black radicals are inevitably the result of their having adopted “white” standards of civility. When Martin Luther King, Jr. excluded the gay writer James Baldwin from the 1963 March on Washington, the civil rights leader was, Zamalin argues, “applying the same standards of civility found in the white racism he denounced”. Two decades later, when Baldwin, in a public conversation with Audre Lorde at Hampshire College, declared that he couldn’t understand why Lorde, a lesbian feminist, insisted that black women faced struggles distinct from those of black men, he too was replicating the moral failures of whites.

It is hard to understand why prejudice against gay men or resistance to feminism among black intellectuals should require explanation in terms of white people’s moral failings, or what this has to do with civility. Unless, of course, one shares Zamalin’s implicit premise, common across a swath of the American Left, that only white people possess real moral agency. When black people err, it is through a kind of excursion into, or infection by, whiteness. Indeed, white people appear in this conception as the authentic protagonists of history, which they drive forward by their nefarious will to dominate.

The role of non-whites, by contrast, is to offer romantic but ultimately ineffective resistance. Every generation’s valiant struggles for justice are suppressed by open enemies and unreliable allies who insist on upholding civility rather than seeking racial equality. That this narrative might be insulting, given that repeatedly trying the same thing and failing is a sign of political ineptitude, doesn’t seem to compute.

Zamalin appears equally dense about recent history. In his account, the years since Trump’s election in 2016 saw elite moderates punish those who bravely spoke out against racism, such as former NFL player Colin Kaepernick. In fact, Kaepernick’s activism was lionised by the mainstream media — GQ magazine named him “Citizen of the Year” in 2017 — and led Nike to offer the ex-quarterback a multimillion dollar sponsorship and his own branded clothing line. Likewise, while the Black Lives Matter movement might seem to have imposed its slogans throughout many of America’s prestige institutions, Zamalin can only see it as a force at the margins of society, “dismissed” and “treated with disdain” by elites.

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It is certainly true that BLM has not managed to effect meaningful changes to American law enforcement, except insofar as violent protests and riots in the summer of 2020 lead many municipal governments to constrain the policing of sensitive neighbourhoods, causing a spike in crime that has led to hundreds more murders than might otherwise have taken place. But while it has been unable to achieve substantive legislative changes, BLM has been taken into the bosom of American elites, neutralising the movement’s radical potential while draping the country’s institutions in the moral authority of anti-racism.

Zamalin cannot seem to comprehend the double-sided nature of the contemporary politics of anti-racism. As an ethical discourse, it is hegemonic throughout US universities, corporations, offices of government, and even the military. At the same time, it appears totally impotent as a political force. Making sense of this would mean sounding the strange gulf between discourse and power in our era. It would mean, for example, asking how Donald Trump — who, as Zamalin recognises, flamboyantly transgressed norms of civility — managed to violate all the political pieties of the conservative establishment only to fail to achieve any of his goals once in office.

For the nationalist and anti-establishment Right, Trump’s orgy of incivility was the beginning not of its empowerment but of a detour into spectacle, in which the imaginary pleasures of “owning the libs” and annoying the media took precedence over winning actual political victories. The January 6 “insurrection” was the ultimate drama in this theatre of resistance. Clueless conspiracy theorists stormed the Capitol on Trump’s behalf, as if, once freed from the shadowy forces holding him back, he might finally accomplish his stated goals.

No sensible person on the Left should wish such a fate for their own side. Or rather, sensible people on the Left might grieve that their own side has for years been caught up in the same fantasies of uncivil resistance, and the same unmooring from the realities of power, that now characterise the populist Right.

In the 21st century, the dramaturgies of protest against the Iraq War led by groups like Code Pink were as elaborate as they were ineffective. These protests were the template for the Left’s resistance to Trump a decade later — both were noisy, lame, and brought Nancy Pelosi to power as Speaker of the House.

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Incivility of this sort is dangerous precisely because it is impotent. Theatrical gestures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s appearance at the Met Gala in a “Tax the Rich” dress and Trump’s mockery of journalists share with the BLM riots and January 6 a common perversion of the difference between politics and everyday life. Performative incivility disrupts our normal, non-political lives with attention-seeking dramatics while at the same time draining politics of its specificity and substance.

