And yet, for a few years in the early Seventies, complex, 20-minute long songs with nebulous lyrics and intricate guitar and/or synthesizer solos could earn you critical plaudits while also making you a millionaire. Emerson, Lake and Palmer rearranged Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and went on to fill Madison Square Garden. Yes made an album based on a footnote in a yogi’s biography and did the same. Rick Wakeman had a custom ice rink installed at Wembley Stadium so professional skaters could bring to life the narrative of his LP The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Audiences loved it.

Then came the backlash. Grandiose concepts and technical chops were out; the raw three chord rebellion of punk was in. Prog became a term of scorn, a byword for rock at its most bloated, self-indulgent and pretentious. Erstwhile cosmic voyagers interested in paying the mortgage changed their sounds completely: Phil Collins went from channeling hyper-skilled jazz drummers on Genesis records to warbling about a “Groovy Kind of Love”, while Yes went pop rock and scored a massive radio hit with “Owner of a Lonely Heart”. To be labeled prog was a threat to your reputation: in the late Nineties, when critics suggested that Radiohead’s OK Computer was a bit proggy, the band took umbrage, denying that they knew anything about the genre. Even “out” prog fans tend to be self-deprecating and a little defensive. And yet I would argue that prog rock is one of Britain’s greatest contributions to popular music; and it is high time to recognize it as such, while at least a few of its founders still walk among us.

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What, then, is this contentious music? The genre’s origins lie in the late Sixties, when bands like The Beatles, Pink Floyd and The Moody Blues were expanding the parameters of pop music, pushing it into experimental, psychedelic and even symphonic territory. The record credited with crystallizing the genre is King Crimson’s debut In the Court of the Crimson King, which combined heavy riffing with elements of jazz, English pastoralism, improvisation and overblown, portentous lyrics. Within months King Crimson were supporting The Rolling Stones at Hyde Park; a few months later their original lineup imploded. In their wake, however, a slew of new, ever-more ambitious bands emerged, while others, such as Genesis and Yes, changed their sound with the intent of “advancing” rock music. Highly skilled young musicians experimented with classical, folk and medieval influences, whole-tone scales and odd time signatures. The playing became ever more virtuosic, the concepts ever more grandiose. By 1973, prog was at its peak — Pink Floyd released The Dark Side of the Moon; ELP released Brain Salad Surgery, which stayed in charts for 47 weeks; Yes unleashed their monumental Tales from Topographic Oceans, a concept album the length of a Mahler symphony and which shot to number one in the UK charts.

Tales, however, also marks the turning point, where prog hubris meets nemesis. For the first time, Yes faced significant critical hostility, while even their cosmically inclined fans grew restless when the band tried to play the whole thing from start to finish. Record labels began pushing prog bands to write shorter, more commercial songs that could be played on the radio. The popular notion that punk killed prog is, therefore, an oversimplification. Not only that, it gets the timeline wrong: punk exploded as a musical and cultural phenomenon in late 1976, three years after Tales from Topographic Oceans pushed the boat out a little too far. Meanwhile, Yes topped the UK charts in 1977 with Going for the One, which featured an unapologetically complex 15-minute epic that filled most of side B. It spent two weeks at number one, the same amount of time as the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks a few months later. Yet this was the last hurrah: by the end of the decade, most of the prog bands had broken up or changed their style.

If not punk, what did kill prog? To some extent, it was creative exhaustion: once you have expanded the parameters of rock by adding in every possible ingredient, where do you go next? But, for the most part, I think the answer is simple: fashions change. Or, at least, they used to.

Strange as it may be to imagine in today’s era of cultural stasis, where octogenarians headline festivals and sixty-something rock critics write reviews of Taylor Swift albums, popular music used to be made by young people for even younger people. Styles flourished and then vanished constantly. Flower power and psychedelia burned brightly then disappeared; glam rock came and went; then it was prog’s turn. Given that you couldn’t dance to it, fall in love to it, or even play it on the radio, the truly remarkable thing is that it was ever popular at all. In the next decade, the primary expression for instrumental virtuosity in rock was heavy metal guitar, while prog’s more cosmic, spiritual themes would manifest in New Age music.

So if prog’s downfall was to be expected, the more interesting question is: why was it so despised for so long? Why was there no triumphant, disco-style resurrection? Here I think we see the baleful influence of those geriatric rock critics. It goes without saying that rock criticism is one of the worst forms of writing to have emerged since the invention of cuneiform; yet there was a time when people cared about the opinions expressed in NME, Melody Maker and other long-forgotten publications.

Being writers and not musicians, rock critics tend to emphasize skilled lyricists — Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Lou Reed, The Smiths — while musically they fetishize simplicity — punk, post-punk and New Wave — on the grounds that anyone should be able to pick up a guitar and express themselves. Class also plays a part: prog was supposedly played by posh boys who had benefited from music lessons, while punk was of the street. And yet Jon Anderson, frontman of Yes, was an ex-milkman from the North of England while Joe Strummer, frontman of The Clash, was the son of a diplomat.

Musical tribalism is acceptable in teenagers, but only among teenagers. But prog served as a convenient whipping boy for lazy rock critics for decades, even as they aged into their thirties, forties, fifties. I didn’t start listening to it until I was almost 30, when an Italian friend, unburdened by British musical taboos, introduced me to Red by King Crimson, a spectacularly heavy yet complex record. From that very first listen, I realized that I had been lied to. But I think that by far the worst legacy of the war on prog was the stigmatization of musicianship, which reached its nadir in the Nineties with Britpop — a bland, backward-looking movement that left behind a smattering of catchy tunes but very little of interest musically.

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Now that rock — like jazz and classical music — is primarily enjoyed by the middle aged and elderly it is time to leave childish things behind. Prog is great because it’s the sound of ambitious, accomplished musicians with an expansive vision pushing themselves to their limits. As with all musical movements, some practitioners had better judgment than others, but all of them were on fire with possibilities. It is the sound of why not? Of what if? Of taking everything that’s available to you and creating something new and unprecedented.

Today there are modern prog bands who continue the tradition — technically accomplished groups from Scandinavia who draw on the classics of the genre, as well as subgenres like prog metal. But I prefer the early stuff, which captures the sound of discovery — like watching Eisenstein or Dziga Vertov invent the language of film, or Lawrence Sterne subvert the novel even as the form was taking shape. Robert Fripp, the leader of King Crimson, once described his vision of music as Hendrix playing Bartók. How can you argue with that?

So if you haven’t tried prog, I encourage you to dive in — there is much to explore. If you have, then I congratulate you on your excellent taste. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go and listen to my 15-disc Tales from Topographic Oceansbox set. I may be some time.

It was a year before I saw the results of one of these “ice storms”. After some brief rainfall, I stepped out of my apartment and saw that my car was encased in ice. Even stranger, each blade of grass had its own miniature ice jacket, as if molded to fit. Although I had lived in Russia, I had never seen this manifestation of cold before. That said, it didn’t strike me as being particularly extreme: within about 15 minutes the ice had melted. The main risk with these sudden freezes was that your pipes might burst, but so long as you left your faucets dripping you would probably be fine.

That was true for a long time. But as this weekend’s “life-threatening Arctic blast” marches south across the country toward Texas, accompanied by apocalyptic headlines such as “frostbite in five minutes” and stories about exploding trees, I find I am no longer quite so sanguine. After all, the last time I saw a winter storm on this scale was the genuinely catastrophic Great Texas Freeze.

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That was in 2021. The extreme weather warning went out on Valentine’s Day, for all 254 counties in the state, which had never happened before: “Winter Storm Uri” was coming. But I found it difficult to take seriously a meteorological event that shared a name with a man who bent spoons for a living. Besides, in all the time I’d lived in Texas, I’d never seen much more than a light dusting of snow that was quickly gone.

I was very surprised therefore when I woke up the next day to find the world knee-deep in snow. Excited, I dug out my sheepskin coat from the back of the wardrobe and took my kids outside to see the real deal. They had great fun trudging about, making snowmen and throwing snowballs. But there was also something eerie about it. There were no cars; nobody else was out on the street. It was as if they were all hiding from something.

Friends started texting me, asking if I still had power. My house did; theirs did not. They were hunkered down indoors, wrapped up in blankets and heavy coats, waiting for the power to come back on. My in-laws called to ask if we still had water. We did; they did not. Worse, we couldn’t help them because the roads were buried in snow.

The reason for our good fortune was that we lived close to a hospital and so were on a protected part of the grid. But many had a much harder time. More than two out of three Texans lost power over the course of six days, for an average of 42 hours; nearly half went without running water for an average of 52 hours. Some people trekked to stay with friends or family who did have power, while others stayed warm by running their car engines or cooked using camping stoves. But this in turn led to an epidemic of carbon monoxide poisoning, with over 1,400 seeking treatment in emergency rooms and 19 people dying. Ultimately, the Texas Department of State Health Services attributed the deaths of 246 people to Winter Storm Uri. Along the Texas coast, nearly four million fish died.

The scale of the catastrophe, and the state’s failure to protect its inhabitants or maintain basic services, was unprecedented. And yet, compared to the cold extremes that you might experience for months at a time in Russia, Minnesota or Canada, Winter Storm Uri was not that severe. By 20 February it was over. The problem was that the state’s lack of preparedness had left it exposed to disaster. Recriminations started flying immediately. The Democrats blamed Governor Greg Abbott for ignoring warnings that the grid would fail in extreme cold, Abbott blamed renewable energy sources, although the ultimate fall guy was ERCOT, the independent organization that ran the grid. There was also a theological element as environmentalists interpreted the Great Texas Freeze as punishment from the heavens for Texans’ love of huge trucks and hydrocarbons.

As for me, I didn’t know who to blame. The event was such a black swan that I wasn’t convinced any leader of any political party would have bothered investing in preparations. One of my neighbors, who had lived in the area his entire life, told me that he hadn’t seen anything like it since the Fifties, when he was a child. I didn’t mind those odds. If big freezes continued on that schedule, I’d be under the ground by the time the next one came round.

What actually happened, however, was that the Great Texas Freeze began to feel like it was but one of a series of biblical plagues that had begun with Covid, the year earlier. Two years later, I awoke from a dream that snow was falling off my roof, only to discover that it wasn’t snow but tree branches, snapping off and crashing to the ground. A sudden freeze had encased them in thick ice, making them too heavy to support themselves. One tree had fallen over and landed on a neighbor’s garage; another had crushed a truck. But that was nothing compared to the freak hailstorm that followed nine months later. Baseball-sized hailstones hurtled from the sky for 10 minutes, pummeling our roof, smashing our windows and destroying our cars. A disaster recovery firm boarded up my windows, but I was informed that there was a shortage of glass and it would be months before replacements were available. My house looked like a particularly insalubrious crack den and stayed that way for half a year.

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There was something disturbing about all of this on an existential level. One freak weather event is bad enough, two seem extremely unlucky, but by the third you’re starting to suspect that the universe has it in for you. Indeed, I think these experiences gave me an insight into how ancient peoples felt when confronted by disasters, and their feelings of awestruck powerlessness before the whims of fickle gods. All you can do is hunker down, wait for it to be over, and hope that you make it through to the other end.

Sometimes, disasters are just going to happen. And as this latest storm approaches, I find myself waiting. If I were to run, where would I run to? The cold is everywhere, all the way up to New York City. Hopefully the state learned its lesson last time and has reinforced the grid. Or maybe it won’t be that bad, and just like in Werner Herzog’s film, La Soufrière, where the volcano does not erupt, so this week’s media weather porn will turn out to have been sheer scaremongering. We’ll find out soon.

Russians had plenty of reasons to protest, yet very few of them did. This was not because of repression; as flawed and corrupt as he was, Yeltsin was no authoritarian. You were free to mock and deride the head of state, and many did. The issue was that hardly anyone saw the point of protesting as they were too busy struggling to survive. Half a decade into Russia’s experiment with democracy, the state had effectively disintegrated. Thieves and “violent entrepreneurs” rushed in to take advantage of the chaos, and most people accepted there was nothing they could do about it.

Yet one group of Russians refused to accept this national humiliation: the elderly. It was common in those days to see pensioners demonstrating, especially if you worked in central Moscow. I regularly passed by groups of communist babushkas standing in front of the statue of Marshal Zhukov just off Red Square (men were a less common sight; I attributed this to the drastic decline in male life expectancy). In their shawls and overcoats, these old women looked just like the ones you saw lighting candles in churches, except they read Lenin instead of the Bible and held aloft banners featuring the hammer and sickle instead of icons.

At the time, this struck me as a strange and exotic spectacle. My own grandparents, born during the First World War and raised in “Red Clydeside”, the epicenter of radical Scottish leftism, were not political at all. Whether they had been in their youth I did not know. The only activist pensioner I knew of was an old lady from the village of Lumphinnans, who had dictated a memoir of her life as a communist activist; my mother had typed it up for her. We regarded her as “a character”.

In Russia, the radicalism of the old was just as futile, but much more depressing. The Communist Party was led by a mediocrity called Gennady Zyuganov, who had inherited leadership of the proletariat when everybody with talent quit to get rich. In 1996, he ran against Yeltsin for the presidency, who at the time had a 6% approval rating. Zyuganov came within a whisker of winning the first round, but then Yeltsin staged a remarkable comeback, supported by state- and oligarch-controlled media, which blacked out all coverage of the communists. Yet this did not bring out the masses in revolt, only the elderly, and the regime knew it could ignore them. It saw the sea of gray hair and knew that the frail opposition had no place in the future being built.

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And so, powerless as they were, the pensioners performed ritual acts. Banners were waved, speeches were given, rallies attended, and holidays celebrated (I remember picking up a flyer for an event commemorating Stalin’s birthday at my local cinema). These protesters had spent their entire lives under communism and endured war and hardship — but they also remembered moments of triumph, like the Red Army raising the Soviet flag over the Reichstag, or Yuri Gagarin beating the Americans in the space race. Now they were being told that their sacrifices were in vain and all that meant nothing. I did not blame them for taking to the streets. To do nothing, to say nothing, would be to admit defeat and acquiesce to their own humiliation.

Around a decade later, I moved to Texas and stopped thinking about elderly protesters. That is, until the second Trump administration got underway. The American variety first came onto my radar when Elon Musk’s DOGE laid siege to USAID, and congressional Democrats, some of whom were considerably older than the Soviet gerontocrats the Western media had once mocked, turned up at the head office to try to gain access. Out of power, these ancient politicians suddenly looked incredibly frail: I couldn’t help but notice their implausible wigs, their halting speech, the tremble in their voices as they attempted to lead a chant that quickly faltered. I saw how easy it was for a security guard to ignore them.

Since then, anti-Trump protests have been held across the nation, and, as many have observed, they are a lot grayer than they were the first time around. At first, I ignored the online snark about “boomer liberals”. But when I reported on a protest against redistricting at the Capitol in Austin in August, it was impossible to ignore the abundance of white hair, the tie-dye t-shirts and occasional wheelchairs. The energy levels were low. Like the wizened Democrats outside the USAID building, the protesters attempted to start up a chant, but it was hesitant and unenergetic and soon died down.

I hadn’t seen so many angry pensioners since Russia. But whereas the babushkas were performing rituals that dated back to the dawn of communism, these elderly Texans were following a script that was written during the heyday of their youth in the Sixties — those heady days of sex, drugs and protests against LBJ and Nixon. Their homemade signs bore profane messages like “GOP Guarding Old Pedophiles”, “Abort Greg Abbott”, and “Fuck ICE, Fuck Trump”.

The aesthetics of it all were very poor. When the rock band Country Joe and the Fish led the crowd in a chant of “FUCK” at Woodstock, it was about youth and sticking it to the man. More than five decades later, the same generation was still in rebellion mode, but the swearing had a crotchety, yelling-at-the-TV energy. When I stumbled upon a No Kings protest in a small town in the Texas Hill Country several weeks later, the atmosphere was more congenial. It ended in time for lunch, and some of the retiree protesters went to get barbecue. It was a nice day out, I suppose, but it wasn’t the future. Like the old communists in Russia, these pensioners had assumed the world they had built would last forever, but now they could feel it receding into history. And just as the regime in Moscow ignored OAP protesters, so Trump was not remotely threatened. He responded by posting an AI video of himself wearing a crown, flying a plane over a crowd and dumping shit on the protesters.

Where have the young people gone? It’s not that Gen Z doesn’t like a good protest: two years of marches against the war in Gaza demonstrated that. Nor is it true that they have lost faith in politics; the recent triumph of Zohran Mamdani in New York demonstrates that they are as easily gulled by charismatic charlatans as every generation that came before them. Perhaps it’s that, rather like the music of Country Joe and the Fish, the story that’s being told just doesn’t resonate in 2025. Trump as tyrant/Hitler/existential threat to democracy etc is a boring, rebooted narrative that didn’t work the first time around, and which doesn’t actually address any of their concerns. And so, as the second Trump administration proceeds, we can expect the median age of the protesters to creep steadily upwards.

On the one hand, I understand the desire to join together and express disapproval, even if it changes nothing — just as those babushkas in Moscow did. There’s something existential about it. But I also wonder whether the best way to spend your final years is in a fit of rage, shaking your fist at a man who will himself very soon exit the stage of history.

For me, the bleakest aspect of today’s geriatric protests is not the ease with which they are ignored, but rather that they reveal the impossibility of escaping from the corrosive effects of American politics. When I see videos of protesters piling unsteadily out of assisted-living facilities, handmade placards in hand, I don’t think “fight the power!” Instead, I imagine retirement homes across the country where the TV is permanently tuned to MSNBC and CNN, and the residents are in a permanent state of febrile rage and terror, fulminating about Trump all day.

Anything — knitting, bridge, chair yoga — would be better than that. I remember a story a friend in Moscow told me about his wife’s 95-year-old grandmother. She had lived through everything from Stalin’s terror to the Second World War to the collapse of the USSR. However, unlike the impoverished babushkas I saw on the street, she lived with her family, was well looked after, and enjoyed good health. She could have rested in those final years, satisfied that she had made it safely to the end, surrounded by her great-grandchildren. Instead, she watched the news obsessively and fretted about the future of Russia.

Given that she was not going to live to see any of the apocalyptic scenarios she was concerned about come to pass, my friend thought that she was upsetting herself needlessly. “Why are you so worried?”, he would ask. But she couldn’t help herself. And so she kept fretting until one day she suffered a fall, dying a week or two later. History rolled on regardless.

There’s a lesson in there, I think. I prefer the way my own grandparents spent their last years — watching game shows on TV, reading books, gardening on their allotment. Dylan Thomas was wrong: given the chance, you absolutely should go gentle into that good night.

This is not the band’s first farewell. After multiple breakups, regroupings and reincarnations, three of the four original members previously attempted to exit the stage in 2017. The plan was to bow out after a world tour titled, appropriately enough, “The End”. The years were taking their toll: Ozzy Osbourne, once legendary for his stage antics, now hung onto his microphone stand and barely moved, while guitarist Tony Iommi had to return to the UK every six weeks for blood tests to ensure that his stage three lymphoma had not returned. Bassist Geezer Butler seemed to be doing alright, but after the tour he stopped dyeing his hair and went home to catch up on his reading — not just acting his age but embracing it, content to put his touring days behind him.

There was, nevertheless, a sense of unfinished business. Drummer Bill Ward had refused to participate, blaming an “unsignable” contract (Ozzy retaliated that he was no longer capable of playing his parts). But now Ozzy, having survived a life of such extremes that he once seemed unkillable, has undergone four surgeries for a spinal injury and is beset with other health issues, including Parkinson’s. Mortality is on his mind; in 2022, aged 73, he announced he was returning to England (“I don’t want to be buried in fucking Forest Lawn”). But rather than go gentle into that good night, there will be one final gig. Ward, who has survived several heart attacks himself, has reconciled with his old bandmates and will join them on stage. Geezer has temporarily come out of retirement. Iommi never really stopped. But this time it really does look like The End.

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They have come a long way since their early days as The Polka Tulk Blues Band, a name allegedly inspired by a brand of talcum powder favored by Ozzy’s mother. Birmingham back then was still an industrial powerhouse, far from the garbage-strewn sinkhole it is today. Other industrial cities — Newcastle, Glasgow, for example — were considerably grimmer, yet while they produced the likes of Lindisfarne and The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, Birmingham and its environs spawned bands with a harder edge. Robert Plant and John Bonham of Led Zeppelin hailed from nearby Bromwich, Judas Priest would follow in Sabbath’s footsteps, while in the Eighties Napalm Death emerged from darkest Meriden.

When it comes to heavy metal, however, Sabbath are the source. Industrial machinery was directly responsible for the band’s sound: Iommi lost the tips of two fingers to a steel press on his last day working at a factory. Undaunted, he melted down a Fairy Liquid bottle to create makeshift prosthetics. He then altered his style to accommodate the injury, playing simpler chords, more slowly. The heavy, grinding sound matched their defiant attitude and sense of themselves as outsiders: Ozzy had grown up in poverty, Iommi and Geezer were the children of immigrants. As Ward put it: “There was this force, all this resentment and anger that was coming out. It came from what we thought was bullshit at the time: politics and war, and upbringing and people’s ways of life.”

But the band’s sinister tritones and penchant for occult imagery owed as much to shrewd commercial instincts as it did to self-expression. Blues bands were sprouting like mushrooms after rain in England in the Sixties; they had to differentiate themselves. As Geezer put it, people liked scary films so why not make scary music? So the band (by now “Earth”) renamed themselves after a film starring Boris Karloff and tapped into the post-flower power occult zeitgeist. Channelling the likes of Dennis Wheatley and Aleister Crowley, they wrote songs about Satan, wizards and a “big black shape with eyes of fire” — not to mention drugs, death, war and an iron man traveling through time, seeking revenge.

Black Sabbath recorded their eponymous 1970 debut LP in a single, 12-hour recording session. Roundly despised by the critics, it was a roaring success with the kids, so they returned to the studio and made the follow-up, Paranoid, four months later. This time they had a luxurious six days. These albums, and the two that followed, Master of Reality and Volume Four, laid the foundation for a sound that was to conquer the world. Contemporaries like Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple played heavy riffs but their ethos was hard rock, steroidal blues, even R&B, with (in the instance of Zeppelin) a whiff of Tolkien. Sabbath’s mutant blues, with its themes of angst, doom and horror, came straight from the depths of the abyss. Their streak of memorable riffs was unparalleled: applied to their music, terms like “sludge” and “grinding” became superlatives. Their influence spread. Judas Priest added another guitar and shrieked higher. Lemmy left space rockers Hawkwind to form Motörhead, turned up the bass and played faster. In Britain, in Europe, in America, in Asia, countless bands discovered endless possibilities within Sabbath’s elemental sound. Play louder, thrashier, slower; sing in a falsetto, sing like Cookie Monster; add blast beats; turn the riff into a drone; play in complex time signatures. Actually take the Satan stuff seriously, set fire to churches, murder your bandmates.

Yet, for all the variations of metal that exist today, no one has surpassed the work of the originators. While their heirs burrow ever deeper into narrower, more niche sounds, Black Sabbath were always looking outwards. They were fans of The Beatles, of blues and jazz; Iommi loved classical music and strove to bring its “tension and drama” to rock. Bill Ward made their songs swing, while Geezer found the groove in even Iommi’s heaviest riffs. The otherwise monumental “Supernaut” from Volume Four incorporates a calypso section, while Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, their most creatively expansive album, features strings, synthesizers and the lyrical piano of Rick Wakeman, plus a psychedelic song about DNA called “Spiral Architect”. 

After that, things get a bit diffuse. Sabotage is a solid album, and while Tony Iommi (and myself) both think that Technical Ecstasy is a classic, many would disagree. By 1978’s Never Say Die, however, the band was undoubtedly creatively exhausted. Ozzy left, taking his unique wail with him. He was replaced by Ronnie James Dio, a much better singer who brought new life to the band, and yet something was lost. Black Sabbath stumbled ahead with an array of vocalists, while Ozzy rose to superstardom under the management of his wife Sharon, becoming first the Prince of Darkness, and later a barely coherent Heavy Metal Homer Simpson on The Osbournes. Bill Ward left, Geezer and Iommi soldiered on, then Geezer left, then Iommi cycled through more incarnations of the band until Ozzy rejoined in 1997. 