What we need is not more incivility — more self-aggrandising antinomianism by narcissists posing as radicals — but a painstaking recommitment to a kind of civility that, by keeping politics off the streets, out of schools, and out of our private lives, channels it back into contests over policy.

If we want real change, from the Right or the Left, we need to depoliticise everyday life and repoliticise politics. If we do not, we will remain stuck together in an unbounded arena of shrill, but pointless, symbolic struggle.

Since then, his work has found acclaim far beyond the academy: business gurus, political pundits and Twitter personalities invoke his social theory — and particularly his account of the ‘mimetic’ origins of desire — to explain an ever-widening array of phenomena. But if his ideas are increasingly popular, their roots are usually ignored.

Girard meant his ideas to serve a religious purpose. He claimed in one of his final books, published in English as Battling to the End (2010), that his work had “been written from a Christian perspective”, and specifically a Catholic one. He was not, however, a cultural conservative trying to offer a defence of traditional Christian morality. While his theory of desire is inseparable from his belief in Christianity as the true faith, it is also tied to a radical perspective: one in which the end times foretold in the New Testament are upon us.

Girard’s theory of desire, separated from its Christian context and purposes, is appealingly counter-intuitive and expansive. It offers the intellectual pleasure of over-turning (perhaps a bit too readily) what is said to be conventional wisdom, and of reducing apparently distinct processes to a single causal mechanism.

According to Girard, we commonly misunderstand individuals as pursuing pre-determined aims common to all human beings — like sex or status. These desires, we assume, are satisfied by what we manage to attain. In fact, Girard argues, our desires arise not so much from such natural drives as from a universal tendency to envy and emulate other people, which orients us to seek out whatever our rivals (that is, everyone else) are seeking. We want what we want because other people want it.

Girard saw imitation not only as a fundamental social process, but also as a source of violence that, if unchecked, might unravel society. This is, in some ways, an ancient insight. The poet Hesiod, at the dawn of Greek literature, observed that strife can lead us to imitate and surpass the achievements of our neighbours in socially beneficial cycles of competition — or it can lead to envious rage and violence. In the eighteenth century, the founders of laissez-faire economic thought argued that what they called “emulation”, copying our rivals’ behaviour with the aim of outdoing their success, was the basis of economic growth, but also a source of conflict among individuals and nations.

The originality of Girard’s thinking lies in his argument that societies manage the ambivalence of imitation — its capacity to promote social cohesion or to degenerate into spirals of competitive violence — through “scapegoating”, or the exclusion of some agent identified with imitation’s negative aspects. In his account, scapegoating is a function of religion, and takes the form of sacrifice, the physical destruction of some victim who was understood as responsible for, or in their innocence expiating the sin of, dangerous imitation. The violence of sacrifice precludes the violence of mimetic desire.

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Girard has found posthumous popularity in Silicon Valley circles — most prominently with Peter Thiel. The historian and philosopher Justin E.H. Smith has written a particularly sharp critique of the way would-be finance and technology gurus use Girard to give a veneer of sophistication to otherwise trivial observations about trends. But Girard intended his theory not to provide bite-sized insights for the business world, but to serve a specific, religious purpose as a justification for Christianity.

According to Girard, the death and resurrection of Christ had freed humanity from the cycle of potentially destructive imitation that scapegoating had been intended to contain. The message of the Gospel was that a perfect man, without any violence in him, had offered himself as the final sacrifice — and as a model for all future imitation. In his death, Christ abolished the need for further scapegoats. In his life, he provided an example for followers — an example that, unlike all previous objects of imitation, could produce no envy or aggression but only love and peace.

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For Girard, Christianity is the end of “religion”. In the traditional sense, “religion” had always meant a system of rules and procedures for containing the violence of mimetic competition and maintaining social order through rituals of sacrifice. Only Christ, Girard argues, offers an escape from these systems.

Unfortunately, for most of the history of Christianity, the radical message of the Gospel was suppressed by the Church. Ever since the late Roman Empire, ecclesiastical leaders worked with politicians to prop up social hierarchies and justify inequality. Christianity was presented as another version of ancient religions, in which priests accepted payment from congregations in return for rituals of blessing and sacrifice. The Church fulfilled the role of what Girard, drawing on an obscure term from the theology of eschatology, calls the katechon, a force that holds back the return of Christ and the destruction of our world.

This is a Protestant vision of religious history. It views the Catholic Church and its compromises — first with the Roman Empire, then with all subsequent political authorities — as an occlusion of the true message of Christianity. But for Girard, a Catholic, this was not a betrayal, but rather a necessary stage in a historical process that is finally coming to an end.

In Girard’s vision of history, the secularisation of the West — the decline of the political role of religion, and of religious belief — means, in an apparent paradox, that the Gospel can, for the first time, “become clear”. For centuries, our societies had existed on the basis of a usually unspoken, and philosophically incoherent, compromise between pre-Christian values (of preserving society through rituals of sacrifice) and the message of Christ, who showed that sacrifice is now unnecessary and that the end of the world is at hand.

Secularisation dissolves this compromise. It hastens the apocalypse, and thus the second coming of Christ, by ending the social rituals that had constrained the violence of competition: “all that remains is mimetic rivalry, and it escalates to extremes.” A society without religion, ritual, constraint, or limit, in which atomised individuals compete with each other in steadily worsening spirals of envy and hostility, is the clearing in which Christ will reappear.

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Pundits discussing the mimetic aspects of media trends or the role of “scapegoating” in cancel culture use Girard’s concepts to explain a world that he insisted is on the verge of perishing. Those who critique Girard’s ideas make a similar mistake to those who wish to take them up for political purposes. Justin E.H. Smith, for example, condemns “the Girardian version of Catholicism as a clerical institution ideally suited to the newly emerging techno-feudalist order” promoted by Thiel. But Girard argued that the role of the Church as a “clerical institution” is coming to an end, as its long compromise with politics ceases — and that this is both a terrifying and joyous event.

His apocalypticism may be disturbing, or indeed mad, but it is not compatible with conservatism — or even with politics as such. Girard is not merely a source of stimulating or useful ideas for Silicon Valley. He is a messianic man of faith, for whom the decline of religion, and of the West, makes straight the way of the Lord.

In Nietzsche’s Great Politics, the political theorist sympathetically articulates the German philosopher’s desire to unify Europe through a “cultural elite” emancipated from Christian morality and ruling over a servile mass. If read alongside Drochon’s essays cheering on Macron, the suggestion is that Nietzsche’s dream has already been achieved. Rather than a critic of our era, Nietzsche is its prophet and advocate.

Macron, who faces a re-election campaign in April, is rarely seen in such a heroic light. The former investment banker is more typically cast as an avatar of France’s class of consultants, managers, and other auxiliaries of transnational capital, from whose ranks he emerged and from whom he continues to draw his most avid support. For these people, Macron’s vision — extending neoliberal reforms to make France more competitive in the global market while deepening its commitment to the EU — is common sense. They are, after all, the beneficiaries of four decades of similar policies, pursued ever since President Francois Mitterand was forced to abandon his socialist economic programme in favour of a “turn toward austerity” in 1983.

Macron’s most ardent opponents, meanwhile, are the so-called “losers” of globalisation. They are members of the native working class who have suffered from deindustrialisation, unemployment, and decades of mass immigration. The expression of their dissatisfaction is divided among three channels: on the nationalist Right are Marine Le Pen and, in an intriguing new development, the pundit-turned-presidential candidate Eric Zemmour; on the socialist Left is Jean-Luc Melenchon. These anti-establishment politicians, however, are each less popular among workers and the unemployed than abstention from voting, which is the choice of a plurality of French citizens. Faced with such foes, Macron and the order he embodies could remain provisionally secure.

Drochon’s writings echo this economic analysis, but with some critical differences. He hailed Macron’s election in 2017 as a triumph of “the experts” but also compared it with De Gaulle’s 1958 seizure of power in a barely disguised coup d’etat. Since then, Drochon has provided regular, largely positive, assessments of the President’s fortunes in achieving his project of neoliberal economic reforms. These aim at turning France into what Macron called a “start-up nation”, an ambition to which Drochon remains attached. He describes Macron not only as the dynamic CEO of France but also as its stern Prince. He summarised Macron’s heavy-handed treatment of the “yellow vest” protesters, who had opposed tax increases on fuel, as showing that the President had been forced to learn Machiavelli’s lesson that it is better to be feared than loved.