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Given the advanced age and shaky health of the band, it is tempting to see them as a metaphor for the decay and decline of Birmingham itself, a city which has seen much better days. In fact, when Black Sabbath formed, in 1968, the city had a higher standard of living than most of the country. The factories were still working; the tower blocks were new. Even the Bullring, the notorious concrete carbuncle long reviled as a symbol of the excesses of brutalism, was in those days regarded as a cutting-edge vision of the urban future. 

It took Birmingham some time to catch up with Black Sabbath’s lyrical and musical vision. Between 1971 and 1981, Birmingham lost 200,000 jobs as the manufacturing sector went into decline. The recession that began in 1979 caused the economy to collapse, and by 1982 the unemployment rate had surged to 20%; it stayed elevated through the end of the decade and beyond. Suddenly songs such as “Hand of Doom”, “A Hard Road”, “Children of the Grave” and “Into the Void” provided the perfect soundtrack for a city in crisis. And yet by this time Ozzy was a mega star, Geezer was happily married, Iommi was living in a Warwickshire mansion with stained glass windows and Bill Ward had retreated to the LA beach where he would work on his strange, introspective album Ward One: Along the Way. 

Now Birmingham, bankrupted by an equal pay lawsuit, can’t even provide as basic a service as collecting the garbage. As for Black Sabbath, there is real anxiety as to whether they will even be able to perform. Iommi has cautioned fans that Ozzy can no longer play a full set and may be seated. Geezer described a nightmare to The Guardian: “I dreamed everything went wrong onstage and we all turned to dust.”

And yet it would ultimately be deeply unfair to compare the aged Black Sabbath to their dilapidated hometown. They rose from the humblest of beginnings and created a genre of music that spoke to millions. For all their ups and downs, despite all the drugs, alcohol and lawsuits, they remained loyal to each other at the end and are bowing out as conquering heroes. Even if Ozzy is confined to a chair and yowls into the microphone for 20 minutes, the fans will receive those final yowls with gratitude. “Birmingham forever,” says Ozzy. Yeah, probably not. Black Sabbath forever? Now you’re talking.

Now, however, there is a new class of exceedingly colorful billionaire. Foremost among them is Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, close friend of Donald Trump, and father of 14 (that we know of). But there are many others: Larry Ellison, the orange skinned octogenarian CEO of Oracle, creepy Mark Zuckerberg with his plan to provide everyone with 12 AI friends each, not to mention Jeff Bezos 2.0, previously a standard issue ruthless oligarch, now a man given to posing with his shirt off and launching celebrities into space.

Not so long ago, the media gushed over these exotic creatures, convinced that they were going to lead us all into a new golden age. Tony Stark was the pop culture avatar of the charismatic tech genius, solving impossible problems with his brilliant inventions. But then things went sour: Trump, social media, disinformation… By the time OpenAI launched the generative AI revolution with ChatGPT, advances in technology were met with as much apocalyptic panic as excitement. It didn’t help that Sam Altman and his fellow AI CEOs kept telling us that the technology they were developing was so dangerous that it might one day kill us all. Curiously, they kept building it.

Never before have we had so many outlandish characters among the world’s rich and powerful. And yet, despite the abundance of targets, satire that tackles the phenomenon of the 21st century tech billionaire is thin on the ground. HBO’s Silicon Valley did a fine job of sending up the quirks of VC culture, but it was content to stop there, and swerved the larger sociopolitical questions. Into this void arrives Mountainhead, a new film by Jesse Armstrong, best known as the creator of Succession — although British readers may remember him as one half of the writing team behind the cult comedy Peep Show.

On the surface, it is easy to see why Armstrong was drawn to the theme. In Succession he wove a saga of a family of vile narcissists vying for control of the media empire their aging father, a diabolical combination of Rupert Murdoch and King Lear, was unwilling to relinquish. Succession served as a vehicle through which he could explore large scale questions regarding the media, politics and the corrosive effects of power on human relationships. In Mountainhead, Armstrong applies the same approach to our new billionaire overlords. The setup is simple: four tech oligarchs are spending a weekend at a mountain retreat in Utah, part of a tradition where they kick back and enjoy simple pleasures like burgers and beer, with no business talk.

Ven, played by Cory Michael Smith, owns a social media app called Traan and, as the richest man in the world, is an obvious analog for Elon Musk. Steve Carell plays Randy, the second richest man in the world, who is nevertheless powerless before his cancer. With his propensity for philosophizing and his wide range of contacts in the industrial military complex, he is most reminiscent of Peter Thiel or Alex Karp of Palantir, though not a direct riff on either one. Ramy Youssef plays Jeff, the most grounded of the four; his company provides safe AI. Jason Schwartzman plays Hugo, the much put upon owner of the Mountainhead retreat, who, as the creator of a meditation app, is merely a centimillionaire.

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The film begins immediately following the launch of a catastrophic new feature on Traan: an AI tool that gives users the power to create deepfakes indistinguishable from reality. Riots and carnage ensue in places as far afield as Libya and India, while in Paris the mayor is murdered. Ven alternately decries the images as fakes, or argues they are a necessary stage of learning: when the first cinema audiences thought that the train heading towards them was real, the answer was not to stop making films, he says. Nevertheless, Ven decides that the solution is to buy Jeff’s company, but Jeff isn’t selling.

As the Traan-inspired unrest becomes more extreme, they make ever more outlandish plans for coups and, inevitably, start plotting against each other. They rationalize their dark deeds in the gibberish language of tech ideology: the singularity, AGI, effective altruism, all that. By the end, in characteristic Jesse Armstrong style, even the character who seemed to be good, or at least not that evil, turns out to be thoroughly amoral after all.

Yet while Mountainhead is entertainingly scabrous, it doesn’t really hit its satirical targets. The first half, with its aristocratic horror at the febrile mob deranged by exposure to misinformation, is as conventional a critique of AI as they come. Certainly, AI has further weakened society’s increasingly tenuous grasp on the real, but the notion that the answer is “guardrails” of the kind provided by Jeff fails to address that we have already seen what this kind of AI look like: it depicts the Founding Fathers as black, among other distortions and obfuscations. As AI becomes the experience layer of the Internet, those who control what it is permitted to show us will have unprecedented power to distort reality themselves.

The larger problem, however, is that when it comes to tech billionaires, the truth is simply far stranger than Armstrong’s fiction. Ven has a business meeting with his baby, says weird stuff, and owns a social media company. But Elon Musk owns six companies, sired an army of children, plans to make humanity a multiplanetary species, dances with a chainsaw and is really good at video games. Likewise, Randy is much less interesting than Peter Thiel, a billionaire who travels the world giving lectures on the Antichrist. Jeff is no Sam Altman, the dead-eyed CEO of Open AI, or Ilya Sutskever, his former chief scientist who used to burn effigies of non-aligned AI at company meetings. And Hugo, the app lifestyle guy, is not a patch on Bryan Jonhson, the centimillionaire who has decided never to die and spends $2 million a year on anti-aging treatments.

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Confronted with this monumental weirdness, Armstrong stumbles. In his vision, tech billionaires are simply greedy bastards, insecure megalomaniacs; his characters are four assholes caught in a pissing contest. In fact, they are not all that different from Mark and Jeremy, the Gen X flat mate losers of Peep Show. Look, says Armstrong, these guys aren’t so special. They’re lonely and sad and a bit stupid.

It’s a reassuring take, certainly, but probably not an accurate one. What if they’re not sad? What if they’re winners?  What if they have won at such a scale and for so long that their personalities have become transformed in ways that are difficult for the rest of us to grasp?

This is what makes the tech billionaire so difficult to satirize. Unlike previous oligarchs who got rich by doing normal things at a larger scale — selling more stuff for less, or monopolizing a particular natural resource before anyone else could get their hands on it — the likes of Musk and Zuckerberg and Altman really do operate on a different plane. They imagine and invent futures, conjure forth fortunes from impossible feats of engineering and the manipulation of zeroes and ones, they bend reality to their will, they transform societies, they take huge risks and reap equally huge rewards. They are worshiped and reviled, sometimes both at the same time. They want to live on Mars. They want to live forever. And although they face setbacks, they generally… win. As a result, they have amassed a degree of power, wealth, fame and influence that few in human history have experienced — no one, in fact — until now.

Confronted with this sui generis state of affairs, Armstrong seeks to cut the billionaires down to size, but in doing so his targets zoom out of range. The times are so new and strange that our imagination is yet to catch up. Other, sharper, narrative strategies will be required if we are to capture the extremes of our age.

What did the people coding away in the glass towers know that I did not? What did they actually do, these data scientists and developers — and why did it pay so much better than what I did? Initially, I agreed with the argument, sometimes aired in The Guardian and other organs of correct thinking, that if our tech overlords were going to have such an outsize impact on society, they had a duty to study literature, history and philosophy. But then I realized that I knew nothing of their area of expertise, and was hardly in a position to criticize.

And so I began to read books about technology and the history of computing. Much to my surprise, they were very interesting. I learned about Charles Babbage and his Difference Engine; Alan Turing and his imaginary machines; and ENIAC, the first computer, which had to be literally “debugged” because the heat and light emitted by its 17,468 vacuum tubes attracted moths. I learned, too, about the 1947 invention of the transistor and “Moore’s Law”, which held that the processing power of a microchip would double every two years, even as costs remained relatively stable, a prediction that proved accurate for decades.

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The biggest surprise, however, was discovering that many of the core concepts underpinning the information age were the work of one man: Claude Shannon. Every time you send a text, make a phone call, search the internet or stream music or video, you rely on ideas he was the first to develop. In terms of impact, he appeared to me to be on a par with Einstein (at least). Yet while Einstein’s name is synonymous with genius, Shannon’s is unknown to the broad public. His first biography wasn’t published until 2017, almost two decades after his death and 80 years after he published the first of two major works that would revolutionize how we do, well, almost everything.

The childhoods of people who change the world always seem mundane in contrast to their later achievements, and in this, Shannon was typical. Born in 1906, he grew up in Gaylord, Michigan, a small town surrounded by farmland. His father was a furniture maker and probate judge, his mother a teacher. As a child, he enjoyed tinkering with radios, and went on to study electrical engineering and mathematics at the University of Michigan. In 1936, he took a position as a research assistant at MIT, where he learned to program a “Differential Analyzer”, a mechanical contraption the size of a room that solved equations with shafts, gears, wheels and discs. The next year, he worked as an intern for the US telephone monopoly AT&T, which had been established by Alexander Graham Bell 60 years earlier.

Shannon now started to theorize about a different kind of thinking machine. The relay circuits in the telephone systems at AT&T were comprised of switches that could be switched on, allowing electrical current to flow, and off, stopping the current. Shannon then made a conceptual leap, applying a system of logical reasoning, developed by the 19th-century English mathematician George Boole, to circuitry. Boole’s binary system was based on true or false questions, and Shannon proposed that if an open circuit was used to represent one and a closed circuit to represent zero, then circuits could be used to perform logical tasks such as decision making and processing rules. In 1937, he articulated this idea in his master’s thesis, “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits”. Though no one realized it at first, he had laid the theoretical groundwork for digital computing. Today, it is recognized as the most influential master’s thesis of all time. Shannon was 21 years old.

In 1941, Shannon took a job at Bell Labs, the research wing of AT&T. During the war, he applied his mathematical skills to anti-aircraft targeting and was part of the team that developed the “X-system” which was used to encrypt communications between Churchill and Roosevelt. This work was significant in itself, but it was after the war that he continued the work of establishing the information age. In “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” Shannon set out to solve the problem of “reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point”. The problem was that analog signals, such as the electrical waves used in telecommunications systems, were susceptible to noise build up: static, errors, interference and so on. But boosting the signal also boosted the noise, which had the effect of rendering the original message unintelligible when it arrived at the other end — for instance in a long-distance phone call.

Shannon’s solution was to shift the focus from waves and current and to rethink the problem: what, exactly, was being conveyed in a message? At first, he referred in a letter to the “transmission of intelligence” before settling on the word “information”. He coined the term bit (from “binary digit”) to describe the smallest unit of measure. Shannon showed that all information — images, text, sound — could be broken up into bits, transmitted as zeros and ones, and then reconstructed clearly at the other end, no matter the medium, whether phone lines or radio waves.

So ubiquitous now is the idea of measuring information digitally that it is difficult to believe it is so recent. Shannon published his magnum opus in The Bell System Technical Journal, in 1948, and his colleagues were quick to see its significance; in the early Sixties AT&T moved the US telephone network to a fully digital system. Meanwhile, researchers at Bell Labs had invented the transistor in 1947, which would make the binary logic circuits Shannon had theorized about a decade earlier a practical reality. The age of the computer now began in earnest. And as computer and communications technology advanced, so more and more information could be created, processed, and manipulated: all at ever faster speeds. Shannon had paved the way for everything from the moon landings to the guided missiles hitting their targets with unprecedented accuracy in Operation Desert Storm; to the rise of the internet and social media; to the vast fortunes of Bezos, Gates, Zuckerberg and Musk.

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When Shannon died of Alzheimer’s in 2001, it seemed that his theory had already transformed the world — even DNA could be measured in bits. Yet, in many ways, the information age still resembled its analog predecessor. Digital information was still stored on physical artifacts such as CDs, DVDs, floppy disks and hard drives, just as analog had paper, tape and vinyl. A shift was taking place, however, as information became increasingly disembodied. Print increasingly gave way to websites; music and film moved online and could be downloaded as torrents of bits. Then, as technology advanced, you didn’t even need to download any of it anymore. Information was everywhere and nowhere, afloat in the ether, accessible through phones, computers, smart TVs and smart fridges — even sunglasses.

We are, of course, still grappling with the consequences of this shift. Few doubt that putting everybody in touch with everybody else instantaneously has driven us all a bit mad. Other changes are more subtle. In “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”, Shannon had declared that meaning was irrelevant to the “engineering problem”. This was not intended as a value judgment, but as all forms of media are reduced to zeroes and ones and made instantly available, it is hard not to think that a certain flattening has occurred. In the age of digital streaming, everything from the Lord of the Rings to Looney Tunes cartoons to Bach’s Goldberg Variations and the songs of Taylor Swift have been equally reduced to “content” — always on, yet also easy to switch off. But more than that, digital information is easily adapted and modified so that the “content” itself has become unstable, increasing its sense of weightlessness. Anyone can modify a digital file, and with the advent of AI, also fundamentally shaped by Shannon’s theories, we can remix, reshape and transform simply by describing what we want to a model.

And so the revolution set in motion by Shannon continues, though we may already have passed through its most radical stage. This occurred during the pandemic when, locked in our homes, we attempted to become information ourselves, like characters in a William Gibson novel. Gazing into our webcams, our voices and images were captured and broken down into bits, transmitted and then reconstructed as digital simulacra on screens elsewhere. As society attempted to render itself virtual, everything was digitized, from church services, to school classes, to wine tastings and even funerals. So excited was Mark Zuckerberg by the prospect that in 2021 he proclaimed we were going to live in the Metaverse, and that “immersive digital worlds” would “become the primary way that we live our lives and spend our time”. But this was also the moment that we started to learn the limits of life-as-information. Zoom fatigue kicked in and the Metaverse quickly became a punchline — its Reality Labs division has reportedly lost over $60 billion since 2020. It turned out that we did have bodies after all.

Ironically, the Father of the Information Age himself may have something to teach us here. For all that Shannon dealt in abstractions, he was deeply rooted in the physical world. He loved jazz and played the clarinet; he taught himself to juggle and ride a unicycle, two skills that require coordination and rhythm. He liked to build machines: at Bell Labs he created a robot mouse named Theseus that could find its own way through a maze. Later, he lived with his wife and three children in a Victorian mansion with a view of Mystic Lake in Winchester, Massachusetts, and built a chairlift to carry them there. His workshop was full of projects that reflected a playful imagination, including a flame-throwing trumpet. A modest man uninterested in fame, he found joy and fulfillment in solving interesting problems and making things. In 1936, T.S. Eliot asked: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” Perhaps Shannon knew all along.

Of course, it had been green around the gills for a long time. Confronted with the hyper-commercialization of radicalism in the early Nineties, the political historian Thomas Frank doubted that even its Golden Age amounted to much: “The Sixties was the age of postmodern fantasy and retailers’ dream, for each identity, each new phase of rebellion, necessitated a comprehensive shopping expedition.” The rejection of tradition, Frank argued, was simply the outcome of a desire to be free to flit between images: “They would be rebels, poets, perky-girls, English, hippies, and playboys in quick succession.”

But while there is much truth to Frank’s critique, the counterculture was not entirely bogus. Some hippies really did turn on, tune in and drop out. Hunter S. Thompson may have ended his days writing for Esquire, but all those drugs and guns weren’t going to pay for themselves. The cartoonist Robert Crumb really was a weirdo. And then there was Frank Zappa, guitarist, satirist, avant-garde composer, and writer of “Why Does It Hurt When I Pee?”

It’s difficult, now, to appreciate how famous Zappa was during his lifetime. Yet between the release of his debut LP Freak Out! in 1966 and his death in 1993 at the age of 52, his was a name you knew even if you had never heard his music — and you probably hadn’t, because it was never played on the radio. The one Zappa factoid everybody knew was that his children had strange names, Moon Unit and Dweezil being the strangest. These are tame by the standards of Musk’s X Æ A-Xii, but in 1969 the nurses were so scandalized by “Dweezil” (Zappa’s term for one of his wife’s “funny looking” toes) that they refused to put it on his birth certificate, and he was legally “Ian” until the age of five, when it was changed for good.

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I first heard Zappa’s music after taping his concert film Does Humor Belong in Music? which was broadcast deep in the night when I was 16. I was amused by the dirty jokes, but it was also obvious that Zappa’s band had incredible chops. The small Scottish town where I lived turned out to be an outpost of Zappa fandom, and it was easy to get tapes and records. But you never knew what you were getting: Apostrophe was great and Hot Rats was sublime but The Man from Utopia was total crap and Jazz from Hell was unlistenable. Zappa always made sure there was something to annoy or offend everyone.

There was little in Zappa’s small-town Catholic boyhood to suggest he would one day become a counterculture icon. The catalyst for this grandson of Sicilian immigrants was his discovery of “Ionisation”, a dissonant, percussion-heavy piece by the avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse, which Zappa learned about when a hi-fi magazine described it as “the worst music in the world”. Intrigued, Zappa tracked down an LP and was astonished by what he heard. Teenage Zappa corresponded with Varèse and taught himself to compose with books borrowed from the library. He began writing his own orchestral music, funding his passion by drawing greetings cards, scoring films and running a recording studio. After a stint in jail for creating a tape of pornographic sound effects, he realized that if he wanted to hear the music he was composing, he would need a band to play it. He joined an R&B group called The Soul Giants and quickly transformed it into a vehicle for his own ideas, The Mothers of Invention.

The songs that Zappa wrote for The Mothers featured satirical lyrics that were right on the nose and complex music that could switch suddenly from polyrhythms and atonality to doo-wop parody. His timing was perfect: records like Freak Out!, Absolutely Free, and Weasels Ripped My Flesh fit right in with the mid-Sixties “freak scene”. But Zappa took his sound considerably further out than even his most psychedelic peers. In 1969 he released Uncle Meat, a bizarre collage of avant-garde instrumentals, tape manipulation, polyrhythms and spoken word excerpts, and also produced Captain Beefheart’s uncategorizable Trout Mask Replica. Even at their most experimental, The Beatles always made sure that their songs contained plenty of pleasing hooks and melodies, with the result that an ostensibly radical album like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band still sold by the bucketload; Uncle Meat, not so much.

Zappa held court in his cabin in Laurel Canyon, welcoming the likes of Mick Jagger, David Crosby, Robert Plant, Joni Mitchell, Jimi Hendrix and Grace Slick. Yet he remained an outsider. He didn’t drink or take drugs, and was contemptuous of hippy ideals. He did embrace the sexual revolution insofar as he liked to get laid a lot, both on the road and at home, where he would bring back groupies regardless of the fact that his wife Gail was in the house. However, this was no ideological commitment to “free love”, as Zappa expected Gail to remain faithful. Indeed, the picture that emerges from his daughter Moon Unit’s recent memoir Earth to Moon is of a Sicilian patriarch who worked constantly, saw his children sparingly, and left every aspect of managing the household to his wife, who he also expected to chauffeur him around (Zappa never learned how to drive).

The Eighties were a very different era, of course. By then, almost all the icons of the counterculture had agreed to play by the rules. They were entering their forties, they had homes and cars and wives and ex-wives and children and they knew they had to please the label bosses if they wanted to maintain their lifestyles. Even the notoriously oppositional Lou Reed advertised scooters and dabbled in rapping. Zappa, having gone completely independent in 1979, made no such compromises. He released a triple LP box set called Thing-Fish, featuring songs from an unproduced musical about AIDs and eugenics. He went to Congress to testify against censorship in music (his only allies were Dee Snider of Twisted Sister and John Denver). When he accidentally had a hit with “Valley Girl” (featuring vocals from Moon Unit), he used the windfall to pay the London Symphony Orchestra to perform his uneasy-on-the-ear orchestral music. Unsatisfied with the results, he began writing and performing his compositions on a digital synthesizer called the “Synclavier”, creating bizarre music that was impossible to play with human hands.

Although Zappa affected indifference to how his work was received, Moon Unit recalls that he would “always” complain about “people not taking him seriously, respecting him, playing his music on the radio, or paying him enough money”. He was amazed, then, when he arrived in Czechoslovakia for his first tour in 1990 and was met at Prague airport by a crowd of 2,500 people. For two decades, Zappa was not only given a hero’s welcome but appointed “Special Ambassador to the West on Trade, Culture and Tourism” by Václav Havel (a role that came to an abrupt end when the Secretary of State objected). Zappa started to imagine a different career; he talked about running for president, though not as a Republican nor a Democrat. In his autobiography he described himself as a “practical conservative”, in favor of low taxes and small government. The cancer put paid to that. In his final years he focused on his most complex music, living long enough to see a collection of orchestral pieces performed in Germany, while his dystopian Civilization Phaze III was released posthumously.

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Since Zappa’s death three decades ago, many of his peers have also taken the great leap into eternity, while those that remain are preparing to follow. Confronted with death, the old gods of the counterculture from Bob Dylan to Pink Floyd are cashing out, selling off their catalogs to the likes of Sony or UMG or Blackstone. To the naive this may look like a betrayal of principles, but in a world where the top pop star is a middling talent feted by teenage girls, sixty-something male rock music critics and wildly despised political leaders, it’s probably a good idea to get out while the going is good. Besides, “the classics” are what people want: today old songs represent almost 75% of streaming. And none of those cultural revolutionaries ever objected to getting rich, anyway.

As for Zappa, an unequal division of the estate by his widow following her death in 2015 led to lawsuits and public feuding between the siblings, so it was perhaps a relief when the catalog was finally sold off to UMG for an estimated $25-30 million in 2022. Dozens of albums have been released since his death, while Dweezil regularly tours, faithfully performing his father’s music, although the last time I saw him play I was one of the youngest people in the audience (and I was 45 at the time).

Sometimes I wonder if Zappa might one day be rediscovered as a serious composer if his Rock music were to be forgotten. Now that I know the works of Varèse, Stravinsky, Messiaen, Alban Berg, and Conlon Nancarrow myself I can see what he was getting at with all the difficult stuff I didn’t like as a teenager. But as much as the world would not be losing one of its artistic treasures if a song like “Broken Hearts Are for Assholes” were to vanish from memory, it would make Zappa a less interesting figure. He was what his peers only pretended to be; a true nonconformist, who pursued the path of most resistance not because he wanted to, but because he had to.

America, by contrast, is much wilder — with its mountains, deserts, hurricanes, bears and rattlesnakes. Unlike in the orderly UK, it’s easy to feel here as if the state has all but disappeared. Surely America’s vast landscape must play some role in shaping political life?

Certainly, following Donald Trump’s victory, it is impossible not to notice the profound contrast between the two countries. Over the last few years British politics has had a decidedly sad, small-country energy. Boris Johnson and “cash for curtains”, Liz Truss and the lettuce, Rishi Sunak in the rain, Keir Starmer snaffling free Taylor Swift concert tickets. In the US, on the other hand, we have an epic political drama that people will be writing about centuries from now. In the last three months, multiple assassins attempted to kill one candidate while plutocrats defenestrated a senile emperor so they could continue to exercise power through a talentless cypher. In a late plot twist, the plutocrats were thwarted, and now their nemesis is preparing to return to the seat of power. Clearly, this level of drama can only happen in a big country where people carve the faces of their greatest leaders into a mountain.