But Drochon’s most important philosophical lessons about, or for, Macron, can be found in his book on Nietzsche, published in 2016, the year before Macron’s election. In it, he challenges the two dominant interpretations of Nietzsche’s politics since the beginning of the 20th century.

The first is that Nietzsche, a critic of democracy, liberalism, humanitarianism, and nearly everything he identified with England, paved the way for the rise of authoritarian movements such as Leninism, fascism, and Nazism. This reading of Nietzsche, focused on the “will to power” and the image of a “superman” liberated from the moral norms derived from Christianity, became popular in early 20th-century Europe among radicals on both sides of the political spectrum. After World War II, it was often invoked by liberals to discredit Nietzsche by presenting him as the intellectual forebearer of Hitler. In response, readers such as Walter Kauffman and Bernard Williams developed a second main school of thought. In an attempt to salvage Nietzsche’s reputation, they denied that he had a politics. Instead, they argued, he had been interested exclusively in individual moral and existential questions.

Breaking with both these traditions, Drochon reconstructs Nietzsche’s political thinking to demonstrate how Nietzsche saw democracy as a force of degeneration that would overwhelm the modern state with demands for material equality. The state, over-extended and unable to meet its goals of social welfare, would be replaced by a “new type of entity” — a hollowed-out husk of a government whose main function would be to oversee the operations of the “private companies” that would increasingly govern individuals. This era of privatisation would culminate in the return of slavery.

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Nietzsche saw the withering of the state and the return of slavery as positive developments. He believed that democracy, with its promises of equality, undermined “high culture”, reducing art and intellect to the level of the newly enfranchised working and middle classes. Only by restoring “caste society”, founded on a servile majority producing goods for a privileged elite, would it be possible to ensure the flourishing of the highest human types: geniuses in the realms of art, philosophy, and politics.

This future elite would fuse the best of the continent’s existing national cultures. They would be untainted by the “slave morality” of Christianity and its heirs, liberalism and socialism. These new aristocrats would be “supermen”, openly revelling in their power, and freed from all “resentment”, from any desire for things to be otherwise. Their slaves, too, would be without resentment — happy servants grateful to be ruled by enlightened masters. They would willingly labour to ensure the well-being of an elite they recognised as morally and intellectually superior. Democracy, Nietzsche argued, would be seen in the future as having played a positive role in history by so psychologically castrating the lower classes that they would become pliant instruments in the hands of their rightful rulers.

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Opponents of liberalism, particularly but not exclusively from the Right, often draw on Nietzsche’s critique of democracy when they argue that what our political order lacks is a constellation of virtues associated with greatness. Magnificence, grandeur, courage, virility — all seem conspicuously absent in our own leaders. Nor do our elites seem capable of planning for inspiringly distant futures, of animating the masses with ideals, or of imposing on themselves or others the discipline necessary for the creation of anything great.

These are the intuitions behind a sort of aestheticised, illiberal Nietzscheanism that has become one of the most visible of the various styles of reaction competing for the attention and allegiance of those dissatisfied with the current order. Around the writings of the pseudonymous Bronze Age Pervert (BAP) circle different valences of discourse in which young and not-so-young men exalt heroic, homoerotic supermen like Yukio Mishima, whose strength and vitality they oppose to the beta-male “bugmen” supposedly churned out by modern liberalism. Their rhetoric echoes that of the authoritarian Nietzscheans of the early twentieth century, who celebrated powerful individuals and despised the bovine masses of bourgeois society.

If Drochon’s reading of Nietzsche is right, however, then the vitalists of the online Right have misunderstood not only Nietzsche but also the neoliberal order. He describes that order not as an obstacle to be cleared to make way for the “superman”, but as the force preparing human material for such great-souled figures to shape to their will.

Since the advent of neoliberalism under Thatcher, Reagan, and Mitterand, the welfare state has, as Nietzsche predicted, given way to the growing power of corporations and to an international elite untethered by historical identities, religious pieties, or Christian ethical scruples. Readers of BAP, coiling around their own resentment, fantasise about a future inegalitarian order in which a revived aristocracy undoes the illusions of democracy — but we are already there!