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The physical environment shapes politics in other ways too. Consider the perpetual debate over gun rights and the Second Amendment, for instance. This is extremely perplexing to outsiders, partly because they do not understand the sacred role of the Constitution. But there is also a pragmatic reason for gun ownership, which I learned from my father-in-law, who grew up in the Texas panhandle. Out there, he told me, the counties are huge, and police are few and far between. Dial 911 and you might be waiting a long time for help to arrive. In a wilderness full of coyotes, snakes, and bears, you need to be able to protect yourself.

You see this sentiment reflected in American attitudes to hunting. When I was growing up in the UK, the image of a hunter was a toff in a red coat, perched on a horse, setting his dogs on a fox. In the US, there is still an element of man against nature, of waiting for hours to shoot dinner, or perhaps to take out a feral hog with razor-sharp tusks charging at you at 25 miles per hour. This is also why the Democrats sent their bumbling vice presidential candidate Tim Walz into a field with a gun: to demonstrate that he was worthy of the male vote, he had to inflict violence upon nature. When he was filmed struggling to load his weapon, he was mercilessly ridiculed, and instantly lost credibility.

Another way the landscape has shaped American politics is by its sheer scale. A large nation forges a different type of politician: to play the game of power in such an immense country, you must become big yourself. In Britain we have a vestigial memory of this; anyone who reads history cannot help but be struck by the fact that our imperial elites, fighting uprisings across the globe while translating Thucydides for amusement, seem like an alien species. Small island Britain no longer has need of such grandiose figures, and for decades has only produced mediocrities and nonentities. Americans, by contrast, have the confidence of a people who have conquered an epic landscape. Trump made his money by developing the land and erecting garish hotels on what was once wilderness. But he is only one rich man among many. America’s rulers know that there is much left to exploit, but you cannot do that if you go small, so the land forges grandiose liars, monumental crooks, and titanic phonies.

America’s landscape is abundant in resources, and this, too, plays out in political debates. In the UK, the case for renewable energy is bolstered by an understanding that resources are finite: one day the oil will run out, and that will be that. In America, though, there are deserts, forests, mountains, glaciers, swamps. How can a land so huge and diverse not feed itself, make its own cars, and produce its own energy? If you exhaust one area, you could just look elsewhere, or dig deeper, “drill baby drill”. This vastness also fuels a greater confidence in renewables. When I see a lone wind turbine in a field in the UK, I imagine it might just about provide enough power for a toaster. When I see the endless rows of turbines rotating slowly in the deserts of West Texas, I am struck by the transformative potential of the wind.

This sense of abundance also defines attitudes towards immigration. Economists may argue that mass immigration is necessary for growth, especially in the face of declining populations, but in Europe the emotional case is centred on inherited guilt: migrants should be welcomed as recompense for historical crimes of racism and imperialism. In America, the emotional case is more positive: it emphasises generosity, that there’s enough for everyone. “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” goes the poem by Emma Lazarus inscribed in bronze inside the Statue of Liberty. Pro-immigration arguments always point to the fact that America is a nation of immigrants, and that they should extend the good fortune their ancestors enjoyed to newcomers. Indeed, Matt Yglesias’s book One Billion Americans is predicated on America’s great abundance: not only could the land house one billion people, he argued, but this would lead to still greater riches. You could never make this argument on a small, crowded island such as the UK — nor in any European country, for that matter.

But just as America is blessed with great natural wealth, so it must regularly suffer the Wrath of God in the form of recurring natural disasters, such as hurricanes, forest fires and periodic earthquakes. These, too, have a direct impact on politics, although the extent of the political fallout of a disaster depends on which party is in power at the time. For instance, following Hurricane Katrina, George W. Bush’s administration was pilloried for weeks and then months; the inadequate disaster response was clear evidence of Republican perfidiousness and racism. Following Hurricane Helene, however, there was infinitely less coverage, as the Democrat’s media stenographers feared harming Kamala Harris’s chances of success in the election. Perhaps, now that she has been soundly defeated, they will develop a curiosity about what is happening in the affected regions.

These disasters also provide regional politicians with opportunities to demonstrate that they are effective in a crisis — if they fail, then their foes make hay. The ice storm that struck Texas in 2021, causing major power outages across the state, was still being used in political attack ads against Governor Greg Abbott two years later. When Kamala Harris argued that Ron DeSantis was refusing her calls and using the crisis to play political games, Joe Biden, perhaps bitter from his ousting, took the opportunity to undermine her by calling DeSantis “gracious”.

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Yet when all is said and done, I think that the American landscape’s ultimate contribution to US politics is something that is at the core of the American character: optimism. The belief that better days are ahead has been central to American politics for as long as I have been alive, from Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” to Barack Obama’s “Hope” to Kamala’s “Joy” and even Trump’s “Make America Great Again”. No matter how polarised American politics becomes, both Republicans and Democrats agree that a new dawn is always right around the corner. And as traumatised as the Democrats may currently be by their crushing defeat, I am confident that they too will soon lift their gaze from the smouldering ruins of the Kamala campaign and once again find hope.

Those who view America from the outside may find this optimism baffling. The same goes for those who live in coastal metropolises and spend far too much time online, succumbing to feverish fantasies that a new civil war is looming. Yet step outside the dysfunctional cities, leave behind the demented discourse and actually enter the landscape and you will find that a sense of renewal is never far away. It’s everywhere: on the edge of a great lake, in the desert, on top of a mountain, or simply driving past immense fields, teeming with crops. This land — diverse, abundant, wild — is still young. And this is why, for all the talk of the end of America, and despite the corrupt media and devious politicians, optimism keeps breaking through.

But internal migration to Texas did kick in, and then some. Newly released census data shows that between 2020 and 2023, nine of the 10 fastest growing cities in the US with a population of 20,000 or more were in Texas, and Georgetown was on the list having grown by 40.1% during that period. Today, census data puts the population at 93,612. Other towns grew at an even faster clip: Celina — outside Dallas — by 143.2% and Fulshear — outside Houston — by 142.7%. Now the possibility of social and political change seems  very real — a popular T-shirt/bumper sticker reads “Don’t Californicate my Texas”. The country singer Creed Fisher (whose oeuvre includes such classics as “Girls with Big Titties”), released a song about the same anxiety: that exiles from the sunshine state will vote for the very same policies that caused the conditions they fled from, changing Texas forever.

Certainly, there are California transplants who intend to do just that. But the overall picture is more complicated than it appears. First, some Californians who move to Texas are conservatives. Second, migration into Texas is from all over the US. And third, Texas has already changed forever.

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Georgetown is an excellent case study. When I first visited, it was the seat of archly conservative Williamson County, the Yin to the Yang of Travis County, which was home to all the hippies and nudists and slackers of Austin. The town was everything you’d expect in Texas: a picturesque courthouse, lots of churches, sheriffs with guns on their hips, harsh penalties for marijuana possession and a Walmart as big as an aircraft hangar. I remember eating at a barbecue joint where the staff wore T-shirts that said “Keep Georgetown Normal” — a direct riposte to the famous slogan Keep Austin Weird. Later, the restaurant was converted into a church.

Georgetown was also a bit snobby. It was home to the first university in Texas, a private arts college with a meticulously maintained campus. There were old families with deep roots, such as the Wolfs, whose surname is now attached to a shopping centre and a subdivision built on what was once their land. Then there were the Stumps, who practised law and had an office on the town square: Stump, Stump and Stump. One Stump was very involved in St John’s United Methodist Church, which was founded by Swedish immigrants in 1882. They had a Swedish-language service early on Christmas morning for descendants of the original members. But most impressive of all was that Williamson County was “dry”, meaning restaurants in Georgetown weren’t allowed to serve alcohol.

It all feels like a lost world now. Things began to change with the opening of Sun City, an “active adult community” for people aged 55 and over that brought an influx of retirees. Sun City was my first exposure to that bizarre American style of authoritarianism, whereby free people submit to strict rules about what colour their doors should be, what kind of plants they can grow in their gardens, and so on.

The inhabitants of Sun City wanted places to go in the evening, so it wasn’t long before the whole dry county thing was abolished and upscale restaurants selling alcohol appeared. My wife and I visited one of them for our anniversary. I remember watching a diner with a personal oxygen tank sipping on some wine. The vibe was snooty and stifling, although rumour had it that Sun City was not quite as buttoned up as it seemed to be. I once met a nurse who told me that the “active adult community” was active in more ways than one and had an unusually high rate of STDs. “They have swinger parties,” she said. To be honest, this is so similar to a myth that swirls around a notorious Florida retirement community that I think it’s an urban legend. But it’s a good story.

More McMansions appeared in my in-laws’ neighbourhood, and new subdivisions were added to the town. During the first decade after my arrival the population grew by 20,000. In 2016, when Clinton ran against Trump, I realised that change went far deeper than the liberalisation of alcohol laws. Much to my surprise, the lawn signs in my in-laws’ neighbourhood seemed evenly divided between Trump and Clinton. There was even a “This House Believes…” sign down by the nature trail. But it was during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 that I really understood how much Georgetown had changed, when there was a major standoff over the Confederate monument in front of the courthouse. One week I’d visit and there would be a crowd of protestors petitioning for its removal; the next, a motley crew dressed in Confederate uniforms would be there defending it. In the cemetery, little Confederate flags appeared by the graves of soldiers who had fought against the Union.

Ultimately, the monument stood — although efforts to remove it continue. Despite that, the protestors seemed much more at home on the square than the recalcitrant Confederacy cosplayers. Whereas once I used to see a burly man casually strolling about with an assault rifle over his shoulder, I now saw a “woman-owned bookshop” that celebrated inclusion and LGBTQ voices. A fancy confectionary shop opened, as did a winery that also sold artisanal olive oil. It became commonplace to see people weaving in and out of the shops, drinking wine in the open. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why this irritated me so much until my son asked if the powers that be in Georgetown would be quite so relaxed if a group of Mexican day labourers started knocking back Corona beers in front of the courthouse, or if a trucker turned up and started swigging whiskey from a bottle in a brown paper bag.

This question brought the new class politics into sharp focus for me. In the days of the old Georgetown families, the big houses were located on streets that ended in little houses. The working and upper classes lived close to each other and knew each other. Perhaps they went to church together. Fast-forward 20 years and the new wealthy were moving into giant air-conditioned boxes in expensive subdivisions while the working-classes had to move out to Jarrell or Killeen, or squeeze into the new apartments they were building in Georgetown.

But it was only when the shop “Cozy Cannabis” opened just behind the courthouse that I felt it was time to shut Georgetown down until we could figure out exactly what was going on. This was a luxury cannabis-themed wellness shop owned by a “canna-mom” who promised “a curated and safe line of legal hemp products” designed “to uplift the mind, body, and spirit of every person who walks through our doors”. Cozy Cannabis also organised events such as “sound healing”, “chakra balancing” and a “cacao ceremony”. In Austin, fine, go for it, enjoy your vibrations. In California? I wouldn’t blink. But in Georgetown?

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To witness so much change in such a short space of time is extremely disorientating. If you can go from a dry county to canna-moms in less than 20 years, then Californication can seem inevitable. In 2020, Williamson County elected a Democrat Sheriff for the first time since the Eighties. At the last general election, Biden narrowly beat Trump.

And yet, I’m not so sure that the arc of history bends toward chakra balancing and White Dudes for Harris Zoom calls. For a start, Georgetown is popular with tourists, so what happens on the square doesn’t represent the locals any more than Piccadilly Circus represents the “real London”. The Democrat Sheriff was elected, at least in part, because the previous one was a reality TV star mired in scandal. The Methodist church in town founded by Swedes disaffiliated from the United Methodists over the liberalisation of their stance on gay marriage and gay bishops. The state representative is a Republican.

But even if Georgetown is fated to be fully Californicated, you don’t have to drive far to enter Trump country. Travel further south, and you will find counties that voted Democrat increasingly leaning Republican. I even recall that when Robert “Beto” O’Rourke ran against Ted Cruz, he polled higher among native Texans than among those born outside the state. All those “new arrivals” may have had a lot to do with keeping Ted Cruz in a job.

The truth is: Texas is always changing. The state was still electing Democrat governors until 1995, while prior to 1961 it had not elected a single Republican to statewide office since Reconstruction. Austin didn’t get weird until the Sixties, and even then, the famous slogan wasn’t coined until the year 2000. Elon Musk is bringing SpaceX to the quiet town of Bastrop and Jeff Bezos is installing a clock under a mountain in West Texas. This is change I can get behind. When I walk around Georgetown, I occasionally feel mild nostalgia for the sleepy town I once knew, but then again, I left for Austin after two months. What makes Texas an interesting place to live is its contradictions — metropolis and country, technology and religion, wealth and poverty — and these are accelerating. So, yes: please don’t Californicate my Texas, but otherwise, let that rough beast slouch forward to be born.

You would struggle to find a pithier encapsulation of elite disdain for the working class. But perhaps it is unfair that the comment should so define her; by the standards of her tribe, it is fairly mild. This is especially true when it comes to the white rural poor, who are widely regarded in refined circles as a benighted pox upon the country, a deluded and potentially violent mob fortunately doomed by demographic trends to extinction, though, alas, not soon enough. Indeed, I have lost count of the number of articles lamenting that the American electoral system gives rural populations too much say over how the country is run.  

The freewheeling contempt shown by those with much towards those with little is especially galling when you consider the harshness of life in America’s impoverished rural communities. The most famous example is Appalachia, which is home to the first people to be labelled and characterised with the infamous stereotype, “hillbillies”: it has lagged behind its neighbours economically since at least 1850. “Diseases of despair” are endemic among the region’s 26.4 million residents: according to the Appalachian Regional Commission, “overdose-related mortality rates for people ages 25–54” were “72% higher in the region than the rest of the country”. Yet when opioids were flooding the region, executives at one pharmaceutical company derided those addicted to their products as “pillbillies”.  Indeed, there is no end to the epithets: hillbilly, hick, yokel, white trash, redneck. But don’t worry, none of them will get you cancelled. 

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Meanwhile, as the election approaches, the media continues to warn us that the threat level from Hillbillystan is “red”. “White rural Trump supporters are a threat to democracy,” declares The Daily Beast. “White rural rage is arguably the single greatest threat facing American democracy, I have no good ideas about how to fight it,” says Paul Krugman. These particular warnings owe much to White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, which was published earlier this year. Its authors, Tom Schaller, a professor at the University of Maryland, and Paul Waldman, a former columnist at The Washington Post, marshalled the data to demonstrate that when it comes to the awfulness of rural whites, the science is settled. In an interview on MSNBC, Schaller described them as “the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay geo-demographic group in the country”. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they are also “anti-democratic” “white Christian nationalists” prone to conspiracy theories who are also “the most likely to excuse or justify violence”.

See? I told you Hillary Clinton was being nice.  

Admittedly, White Rural Rage was a bit much even for The Guardian and The Atlantic, and the book was criticised by the very researchers whose work was cited in its pages. But none of that stopped it from hitting The New York Times bestseller list. 

Although contemporary in form, White Rural Rage is only the most recent expression of a contempt that dates back to before the American Revolution, when Appalachia and the Ozarks were settled by a population Americans refer to as the “Scotch-Irish” — i.e. lowland Scots who had traded border raiding against the English for colonising Ulster in the days of James I, before undertaking a much greater voyage across the Atlantic. In 1765, Charles Woodmason, a visitor to the North Carolina colony wrote of its Scotch-Irish inhabitants: “The Manners of the North Carolinians in General, are Vile and Corrupt — The whole Country is a Stage of Debauchery, Dissoluteness and Corruption.” 

The reputation of the “Scotch-Irish” for clannish behaviour, violence, drinking and general deplorableness grew over the next century. In the 1860s, the Hatfields and McCoys began their famous feud, which was still raging in the early 20th century. It was around this time that the people of Appalachia were christened “hillbillies”, a word said to derive from Scottish “hill folk” and “billy” (alternately a Scots term of endearment or reference to William of Orange). However, given that the term didn’t appear until 300 years after the “Scotch-Irish” had left Scotland, this seems debatable, at the very least. 

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Following on from these murky origins, “hillbilly” eventually spread from Appalachia and today is used as a catch-all insult for any member of the rural white poor. But there is an ambiguity to it: America has a rich lore of outlaws and renegades, and the hillbilly — stubbornly self-reliant, wilful and loyal to his family — also fits this archetype. This ambiguity is reflected in popular culture: Hank Williams Sr, widely regarded as the greatest songwriter in the history of country music, was known as “The Hillbilly Shakespeare” not because he feuded with his neighbours but for the primal eloquence of his pain songs. The Beverly Hillbillies made fun of its family of yokels turned millionaires, but the characters were good-natured and moral and much more likeable than their scheming banker neighbour. The Andy Griffith Show was full of homespun wisdom, and featured a hillbilly band called The Dillards which introduced many Americans to Bluegrass music. This is also where Ron Howard got his start as a child actor, little realising that 60 years later he would tell a very different version of rural life in his film adaptation of J. D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy. 

In the Seventies, shows such as The Dukes of Hazzard still portrayed hillbillies in a favourable light, but this is also when horror movie tropes about depraved, inbred yokels sexually assaulting, torturing, killing and eating urbanites who had wandered off course became entrenched in the culture. In 1972’s Deliverance, Ned Beatty’s character was instructed to “squeal like a pig” by his hillbilly rapist. In 1974’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a group of college students stumble upon a house where Leatherface murders and carves up his victims while wearing a mask made of human skin. In 1977’s The Hills Have Eyes (purportedly inspired by the legend of the Scottish cannibal Sawney Bean) a family headed out on vacation are attacked by a clan of mutants with a taste for human flesh. The old monsters — mummies and ghouls and werewolves and the like — had lost their ability to scare. True evil was a demented hillbilly. 

The visceral loathing that today’s US elites have for the rural poor shares a psychic undercurrent with this realm of fantasy. I once knew a Russian psychoanalyst who argued that to feel hatred was inevitable, and that if you denied yourself an outlet for so powerful an emotion you would become ill. The important thing was to be careful who or what you chose to hate, how much, and for how long. This can help us understand much of the vitriol that is aimed at the rural white poor today. Most of the groups it was formerly acceptable for American elites to despise are now off limits, and there are severe social and legal consequences for attacking them. But the Hillbilly Trump voter exists in a state of exception. Compassion is not forbidden — you will recall that Hillary Clinton argued that some form of “deprogramming” might be possible for deplorables. But it is not compulsory: you are free to deride, abuse, even to cheer along their ultimate extinction if you feel like it. The hate is liberating.

Needless to say, we can expect to see a lot more of this style of liberation as the election approaches, even more if Trump wins, and still more if he selects J.D. Vance as his vice president. The Hillbilly Elegy author turned senator is an especially potent hate symbol as, although he is of Appalachian stock and experienced serious familial trauma in his youth, he subsequently studied law at Yale before becoming a successful venture capitalist: the insults write themselves. However, this makes Vance a more interesting figure. He could have left his roots behind and adopted the mores and shibboleths of the elite society to which he had gained access, but instead he chose to stay loyal to his original tribe. He is the hillbilly at the gates, albeit in a well-tailored suit.

Sometimes, when contemplating the possibility of a Trump victory in November, I wonder how the media and elites will respond. The first time around, there was a brief moment of self-reflection when they considered that perhaps they had misread the country, and that they ought to stop condemning the evildoer and go out there and try to understand him. But as Dostoevsky pointed out, that is difficult, and so these efforts at empathy lasted about five minutes before they went back to condemning.

So, I am sceptical that it will be any different this time around. But then I ask: are they really going to just repeat the same tropes over and over again for four years? How can they bear it? And then I remember that the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise is now up to nine films, and that there are many, many, many variations on the hillbilly horror theme out there. So of course they are. Like the producers of low-budget slasher fare, they don’t want new ideas — the ones they already have work just fine. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of course, the reality was much more complicated than that. But the narrative contained sufficient truth — who can argue with the fifth-largest economy on the planet? — that the story endured for generations. In recent years, however, a new, darker narrative has begun to supplant it — more or less a sequel to the Death Wish movies, only without the vigilante justice.

This California is a dystopian zone where criminals roam the streets and homeless drug addicts die in the gutter, while a rotten ruling class presides over extreme inequality while peddling delusional ideas. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people are fleeing the state. During the pandemic, California’s population decreased for the first time since it achieved statehood in 1850, while more than 343,000 people left in 2022 alone — a net loss of 113,000. And the twist in the tale, the truth that is most inconvenient of all, is where the largest number of Californians are fleeing to: Texas.

This isn’t just inconvenient — it’s downright embarrassing. Because until very recently, the narrative about Texas was that it was essentially the anti-California, a backwards hellscape of racist, Bible-thumping, gun-toting hillbillies. In this blighted zone, heavily armed cult leaders await the apocalypse with their child brides while grinning Republican governors sign execution warrants for the mentally ill.

Just as California was never heaven, neither was Texas ever hell. The narrative had a good run, mind you: just a few years ago, I met an expat English journalist in Austin who was still able to pay the rent by hacking out an endless stream of utterly predictable stories about guns and death for a liberal readership in the US and UK. But even as a caricature, this narrative just doesn’t make sense any more: it overlooks the fact that Texas is home to the headquarters of more Fortune 500 companies than any other state, that Houston is one of the most diverse cities in America, and that Austin is home to Elon Musk’s gigafactory. When the richest man in the world abandons the Golden State for shitkicker country, a new narrative is clearly required.

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I don’t think it exists yet, which might explain why a new concept being tested in the press — that of the flight from Texas. As far as narratives go, it is at once lazy but also ingenious. Lazy because it mirrors large parts of the California narrative; people are leaving the state en masse due to the exorbitant cost of living and intolerable politics. And it is ingenious for the same reasons. Ha! You thought Californians were moving to Texas because of the low taxes and “muh freedom”? Think again. Some people are leaving Texas for California! Thus this new Texas narrative resolves the contradictions of the California narrative: it’s OK, Texas is shit after all and the Golden State is still golden.

Of course, a quick scrutiny of numbers show that the narrative is weak: yes, almost half a million people left Texas between 2021 and 2022, but the state still made a net gain of 172,261 people. Of course, a narrative doesn’t need to be true to really take hold; it can also pick up steam if enough people want to be true. But it does need to be rooted in some kind of observable detail to be plausible, or to capture an emerging trend.

So, will the flight from Texas become a media staple? The argument is based on three premises: that people are fleeing Texas because of political polarisation, the high cost of living and “disenchantment”.

The least plausible of these is the argument from political polarisation. It’s hardly news that Texas is governed by Right-wing Republicans at the state level and has been for decades. Indeed, the enduring conservatism of Texas is regularly reinforced by the recurring mini-narrative that, any day now, the state will turn blue, which most recently fuelled floods of media fan fiction dedicated to the empty suit that is Beto O’Rourke. But like Millerites climbing on the roof to greet the returning Christ, those who hope are always sadly disappointed. As it is, migrants to Texas are not moving to the likes of Cut and Shoot (pop. 1,185) or Ding Dong (pop. 22, last time anyone bothered to check), but rather big cities, which are all run by Democrats, with the exception of Fort Worth and Dallas. Meanwhile those who are nostalgic for the Leftist politics of Portland or San Francisco can always move to Austin and dabble in avant-garde social experiments such as defunding the police, or chant “From the river to the sea” with thousands of others at pro-Palestinian rallies.

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More intriguing is the argument from “disenchantment”.  This refers to the idea that, as far as tech hubs go, Austin is an imitation of Silicon Valley, a place where “ambition goes to die”. As a result, tech workers who moved here during the pandemic are starting to look back to the West Coast. Not being a data scientist or AI guru, I can’t really speak to the quality of the code being written in Austin, but it is true that the action remains concentrated in Silicon Valley. OpenAI did not emerge in Texas, after all. On the other hand, the tears of highly paid tech workers is not really a theme that many people care about (other than tech workers, of course).

But if these two themes are weak, then the third, the rising cost of living, really does have legs. This started to spiral out of control during the pandemic, when tech companies permitted their employees to work anywhere. Suddenly there was an influx of outsiders flush with cash who were able to buy much larger homes than the ones they had in California: I still remember the pang of envy I felt when a friend who worked at Apple told me about some colleagues from the West Coast who had sold some stock and bought their giant homes outright. In 2021, it was the top interstate move in the US. House prices rose in Dallas and Houston, while Austin went from being one of the most affordable cities in the country to a place where an 830 square foot “murder shack” by the side of the freeway might set you back nearly a million dollars.

This problem is compounded by the fact that Texas has no state income tax, only property tax. This seemed like a good deal when houses were cheap, but it’s much less of a good deal when your property evaluation increases at a far faster rate than your salary. Thus, while I and others who bought their homes before prices went crazy have theoretically benefited — my own house, in an unassuming suburb, has increased in value more than 2.5 times since I bought it 10 years ago — we have also not benefited as taxes have surged.

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But back to those narratives, one out of three isn’t exactly winning. “Property taxes are really high” doesn’t quite get the juices flowing, and Texas still has a long way to go before it reaches California’s levels of unaffordability. As far as arguments go, then, it’s not nearly as exciting as the old Texas narrative with all those guns and preachers and prisoners on death row. And nor is it as gripping as the new California story of an earthly paradise committing slow suicide.

Points for trying, I suppose. But this story needs spicing up. I’d suggest working in some details about millions of feral hogs on the rampage out west, while hunters strafe them with machine guns from their private helicopters flying overhead. Or maybe it’s time to revive the killer bee panic, or talk up 13-year-old hitmen on the border, or pray for more and worse ice storms. Short of that, perhaps a Tunguska-style asteroid event would do the trick. See? It’s not that hard.

In those days we didn’t worry about cultural appropriation. But now I can’t help but think of one academic’s objection to Nancy Pelosi posing in a traditional Ghanaian fabric as a tribute to George Floyd: “My ancestors did not invent Kente cloth for them to be worn by publicity (obsessed) politicians as ‘activism’ in 2020.” But what if you’re wearing someone else’s national dress just because you like the pretty pattern? Is that worse? Does tartan not count, because Scots are insufficiently oppressed?

Regardless, back in the day it never occurred to me to wonder whether my ancestors would have approved of the kilted Canadian. Now, I suspect that they wouldn’t have given a shit.

I certainly didn’t. But perhaps I was relaxed about the pseudo-Scotsman because I knew that the whole “ancient tradition” of clan tartans was itself a fiction. I still remember the shock and disbelief I felt 30 years ago, when one of my lecturers at the University of Edinburgh explained that Walter Scott had cooked it up for a pageant celebrating King George IV’s visit to Scotland in 1822. Having been raised in the myth myself, it seemed incredible that so fundamental a symbol of Scotland could be at once so recent, and so fake. It being St Andrew’s Day today, the story bears retelling.

George IV was the first British king to travel north of the border in almost 200 years. At the time, the Edinburgh-born Scott’s historical novels were bestsellers, and the monarch was a fan. So, Scott was tasked with making him feel welcome. But the festival he organised owed far more to his imagination than historic reality. In it, representatives of Scottish clans cosplayed as highlanders — wearing their supposedly traditional and unique clan tartans.

Scott didn’t make it all up out of nothing, of course. Highlanders had worn tartan, and there were regional variations, but not a strict family taxonomy. And following the decisive defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s highlander army at the Battle of Culloden in 1746, tartan was banned for 40 years. By the time the ban was lifted, highlanders had got used to wearing the same kind of clothes that lowland Scots wore, which were very similar to the kind of clothes that English people wore.

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Nostalgia for the past remained, however. But it was commerce that revived tartan. In the early 19th century, a family of entrepreneurial merchant weavers in Edinburgh started a successful business matching tartans to clans, reinventing old designs or offering entirely new ones for “chieftains”. Scott dialled this polite fiction up to 11 — and tartan was established as one of the ultra-symbols of Scotland.

Some baulked at the artifice of it all. One Edinburgh resident complained that Scott had “ridiculously made us appear to be a nation of Highlanders, and the bagpipe and the tartan are the order of the day”. His own son-in-law referred to it as a “hallucination”. But many embraced Scott’s romantic retconning of history. The king himself was delighted to claim his Scottish roots, and strut about in a Royal Stuart tartan mini-kilt and pink tights. Lowlanders began dressing in the colours of imaginary highlanders and the tartan biscuit tin was born. Two decades later, Queen Victoria’s German consort Prince Albert decked out Balmoral as a kitsch Celtic fantasia and designed his own tartan.

Since the days of Scott, tartan has been inextricably bound with a desire to sell Scotland to the rest of the world. Walk down Edinburgh’s Royal Mile today and you will see tartan scarves, tartan skirts, tartan cardigans, tartan shortbread tins, tartan bonnets and, of course, tartan kilts. The target audience for this abundance of tradition is not local; it is the visitor looking to take something “authentic” home. If a Scot wears tartan, more likely than not it’s for a wedding.

And yet, when Scots emigrate abroad, it is Scott’s “hallucination” that endures after all memory of the homeland has faded. A 14” x 14” square of tartan made it to the moon three years before The Bible did because astronaut Alan Bean, whose Scottish ancestor had left the motherland in the mid-17th century, took a sample of the Clan MacBean for a spin in his Lunar Excursion Module in 1969. North Carolina’s Scottish Tartans Museum, in business since 1988, recently celebrated a 20-year extension on its lease. And while the Highland Games in Salado, Texas, can be a confused and confusing affair — I recall getting mildly irritated at all the songs about Irish whiskey and fields of emerald green — the Farquhars and the Colquhouns certainly knew their tartans, as did all the other representatives of the clans, proud standard bearers of an ancient tradition that dates all the way back to 50 years after the US itself was invented.

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Personally, I prefer it when Americans invent their own tartans, with no connection to Scott’s highlander mythology whatsoever. These days, 27 states have their own tartan, including Texas, California, Hawaii and Rhode Island. USA Kilts (est. 2003) offer the American Dream tartan, which features 76 blue threads for the year 1776, 13 red stripes for the original colonies and a gold stripe as a reference to the “golden door” mentioned in the poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty.

An exhibition currently running at the V&A in Dundee highlights just how fluid tartan can be. On display are 300 exhibits from around the world, selected to demonstrate that the grid design is “open to infinite possibility”. Tartan, says the museum curator Mhairi Maxwell, is “a global phenomenon, expressing diverse ideas of belonging, kinship, nationalism, unity and resistance”. Indeed, it periodically slips loose of its moorings and acquires new meanings. When punks adopted tartan as an anti-establishment symbol in the Seventies, it was not the highland clearances that they were railing against. When Japanese schoolgirls wear short tartan skirts, they are not evoking the spirit of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobite rebellion.

In Scotland, too, people continue to invent tartans, now free of clan-connections. Recent years have seen a flourishing of designs. There is a Sikh tartan, commissioned by Gary Singh, a licensed grocer from Edinburgh. Since 2020 we have been blessed with not one but two tartans dedicated to climate change —  the Climate Emergency tartan and COP26 — A New Dawn. In 2017, the Hunter Foundation commissioned the Obama Family tartan to commemorate the celebrated podcaster’s golfing holiday in Saint Andrews. The year before that, the Russian Consulate in Edinburgh commissioned the rather more sombre Second World War-themed Russian Arctic Convoy tartan, though whether anyone is likely to wear it in the current political climate seems doubtful. There is also a “Homeless” tartan to promote the plight of homeless people, and a Trump tartan which was designed to decorate the Trump International Golf Links in Aberdeenshire.

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Tartan is not the only national signifier that frequently becomes detached from what it once signified. The Union Jack exists both as national flag and as global style icon, and its latter status owes much more to the music, films and fashions of the Sixties than it does to King James VI’s design sense. The Guy Fawkes mask transcended its historic origins through V for Vendetta, and has since become a free-floating symbol of revolt (with Warner Brothers collecting a royalty for each mask sold). And of course, there are countless other, non-British examples. Russian matryoshka dolls originated in Japan, while Mexico City’s Day of the Dead parade was inspired by a scene in a James Bond film. Entire national cultures were confected by Stalin and imposed upon Central Asia. Today, the successor states decide which bits of those Soviet identities they wish to keep, and which to discard.

Though unusually flexible, tartan is therefore typical of national symbols. Sir Walter Scott’s vision of Scottish tradition may have been a hallucination, but what do you call a hallucination when it lasts for two centuries and engulfs the world, evolving along the way? This Saint Andrew’s Day, I propose that we recognise him as the patron saint of culture-as-hallucination, of high artifice and symbolic mutability. Let the example of tartan demonstrate an alternative, better pathway for those who would seek to ring fence “tradition” and put a “private property” sign on culture. That approach leads to the smallness of the biscuit tin, and the prison house of “heritage”. A robust culture is attained through fantasy, through making things up — and continuing to make things up.

But what if a different crisis gets us first? What if the biggest problem we face is that billions of people are getting old at a faster rate than babies are being born? In Italy there are so few children that schools are “vanishing like the melting glaciers”. In Japan, adult nappies have outsold the baby variety for over a decade. Indeed, there is such a superabundance of waste from incontinence products that one town has started burning them for fuel. The problem is global: for countless millennia, forming families was the most intuitive thing imaginable, but no longer.

Of course, not everybody sees this as a problem. The glass-half-full take is that the declining birthrate has finally put our Malthusian terrors to bed. The threat of exponential overpopulation has corrected itself: for instance, China’s population is set to drop from 1.4 billion today to 800 million by 2100. The glass-half-empty view is that there won’t be enough young people to sustain this vastly expanded older population. The advice offered by economists is simple and utilitarian: countries that are depopulating must increase immigration.

But the materialist nature of today’s discussion, where it is being had, obscures the many profound existential questions posed by the impending arrival of a grey planet. In fact, there is only one forum in which these are being addressed: science fiction. Here, a handful of stories have tried to imagine what a world without children would look like.

The most famous of these thought experiments is Alfonso Cuaron’s 2006 film, Children of Men, based on the PD James novel, in which an ecological catastrophe has rendered the human race infertile, and civilisation stands on the brink of collapse. But while Children of Men is bleak enough, and contains generous helpings of man’s inhumanity to man, it is only set 18 years after the last birth. As a result, there are still plenty of young people about, among them a vigorous 40-ish-year-old Clive Owen, who ultimately discovers a mother and baby. The film ends with their rescue, and choral music, and the sound of children laughing. Crisis averted!

But if Children of Men loses its nerve, ultimately resisting the full ramifications of its premise, the same cannot be said of Greybeard, a novel by the British Grand Master of science fiction, Brian Aldiss. Written in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, it imagines that a nuclear catastrophe has left all humans and many animal species infertile. Crucially, Aldiss begins his story half a century after the event, when humanity is on the verge of extinction. The youngest people in the novel are Algy Timberlane, aka “Greybeard”, and his wife, Martha, who are both 56. Most of the characters are in their seventies or older.

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This enables Aldiss to explore the nature of an aging planet in detail. His first assumption is that a physically frail, and therefore vulnerable, community is a much more fearful one. At the start of his novel, Greybeard and his wife have spent a decade living in the village of Sparcot, which is run by a petty local tyrant. They have accepted his irascible rule in exchange for the promise of security. The residents squabble and complain about toothache while living in fear of invading Scotsmen and, of all creatures, stoats — one of the few species of mammal to have escaped the catastrophe with their reproductive organs intact, meaning they proliferate. The choice of animal is inspired: if Aldiss’s protagonists had feared feral dogs, their weakness would have been less obvious; how much worse that this diminished population cannot control a pest that nobody today gives a second thought. How alarming that Aldiss’s prophecy is starting to come true, on depopulated Japanese islands where cats vastly outnumber pensioners.

Loss of strength is only part of the problem, however. Civilisation is also undone by a collective loss of will. In the immediate aftermath of the crisis, the survivors hope that the infertility is a transient phase from which they will recover. Then, as the years pass, and it becomes clear that there will be no children to inherit the fruits of their labour, people lose interest in maintaining society beyond the bare necessities required to survive. The economy collapses and the result is a simpler, reduced world, of villages without businesses and new technologies. But this is not the pastoral dream of today’s “degrowth” proponents; it is an impoverished, dilapidated world that has given up on itself, and awaits oblivion.

Darkest of all, however, is Aldiss’s take on how this ageing remnant of humanity would treat children. Ownership and exploitation are the dominant attitudes. Initially, a global effort is made to gather the surviving minors in three “Childsweep” centres, where there are “three psychiatrists to every child”, to help them cope with the trauma of the world they have inherited. But like any scarce resource, the children become the subject of an international dispute, which leads to a catastrophic war. When, decades later, Greybeard arrives in a village which has a handful of mutant children, he finds that they are periodically put on display as a “treat” for the inhabitants of a village. Later still, when he discovers a few healthy youths, the first one he meets is being kept as a sex slave by a con man. Aldiss’ bitterness may be partly explained by the fact that when he wrote the book, he had lost custody of his children following a divorce, but his point is universal: as we saw during the pandemic, when humanity is under pressure, it does not treat its children well.

Of course, Greybeard is extreme by design. I’m not arguing that our leaders should abandon all thoughts of climate change and prepare for a crumbling world overrun by feral stoats in which most adults abuse the dwindling number of children. But the thing about the real world, as opposed to the world inside a novel, is that we can have many intersecting (and insurmountable) problems at the same time. Today’s climate change activists think too much like novelists: they are performing one simple thought experiment, by imagining our world as it is now — the same balance of young and old, the same technologies, the same governments — and extrapolating the future along one central theme, in search of a tidy resolution. But the warmer planet they imagine will also be a grey planet, filled with elderly people.

There will be many more Joe Bidens unable to make it to the end of a speech or climb stairs unaided, many more Mitch McConnells freezing before the cameras, many more geriatric pop stars miming to songs they first performed 50 years earlier. And they will be the lucky ones. A great many others will be alone, ill, vulnerable, surrounded by decaying infrastructure, while rats and other creatures run wild. In this context, we may want to reconsider some of our anxieties about the AI apocalypse. Indeed, this could be one area where it would benefit us to be a little less existential and a little more materialist. An older, depopulated world will clearly require a far higher degree of automation and augmentation; there’s a reason that Japan is known for its robot technology.

Aldiss’s conceit rules out some possibilities that are open to us, of course, including the economists’ favourite: immigration. But you don’t need to be a science fiction grand master to imagine how this policy might go awry. They are assuming that older, poorer countries will remain attractive destinations for the inhabitants of younger ones; that there will not be significant backlash from the existing populations; that the immigrants themselves will not adopt the customs of their host societies, stop reproducing, and also grow old.

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Those countries that cannot stomach more immigration will seek to incentivise larger families. This is the approach of Hungary, which grants mothers under 30 an exemption from income tax. Historically, however, the idea of rewarding families for great feats of reproduction has had mixed results. And the time may be coming when no matter how attractive the tax breaks, couples simply can’t have children. Sperm counts are plummeting worldwide. Scientists have suggested that everything from obesity to “endocrine-disrupting chemicals” may be responsible, but without firm conclusions, humans may yet end up like French bulldogs, unable to reproduce without direct medical intervention. And of course, some communities opt for extinction over change: today, for every 150 Parsi Zoroastrians born in India, 600 die, but the community refuses to recognise the children of women who marry outsiders. In the 200 years of their existence, the Shakers have had ample opportunity to reconsider their celibacy, but have declined to do so, relying on conversion to keep the numbers up. Today, two remain.

You would think that — given its inevitability — we would put a bit more effort into imagining this grey new world. But Greybeard is one of very few attempts to confront a planet in which most people are very, very old. In politics, the story is worse than in literature. All the signs are that we would rather not think about it: China, for instance, stopped reporting on its fertility rate in 2017. Perhaps this is because we have already made our decision: like the Parsis, we are not going to have more children, and so all we can do is wait for the great die-off to unfold.

Meanwhile, house prices are so high in San Francisco that even software engineers at mega companies struggle to afford accommodation, tech companies are downsizing, and homelessness is on the rise. Confronted with these problems, the city recently recommended a payment of $5 million each in “reparations” to eligible black residents. The figure was arrived at without actually doing any maths and, it is estimated, would cost everybody else $600,000 each.

As always, Silicon Valley is at the vanguard of a wider Californian trend. Here is a place where things were too good for too long; where the ruling class became unmoored from reality, hastening their state’s decline. Residents are voting with their feet: in 2020, California’s population declined for the first time in its history, a trend which continued through July 2022. Where, people are asking, are all those who came to California seeking success now going?

For many, the answer appears to be Texas. Austin in particular has received some high-profile defections. In 2020, Joe Rogan left LA for the city because, as he put it, “I want fucking freedom.” Joe Lonsdale, the co-founder of Palantir, the data mining firm  that helped locate Osama Bin Laden, declared that Texas beats California “in almost every method you can name, whether it’s education, pollution, homeless[ness].” Trump-supporting billionaire Larry Ellison relocated the HQ of database giant Oracle from Redwood City to Austin following a bitter struggle with regulators. And, most famously, Elon Musk shifted Tesla’s headquarters to Austin in 2021, after claiming that California regulators had started behaving like a “monopoly that cannot go bankrupt”.

Musk’s announcement marked the moment when the rise of Austin as a tech hub reached critical mass in the public consciousness, but the process had been underway for over a decade. Long before Tesla arrived, Google, Amazon and Meta (as well as older firms such as Apple, IBM and Dell) had established significant presences in the city. They had been attracted by a concentration of engineering talent and Texas’s business-friendly government. The result is that the Austin metro’s population has exploded, while rents and house prices have soared. Since I moved here, during the second Bush administration, the downtown skyline has completely transformed. A second centre, “The Domain”, has sprouted in the city’s north, where many tech firms have offices.

The cultural changes have also been profound. The laid-back city of old prided itself on the slogan, “Keep Austin Weird”. But there is a sense among locals that, in the new Austin, idiosyncrasies are ironed out. Formerly hip neighbourhoods that might once have boasted the odd wax museum or vintage thrift store are now lined with luxury boutiques and frou-frou eateries, while quirky institutions have either fled to the remote reaches of the city to survive or closed for good.

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Although Austin was a second-tier provincial city until very recently, it always punched above its weight when it came to the counterculture. Cheap rents, low house prices and Left-wing politics made it attractive to creative people and misfits: “slackers” unafflicted by the ambition and status anxiety that bedevils all those chasing careers in NYC or LA. Psychedelic music was born here, in the shape of The 13th Floor Elevator’s debut LP — released a year before Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. And in my almost two decades here, I have met many interesting characters without trying, including a Scottish BMX champion who was once name-dropped on an episode of Neighbours, Morrissey’s guitar technician, and a man who turned his PhD on crustaceans in Victorian literature into a career in AI. The poster boy for the Keep Austin Weird era was Leslie Cochran, a homeless man in a thong bikini who ran for mayor three times and had his own line of fridge magnets that allowed you to dress him in an array of outfits. Leslie’s death in 2012 (he was only 60) coincides almost too precisely with the last gasp of weird Austin.

As depressing as this metamorphosis might feel to many Austinites, it is simply the next logical stage in a process that began years ago, as middle-class hipsters displaced the black and Hispanic residents of the working-class neighbourhoods they moved into. What follows now is not gentrification but rather wholesale destruction, as entire blocks are razed to the ground and replaced with luxury apartment buildings, while the truly wealthy erect ostentatious ziggurats on lots where modest kit houses once stood.

Tech bros are often cast as the villains here, but they are too easy to scapegoat. A more interesting example of how social dynamics have shifted in the new Austin can be found in the furore that erupted when the residents of a brand new luxury development attempted to shut down a weekly car club that had been taking place since the Nineties. The sight of customised low riders and the roar of engines was too much for the exquisite sensibilities of the residents of “The Weaver”, one of whom denounced the club as “a display of toxic masculinity”.

The invocation of Left-wing pieties in the service of naked class war captured perfectly the way similar language would be used to justify policies during the pandemic that had a disproportionately harmful effect on the poor. Austin’s leadership embraced school closures and mask psychosis. After the murder of George Floyd, it also voted to defund the police — promptly experienced record murder rates. This was not the first time radically progressive policy had backfired in Austin. In 2019, the city had decriminalised public camping, allowing tent cities doubling as drug markets to spring up along freeways and in underpasses. San Francisco had already demonstrated how a policy that sounds compassionate can quickly become indistinguishable from the worst kind of laissez-faire cruelty, yet Austin seemed determined to pursue the policy to its destruction.

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But while Silicon Valley operates in uber-progressive California, Austin has an openly hostile Republican state legislature to contend with. Texas puts a limit on just how far the city can go with its more avant-garde policies, while occasional uprisings from the electorate thwart others. The ban on public camping was reinstated by popular vote. It is also misleading to assume that everybody moving to Austin is a doctrinaire progressive: when three-time Democrat failure Robert “Beto” O’Rourke was defeated for the first time, he had actually polled higher among native-born Texans than among those who have moved to the state from elsewhere. Indeed, Musk himself has argued that Austin should not slavishly copy San Francisco, while Lonsdale said that bad policies made the state “unlivable”. Indeed, so appalled is Lonsdale by the “far Left” thinking he saw in San Francisco that he co-founded the new University of Austin to challenge the “new ideologies of intolerance that order subservience and quash those who think differently.”

It would be preferable, of course, if we did not live in a world where entire cities could be so radically transformed by the desires of the super-rich. But in this, Austin is becoming not weirder, but more normal. All the great cities — Moscow, London, Paris, New York, LA, Istanbul — are full of buildings, monuments and institutions that exist only because rich and powerful people wanted them: indeed, there are entire cities, such as Saint Petersburg and Astana that exist because of this principle. If not exactly progress, it is a sign of Austin leaving childish things behind.

Meanwhile, even as the old “Keep Austin Weird” spirit teeters on the verge of extinction, the new city is weird in its own ways. Sometimes this is in the style of nouveau riche grotesque: $150 cups of coffee are weird. But I also recall my confusion the first time I drove past the shell of Musk’s immense Tesla Gigafactory just outside the city. At first, I assumed it was just another Amazon warehouse, but the scale was like nothing I had ever seen before. It was weirdly radical to see so ambitious a manufacturing plant in a Western country when we have spent decades getting the rest of the world to make our stuff for us.

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And people here still dream of creating their own worlds: I recently met a man who was considering building a commune south of the city, while Musk himself is rumoured to be contemplating the construction of a “utopia” in the Austin metro area, close to where facilities for The Boring Company and SpaceX are being assembled. On the one hand, Musk’s plans have a practical aim: he wants his employees to have access to affordable housing. But on the other, they are extremely secretive, although Kanye West was reportedly involved in discussions about what the town might look like.

But whether Musk builds his City of the Sun or not, there is a more certain sign of the old Austin’s extinction. The city has approved a 12-foot tall monument, to be erected downtown, that will read: “Keep Austin Weird.” In doing so, a cold, heavy slab has been dropped on the still warm corpse of the town that was once was, to guarantee it never escapes from its resting place.

After years of drifting apart, the United Kingdom suddenly felt united again. It couldn’t last, of course, and it hasn’t: a new UnHerd Britain poll reveals that while 55% of UK citizens agree that it’s a good thing Britain has a monarchy, in Scotland only 45% do.

Yet while the results are unlikely to put a smile on King Charles’s face, they are not, in the end, all that surprising. If anything, they represent a reversion to historic norms, following the fever dream of grief that broke out upon the Queen’s death. Previous surveys on Scottish attitudes to the monarchy have also shown that the Royal Family is not especially popular: shortly before the Platinum Jubilee, for instance, a poll found that fewer than half of Scots supported keeping the monarchy, while the Royals were similarly unloved four years before that. On a visit home last summer, I found that while Tesco had decked out even the frozen meat aisle with “happy and glorious” banners to mark the Queen’s jubilee, it was a lot harder to find signs of celebration in Scottish shops and institutions. The management of the purportedly “Royal” Botanic Garden in Edinburgh had tucked their jubilee sign away in a corner, while at the celebratory garden party in my hometown of Dunfermline, there were no royal souvenirs, not even a mug — although there was a cut out of John Forbes, a long-dead local worthy who founded the city of Pittsburgh.