To object that this system has not made the right people its supermen seems precisely the sort of whining that proves one is afflicted with resentment, and thus incapable of being a superman. Macron, Angela Merkel and even Justin Trudeau, the cosmopolitan leaders of our societies who rule through the manipulation of symbols to ensure that majorities remain relatively productive and content, are the real supermen. From the perspective of the angry young men who despise our leaders as effete weaklings, this may seem an absurd contention. But Nietzsche called for a new sort of ruler, a “Caesar with the soul of Christ”, who would combine the old aristocracy’s merciless exploitation of inferiors with the post-Christian democratic habits of guilefully manipulating the masses by taking on the guise of their own weak nature.

Illiberals of the Right are correct to be disgusted with the way that the horizons of contemporary life have been constricted (the “bugman” life of passive consumption), and with the character of our apparently feckless elites. They are wrong, however, to imagine that these are the same problem, and that they can be overcome by the introduction of more ruthless, brutal, and cruel supermen.

Online reactionaries’ supposedly radical alternative to the present is only more of the same, but with different branding: the inequalities of the present order stripped of their humanist pretence. The substantive, serious objection to our order would not be one couched in the thought of Nietzsche, whose political ideal it has already satisfied. Rather it would be one made in the name of liberalism, whose promises of autonomy and equality have been perverted by elites who are already far “beyond good and evil”.

But Sinema is more enigmatic. It was said that she demanded $100 billion in cuts to proposed climate programmes, though this was denied by her office. The package was trimmed to $2 trillion, but she still refused to support it. She was accused of being bent on the “destruction” of the Biden Presidency. She had, one commentator wrote, a “death grip” on the Democratic Party.

In public, Sinema was taciturn, even as she was trailed and harried by progressive activists, who followed her into public restrooms, or tried to confront her at a marathon. Nobody on the Left understands her thinking; to the Washington Post she is simply “inscrutable“. So fury, and theorising, is their response. (Hers was to tell them, somewhat cryptically on Instagram, to “fuck off”.)

Biden’s bill has been maimed by Sinema, regardless of what happens in the weeks ahead. Eventually, interest in her may begin to fade, or she might face a primary challenge that ends her career as a senator. But there is another way to look at Sinema, one with wider and much longer-lasting implications for politics and political theory than her obstructionism in the Senate.

In recent years there have been two major shifts in the relationship between politics and political theory. On the one hand, a number of important modern political thinkers, such as Michel Foucault, once perceived in American academic and activists circles as useful, even necessary, for ostensibly radical and critical Leftist politics, have begun to appeal to the Right, which long rejected them. On the other hand, adherence to a capitalism-friendly version of academics and activists’ politics, especially on matters of culture, race and sexuality, became a condition of membership in nearly every important institution in the United States. Ideas that once generated a thrilling frisson of subversion in college seminars among students and teachers, who at the time could see themselves as joined in a common project of Leftist critique, have now become the ever-more explicit moral centre of our regime — or are being taken up by its opponents on the Right.

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Such changes can perhaps be traced more easily through the writings of thinkers whose minds, because of their mediocrity, reflect rather than resist larger trends. One such thinker — a former activist and, technically, a scholar — is Sinema, who holds a PhD in “Justice Studies” from Arizona State University. Her 2012 dissertation Who Must Die: the State of Exception in Rwanda’s Genocide, and her 2015 book of almost the same title, are representative moments in the double shift by which Leftists once enamoured of certain strands of radical political theory repurposed it towards the consolidation of a new hegemonic political morality, discarding its subversive dimension — and making it available to the Right.

In her work on Rwanda, Sinema purports, through a handful of incompletely understood concepts drawn chiefly from the writings of Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, to discover in the genocide committed in 1994 a generalisable lesson about the importance of the rule of law. In its absence, she argues, the worst sorts of barbarities are possible, and indeed likely.

Sinema’s work has no original insights, and hardly any grasp on the theory that supposedly informs it. It is, however, a useful document. It sheds, in the first place, some light on Sinema herself, a former anti-war radical who is now perhaps the most notorious centrist in Congress and who prides herself on upbeat bipartisanship (expounded in her 2009 book, Unite and Conquer: How to Build Coalitions that Win and Last). For those who would rather dim the lights on Sinema, an already highly-visible political personage, her invocation of Schmitt and Agamben offers an opportunity to consider the strange transformation that these theorists’ work has undergone.