It may be tempting to connect increasingly negative attitudes to the monarchy with the rise of nationalist sentiment since devolution. Prominent cultural figures, such as the author Alasdair Gray and the SNP politician Margo MacDonald, espoused republicanism. Nicola Sturgeon’s anointed disciple, Humza Yousaf, has vowed not only to break up the UK using “any means necessary”, but also declared on Monday that within five years of independence, he’d expect Scotland to find a new head of state. But republicanism isn’t merely an SNP talking point; Scotland’s bad relationship with monarchy goes back a long way, at least as far back as the Reformation, nearly five centuries ago.

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Calvinism, the national philosophy that came to dominate afterwards, is an innately levelling creed, with its cheerful teaching that God has already decided who is saved and who is damned and there is nothing you can do about it. Post-Reformation, the inhabitants of Dunfermline managed to forget where they buried no fewer than seven Scottish kings, including one of the greats, Robert the Bruce, who was only rediscovered by accident in the 19th century. In Scotland, the monarch was not the head of the church; the ministers elected their own leader. John Knox, who spearheaded the Reformation, neither admired nor feared monarchs and reduced Mary Queen of Scots to tears in front of her own court. George Buchanan, the tutor of Mary’s son James, was the author of The Law of Government Among the Scots, wherein he wrote that “the people have the right to confer royal authority upon whomever they wish”, and that they were free to overthrow — and kill — tyrants. Buchanan freely admitted to having “whipped the king’s arse” when the heir to the throne annoyed him.

Chafing against the ideas that his Calvinist tutor had tried to impose upon him, James threw off any restraints on his power as soon as he could, describing monarchy as “the supremest thing on earth” after he became king of England as well as Scotland. His son Charles I attempted to rule in the same way, but when in 1637 he tried to bring the Scottish church to heel by forcing it to accept the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, the people did not meekly comply but rather rose up in anger, resulting in two wars of rebellion. Taking a leaf out of George Buchanan’s book, the Scots did not accept the King’s authority if it conflicted with the will of God (although they later agreed to fight for him when he agreed to support Presbyterianism).

But if the Scots were less than keen on monarchs, then the feeling seems to have been mutual. For a period of almost 200 years, following a brief appearance by Charles II in 1650, no king bothered to make the journey north of the border until George IV (described by Robert Burns as “a witless youth”) toured Scotland in 1822. This trip, in which the portly King appeared in a mini-kilt and pink tights, appears to have presaged a kind of thaw, and inadvertently laid the seeds of today’s heritage industry. Sir Walter Scott, at least, was very excited, and the pageant he organised cobbled together so many Scottish tropes that one resident of Edinburgh complained that he had “ridiculously made us appear to be a nation of Highlanders, and the bagpipe and the tartan are the order of the day”.

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However, it was with the ascension of George’s granddaughter, Victoria, to the throne that Scotland really seems to have become integrated into the cult of monarchy. Prince Albert purchased Balmoral for his Queen in 1852 while Glasgow, today the most anti-monarchical place in the UK, was referred to as the Second City of the Empire, a title its inhabitants welcomed with pride. Indeed, the whole city was transformed into a monument to Empress Victoria; a statue of the Queen riding a horse (the first equestrian statue of a woman in the UK) stands close to the City Chambers (which she opened in 1888) to this day. This is easy enough to understand: in those days, Britain was winning at geopolitics, and the Scots wanted to be part of the winners’ club. While nationalists today may sometimes complain that Scotland is England’s last colony, the truth is that the Scots were enthusiastic colonisers themselves, proudly extending and administering the power of the British Empress across the globe.

Yet within a few decades of Victoria’s death, that sense of shared triumphalism vanished. My grandmother grew up in Clydebank in the heyday of the radical Red Clydesiders and remembered red flags flying at rallies in the Twenties and Thirties, while my father recalls attending a birthday party in a “communist chapel” in the early Fifties. He also remembers people booing Churchill when he appeared in cinema newsreels, and yet despite this radicalism, he has no memory of anyone booing the Queen. Indifference rather than hostility was the rule; she seemed “remote”.

Similarly, by the time I was growing up in Fife in the Eighties and Nineties, it was a given that the Royal Family were ludicrously posh and rich and out of touch, but we also accepted that that was kind of the point. Prince Charles may have liked to stride around Lochnagar in a kilt and paint landscapes of the Scottish wilderness, but this did not endear him to the masses; indeed, all that stuff about talking to plants inspired mocking impersonations at my school, and beyond. The Scottish comedian Craig Ferguson took his exceptionally cruel portrayal to the US, where it became a regular feature on his late-night chat show.

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For all the talk of the Queen’s love of Scotland, which was emphasised after she died at Balmoral, it does seem that this profound emotional attachment was more than a wee bit correlated with that majestic estate. Although I do not doubt that the Queen was absolutely sincere when she spoke of her “deep and abiding affection for this wonderful country”, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to suggest that anybody who spends every summer in a castle surrounded by beautiful forests could reasonably be expected to love it. Indeed, I might never have emigrated to the US if Balmoral were my holiday home. By contrast, the Queen spent much less time at her official residence, the Palace of Holyrood House in Edinburgh.

Yet for all that, I do not recall meeting many vocal republicans until I went to university, and they were all English. The nationalists that I knew in the Nineties — and I knew somebody who ran (unsuccessfully) for the UK parliament — never talked about the Queen or her family. They weren’t fans, of course, but they didn’t care that they weren’t fans: the Royals were simply irrelevant. It is not until 2004 that the republican “Declaration of Calton Hill” — a spirited call for “an independent Scottish Republic built on the principles of liberty, equality, diversity and solidarity” — was issued, to coincide with the Queen’s visit to open the Scottish parliament. It attracted support from significant Scottish cultural figures such as Iain Banks, the poet Edwin Morgan, and Irvine Welsh. But it was organised by the Scottish Socialist Party, which currently has zero seats in the Scottish parliament. Ever since the days of Alex Salmond’s leadership, the official position of the SNP has been to retain the monarchy.

None of this is to say that I don’t think republicanism could become a serious force in Scottish politics. If Scotland were to become independent, then the lowest hanging fruit for nationalists to go after to maintain their sense of existential purpose would be the abolition of the monarchy, as Humza Yousaf’s sudden interest in republicanism makes clear. But until that day comes, the Royal Family simply will continue to be unpopular in Scotland, and poll after poll will reveal that they are unpopular, but it will not matter at all. Always “there” but never actually present, they will drift by on TV screens, occasionally turn up to open a building, and then go away again.

And Scottish apathy might, in the end, be for the better. Because although it is nice to think that we have an inherent aversion to authority, Scots were actually quite respectful towards Calvinist preachers for many centuries, and — as the willing submission to an extended lockdown revealed — the pursRed-lipped, finger-wagging, moralising style of leadership still has quite a constituency in the country. If not King Charles, then who? I’ll take my chances with the Royals, thank you.

I suspect that not even the biggest Disney superfan would go quite that far today, although Bambi, which premiered 80 years ago, is still held in high regard. And of all his films, Bambi was Walt’s favourite. In 2011, it was added to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry, alongside Chaplin’s The Kid, Porgy and Bess and The Big Heat. Bambi, in fact, is more than a film: it’s part of our cultural fabric. Like Sherlock Holmes or Superman, you don’t need to engage with the source material to know something about it. Specifically, the crucial plot point: Bambi’s mother dies.

When I was a boy in Scotland, it was impossible to watch a Disney “classic”; they would not be released on home video until I was in high school. As a result, I knew Bambi from clips on the insipid compilation show Disney Time. Bambi was represented by the scene where Thumper pounds his foot on the forest floor; yet still I was aware that Bambi’s mother died. It was in the air, like Kryptonite, or “elementary my dear Watson”.

I was in my thirties and living in Texas by the time I finally saw the film, which I watched with my son, who was three or four at the time. It was obvious from the painterly backdrops and acutely observed movements of the deer that Disney was going for “art”, but when is his mum going to die? I wondered. And then, around halfway through, it happened: having escaped the hunters once already, and endured the harsh winter, Bambi’s mother has finally led her son to a source of food when the baddies return. Mother and son flee, a shot rings out, and Bambi is alone in a world gone silent. A stag appears before him: “Your mother can’t be with you anymore,” it says. Later, the forest burns down.

This was heavy stuff, and not just by Disney standards. I looked at my son, who had become quite upset when the “Heffalump” faced mild peril in a terrible straight-to-DVD Winnie the Pooh sequel. But the Bambi death scene was too subtle; it had gone over his head. This felt like a narrow escape, that I had dodged a conversation I didn’t want to have yet.

It’s not that I was against death in children’s cartoons. Like everyone else, I had seen many animated characters meet their demise, but these were usually “good” deaths, the kind where evil is obliterated: the villain falls into the sea, dies by the sword or plunges into molten lead. Dead parents were not uncommon either; children’s stories teem with orphans, but the parents are almost always long dead before the action begins. Those deaths are backstory; their purpose is to remove protection from the child heroes and so expose them to risk and adventure.

Bambi was different. Most of the film up until the death scene was dedicated to establishing the bond between mother and son; and then when the death came it was starkly materialist in its finality and meaninglessness. It was as if “Uncle” Walt wanted to torture Bambi and, by extension, his audience of little ones. What was he up to?

One clue lies in the source material, which was not aimed at children at all. Bambi, A Life in the Woods, by the Austrian author Felix Salten, provided Disney with the basic structure of the narrative — Bambi’s journey from birth through childhood and adolescence to fatherhood — but also featured scenes of animal-on-animal violence. “Friend Hare”, on whom Thumper is based, loses his son to a murderous pack of crows; a pheasant is torn apart by a fox; Bambi gives another deer such a drubbing that it almost dies. The Nazis banned the novel, regarding it as an allegory for treatment of Jews, but Salter’s actual goal was to articulate the truth about the animal world.

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This shows through even in Disney’s sanitised version. Unlike all other talking animal cartoons, where the lions, dogs, cats and fish are analogues for people and have human conflicts, Bambi is a poem about animals, and its protagonists live animal lives centered around birth, death, rutting, raising children, finding food and dodging predators. This is why, once Bambi’s mother dies, she is gone forever. Of course, Disney could have bowdlerised that aspect and made a completely insipid film if he had wanted to, but he may have had a personal reason for keeping death at the heart of the narrative. In 1938, the year that Disney bought the rights to Bambi, his mother died after workmen from the studio botched a repair of a leaking gas furnace in the house he had bought his parents.

Was Disney working through his own guilt and grief when he inflicted the traumatic scene on his audience of small children? Surviving storyboards show that initially he planned to go further, and depict Bambi’s mother’s lifeless corpse on screen. The businessman in him knew that this was too much; the film implies the death, and then leaps forward to Bambi as a horny teenager annoying an owl with his equally horny friends. Anything more than that would have derailed the narrative and turned it into what Stephen King once joked that it was: a horror movie.

In fact, it would be another 50 years, long after Disney’s own death, before the studio he founded depicted parental death inside a film again, in The Lion King. This time it was a father, Mufasa, who died, but now all restraint was cast aside: not only did the animators depict him falling, screaming to his death in a stampede, but they also showed the traumatic aftermath as Simba, the hero, first attempts to “wake up” his dead dad before climbing under the corpse’s lifeless paw for one final hug. And yet in a significant way, The Lion King is the softer of the two films. Whereas Bambi lives in a materialist universe where death is final, Simba is equipped with a metaphysical system which holds that dead kings live on in the stars, and he is later addressed by his father, who appears in the clouds, smiling benignly down upon him from the clouds. It’s OK children, he didn’t really die; his spirit lives on.

The success of The Lion King seems to have liberated Disney’s screenwriters to start getting into death. Although films from Disney proper still tended to feature “traditional” cartoon deaths, the studio’s Pixar division greatly expanded the territory, to such an extent that I suspected the studio’s original boss John Lasseter must have mandated at least one death in each film for maximum pathos. In Up, for instance, the hero’s wife suffers a miscarriage, grows old, and then dies. In Inside Out, Joy’s imaginary friend, Bing Bong, disintegrates in front of the audience’s eyes. In Coco, almost everybody is dead, and some face a second death in the afterlife as the living gradually forget them. As for parental death, after waiting so long between Bambi and The Lion King to dip a second toe in those waters, Disney killed off parents inside the story at least three times between 2003 and 2015, in Finding Nemo, Frozen and The Good Dinosaur.

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After a while, all the onscreen deaths we were witnessing started to irritate me: Why is this ruthless multibillion-dollar corporate behemoth banging on about death so much? It was as if The Lion King was the Texas Chainsaw Massacre of children’s animation. Just as that latter film had rendered all the old Universal monster movies featuring Dracula and the Mummy quaint, so the spectacle of Simba nuzzling the corpse of his dead dad had desensitised a generation to cartoon death. In particular, the death of a parent was now just a plot point to be got out of the way early in the film; then the fun stuff could start. It felt manipulative and exploitative: no longer shocking, Disney had made death boring.

I didn’t doubt that the filmmakers thought they were helping children by introducing them to the idea of mortality, but my kids already knew about death. I thought it more valuable to encourage them to think about the wiles of large corporations that emotionally manipulate children and their parents in order to sell ever more toys, pyjamas and lunchboxes, and in particular to foster scepticism about Disney and its subsidiaries, intent as they are on flooding the world with a seemingly infinite spill of formulaic pabulum: adolescent power fantasies, pointless sequels, prequels and spinoffs, princess after princess, and endless shitty remakes.

And yet. Bambi — Bambi I still respect. I think it’s the absence at the heart of the film that gives it such power, even after 80 years. Disney knew that the grief over the loss of a parent was too vast and all-encompassing to reduce to a plot point. He could only draw a veil over it and move on.

This, increasingly, is what ex-presidents do: they trade on their brand, milking their fanbase for cash. Obama has his media company, his tedious podcast with Bruce Springsteen, his paid appearances. The Clintons had their consultancy and speaking fees. After all, how can they continue to hobnob with their billionaire friends unless they, too, get filthy rich? Trump, I figured, was a little different: already wealthy, it was adoration he sought.

Freedom Tour tickets ran from the thousands for a seat close to the stage all the way down to $45 for those at the back. (There was a still lower level that got you a seat watching a video screen in an overflow hall.) Intrigued, I purchased a ticket for the cheap seats, wondering how the disgraced prophet would try to shore up the faith among his followers. Biden and his media stenographers would have it that these followers are an extremist, angry force active in the land, still fulminating over a thwarted coup attempt. His opposition researchers have already coined a new insult: “ultra MAGA”. And I wanted to know: what is happening to Trumpists during their period in the wilderness?

*

The Austin Exhibition Center is a massive space that’s right downtown: it is easy to reach, so I expected to see some protestors, especially given the role of Trump-appointed justices in the recently leaked Roe v Wade ruling. But there were none, just a dude selling car air fresheners shaped like prominent Democrats (because “Liberals Smell”).

Trump fans, on the other hand, had turned up en masse, and early. It took over an hour to clear security, which provided me with ample time to check for signs of the “multiracial whiteness” that The Washington Post warned us about. And indeed, I saw that Trump had attracted Asians, Hispanics and a small number of black people in addition to white people, although within each of these very broad categories there was great diversity.

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Among the white people, for example, there were representatives of the big-beard-and-shaved-head cohort, older rural Republicans, preppy college kids and black T-shirt Infowars types. The gender split seemed close to 50/50. The vibe was good humoured despite the long line: people were expecting a good show. A Trump impersonator walked up and down, posing for pictures. The woman in front of me asked if she could touch his hair. “Go for it,” he said, adding: “It’s real, completely real.”

*

Dinesh D’Souza was wrapping up as I entered the hall. The Left had captured all the institutions, he said; nothing could be done. Conservatives needed to withdraw and create new ones, a culture within the culture. This got some applause, but the message struck me as defeatist and un-Trumpian.

D’Souza was followed by the author of a business book, who wanted to live in a world where you could still tell jokes without fretting about offending people. He then told a mild gag, about getting punched after “helpfully” fixing a lady’s skirt, which would have been suitable for broadcast pre-watershed any time in the past 50 years. The crowd laughed: this guy was definitely more entertaining than Dinesh D’Souza.

Next up came Kevin Sorbo. Democrats get Jay-Z and Beyonce, MAGA people get the star of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. An outspoken Christian conservative with a penchant for trolling liberals (“If men can’t comment on abortion because they don’t have a uterus, why does the Left comment on gun control?”), Sorbo was dropped by his Hollywood agents and ejected from every social media platform bar Twitter. But he has fought back by forming his own production company and now makes successful films for the Christian market. I half-remembered a line from The Brothers Karamazov, describing Alyosha, the protagonist: “he had gone beyond the fear of appearing ridiculous.”

To me this has always sounded like the greatest of freedoms, although those who achieve it are not always likeable. Trump had done it; he could afford to. Sorbo had done it and paid a price, but he had survived. The audience, with fewer resources, were being encouraged to do the same, to own the MAGA-ness that earned them the contempt of the elites. “I’m not here to wake up the sheep,” said Sorbo. “I’m here to wake up the lions — and you guys are lions.”

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This would emerge as a major theme of the day. There were barely any references to policy, to Roe v Wade, to Ukraine, or even to the Republican Party. Very little organising was going on. The American Freedom Tour was not a rally; it was a revival meeting bringing believers together so they could strengthen each other in the faith and return renewed to the world to tell the truth.

Sorbo, at least, did not attempt to lead the audience in prayer, though the MC who came on between the “acts” did. The Bible instructed us to pray for our leaders, he said, and that included Joe Biden, even if he was not the audience’s favourite person. He pulled it off: heads were bowed, and everybody went silent to join him in a prayer for the president.

*

By lunchtime it was clear that Trump had drawn a huge crowd: the number “8000” kept coming up. Yet the success in Austin appeared to have caught the organisers off guard: there was hardly any merch for sale, just a whiny-voiced snake oil salesman pitching membership of the “inner circle” for $30,000 a pop, an online system for investors that was supposed to be foolproof, and copies of Trump’s latest book, Our Journey Together, which you could get signed by his son.

Trump had missed an opportunity, as his followers loved T-shirts and hats. The variety was spectacular: a grinning Trump sprinkling stars that formed the word “America”; Trump as Theseus holding up the severed head of the Gorgon Medusa; and “God, Guns and Trump”, to name but a few. “Ultra MAGA” was already a T-shirt. Trump’s fans are serious about their beliefs, but they are also in on the joke.

The tone, however, hardened in the afternoon. Introduced to us as “Donald Trump’s pastor”, Mark Burns, an ultra-energetic black preacher and Christian media entrepreneur, was the first speaker to really push evangelical conservative stances on abortion and gay marriage, but he also came out swinging against transgender athletes, Black Lives Matter and CRT.

And then he invoked the name of Rosa Parks. All American children are raised on the story of how she rejected an unjust law and refused to take her seat at the back of the bus. Burns offered a radical reinterpretation of the story: the second-class citizens of today are not black people but white Christian conservatives, and the time might come when they might have to follow Rosa Parks’ example and reject unjust laws.

*

“It seems from what the speakers are saying that Trump is thinking of running again,” said a middle-aged man, sitting behind me. “I thought he was going to hand over the baton. How old is he?”

His friend did a quick Google search. “It says here he’s 75. He’ll be 77 and a half at the next election.” There was a pause. “He’s still sharp, though.”

“I heard one of the speakers say he is the greatest president of our lifetimes,” said the first man. “Well maybe some of the young folk here don’t remember, but I was around for Reagan…”

The consensus was that Reagan was better than Trump. The conversation then switched to a discussion of Elon Musk’s tweets, the border situation and Disney’s declining stock price. These men were well-informed professionals who had arrived later in the day and were worried they had missed rock star Ted Nugent. Although he was never mentioned by name, Chris Rufo’s influence loomed large in their conversation — and at the Freedom Tour in general. Trumpian causes such as the border wall might get the occasional shout out, but Rufo’s, with his leaks and campaigns against woke institutions, were the driving force. But Rufo is aligned with Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, not Trump. Even at the ex-president’s own event, the centre of gravity seemed to have shifted: the agenda is no longer set by Trump.

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The men behind me had not missed Ted Nugent. The rock star landed, playing the Star-Spangled banner on electric guitar, telling the audience that although he loved us “madly”, he would love us even more if we “went berserk on the skulls of the Democrats and the Marxists and the Communists”. This soundbite would briefly light up Twitter the next day, juxtaposed with the news of the racially motivated mass shooting in Buffalo. He did not receive boos, but Don Jr’s girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, de-escalated the rhetoric when she arrived on stage: she settled for sneering at Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and reciting his many failures (high price of gas, debacle in Afghanistan, no baby formula) against Trump’s many victories (low price of gas, victory over Isis, record low unemployment) while repeating the mantra: Trump was right.

In the morning Sorbo had made fun of Obama’s golfing skills; now the attacks on Biden, Big Tech and other bête noirs of the MAGA movement became relentless. I expected things to deteriorate further when Donald Trump Jr took to the stage. This scion of privilege, like his father before him, presents himself as a defender of the working class — with the energy and delivery of a stand-up comedian. Clearly revelling in his heretic status, he was willing to go much further than any of the previous speakers in terms of his selection of targets.

There had been little mention of Ukraine until this point, but Trump Jr attacked the senate for rushing through $40 billion worth of spending on a regime he described as second only to Russia in its corruption. Then he attacked Big Pharma, Big War, defence contractors and the Biden administration for doing nothing to stop the flow of fentanyl over the border from Mexico. The self-proclaimed “prince of MAGA” was leading the audience into territory that until very recently would have been the preserve of the Left. They followed him willingly, cheering at his comments.

And then, finally, eight and a half hours after the show had begun, the man himself took to the stage. Following the energetic and radical performance of the son, the father was content to perform a greatest hits routine — the wall, “fake news”, his successful renegotiations of NAFTA and the bill for Air Force 1, his victory over Isis. Yes, the election was stolen, but he didn’t bang on about it, and he didn’t mention January 6th at all. He was coy about his intentions for 2024, only saying that the audience would be very pleased.

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And the audience was pleased, on the whole. Trump put on a show, and those who saw it were entertained, even if some people got up and left before he was finished (he was an hour late) and so missed the comedy dance moves at the end. Trump was the main draw, required to bring the show together, but he was no longer the main source of energy or ideas. He was, however, “still sharp” — a canny performer who knew how to keep his audience excited enough that they would tune in for the next episode.

I wondered if he has a twist in mind for us. Many a businessmen will pass the family corporation onto his son, and Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, erstwhile dictator of Turkmenistan, recently passed on the presidency to his son Serdar. The order of the show kept it in the family: the top three headliners were Trump, his son, and his son’s girlfriend, whose main claim to fame otherwise is years spent as a second tier talking head on Fox News. Suddenly the thought of Don Jr signing his dad’s books no longer seemed absurd but rather one of the rituals through which a patriarch might anoint a successor.

As the Democrats complete their transformation into a party representing the interests and values of the professional-managerial class — and so prove themselves unable to learn from 2016 — it’s worth noting that Trump Jr’s appropriation of hitherto leftist critiques of power drew some of the loudest cheers from the audience. Despite his immense wealth, he has, like his father, the same ability to articulate the concerns of people infinitely poorer than himself. His isn’t “classical” Trumpism; it is a new, more radical mutation.

MAGA isn’t finished, but nor is it fixed, and though the American Freedom Tour wasn’t pointing towards a particular end point, it did prove that something else is being born. But there were still no protestors outside the stadium when I left.

Indeed I only found that out last week, when word got out that North Lanarkshire Council had agreed to purchase Cumbernauld’s town centre, but only in order to raze it to the ground. The responses adhered to a familiar script. Architectural historians, of course, were appalled; they argued that, as Britain’s first shopping centre and a radical experiment in building a town centre that went up instead of down, the eight storey “megastructure” was an important part of our cultural legacy. But there was no popular outrage at the news that the rotting eyesore in the centre of the town might soon be gone.