Schmitt and Agamben, in principle, should have been uncomfortable reading for Sinema. The former was an early 20th-century German legal theorist who attacked liberal democracy and supplied theoretical justification for the Nazi regime; the latter is a still-living Italian philosopher who used Schmitt’s ideas for his own critique of liberalism, launched from the radical Left rather than the far Right. But, given Sinema’s political and intellectual origins on the anti-war Left of the early 2000s, her choice is less surprising. The two thinkers were critical references for activist and academic critics of American power throughout the War on Terror.

Since the Eighties and Nineties, Schmitt had become first acceptable, and then compulsory reading, for American political theorists, who were taken with what seemed to be his insights into the deficiencies of liberal democracy’s emphasis on the rule of law and the formal aspects of democratic procedure. Some thinkers on the Left, such as Chantal Mouffe, used his ideas to advocate for a reinvigorated form of political democracy that valued frankly acknowledged conflicts over neutral rules and norms. This so-called “agonism” once inspired populist Leftist movements in Europe, but seems to appeal to few American academics after the rise, since the first Trump campaign, of Right-wing populism at home. Norms — such as Nato and Nafta — suddenly appealed to Leftists who had long critiqued them.

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While some tried to use Schmitt to attack liberalism from the Left, others, drawing on Agamben’s interpretation of Schmitt, argued that the United States was becoming or had become a dangerously illiberal country. Schmitt had argued, infamously, that states inevitably find themselves confronted with “states of exception” — situations where legal norms can no longer be applied. In such instances, some agent must decide what is to be done so that order can be restored and the normal rules can function again. Schmitt saw this power to make decisions in exceptional circumstances as the essence of sovereignty. He argued that liberal democracies — oriented towards preserving the rule of law, which their leaders and ideologues imagine needs no supplement of sovereign decision-making — ignore this fact to their peril.

Agamben, however, countered that supposedly liberal states are in fact constantly dealing with “states of exception”. Liberals do not, in his view, periodically confront normless states of exception in crises; rather they constantly create these conditions. In a series of works including his 1995 Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben drew on Schmitt and Foucault to warn that what he saw as the paradigmatic instances of the Nazis’ systematic illegality and inhumanity — the concentration camp and the lethal power of doctors over “life unworthy of life” (the disabled, mentally handicapped, etc.) — were also present, at least potentially, in democratic states, which create their own zones in which law and rights are suspended.

After 9/11, these arguments took on great cogency for many thinkers on the American Left. The US Government appeared to them to be suspending fundamental rights of its citizens through the Patriot Act, which suspended long-standing norms about the limits of state surveillance. Meanwhile, in Guantanamo Bay, the Government seemed to consign individuals to a site-specific state of exception in which the norms governing neither the treatment of prisoners of war, nor criminals applied. Agamben’s theories did not offer much clear direction on what critics of the apparently norm-less War on Terror might do to oppose the “sovereign” power of the United States, but they did give a moral and philosophical weight to critics’ sense that the country was on a dangerous slide towards reenacting the worst horrors of the 20th century.

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Rather than argue, as Schmitt and Agamben did, that states of exception necessarily appear, or that liberal states continually create them, Sinema insisted that such situations could be avoided by protecting the rule of law. This revealed a basic misunderstanding of her chosen interlocutors’ arguments. Schmitt posited that the rule of law is never adequate, since states of exception requiring the exercise of sovereignty necessarily appear; Agamben likewise argued, following Foucault, that liberal states are inherently unable to live up to their own constitutional norms and in their routine exercise of power, place certain spaces and persons outside them. Sinema, either with naïveté or the cunning of stupidity, simply wishes the problem away and urges us to follow the rules. But, while her intellectual inadequacies are her own, the lameness of her conclusion reflects a change in the political valence of theory.

By the mid-2010s, as Sinema was writing, Leftist opposition to the imperial and illiberal dimensions of American security policy was melting away — or moving to the Right. In the following years, fears about terrorism targeted the latter, painting American conservatives, and the spectre of white supremacy, as security threats in much the same rhetoric that had been used to describe Islamic terrorist networks.

Since the spring of 2020, as Agamben has repeatedly observed, Covid policy has imitated the War on Terror in its suspensions of rights — and intimated the handing over of political power to medical officials in ways anticipated in Homo Sacer. Thus, if Schmitt and Agamben remain relevant for understanding our politics, it is in ways that are uncomfortable for the cultural Left, which now finds itself increasingly running, rather than critiquing, the machinery of American power.

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In our present-day sequels to the War on Terror — the campaigns against racism and Covid — hegemonic institutions pursue enemies and suspend liberal norms in the name of our psychological and physical wellbeing. Now in possession of what we might call the commanding heights of the moral economy, from which it produces elites’ and would-be elites’ worldview, this Left no longer needs to perform radicalness.

It can assume instead the position of a centre ringed about by benighted, ignorant, but nevertheless dangerous enemies: conservatives. The latter are not credited with having specific, comprehensible or legitimate objections to the dominant policies and values. They are instead imagined as hateful, prejudiced enemies of legality, science, and moral decency — that is, they are seen not as political foes, but as cognitive and moral degenerates — in a manner that recalls the way Islamic terrorists during the Bush era were said to hate America “for our freedom” and to be full of irrational “Islamic rage”, rather than recognised as having a comprehensible set of objections to American policies in the Middle East.

We should not be surprised to hear pleas for the rule of law and deference for experts from those who once, drawing on radical theory, revealed the subterfuges and hypocrisies behind liberal norms of legality and objectivity. Critique, like terrorism, is a weapon of the weak. The powerful claim to defend security, reason and morality, while those out of power, grown clever and cynical from their experience of marginality, contest these claims and question whether such things even exist to be defended. With the cultural Left in the ascendancy, the political theory by which it climbed has become a ladder to be thrown away — and available to be taken up by the Right.

Long after the furore around Sinema is forgotten, her academic work will glint as one ironic point of light in this vast change in the way liberals and conservatives in America think about themselves and their country.

Many conservative voters, and brightest intellectuals, have become disillusioned with the Republican Party’s long-standing combination of laissez-faire economics, aggressive foreign policy and “family values” targeting abortion, gay marriage and other social issues. The Trump presidency revealed that traditional Republican political elites still hold too much of this platform, even as their base rejected it — and them. Meanwhile Trump’s alternative agenda, pitched initially as a rejection of both “globalism” and culture-war issues, collapsed amid blustering incompetence.

Canada is often cast as a more progressive version of the United States: less nationalistic and religious, more accepting of diversity and more generous in its welfare programs. But according to Michael Cuenco, a sharp-eyed young political analyst, Canada offers important lessons for the American Right.

Cuenco draws on the work of those American thinkers who have most cogently articulated the case for a “pro-worker” post-Trump conservatism, such as Michael Lind, but departs from them in critical ways.

His most original, and provocative, proposal for a new conservatism relies on a heterodox rereading of Canadian immigration policy, which is often cited as a model by reform-minded Americans on the Right. In a two-part series of articles for American Affairs this spring, Cuenco noted that American conservatives have long envied Canada’s “points system”, whereby the majority of immigrants are classed and selected on the basis of their potential economic contribution.

In this way, Canadians can avoid having to make what Americans would describe as a difficult choice between having a robust social safety net or an open labour market, between high levels of immigration or civic peace. But, Cuenco insists, America has failed to recognise that the Canadian system also requires what he calls a “civil religion” — one that is founded on a politically useful untruth.

The “civic religion” that enables this peculiarly effective immigration policy, Cuenco argues, is “multiculturalism”. However, this “noble lie” was told not to facilitate immigration, but to ensure social cohesion by smothering potentially dangerous domestic tensions. Indeed, it was conceived by prime minister Pierre Trudeau, father of the current prime minister, to contain and gradually dissipate the threat of francophone separatism. People insisting on their personal rights or identities may seem to be resisting hegemonic power, but they are really demonstrating that their characters and worldviews have been thoroughly shaped by it. The conservative mission, rightly understood, would not be to bemoan the hidden “religious” dimension of contemporary liberalism or undo false consciousness of its believers, but to better direct that process of shaping.