In fact, the destruction of The Centre Cumbernauld (to give it its proper name), which was erected on concrete stilts over a dual carriageway in 1967, has been a dream of many people for a long time. In 2005 it topped a poll of 10,000 people in the UK as the building in Britain that people most wanted to see demolished. Cumbernauld itself, like many of the 27 New Towns that were built in the UK after the war, does not have a great reputation. The comedian Craig Ferguson (who grew up there) once derided it as a “modernist experiment”, where “clueless” town planners had provided “soulless housing for ground-down workers”, before adding that the houses looked like “German machine gun turrets”. My cousins on the west coast of Scotland were pithier: they called it “Scumbernauld”.

Yet for a brief moment in the Sixties and Seventies, Cumbernauld represented an exciting vision of the future, in which a projected population of 70,000 workers and their families would move through the town via a network of pavements, underpasses and bridges. They would never have to cross a road, and never have to spend more than 20 minutes walking to reach the “brilliantly logical” town centre, which housed shops, a library, offices, apartments and even a few penthouses.

When Princess Margaret visited The Centre Cumbernauld in 1967, she pronounced it “fabulous”; that same year it won the Reynolds Memorial Award from the American Institute of Architects. My grandparents lived there in the last years of their lives and greatly preferred their Cumbernauld flat to the one they had lived in on Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow; likewise my Aunt Janet, who lived there between 1972 and 1982, still remembers how novel it was to go shopping without being rained on.

Indeed, even if it had been pouring when I paid a visit last week, I would have remained dry: when I stepped off the bus, I was already inside the centre, confronted with its “brilliant logic”. Is it possible, I wondered, that the architectural historians are right: does Cumbernauld’s town centre deserve to be preserved for future generations? I followed a ramp (there were no stairs or lifts) to the first floor, where I entered the retail complex which had so impressed Princess Margaret 55 years earlier.

The years have not been kind to the place. Where once it featured well-known retailers, such as Halford’s, M & Co. and the supermarket chain Presto, now it is clearly the part of the complex where rents are cheapest (an additional shopping centre, the Antonine, was grafted onto the original building in 2007; that one was opened by Princess Anne); it is here that the eyebrow threaders, tattoo artists, “vintage” shops and suicide prevention centres set up shop. The interior had been remodelled so all traces of its late Sixties utopia-lite origins were gone: bizarrely, the enormous clock from St Enoch’s train station in Glasgow had been embedded in the wall of a mezzanine in the new section, where it kept the time at a permanent 8:20.

After about ten minutes, a security guard informed me that it is forbidden to take pictures in the centre, because it is private property. I moved to the next level, which contains the library and a children’s day-care. This section has not been remodelled; it is very close to the original: lots of brick and tile and concrete, the pipes and wires were exposed. The corridors had names, as if they were streets, but the doors granting entry to them were locked. A service lift was out of order; a weird bench was moulded into the concrete; the glass overhead was filthy. Through it, I could make out the windows of the penthouses, long since abandoned. At the far end, a roof garden for toddlers hung suspended in the air over the dual carriageway beneath.

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The library itself was cheerful enough, but overall, I felt as though I had stumbled upon a vision of Logan’s Run as reimagined by Seventies British trade unionists, only the death squads that were supposed to kill you after you turned 30 had all gone, and everyone had long since taken the opportunity to run away, or simply grow older. It was pretty grim.

But if it was grim on the inside, then it was much worse from the outside. Glimpses of Cumbernauld’s town centre from the window of the bus over the years had not done justice to the scale of the architectural catastrophe. It reminded me of the vast Izhmash plant in Udmurtia, Russia, where they pump out AK 47s and other weapons. But Izhmash at least had a decorative historical entrance; with the general absence of windows and the abundance of pipes and wires in the town centre, everything looked like the back of something. The only feature the eye was drawn towards was the long rectangular section with porthole windows suspended on stilts that hung over the road. Locals call it “the alien’s head”.

From there I took a stroll over the bridges and through the underpasses of the town. Certainly it was convenient, though obviously the planners had not thought about the canvas that endless concrete represents to bored teenagers and the threatening atmosphere it can present at night. I was passing through a particularly luminous underpass when I was accosted by a man with a hammer and sickle tattoo on his arm. “They paint it and then it gets graffitied the next day,” he said.

When I asked him how long he had lived in the town, he replied: “Most of my life, on and off. Cumbernauld is a social experiment: it’s driven me doolally. Have you seen the centre? It’s full of people like that.”

Returning, I felt a sense of coercion: the ghostly hand of the planners had arranged everything so that I was more or less obliged to follow the same route through extremely functional housing. Obviously the working classes had no need of freedom, beauty, or variety: they could get by with a few trees. Behold, Le Corbusier’s “machine for living in”, in the Lanarkshire hills.

When I arrived in Cumbernauld, I was open to the idea that the town centre might be worth saving. Now, not so much. It was not the brutalism; having spent a lot of time in the former USSR I have developed a taste for brutalism when done right. In Central Asia, in particular, architects took eastern motifs and incorporated them into their concrete structures, giving a character to blocks of flats, universities and national libraries that is entirely lacking in Cumbernauld. Those structures are worth preserving, though the cheapness of the materials likely means that one day those buildings too will disappear. Nor do I think it’s a coincidence that the USSR embraced brutalism in the Seventies, after “communism” had withered to mean a fridge and a TV in every house, and an annual beach holiday. In the end, the ideology was not that dissimilar to the modest utopianism of Britain’s post-war town planners.

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Cumbernauld’s town centre was pioneering, but it was also a failure. There is no disgrace in that failure, however: the first generation of occupants, like my grandparents, found these homes a huge improvement on the Glasgow tenements they had grown up in; indeed, New Towns across the country were an improvement on conditions in the slums they were designed to replace. Instead of a single room, kitchen and shared toilet, families now had extra bedrooms, bathrooms and a living room. Later generations did not have this point of comparison, however, and lived in the town once it was already decaying.

The problem with preserving architectural experiments is that they are not like novels lacking the letter “e” or repurposed urinals that live unobtrusively on bookshelves and in museums; they are infrastructure, and it is very hard to persuade people that they should pass their lives in crumbling buildings that they hate because of the interesting ideas that inspired them.

It would be nice, of course, if you could take all those decaying brutalist buildings from around Britain and move them to an open-air park where architectural historians could admire these daring visions, while others could reflect on the dangers of falling for ideas that look good on paper. But that isn’t going to happen: some of these buildings will be preserved, but most of them are going to disappear, just as most of everything has disappeared.

The truth is, we often judge New Towns too harshly: it takes centuries for a city to become interesting, and even then, many old places are also quite boring and squalid. And as it turns out, many New Towns were simply a step in a broader evolutionary process. Just as Milton Keynes has realised its destiny as a sleeper town for middle class people priced out of London and Oxford, so Cumbernauld is discovering its destiny. It was never to be a self-contained social unit built around an eight-storey mixed use retail, office and residential complex — but rather a bedroom community on the edge of the larger metropolis of Glasgow.

This faceless collection of houses and shops and retail parks, without any particular centre or identity, will ultimately surrender to a vast urban sprawl: that’s progress. In time, other New Towns will see that this too is their best option; or, if they are not located close enough to a major city, continue to crumble, until one day they vanish and are forgotten forever.

One of my earliest political memories is of the minister in my grandparents’ church starting the service with a prayer for striking miners. A few years later, at the Glasgow Comic Art Convention, I remember Alan Grant, the Scottish co-writer of Judge Dredd and Batman, exhorting the audience not to pay the poll tax. This was also the era in which a fictional, unemployed, ranting Glaswegian with a bandage wrapped around his head became a beloved national symbol.

Indeed, in the 80s and 90s, a freewheeling attitude of utter contempt for the high and mighty seemed as Scottish as a Tunnock’s Tea Cake. Yet on my first visit home from Texas since pandemic chaos destabilised the world, I detected a very different mood in the air.

This was the first time I had been in Scotland since the government at Holyrood had passed a law making it illegal to utter wicked words in the home, the enforcement of which will necessarily involve family members denouncing the sinners among them to the authorities. I had missed Nicola Sturgeon’s daily briefings on TV, although I was aware that when the BBC had proposed to broadcast them less often, and perhaps not in full, there had been “widespread criticism”, while a petition to keep them on air had attracted over 50,000 signatures.

Meanwhile, I found myself receiving regular moral instruction from the government in the form of signs admonishing me against uttering wicked words on the train, letting my dog shit in the street, or conversely, letting my dog hunt hares; minimal unit pricing for alcohol had also been in place for three years. That finger wagging from the pulpit energy was back: it was as if the Scottish government feared that an irredeemably sinful people might at any moment erupt in spasms of hatred aimed at both humans and speedy animals with long ears.

What happened to the Scotland I remember? It was as if, by voting the nationalists into power, my fellow countrymen had accidentally resurrected Calvinism in woke form. The national poet wouldn’t have liked this much, I thought — and not simply because, were Robert Burns to return today, he would be cancelled in seconds both for his womanising, and his efforts to get a job as a bookkeeper on a slave plantation in Jamaica.

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A deep disdain for authoritarian piety runs through Burns’ poetry, informed not only by his rebellious temperament but also his direct experience of being denounced from the pulpit by the moral guardians of his day. Most famously, in Holy Willie’s Prayer he satirised a self-satisfied Calvinist believer who thanks God for making him one of the elect and justifies his lustful nature as a “fleshly thorn” intended by God to prevent him from becoming too perfect. Simultaneously he prays in a most unforgiving fashion for the destruction of his enemies for the same sins. Thanks to Burns, Holy Willie became archetypal, and I have often thought about his 21^st century equivalents while walking around Edinburgh. For Burns, however, it was personal: the man he mocked was no abstraction but a certain William Fisher, an elder in Burns’ own parish, and the poem was so libellous that he circulated it in private.

But it wasn’t just preachy, vindictive hypocrites that earned Burns’ mockery. In To a Louse he describes in loving detail the journey of a louse to the top of a lady’s bonnet in full view of everyone but her. Extracted from the poem, the famous lines “O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us/To see oursels as others see us!” sound like a prayer for wisdom and humility, but read in the context of the preceding verses it is hard to escape Burns’s glee at puncturing his neighbour’s self-satisfaction. Indeed, Burns sought to undermine just about everything that Calvinist worthies presented to him as sombre and sacred; in Tam O’Shanter, a drunkard’s horse outruns a horde of spirits, while in his Address To the Deil, Burns suggests that even “Auld Hornie” himself might have a shot at redemption if he would only change his ways.

Would the religious authorities of Burns’s day have accused him of “stirring up hatred” had such a vaguely worded law existed at the time? It seems likely. And would Burns, so aware of the lines he crossed in his own verse that he circulated some of it secretly, have felt at ease in a country where friends and family are encouraged to inform on each other for things said in their own homes? It seems unlikely.

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Yet many Scots do appear to be comfortable in such an environment, and place great trust in the authorities to always do the right thing, to adjudicate with wisdom over what can and cannot be said in private as well as in public. The more I thought about it, the more my experience growing up in Scotland in the 80s and 90s seemed anomalous. Perhaps the virulently anti-authority strain in the national character was especially pronounced back then not because of some innate aspect of the Scottish soul but rather because the country was ruled by an indifferent Conservative government in London that had very little support north of the border.

Between Thatcher’s election in 1979 and her resignation in 1990, she managed to alienate large swathes of Scottish voters, and the number of Conservative MPs in Scotland dropped from 22 to 10. When Alan Grant took to the podium to inveigh against the Poll Tax in front of a bunch of youthful comic fans, it had already been in place for a year longer than in England. Mrs. Thatcher had decided to experiment with it first in the test lab of Scotland, where she wasn’t too bothered about alienating voters.

It’s not that all Scottish people were contemptuous of all authority; but many of them were contemptuous of that authority. After all, it’s easy to be anti-establishment when you have nothing to gain from the establishment. Once the SNP came to power, that changed. There was a different power in the land, and many people identified with it, agreed with it, and benefited from it. Meanwhile the Brexit vote and the omnishambles of Boris Johnson’s leadership has made it easy for the SNP to direct that caustic, skeptical, questioning attitude southwards.

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It was easy, too, for Burns to hate the establishment. When he wrote those poems mocking the powerful and attacking hypocrites, he — a poor farmer and notorious fornicator — was completely alienated from the powers that stood over him. But what if he had lived in today’s Scotland, where a poet of his stature would not need to think about moving to Jamaica to earn money, but might instead be offered a cushy professorship at a state-funded university, prestigious seats on cultural committees and access to funding from Creative Scotland?

I doubt that even then he’d bite his tongue. Following the success of his first collection, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, Burns moved to Edinburgh where he was feted by the literary elites of his day. In this environment his jabs at preachers and rural overlords were about as edgy as attacking Trump in the pages of The Guardian, and he began to focus on collecting and reworking traditional ballads instead of insulting  the church elders who annoyed him.

But he still enjoyed provoking the sacred cows of his new audience, too. His poem, A Dream, which Burns wrote in response to a particularly unctuous encomium to George III not only disparaged the king but included the suggestion that Bonnie Prince Charlie might have done a better job. To the enlightened Edinburgh readership of Burns’s day this was much more ‘problematic’ than whatever derision he aimed at rural ministers: support for the vanquished Stuarts was not only politically unacceptable but regarded as an uncultivated, lower class belief. Burns in fact had written it before moving to the big city, but he kept on publishing it in every edition of Poems, even when it would have been in his interests to leave it out.

As the literary scholar Carol McGuirk observes, Burns was a man “stimulated by prohibitions”. He would find plenty to stimulate him in Scotland today. The love poet, the man of the people, the composer of odes to haggis — I like that poet. But the Burns I find most inspiring is the annoying guy, the rebel who doesn’t trust overbearing Calvinist types, and who doesn’t pander to self-satisfied elites, even when it’s in his best interest to do so. It is those qualities that make him a poet not only of his time, or more generally of ‘all times’, but specifically for our times.

Who knows, perhaps there are as yet some true believers out there, shaking their heads more in sorrow than in anger each time Putin, Erdogan or Xi Jinping do something a bit dictatorial, as if they just don’t get it. Yet the success of China in particular at getting very rich while remaining a one-party state suggests that, as with belief in Marduk, patron god of Babylon, it is time to let that faith go.

Embracing capitalism is not without risk, of course, and the degree of control exercised when China was a Maoist dictatorship is no longer feasible. That said, the technologies developed in Silicon Valley have enabled all kinds of fun opportunities for surveillance and repression, and China’s conformity-inducing social credit has blazed a trail that others will follow to one degree or another. But it would seem that those regular, faintly terrifying nudges are no longer sufficient for Xi Jinping’s party, which now seeks to exert still more direct influence over people’s lives, and specifically over the culture they consume.

For instance, at the start of August an article appeared in China’s biggest state-run news agency comparing video games with “electronic drugs” and “spiritual opium”. A few weeks later, online lists ranking celebrities by popularity were banned to “rectify chaos in the fan community” . Before the month was out online gaming companies were barred from providing services to minors except on Fridays, weekends and holidays, and even then only between 8pm and 9pm.

Next, reality TV shows with “abnormal aesthetics” featuring “sissy men” were forbidden, with viewers encouraged to “love the party, love the country, advocate morality and art”, and instructed to “consciously abandon vulgar and kitsch inferior tastes, and consciously oppose the decadent ideas of money worship, hedonism and extreme individualism”.

What is going on? Many in the media have speculated that we may be witnessing the birth of Cultural Revolution 2.0, but given that Xi himself was denounced by his own mother, imprisoned and then exiled to a rural village for seven years during Cultural Revolution 1.0, it seems unlikely that this is a model that would appeal to him. Besides, that was not an orderly top-down set of mandates, but rather war waged on the Party hierarchy by Mao, who encouraged the youth to rise up against their elders under the slogan “to rebel is justified”.

Xi Jinping’s view is the opposite: to rebel is very much unjustified. The “kids these days” energy is strong: there is too much freedom, too much fun. Rather, his approach recalls the approach to culture that was standard among all 20^th century totalitarians, who were much concerned with the state of their subjects’ souls (as opposed to mere authoritarians who accepted lip service in exchange for obeisance).

Take the clampdown on “sissy men”, for instance. Among the many things banned by Saparmurat Niyazov, the late despot of Turkmenistan, was ballet. The media, always on the lookout for a quirky dictator story, reported on this as something eccentric and amusing. However, I once interviewed a former regime apparatchik who recalled watching the dictator humiliate a male ballet dancer on TV, berating him along the lines of “what kind of man prances about in tights?”

Niyazov was not randomly banning a style of dance on a whim; rather he was suppressing what he regarded as a feminising influence which had entered the country via Russian colonialism. The models of manhood he highlighted in his book The Ruhnama were Noah (in his Islamic incarnation) and stern Turkic warriors from a legendary past — and himself, of course.

Think also of Mussolini, stripping down to dig ditches with workers, seizing every opportunity to model virile masculinity. Or think of just about every single monument or painting in every dictatorship ever, whether they be Right-wing or Left-wing, all of them depicting men as hard, tough, resolved, stoic. All totalitarian regimes take a strong interest in enforcing specific ideas of gender (although it should be noted that communist iconography frequently depicted strong, stoic women working alongside their men) to demonstrate the behaviours their subjects are expected to perform.

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Likewise, we should not be surprised that Xi Jinping’s party is instructing artists and performers to behave themselves and promote specific ideas. Totalitarians take culture very seriously. Mao was a poet and bibliophile, as was Stalin, whose quip that writers were “engineers of the human soul” was repeated by Deng Xiao Ping half a century later. Xi Jinping has authored a few tomes himself. To take culture seriously means that you fear the consequences when culture goes wrong. Little wonder, then, that the Party is instructing its most influential creators as to what they can and cannot do; it would be strange if it didn’t.

The culture favored by impressionable young people, meanwhile, is all the more to be watched. Totalitarians are obsessed with childhood; in Hitler’s Germany toddlers received puzzles featuring stirring scenes of the Wehrmacht in action, while dolls had the correct kind of (Aryan) features. Sergei Mikhalkov, author of the lyrics to the Soviet national anthem, was a celebrated children’s author.

In Mao’s China you couldn’t listen to The Beatles but you could hear the Chairman’s slogans rendered in song, while as late as 1985 Soviet Komsomol officials, concerned about the spread of bourgeois culture via the new medium of taped music, circulated a list of Western artists and their ideological crimes to provincial authorities in the name of “intensifying control over the activities of discoteques.” Thus was Donna Summer blacklisted for “eroticism”, Sparks condemned for “neofascism and racism”, Pink Floyd denounced for “distortion of Soviet foreign policy” while The Village People, bizarrely, were found guilty of “violence”.

And, of course, all regimes sought to control children’s time, in ways that are far more invasive than restricting access to video games. Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, the USSR and Mao’s China all had official youth organisations (China’s Young Pioneers exist to this day), ostensibly similar to the Boy Scouts; only whereas that organisation was founded by a man keen to encourage clean thoughts and camping skills, the totalitarian versions were run by the state and mixed the fun and games with political indoctrination. In the USSR, you could start young in the Pioneers, graduate as a teenager to the Young Communist League before eventually make your way into the Party.

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However, as much as Xi’s recent spate of mandates has parallels in totalitarian regimes of the past, many of the things he is banning or restricting trouble people in Western countries, too, and are also often addressed with repressive measures, albeit usually by means other than government fiat.

A concern with “sissy men” might seem remote to us now, but the idea that males should model specific, positive forms of behaviour is hardly alien. The #MeToo movement saw the downfall of many a powerful man whose behaviour was exposed and then amplified by journalists on a mission to bring down the most egregious abusers. “Toxic masculinity” was suddenly a ubiquitous term, and while bad (as opposed to illegal) behaviour was not banned, the social costs of acting in a certain way increased dramatically, ending careers with the same finality as any government intervention. But those men had at least done something wrong; boys who are guilty of nothing at all may these days simply be medicated with drugs such as Ritalin to ensure that they behave in a socially desired fashion.

The idea that popular culture itself is subversive is likewise not unknown to us; the Catholic Church was appalled by Hollywood in the 1930s, while parents burned horror comics in the 1950s, and MPs debated whether Alice Cooper ought to be allowed to enter the UK in the 1970s, and the tabloids were disgusted by video nasties in the 1980s, and so on, ad infinitum. Even if governments are reluctant to enact bans or mandates, sufficient social pressure can and has led to self-censorship and voluntary submission before standards enforced by industry bodies. It’s not that long since something as innocuous as Michael Jackson’s Thriller video was forbidden to be shown before the watershed. Today, meanwhile, the panopticon of social media guarantees that few celebrities will deviate from the same approved set of doctrines.

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Nor is the concern for what children do with their time unique. The days of kids roaming about on abandoned building sites and lobbing rocks at each other for laughs are long gone. Today’s helicopter parents loathe the idea of unstructured time and are constantly looking for productive activities to ensure that their children grow up into the “right” kind of person, i.e. a version of themselves, but even better. However, whereas in the bourgeois West it is left to parents with sufficient means to ensure that their offspring can experience the joys of a rigorously managed childhood, in China all kids can benefit from being told exactly how long they can spend on the things they enjoy, regardless of social status.

Totalitarians everywhere dream of a world of virtue, where everyone shares the same, correct opinions (theirs). Xi Jinping has the advantage of being able to rule from the top down, whereas in the West those who would seek to instrumentalise culture and engineer our souls have to advance in a messier way, via peer pressure or through a gradual process of institutional capture.

These two approaches are not equivalent; I would much rather live in that messy world, where it is a lot harder to gain dominion. Even so, regardless of whatever short-term victories are achieved by those who dream of total control, the history of the 20^th century teaches us more than simply what their techniques look like: it also shows us that our would-be masters are always ultimately frustrated — though not before considerable damage is done first, of course.

Or so Khruschev hoped. But Stalin, it turned out, could not be so easily forgotten. This June, Russians named him the “most notable” figure in history for the 10th year running; and now, a mere two months later, a new poll by the the Levada Center has found that nearly half of Russians want a Stalin statue to celebrate the USSR’s victory over the Nazis — a figure that has nearly doubled in the past ten years. Surprisingly, this is largely driven by people under the age of 40, among whom support for a monument has quintupled over the past decade.

Around this point in articles on Stalin it is customary to observe that the Russians, unlike the Germans, have not reckoned with their dark past. But this comparison is not exactly apples with apples. If Stalin had killed himself in a bunker surrounded by Karl May novels after starting and losing a war that had led to the collapse of the Soviet regime then nobody would be talking about erecting a monument to him today. But Stalin won — beating Hitler, establishing a vast empire and making the USSR respected and feared in the process.

In fact, if Stalin is on the verge of making a comeback, then he is about the last significant figure from Russia’s past to do so. This is a country exceedingly keen on resurrection: it is, after all, the land that produced Nikolai Fedorov, a philosopher who believed that it was mankind’s duty to reconstitute the dead of all past generations, atom by atom, that they might live again and colonise space.

Indeed, I can’t think of another country that has destroyed or suppressed so much only to bring back so much. When Gorbachev implemented glasnost in the 1980s, the response of many was not to look ahead but backwards. Authors and artists who had been memory-holed were rediscovered and republished, while the crimes of Stalin, buried by Khruschev, were exposed. Suddenly it was possible to read Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov without fear of punishment; it is no coincidence that one of Russia’s main human rights organisations, founded during this act of unearthing, is called “Memorial”.

Then Russia’s imperial past was exhumed. Nikolai II, the last Tsar, was dug up months before the USSR collapsed. Leningrad became Saint Petersburg once again, Gorky became Nizhny Novgorod and countless streets reclaimed their pre-Revolutionary names. Monumental buildings destroyed by the Soviets reappeared as shiny replicas: I vividly recall my first day in Moscow in 1997, walking down the street to the school where I was going to be teaching English to New Russians, when suddenly I saw looming ahead of me the golden dome and concrete shell of the Church of Christ the Saviour, reborn on the exact spot where the original had stood before the Stalinist regime blew it up. This was not the only cloned old building in the area: half a mile away, the gates to Red Square which I thought were ancient turned out to be a replica, as was the nearby Kazan Cathedral.

New monuments commemorating figures from history also appeared. The most notorious was Zurab Tsereteli’s enormous statue of Peter the Great standing on a toy boat in the Moskva River; the story goes that he had originally pitched it as a sculpture of Columbus to the authorities in NYC, but when they rejected (presumably on the grounds that it was terrible) he simply placed a different head on the body and had his good friend the Mayor of Moscow commission it instead.

Later, Tsar Alexander II got a monument in the grounds of the church of Christ the Saviour, while Dostoevsky got a giant statue in front of the Lenin Library in central Moscow — thus the great critic of revolutionaries got to cast his shadow over a building named after the greatest revolutionary of all. Meanwhile, the last Tsar and (most of) his family were buried in the Peter and Paul Fortress in Saint Petersburg in 1998, seven years after their exhumation. They were canonised two years later.

Yet even as Russia was resurrecting symbols of its Tsarist and Orthodox past, so Soviet elements were already creeping back in. A monument to the Second World War-era General Zhukov was unveiled a stone’s throw from the Kremlin in 1995. When Putin became president five years later, he almost immediately brought back the Soviet national anthem, albeit commissioning new lyrics from the 87-year-old children’s author Sergei Mikhalkov (who had written the original words for Stalin in 1944, and a second set in 1977).

At the eternal flame by the Kremlin Walls, the “hero city” of Volgograd was commemorated by its old name, Stalingrad. By the time I needed to get a police report for my US green card application in 2005, a bust of Felix Dzerzhinsky, first head of the Cheka, was waiting to greet me at Petrovka 38, headquarters of the Moscow police. There were also more innocuous manifestations of this fascination with the past — a TV channel called “Nostalgia” played back-to-back broadcasts from the USSR, while restaurants modeled on Soviet-era canteens were serving up compote and bowls of borscht.

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No doubt this is all a response to the war on memory and culture that was waged by the Soviet elites against their own people for much of the duration of the USSR’s existence. But it is also the case that the Soviets themselves had a complicated relationship with what had preceded them and were also quite keen on resurrecting selected bits of it. To begin with, they would not let their founder die — rather they preserved his body in a glass box, and spent decades declaring “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live!” And while the likes of Vladimir Mayakovsky composed avant-garde poems addressed to readers living in the future, the art that would dominate — Socialist Realism — owed much more to the 19^th century novels and poems and paintings the regime’s leaders had enjoyed in their youth.

Yes, the Soviets destroyed a lot of churches (and other religious buildings), but they also assiduously maintained the cathedrals inside the Kremlin, preserved the painted interiors inside Saint Basil’s and collected the finest examples of icon painting in a dedicated museum in the capital of world communism. During World War II, Stalin rehabilitated Tsarist era generals such as Kutuzov and Bagrationov to inspire the war effort against Hitler. Post-war, the Soviets reconstructed historic buildings that that had been destroyed by the Nazis, preserved entire villages as open-air museums, published scholarly and popular collections of folk tales, and even formed “folk orchestras” to keep alive traditional songs. Thus, the new civilisation was obsessed with and beholden to the civilisation that had proceeded it, (although these acts of recreation also entailed mutation, needless to say).

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Meanwhile Putin, now that he is ageing out of posing shirtless with tigers, has taken to penning long historical essays which are published on Kremlin.ru. In Russia, the past is always coming back. Viewed in that context, it’s as if the rising support for some sort of formal commemoration of Stalin is the terminal point of that urge towards resurrection, the last stage in a process that they can’t quite pull the trigger on.

You can understand why: Stalin was an evil, murderous bastard. But it’s important to realise that many Russians have reckoned with this: the Levada report notes that Stalin’s “repressions, executions and military blunders are well-known” and that “only a small number of Russians” would “completely deny these facts”. But Russia is also no stranger to monsters. Ivan the Terrible — who received his first monument in 2016 — murdered his son, murdered princes, slaughtered priests, massacred the population of Novgorod, implemented a reign of terror and invented the oprichniki, the prototypical secret police organisation. But “terrible” is a mistranslation of grozny, which in Ivan’s case might be more accurately rendered as “formidable” or “awesome.”

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Now that the generation directly oppressed by Stalin is dying out, and a new generation raised on tales of heroism in World War II has come of age, it would seem that increasing numbers of Russians are coming to the conclusion that Stalin, like Ivan before him, was just one of those rulers who had to do terrible things to achieve great things. In fact, if you really want to see a monument to Stalin you don’t need to wait; according to Der Spiegel there are already quite a few busts and statues knocking about — they just tend to be out of the way. A Stalin in mosaic form very nearly made it into the Cathedral of the Armed Forces, which was inaugurated last year to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. Included in the original plans for the interior décor, he was ultimately dropped.

For now, however, Stalin lacks a grandiose monument. Perhaps he will never get one. But the truth is, Stalin began his long comeback during Glasnost, when the archives were opened; he returned with his victims. From that moment on it became impossible to keep him buried. And so, despite Krushchev’s best efforts, the old man’s back again — whether we like it or not.

Throughout history many people have felt terror when the end seemed nigh; but there have also been those for whom the apocalypse could not come soon enough. Zoroaster, Christ, Mohammed and Marx all posited the coming of a happy day when this corrupted world would end, giving way to a better one.

Some enthusiastic souls proposed precise dates: in AD156 the followers of Montanus gathered on the plains of Asia Minor waiting for the New Jerusalem to descend, while 1,500 years later Isaac Newton pored over the books of Daniel and Revelation, before coming to the conclusion that the world would end within a hundred years of his own lifetime. Montanus and Newton were wrong, like all the others who have sought to fix a date for the end.

But what if it were possible to wrest the apocalyptic timetable from the hands of God or History and accelerate the advent of the new world? Well, some claim to have done that, too — such as Kondraty Selivanov, a Russian peasant who in the 18^th century revealed to his followers, the Skopts, that if they castrated 144,000 people (the number of “the firstfruits unto God and to the Lamb” in chapter 14 of Revelation) then they would bring about the end of the world, last judgement and resurrection. That the Skopts may have numbered 100,000 before being annihilated by Stalin nearly a century and half later says a lot about the motivating power of apocalyptic longing.

The Skopts first appear in the historical record in 1771, in a strange encounter between two peasants bathing in a river in the Oryol region, close to the modern-day border with the Ukraine. One of them lacked genitals and explained to the other that he had castrated himself to avoid performing his conjugal duties. The authorities were called in to investigate and eventually discovered that 32 men in the surrounding villages had submitted to what Selivanov referred to as the “fiery baptism” in the hope of securing salvation.

Russia provided fertile soil for apocalyptic movements. In the mid-17^th century liturgical reforms had caused a schism in the Church, giving rise to a multitude of radical sects convinced that they were living in the end times. For a hundred years assorted ascetics, orgiasts and self-immolators had suffered persecution at the hands of the state; Selivanov was originally a “Khlyst”, who followed their own Christs and whirled themselves into states of ecstatic delirium.

By a phonetic sleight-of-hand he transformed Christ the Saviour (iskupitel’) into Christ the Castrator (oskopitel’), while also teaching that John the Baptist had castrated Christ, and sexual characteristics only sprouted on Adam and Eve after they ate the forbidden fruit. Skopt baptism came in two styles: “the Little Seal” entailed either the removal of the testicles or a woman’s nipples. “The Great Seal” required the amputation of the penis or breasts. A cauterising blade was applied afterwards, the Skopts applying the same techniques they used on their livestock to themselves.

In the old days, Selivanov would have been burned at the stake, but he lived during the reign of Catherine the Great, who fancied herself enlightened. Catherine’s response to the Skopts was that they were “simpletons” who believed in “irrational nonsense”. Selivanov was sent out of harm’s way to Siberia; but a man capable of castrating himself does not bend easily, and Selivanov did not change his opinions during the two decades he spent in exile. Rather, he started claiming that he was both the Messiah and Catherine’s deceased husband, Peter III. After her death he travelled to Saint Petersburg where he won an audience with the new Tsar, Pavel I, who was curious to meet this strange character claiming to be his father. When Selivanov urged his “son” to get castrated, he was dispatched to a mad house.

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This was a temporary setback, however. In 1801, Pavel’s son Alexander ascended to the throne, a fad for mysticism swept through Saint Petersburg and the castrated messiah soon found himself a welcome guest at mansions in the capital. Alexei Elyansky, the Royal Chamberlain, was so much a true believer that he prepared a detailed proposal for the conversion of all Russia to the Skopt faith, which he submitted to Alexander in 1804.

In Elyansky’s vision, the army and every state institution would be guided by a holy eunuch, while Selivanov himself would advise Alexander. Inexplicably, the Tsar rejected this plan, and Elyansky was dispatched to a monastery. Selivanov was permitted to remain in Saint Petersburg, however, and the Skopts were allowed a temple which held 300 worshippers. In 1805 Alexander is said to have consulted with Selivanov before embarking on his campaign against Napoleon, who the Skopts regarded as Antichrist. It was only in 1820, when the Tsar found out that members of the military had submitted to the fiery baptism, that the extraordinarily persuasive Selivanov was expelled from the capital. Confined to a monastery outside Moscow, he died in 1832 at the age of 112.

The Skopts regarded their 20-year period in the capital as their “golden age”. After the fall of their charismatic leader, they had to come up with explanations for their missing genitalia, as self-castration had been made illegal in 1816. Excuses ranged from injuries sustained in the Napoleonic war to random passers-by carrying sharp blades; in 1826 the law was revised so that blaming your missing body parts on the deeds of wicked strangers was treated as an admission of guilt. Those found guilty were dispatched to Siberia, where they could prove useful to the Tsar by helping settle the frontier.

Scattered across the empire, the Skopts awaited the return of Selivanov, who they believed was still roaming Russia in secret. As each generation of the sect faced its own built-in apocalypse, members were allowed to have a child before submitting to the fiery baptism. They tried not to draw attention to themselves and were known as a prosperous community. But stories circulated that they ate the testicles and breasts they amputated, while Andrei Sinyavsky states in Ivan the Fool, his account of Russian folk history, that they paid poor people to let them castrate them. Echoing anti-Semitic tropes, the Skopts were also accused of draining blood from infants and using their ground up corpses as an ingredient in communion bread.

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Meanwhile, as the Skopts were alternately evading or enduring the attention of the authorities, the works of a new prophet were published in Saint Petersburg. Like Selivanov, Karl Marx predicted that an end to the existing order was coming, although it was not the castrated but the proletariat who would inherit the earth. Vladimir Lenin was the most successful of Marx’s interpreters: like Selivanov, he was not content to wait for the apocalyptic moment but set out to accelerate it. According to Marxist theory, the Revolution was not supposed to begin in backwards Russia but rather in an advanced capitalist nation such as Germany. But Lenin, like Selivanov before him, revised doctrine to suit his psychological needs, and after seizing power in 1917 dispatched agents to accelerate the world revolution.

As for the Skopts, they welcomed the new regime, hoping that the Bolsheviks meant what they said about religious tolerance. They did not realise that revolutionary ethics justified lying for the sake of the cause, just as their own ethics justified lying to protect their pursuit of 144,000 castrations. But the Skopts were marked for extinction: derided in anti-religious propaganda, they were then targeted for violent repression as “Kulaks” — rich peasants — during the Stalinist regime. After a century and a half of cutting and cauterising their way towards a happy ending, they were swiftly wiped out by a rival sect that aimed its violence at its enemies rather than its members’ groins.

Today the Skopts occupy a marginal place in the study of Russian history. There is one book about them in English, by Laura Engelstein, a chapter in Sinyavsky’s out-of-print study, and a few mentions in encyclopedias of religion here and there. But sometimes I imagine an Adam Curtis-style retelling of the last two and a half centuries that places the Skopts at the centre of things, as if they represent the most perfect articulation of an idea that played out over time.

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After all, lots of religions involve some kind of mortification of the flesh to help the faithful overcome their earthly desires, but since Origen castrated himself in the early 3rd century AD, very few adherents of any creed have shown much willingness to go all in and cut off temptation at its root, and none besides Selivanov have built a theology around it. That it took a millennium and half to happen gives us a sense of what it takes to override the command to multiply received from God in Genesis 1:28 and which Richard Dawkins tells us is encoded in our very genes.

Understand the power of the desire that drove the Skopts and you might also better understand just how it was that the Bolsheviks, an obscure sect with a still more accelerationist apocalyptic creed managed to take over the world’s largest country; and you can also see how impoverished our modern pseudo-religions are in comparison, amounting to little more than intra-elite games played for power in earthly institutions.

Even the passionate protestors of Extinction Rebellion seem to lack all motivation next to the Skopts. The truth is that anxiety about apocalypse is not enough; you have to believe in something wonderful awaiting us once we have passed through the ordeals of the end. If you have that then truly incredible things are possible — including incredibly grotesque, stupid and destructive things.

That the systems that held entire populations captive, and which enslaved and killed millions, and were run by little men who were worshipped as gods, are deemed too trivial to study is really quite remarkable.

Indeed, if you ask Google “do they teach about communism in schools?” the results on the first page will consist mainly of archival and scholarly papers about educational programmes during the 1950 and 60s. Well, those and some much more recent articles about Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who in late June signed a Bill mandating that all high school students must learn about “political ideologies such as communism and totalitarianism, that conflict with the principles of freedom and democracy essential to the founding principles of the United States.”

Why now? Speaking at a press conference in a middle school, DeSantis attacked teachers who praise Mao Zedong and denounced Che Guevara as a “total communist thug” before adding “We’re going to be pushing back on a lot of the whitewashing that’s been done.”

Lenin, of course, would instruct us to ask cui prodest? DeSantis is a Republican who has many Cuban immigrants in his state, not to mention voters who have escaped other Latin American leftist regimes, so attacking communism is certainly good politics in Florida. But at the press conference DeSantis was careful not to frame the study of communism in purely historical terms. He also gave space to Ana Bouza, who fled the Sandinistas in Nicaragua at age 16, escaping at first to Venezuela, before moving again to Florida — only to have her granddaughter inform her one day that socialism was “not… that bad.” DeSantis himself is only 42, and so was two years old when uber cold warrior Ronald Reagan was elected. It seems, therefore, that his concern is that ideas once thought confined to the dustbin of history might yet have some life in them and be at risk of spreading.

He is not necessarily wrong. A decade on from the Communist Party USA’s enthusiastic embrace of Occupy Wall Street, the acceptance of “socialism” in America as something non-radioactive continues to advance. A Gallup survey in 2019 found that socialism was as popular as capitalism among young adults, while Bernie Sanders, who did not shy away from the term, was the last of Biden’s challengers to drop out of the Democratic Party presidential primaries. DeSantis himself has young daughters, so perhaps he is worried that the day is coming when they read the glowing profile of Rosa Luxemburg in Teen Vogue, then run away to join the LARPing kombucha-drinking revolutionaries in America’s whitest big city.

Indeed, I sometimes wonder if some aspects of the so-called Great Awokening that caught so many observers off-guard might not have been so surprising had more people known something about radical left regimes of the 20^th century. Much has been made of the parallels between last year’s summer of statue-toppling iconoclasm and China’s Cultural Revolution, but that is only one example.

If you have even a cursory familiarity with the history of the USSR and its satellite regimes, you will not be shocked when self-proclaimed progressives turn out to be censorious prudes fearful of ideas, nor will you be amazed when liberals fail to defend their principles and go along with things that they don’t believe, “hiding, for [their] job’s sake, the rattle of bones”, to quote Aleksandr Blok. Nor would you be surprised to learn that Left-wing authoritarianism exists, contra the parochial studies seeking to prove otherwise.

That said, I am not sure that a pure focus on hardline totalitarian communism is necessarily the best way to educate people about the false promises of bogus utopias. As Czeslaw Milosz observed, people take the reality they live in as something “natural” and “cannot believe that one day a rider may appear on a street he knows well, where cats sleep and children play, and start catching passers-by with a lasso.”

Thus were I to design a curriculum, I would certainly teach about Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, but I would also teach about the herbivorous phases of socialist regimes, when they were working as well as they ever did — and yet still there were shortages of the most mediocre goods, and people were still forbidden to travel abroad or listen to foreign radio stations, and religious believers were still subjected to crude propaganda, and there were still armies of snitches informing on their neighbours, and a cassette copy of Deep Purple’s In Rock that had been taped and retaped hundreds of times over was a precious commodity that could make you the envy of all your friends. (In fairness, I would also teach that in these conditions of bad government and permanent shortages, solidarity and kindness between individuals can flourish.)

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And none of this is to include, say, the successes and failures of post-war socialist parties in Western Europe. But even if DeSantis emphasises the excesses of communism at its worst, that is a great improvement on what we have had up to this moment, which is pretty much nothing. My main critique of this law is that it is required at all; but Florida also has a law mandating the study of the Holocaust, so this is not an innovation. The classroom is not the public square, and governments can and do decide what is taught in them. Indeed, DeSantis may have started a trend — hot on the heels of his press conference, the Arizona House voted in favor of a similar bill.

And yet, I wonder if this moment when some students in America start learning about communism might not also mark the moment when the subject jumps the shark. American elites have long treated anything that smacks of “anti-communism” as terribly déclassé, thanks to the legacy of McCarthy, and there is a strong whiff of that in the coverage of DeSantis’ bill on purported news site The Daily Beast, which ran a story with the headline Florida Guv’s School Crackdown is a Red Scare Throwback.

In addition, the fact that this type of bill was pioneered not just by any Republican governor, but by DeSantis, who is a staple of hate-click media content targeted at progressive audiences, means that it is all but guaranteed to be sucked into America’s uber-degraded culture war discourse. At the same press conference where DeSantis announced that young people in Florida were going to be learning about communism, he also spoke about two other bills — one related to civics education, and another which requires public universities to “annually assess intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity” on campus. The first of these was not very controversial, but the second certainly was, and DeSantis also signed an early law banning “Critical Race Theory” or CRT in schools, which was even more so.

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Now you would think that reasonable people on both sides of the political aisle might be able to agree that teaching children to think of themselves as oppressor and oppressed on the basis of their skin colour, or to use curricular materials where “whiteness” is depicted as a pact with Satan (to pick just two examples), is more than slightly batshit, and likely to do more harm than good. But when other Republican-controlled legislatures followed DeSantis’ lead and banned CRT, the debate over the extent of extreme wokeism in education and whether simply banning it is the most effective response got sucked into the polarisation vortex and rapidly degenerated into the moronic inferno of culture war kayfabe.

Media workers at progressive corporate content mills argued that since little children were not literally studying the works of theorists such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, the parents railing against CRT across the country were all Fox News-hypnotised racists who in truth just wanted to ban all discussion of slavery and Jim Crow, etc. Even by the standards of today’s American media, with its epic 29% trust rating, it was quite the display of gaslighting. Some valiant souls attempted to study the laws on their merits, but they were few and far between.

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And so I fear that if bills requiring students to study the history of communism do catch on among Republican-held state legislatures, you can rest assured that the same media workers will rush to boost their detumescent ratings with hot takes denouncing DeSantis as the new McCarthy.

Meanwhile your more elite click chasers will commission solemn editorials from academics comparing Evil Conservatives to Putin, and Twitter will light up with long threads arguing for a more nuanced take on Stalin, who beat Hitler and was also “a great listener and collaborator during discussions.” And besides, isn’t America uniquely evil because racism and Trump? Meanwhile, Right-wingers will start arguing that socialised healthcare leads directly to the Gulag.

Of course, in communist regimes even this degraded level of debate would be inconceivable, so perhaps I should be grateful? Even so, I fear that the Culture War is rotting more brains than the Cold War ever did. What is to be done, indeed?

But if you complicate that a little by coming from the northern half of Britain, well, that’s a bit different. Yes, there are many world-famous Scots — Adam Smith, Arthur Conan Doyle, James Watt and Sean Connery, to name only four. But with the exception of the last one, none of them wrapped themselves in tartan, and so they are usually associated with the broader “British” identity.

Of course, if the SNP were to have their way, then the very concept of Britishness would be abolished, and Nicola Sturgeon is adamant that this option should be put to the vote sooner rather than later. Were that to happen, then I think these figures and others would be retconned as purely “Scottish”, in much the same way that the post-Soviet states projected their modern identities into the past. Thus was the prophet Zarathustra resurrected in the late 20^th century as a Tajik national hero, for instance. Whether or not such retcons gain credence with the wider world, however, is another matter: Nikolai Gogol remains resolutely part of the Russian literary canon, despite his Ukrainian origins.

As for Scotland, I think this retconning might prove to be quite challenging, also. For instance, in more than two decades spent living outside the UK, I have found that many people are quite foggy when it comes to my homeland’s precise constitutional status. They know that it’s not part of England, but the shared parliament and royal family and currency are confusing. Despite this, awareness of Scottish symbols is high, thanks in no small part to Walter Scott cobbling together all that malarkey about clans and tartans in the 19^th century. Our whisky is also held in high regard, and many a golfer aspires to play at the Old Course in Saint Andrews. In fact, I’d say that as far as small countries go, we don’t have it too bad — we’re certainly better off than the Belgians with their waffles, Tintin books and melancholy kickboxer.

But still, as Scots are few in number and comparatively rare beyond British shores, we remain quasi-mysterious to many. So whenever Scotland has appeared in the media, or come up in conversation in the different places where I have lived, I have always found it interesting to think about what that says about my homeland, how it is perceived, and whether, after almost a decade and half of nationalist rule, those perceptions are changing.

For instance, in Moscow in the late Nineties, I learned very quickly that by far the most famous Scotsman as far as Russians were concerned was a wee Australian in blue face paint named Mel Gibson.  “Ah, Scotland,” they’d say. “Braveheart!” “Yes,” I’d say, “Braveheart.” True, members of the older generation were familiar with Robert Burns in the Soviet era translations by Samuil Marshak, and quite a few people had seen Highlander (where the Scottish guy is played by a Frenchman rather than an Australian). But overall, to be a Scot abroad then — and since — was to live in the shadow of Braveheart.

Usually I would bluff my way through discussions of the film because I hadn’t seen it, and most people found that baffling, even disappointing (“How can you not have seen Braveheart?”). I suppose it would have been easier just to watch it, but I am very good at sustaining Larry David-style points of principle over things that are inexplicable to others. I’d been taught about William Wallace as a child, but even then, I thought there was something not quite right about the myth. I think it was all that stuff about losing, and then being eviscerated while still alive — it just didn’t seem like something I wanted to aspire towards.

I was more of a Robert the Bruce kind of guy, and not just because his bones were buried in my hometown of Dunfermline. I liked how he — you know — won. Besides, yearning for the days when hairy dudes roamed the heather and had periodic fights with the English just wasn’t my bag. I preferred the bewigged intellectuals of the Scottish Enlightenment: a handful of brilliant individuals coming up with world changing ideas on the fringes of Europe. That seemed like a healthier model for the nation, (though, I grant you, less appealing as fodder for a Hollywood blockbuster).

However, despite the predominance of Braveheart, it wasn’t all Mel Gibson all the time. I remember discussing Dolly the Sheep. I liked to explain that Dolly had aged much faster than a sheep produced by the traditional method and was now preserved forever in the National Museum of Scotland, where she received visitors every day — our Lenin. I also tried to steer people towards Trainspotting because I felt that it captured Scottish nihilism quite well, and I had a story about Irvine Welsh renting Jean-Claude Van Damme movies from the video shop in Dunfermline which made him sound very uncool. But Trainspotting did not endure; people did not want janky Edinburgh junkies. They wanted Braveheart.

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And so it continued, for years. It was while I was living in Russia that Scotland held its referendum on devolution, but I don’t remember that catching people’s attention. It wasn’t supposed to; Labour thought that Scotland was their fiefdom and that that they would run it forever, like Moscow ran its satellite states during the Cold War.

When I moved to the US in 2006, I discovered that Braveheart also cast a long shadow over the land of the free, although Sean Connery was very popular, as was the late night chat show host Craig Ferguson, extracted to LA via Cumbernauld. One year later the SNP took power, but things were still quiet for at first, although I do remember one unusual story making it across the waves a few years later. In an early act of cultural auto-colonisation, the likes of which are now commonplace across British institutions, an MSP lodged a motion supporting the gay wedding of the little-known Canadian superhero Northstar to his partner Kyle in the Astonishing X-Men #51, published by Marvel Comics, the New York-based subsidiary of the Disney corporation. Admittedly, I read about it on a crap comics website; even so, it felt like a new development.