Against Quebecois claims to being one of the two founding nations of Canada (the French and the English), Trudeau promoted the idea that Canada had always been and must remain a “mosaic” of diverse communities. By emphasising a “multi” rather than “bi” cultural perspective, French Canadians’ particular status could be diluted, and the hegemony of the English-speaking political and economic leadership class (the so-called “Laurentian elite”) secured.

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In Canada — and, one might argue, throughout the Western world — the official political culture of the past two generations has increasingly become a kind of pageant of “difference” in which citizens are solicited to remember the far-flung origins of their compatriots, the important contributions of immigrants, the richness of their “communities” and other such clichés. One might see this sort of compulsory “multiculturalism” as a cynical means for reducing genuine differences in groups’ worldviews and long-standing historical grievances — which have the potential to generate irresolvable conflict — into a pacific dramaturgy where different identities are paraded.

But that’s a good thing, says Cuenco. In his formulation, Canada’s civic religion of multiculturalism makes for a political culture that is “Left in theory, Right in practice”.

There are many contemporary thinkers who wish to overcome the political division of Right and Left, and share Cuenco’s ambition to bring together progressive and conservative critics in defence of the working and middle classes. But Cuenco proposes something more interesting and more radical than a horse-shoe shaped coalition of the discontented.

He argues that the polices and values of one side (the Left) must be placed in service of the ultimate aims of the other (the Right). What we need, he proposes, is a group of elites who both recognise the legitimacy of populist resentment and the need to convert its demands not only into feasible policies but also into the language of liberal and progressive values.

And so Cuenco offers us a new articulation of the classic defence of liberal democratic civil religion proposed by Emile Durkheim, who argued that our form of government promotes human rights as a kind of worship through which we affirm and renew our membership in a national collective — one that is made all the more binding because we imagine ourselves to be autonomous individuals.

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This “noble lie” by which liberal states seem to dissolve themselves into a shapeless mass of isolated individuals — through their emphasis on rights — is in fact the religion by which such states master fractious societies and persevere in being. What could be more conservative?

By returning to Durkheim and casting multiculturalism as a civic religion, Cuenco also reveals a number of paradoxes on the Right and Left. Thinkers on the Left usually understand themselves as pursuing the transformation of society in line with a substantive vision of equality, as radicals opposed to supposedly dominant ideologies and institutions. Yet these are the very values that have shaped America since its foundation — values which are hegemonic throughout all major political, cultural and economic institutions. From Marxist professors to progressive human resource managers, the Left is a party of order and tradition.

On the Right, meanwhile, conservative intellectuals, particularly those of a populist bent, insist today that America must be saved from the excesses of the Left, which include everything from the Civil Rights movement of the Sixties to the Progressive era of the early 20^th century. The views of many (indeed most) living Americans, along with vast portions of American history, and their ideological foundations, appear to such ostensibly America-loving conservatives as unworthy of conservation. A number of venues on the post-Trump right, such as American Mind and American Greatness, have recently called for an “American Caesar” or “Salazar Option” by which a dictator might sweep away America’s supposed internal enemies, and with them, much of what defines America.

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In contrast to such puerile fantasies, Cuenco urges the American Right to see the real conservative potential of the policies and values of the Left. Reducing income inequality and reigning in the tax-evasion of our financial elites would reduce the political power of the latter to shape American media, culture and politics around their peculiar and increasingly racialised understanding of ethics. It would provide capital for programmes of reindustrialisation and infrastructure development that was promised, but never achieved, by Trump in his first campaign. Likewise, reorganising the US immigration system along Canadian lines, coupled with the renewal of a civic religion that gives a progressive veneer to a calculus about the probable economic impact of any would-be immigrant, would soothe culture wars over immigration and national identity.

Success on both fronts requires conservatives to make peace with the state, bureaucrats and experts — and to distinguish their specific critique of our current elite’s depredations from an overly sweeping and inherently self-defeating opposition to the very existence of elites.

It also requires conservatives to learn, as Pierre Trudeau did, to take up the language of the Left, and instrumentalise it towards the end of holding society together — rather than trying to drag it back into a vanished past or impotently raging at its continued disintegration.