But the hitherto super-boring world of Scottish politics was about to change drastically. Mel Gibson’s dominance as a conversation topic for people mildly curious about where I came from was seriously challenged in 2014 when Scotland voted on whether or not to remain inside the UK. Suddenly the possible dissolution of a 300-year political union was in the headlines and, for the first time ever, the continued existence of a collective British identity seemed in doubt. Most people in the US had simply never thought about any of this before. Starting about three days before the referendum I found myself fielding all kinds of questions about independence (not that I had a say in any of it, mind, because the SNP had disenfranchised all Scots living overseas).

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A cheat sheet, rather than a detailed discussion of, say, claims about the viability of North Sea oil was all that was desired, so I didn’t discuss the issues at length. But that was fine — it was startling, and refreshing, after all this time to find that the Scotland my family lived in, and to which I regularly returned, was finally more compelling to the people I knew than Mel Gibson’s bekilted action movie.

Still more striking, however, was the mood the day after the referendum. I vividly recall going into work and feeling a strange sense of anticlimax among those who had talked to me about it. Presented with the opportunity to turn everything upside down and strike out on its own, Scotland had voted to… maintain the status quo. What lay behind this sense of disappointment, I wondered, among people who had zero skin in the game? At first I thought it was the influence of the revolutionary war — for Americans, declaring independence from the meddlesome parliament in London is ground zero for their national identity. And perhaps that was part of it; but now I wonder if it wasn’t also the shadow of Braveheart. Everyone appeared to have seen that film, they had all heard Mel’s stirring words about freedom, and here, given the chance to at long last fulfil Wallace’s dream and seize independence, a majority of Scots had turned around and politely declined to do so.

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The referendum was a watershed moment in the global imagination, the moment at which Scotland ceased to be a nostalgic fantasy and became a modern country, a place where things sometimes happened, things that required further explanation. Now, with Nicola Sturgeon insisting on another referendum, I suspect it is only a matter of time before I find myself answering questions about Scotland’s constitutional status again. The conflict with Boris is scoring headlines even amid the raging garbage fire of America’s self-obsessed media. I’ve already discussed the hypothetical of a hard border between Scotland and England with one curious Texan.

An awareness overseas of Scotland as a place that, culturally at least, is not fully British is definitely on the rise. I’d say that’s half the battle for the SNP, but it isn’t — independence is a zero-sum game, after all. It is a change, however, and a significant one. Something else has changed, too: these days I’m more likely to be asked about Outlander than Braveheart. And I haven’t seen that, either.

While Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost meant that it was possible to discuss the USSR’s past more freely than ever, the same openness did not extend to the present, and the Politburo reacted with all the secrecy and dissemination that had been characteristic of the Soviet regime since its founding. It wasn’t until the morning of 28 April that workers at a Swedish nuclear power station detected abnormal levels of radiation and identified the USSR as the source. The news broke worldwide that evening, and the Soviet government was finally forced to admit that their “peaceful atom” was not as safe as they had claimed.

Thirty-five years later, and much has changed in the world — not least the disintegration of the USSR itself — but the idea of Chernobyl endures, lingering on in our imaginations as a symbol of the dangers of nuclear power. It manifests itself in serious books and solemn documentaries, but also in B-movies and weird comics, in an abundance of heavy metal songs, in Kraftwerk’s live shows, and in cult video games.

HBO’s 2019 Chernobyl series was a cultural phenomenon, one of those TV programmes that people just couldn’t stop talking about, like Making a Murderer or Tiger King. The Chernobyl-mania it induced led to a boost in disaster tourism in the area, with Instagram influencers pioneering a new, “pouting-in-Pripyat” genre of selfie. This in turn led to a brief tumescence of scandalised headlines, before the next outrage came along (long since forgotten, of course) to replace it.

The truth is, however, that while the HBO series gave Chernobyl tourism a bump, it was hardly a new phenomenon. I remember reading an account of a trip to the irradiated forests and abandoned buildings of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in the early 2000s in The Fortean Times. The author described an idyllic nature reserve which was not even all that lethal, so long as you didn’t stay too long and knew which areas to avoid. Equally fascinating was the “stalker” subculture that had emerged around the Zone, directly inspired by the 1979 Andrei Tarkovksy film, Stalker.

In that film, a mysterious “Zone” has been left uninhabitable following an alien visitation, but individuals known as “stalkers” illegally explore the forbidden landscape, and bring outsiders in, for a price. Stalker itself was adapted from Roadside Picnic, a novel by the USSR’s premiere science fiction writers, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, that was first published in 1972. Thus, the idea of a deadly, forbidden Zone had been imaginatively explored by a celebrated film director and two of the USSR’s most popular authors years before the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone erupted into real life; and that imaginary experience shaped how people conceived of and related to the irradiated landscape they now had to live with.

I was living in Moscow when I read the article in The Fortean Times and thought it would be interesting to visit the Zone, but it was difficult to organise, and I never got round to it. Nowadays, it’s much easier: you can sign up for one of several post-apocalyptic package tour options online, and, departing from Kiev, ride the bus for four hours to Chernobyl, accompanied by professional guides equipped with dosimeters. After stopping by the power plant and pausing for a photo, you can promenade through Pripyat, admiring the abandoned Ferris wheel and the crumbling Polissya hotel. So long as you stick to the approved itinerary, you will only be mildly irradiated — no more than if you spent a few hours on a plane.

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In Chernobyl: A Stalkers’ Guide, British author-photographer Darmon Richter chafes against the rigid, schematized approach to experiencing the Zone that has emerged in recent years, and goes as deep into its forests and abandoned settlements as anybody is ever likely to. Richly illustrated with scores of photographs, it is a document of obsession, describing trips undertaken over the years since he first visited as a tourist in 2013. Starting in 2016 he began offering guided tours himself, and over the next four years took over one hundred visitors along routes that went beyond the usual sites to provide deeper insight into life in the area, with a focus on “village life and tradition, public art (murals, mosaics and monuments), and overlooked works of architecture”.

In Tarkovsky’s film, the Zone contains a room which is said to fulfil the wishes of anyone who enters it — if they can reach it, that is. So, too, in his book Richter is constantly searching for new, deeper, ways to experience the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, as if in pursuit of some secret as yet unrevealed. At one point he enlists the services of “Kirill”, an experienced stalker who leads Richter and some friends on an illegal hike that sees them creeping past police checkpoints, dodging cop cars, crossing rivers and fields, sleeping in abandoned houses, and staring at an abandoned radar station before finally spending a night in one of Pripyat’s 10,000 empty flats.

But this journey, while no doubt interesting for the participants, doesn’t quite translate to the printed page. Richter preemptively sucks the tension out of his narrative by sharing the story of a French group who got caught and suffered a fate no worse than $14 fine, and the reduction of their 90-day entry permits to five. They returned to Ukraine the next day, because, well, because the authorities in Ukraine just don’t care all that much.

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Perhaps the most interesting of Richter’s several voyages into the Zone is described in the chapter “Monumenteering”. Here he decides to visit every Soviet monument left standing in all the villages and settlements that were so hastily abandoned by their inhabitants 35 years ago. This section reveals that the Zone is much more than a tourist attraction and nature reserve; it is also a strange radioactive Pompei, a lost world where the signs and symbols of a vanished civilisation linger on, even as they have been erased from the landscape elsewhere as a result of Ukraine’s laws on decommunisation.

As he ventures through this strange landscape, Richter discovers one strange sight after another: abandoned blocks of flats that run alongside crumbling roads; a decaying statue of a glowering Soviet warrior emerging from the trees, clutching a machine gun; a forlorn, overgrown arch commemorating the 300^th anniversary of Russia and Ukraine’s unification; an enormous, rusty, sheet metal hammer and sickle that looks as though it was left in the woods by accident. Entering a former fish farm, he finds ancient specimens still preserved in glass jars; he also penetrates the most dangerous part of the Zone, the “Red Forest”, that was razed to the ground after all the trees died. Now beautiful pines and white birch trees grow there, at once beautiful and lethal.

Most haunting of all are the many monuments to those who lost their lives in World War II. The neglect of these once sacred sites marks a second death of sorts for those who died resisting Hitler’s armies; despite their sacrifice, those men and women cannot, in today’s Ukraine, be forgiven for serving in Stalin’s army. (By contrast, when Richter crosses into Belarus, which is run by a Soviet-style authoritarian, Richter finds that all the monuments to the war dead of the fallen empire are well-maintained).

Richter succeeds in his quest to visit all the monuments in the Zone, but he is not quite done. One more voyage remains: just as Tarkovsky’s Stalker is structured around a journey towards a mysterious room, so it turns out that Chernobyl: A Stalker’s Guide is leading us to the control room of Reactor 4, where the disastrous test that led to the meltdown run that fateful night 35 years ago. But whereas Tarkovsky’s film leaves the room unpenetrated and mysterious, Richter manages to bribe his way in and so achieve his heart’s desire; he even manages to sneak in a tour of the immense New Arch that today encloses the Soviet-era concrete sarcophagus that in turn encloses Reactor 4. It seems like a real achievement, but then he lets us know that today even the control room has been added to official tours. It is almost as if, by entering the room himself, Richter broke the spell.

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Of course, there are those who might dismiss Chernobyl: A Stalker’s Guide, as “disaster tourism.” Richter rejects the term, describing it as “grossly misplaced”, and says that of the people he has led on tours “more had come to see signs of life and progress, than of disaster.” That may be so, but even then, I am not so sure that “disaster tourists” have that much to apologise for in the first place. People have been fascinated by ruins and the remnants of fallen empires for centuries. In Berlin you can visit a perfectly preserved bombed out church in Berlin and buy a postcard, in Mexico you can visit ziggurats erected by practitioners of human sacrifice, who were swept away by war and disease, and nobody will criticise you.

For as Richter discovers when he enters the control room at the end of his journey, Chernobyl has no great secret. In truth, its meaning is very old, and very obvious: there are forces larger than us that we cannot control, we are not the masters of the world, and our grand dreams can shatter in a second, humbling us. There is not much we can do about that but stand and stare and remember our powerlessness; it’s probably even quite a healthy thing to do.

That Chernobyl is today a popular tourist destination, added to the list of other sites where empires fell or tragedies happened, is a sign that the process which started 35 years ago, when people first began processing the event in books and art and music, is almost complete. Once unimaginable except in works of science fiction, today Chernobyl is almost normal.

Darmon Richter’s Chernobyl: A Stalkers’ Guide is published by FUEL

Then I learned that the moral philosophers at Amnesty International had discovered a distinction between “nice” dissidents and “not nice” dissidents, and that “not nice” dissidents do not deserve the title of “prisoner of conscience”. They are, it seems, simply prisoners — like people who get done for robbery or arson, presumably. I learned this, like so many others, when Amnesty stripped Alexei Navalny of the title of “prisoner of conscience” after it discovered what anybody who pays a modicum of attention to Russian politics has known for a really long time: that Vladimir Putin’s most indomitable opponent is a Russian nationalist who has used unsavory rhetoric when talking about immigrants. Not to worry, Amnesty explained in a rather desperate-sounding press release; they would continue to support Navalny, despite having just denounced him as an extremist and, in doing so, providing Putin with some rather excellent propaganda.

I suppose it’s theoretically possible that the good folks at Amnesty don’t read newspapers and know nothing about Russian politics. More likely, however (and despite their protestations to the contrary) they were caught off guard by a coordinated online campaign to discredit Navalny and panicked. Regardless, the fact that Navalny really is a Russian nationalist, and really did call for the expulsion of Georgians from Russia during the war in Ossetia, raises interesting questions. Who exactly do we in the West think we are cheering on when we venerate the opponents of despots we despise? And what do we think would happen if they ever came to power?

Navalny, unsurprisingly, is a product of his own culture, which makes it unlikely he would ever be a liberal democrat. Yes, the Russian opposition includes principled liberals, but most of us have not heard of them because their platform is incredibly unpopular within Russia. Anybody seriously looking to rally opposition to Putin is unlikely to latch on to ideas that were so thoroughly discredited by Yeltsin, the oligarchs and their Western enablers in the 1990s, when the president shelled his own parliament and male life expectancy dropped from 65 to 57.

At the start of his political career, Navalny joined what was possibly the “nicest” of all the liberal parties, Yabloko, which was led by Grigory Yavlinsky, a vocal critic of Yeltsin’s disastrous policies. Navalny was thus granted the privilege of drinking deep from the cup of abject failure: he was a member in 2003 when Yabloko fell just short of the 5% threshold that would have won the party seats in the Russian Parliament. He might still have been in 2007, when the party’s share of the vote fell to 1.6%, had he not been kicked out of the party a few months earlier for “nationalistic activities”.

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Whether or not Yabloko were the victims of election fraud, as many argued, was beside the point: they were the poster children for the idea that nice guys finish last, especially in a system controlled by a ruthless operative such as Putin. And with the other opposition parties coopted by the Kremlin’s “managed democracy”, Navalny’s choices for political ideas around which to rally opposition to the corrupt elite were limited: either revanchist communism or some kind of nationalism.

Communism was a non-starter: not only was Navalny old enough to remember the rotted, senile variant of the ideology which had prevailed during his formative years, but the post-Soviet communist party was useless. Like Yabloko, it could never be mistaken as a serious vehicle of opposition, even if it was still able to rally armies of angry grannies to turn up for protests against the government.

Instead, he turned to nationalism. The field here was more open, with several parties vying for territory. Russia’s most famous nationalist politician, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, was a buffoon fully integrated into Putin’s corrupt system, and not to be taken seriously. Another nationalist, the scandalous author Edward Limonov of the National Bolshevik party, established his oppositional bona fides after a stint behind bars in the early 2000s for allegedly attempting to raise a militia to invade Kazakhstan.

Limonov, however, was too weird to become a mainstream phenomenon; he was a political provocateur who glamorised both Che and Khomeini, chanted “Stalin Beria Gulag!” at rallies and called for the introduction of polygamy to Russia. He also wrote lyrical memoirs, including one structured around his memories of bodies of water that had won a prestigious literary prize. Despite his weirdness, however, he succeeded in attracting young people to his party, and they won a reputation for their fearless opposition to Putin and his cronies.

Putin was also casting around for a founding ideology around this time, and likewise saw the attraction of nationalism. When he started to resurrect Soviet symbols, and “Volgograd” was replaced with “Stalingrad” at the eternal flame monument outside the Kremlin walls, this immediately led to anxiety among some Kremlinologists that Putin was out to restore the old USSR. This was naïve; Putin had no interest in taking back the Baltics or Central Asian Republics. He was, however, looking for a unifying idea that could inspire pride in all Russian citizens, and settled upon the USSR’s victory over Hitler in the Second World War.

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Aside from the fact that “We beat Hitler” is always a winner, there was another appeal to this idea. Soviet propaganda had always stressed the multinational aspect of the Soviet war effort, that it was the combined forces of all the Soviet peoples that had brought down Nazism. If you visit the Republic of Kalmykia in southern Russia, for instance, you will see that the war monument in Elista, the capital, features not Slav faces but Mongolians — and this despite the fact that Stalin actually deported much of the population to Siberia during the War for fear that they were untrustworthy. It was easy for Putin to take this pre-established model and apply it to multiethnic Russia as the successor state.

With Putin having annexed the “imperial nationalist” position, and all other positions discredited in the eyes of voters, that left ethnic nationalism as the last powerful idea up for grabs. And that is what Navalny began to advocate, and continues to advocate unapologetically, because his main constituency is not Amnesty or western liberals but people inside Russia who are disgusted by Putin.

If Navalny’s politics were transplanted to the UK or US, they would most certainly offend all good progressive people — and so it was that Amnesty suddenly found itself embarrassed to be associated with them. But is it so surprising that dissidents we admire for their bold opposition to tyrants also hold ideas that would not win them invites to dinner parties at Martha’s Vineyard?

Consider the most celebrated of Russian dissidents, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He was a man of ferocious principle and extraordinary bravery; but he was also a conservative Russian Orthodox nationalist who lambasted the West for its decadence and lamented the loss of Ukraine and Belarus following the dissolution of the USSR. Then there’s Lech Walesa, a devout Catholic and trade unionist who hated communism but may also have been a secret police informant. And this is to say nothing of the once-saintly Aung San Suu Kyi, or the once-upon-a-time heroic freedom fighter Robert Mugabe, or the Ayatollah Khomeini who was memorably described as “a Gandhi-like figure” by the US ambassador to Iran. We all know how well that one aged. In fact, with a few notable exceptions such as Nelson Mandela and Vaclav Havel, great dissidents often prove to be disastrous national leaders, at least as bad if not worse than the system they overthrew.

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This is not to say that Navalny would be worse than Putin. In fact, Yevgenia Albats, a Russian liberal who has known Navalny since 2004, argues that his main political goal was always to win over moderate nationalists, and that he has expressed regret for his past rhetoric. But there can be little doubt that ethnic Russian nationalism is a potentially destabilising force in the country. The multinational USSR died in ethnic violence, and multinational Russia was born in ethnic violence, and when Putin came to power, he inherited the war in the Caucasus. He bought off some separatist leaders and killed others, but their submission is not permanent, and it is almost certain that once he exits the scene there will be some in the regions who will want to test the new leader.

How would a president Navalny handle that? Amnesty, of course, has done its bit to help Putin and make sure we never find out. But the truth is that even were he to be released from jail, Navalny is unlikely to ever be leader of Russia, and not just because of his criminal convictions. According to independent polling, the Russian public’s trust in him remained at a lowly 3% between 2017 and 2020.

Yet Navalny keeps on going, despite harassment of his family, a poisoning attempt, and now imprisonment. His hatred and contempt for Putin’s regime is so all-consuming that it exceeds his concern for his own safety. To become a dissident — a real, outspoken, vocal dissident — is an extreme act. Navalny is not some keyboard warrior or posturing faux-radical; he is hardcore. And that is the role of the Navalnys of the world — to be hardcore, to tell the truth, regardless of the consequences, while the rest of us keep our heads down. And given all the suffering that being a dissident entails, perhaps it’s asking a bit much that they make us like them too.

Sound familiar? Welcome to Russia in 1996, just after the re-election of President Boris Yeltsin, the onetime Soviet apparatchik turned champion of democracy, who then presided over the rapid immiseration of his nation on an epic scale.

It’s a little-understood period, not least because so many Western experts and institutions (many of them still going strong today) were complicit in the human tragedy that came about as a result of Yeltsin’s economic “shock therapy”. An expert class incurious about its own failures is a familiar enough phenomenon, of course, but there are other instructive parallels between Russia in 1996 and the US in 2021. And these parallels could, perhaps, give us a glance into what will become of the apparent corporate-media-political monolith that has ascended to power behind Biden.

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There are important differences of course. When somebody in Russia starts panicking about dictatorship, they know a lot more about what it means than your typical American pundit angling for a book deal. And in 1996, many Russian liberals were worried that dictatorship was on the horizon. Yeltsin’s first term had been a failure, with millions thrown into poverty and a precipitous decline in life expectancy. As a result his opponent — one Gennady Zyuganov, head of the Communist Party — looked likely to win the election, which would have been bad news for business, as well as the values and ideals of Russia’s pro-Western liberals.

And so practically the entirety of Russia’s business, media and liberal elite rallied around Yeltsin to support his re-election. Remarkably, this was despite the fact that Yeltsin himself had, only a few years earlier, ordered an attack on Russia’s parliament when it kept blocking his executive orders. Unlike Trump’s fiasco, this incident ended not with a mob in fancy dress storming the building but rather 147 people losing their lives after an assault by tanks and helicopters.

So Yeltsin was pretty unconvincing as a champion of democracy (even if Clinton’s secretary of state praised him for his “superb handling” of the parliament). But the prospect of Zyuganov was regarded as still worse, providing Russia’s “liberal” forces with a “moral clarity”: a conviction that they had to bend and break all rules and norms to prevent him from being elected. Like America’s establishment in 2021, Russia’s elites in 1996 had no time for journalistic objectivity or “both sidesism”. The future of the nation itself was at stake.

There was no social media back then, but television had enormous influence, and the three main channels railed against Zyuganov and his communists. Of those three, one was owned 100% by the state, while the other two were controlled by oligarchs. Boris Berezovsky — later to enjoy some notoriety as a foe of Putin living in exile in England — ran ORT, while a stage director-turned-banker by the name of Vladimir Gusinsky ran NTV. Certainly Zyuganov posed a direct threat to their business interests — but they may also have entertained the notion that they were fighting for liberal democracy, and that this was far bigger than their rivalry.

As a result, Zyuganov had it considerably worse than Trump. Bar the likes of Pravda, he had very few allies in the media. ORT and NTV filled the airwaves with hagiographies of Yeltsin and documentaries on the horrors of communism. The editor of the news magazine Itogi declared, “This is not a game with equal stakes,” adding that he was “willing to be unfair” and “willing to stir up a wild anti-Communist psychosis among the people”. The general director of NTV openly took a job on Yeltsin’s campaign team.

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Perhaps no American journalist was quite so honest as to take a job directly on Biden’s campaign team, but The Washington Post did retroactively edit an article that cast Kamala Harris in an unflattering light, and the LA Times has launched an ongoing series of fawning coverage of the Vice President. So it might be slightly less irritating if significant parts of the American media did openly declare what they’re up to, instead of trying to disguise it as “journalism”.

But perhaps the most interesting parallel is that Zyuganov was not only denied any kind of favourable media coverage; he was denied access even to the communications infrastructure. When the communists tried to buy advertising on state TV, their money was turned down. At least Twitter and Facebook waited until Trump was on the way out before they switched him off. But they did still eject the actual President of the US from access to social media, whereas the bosses of Russian TV were merely excluding an opposition candidate from the airwaves. The reasoning was similar: both men were too dangerous to be granted access to a channel by which they could communicate directly with their supporters.

Yeltsin, of course, won, and the oligarchs and media barons who had supported him wound up closer to the government, wealthier and more powerful than before, while preserving — for the time being — their own status quo. And if life were a movie, that would have been a great time to roll credits, with the commies defeated and all the rich people getting to keep their money and influence.

But life carried on, and it’s the next act that’s perhaps the most instructive for us. The underlying problems that had made Zyuganov popular in the first place did not go away. Russia’s economic woes deepened. The overt collusion between the media, the oligarchs and Yeltsin — combined with disappointment in an aging President who was increasingly decrepit and erratic — led to further degradation of trust in the media and Russia’s governing institutions; democracy itself was rechristened dermokratiya — “shitocracy”.

And then, four years later, an ex-KGB officer by the name of Vladimir Putin came to power. A more effective authoritarian than Zyuganov, he swiftly chased Berezovsky out of the country and stripped Gusinsky of his TV station. Having been part of the Yeltsin regime himself, he understood what many members of America’s current ruling class appear not to — that any weapon you deploy against a foe can also be turned against you.

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And so we turn from Russia to the US in 2021. Again, if life were a movie, then the recent inauguration would have been a great moment to roll credits — perhaps as Lady Gaga was singing the national anthem, while a tear trickled down Stephen Colbert’s cheek. But life has already moved on.

A recent poll reveals that trust in traditional media has dropped below 50% for the first time ever, while trust in social media sits at a mighty 27%. Many Americans, like the Russians before them, are adjusting to the default assumption that at best they are not receiving the full picture. At least Russian journalists lacked the comical levels of self-regard of their US counterparts.

Nor are other institutions doing that well on the trust front, even — or perhaps especially — as they all espouse the same package of received ideas. And once the relief that Trump has gone has passed, what will become of Biden? Unlike Yeltsin, he may not disappear for days on alcoholic benders, but it is fair to say that he has not, for much of his very long career, inspired a lot of confidence. As Obama himself is reported to have said: “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.”

Now I don’t think that Biden will flame out to the extent that Yeltsin did, with the result that a sinister Putin-type rough beast shall slouch forward, to be born in the land of the free and the home of the brave. But I do think that this apparent corporate-media-institutional monolith is unlikely to endure — despite the persistent belief among some American political fantasists that each victory is their chance to exercise eternal hegemony over their enemies.

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For instance, when the billionaires behind Twitter and Facebook ejected Trump from Twitter — and, under pressure from the Democrats, began censoring all kinds of opinions of which they disapproved — they crossed a Rubicon. Once the Republicans have stopped rolling around in their own mess, they will realise that large monopolies controlled by people who are closely allied with your opposition and who wield the power to switch you off at will are not a thing to be tolerated. Alexei Navlany agrees, as do Angela Merkel and President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of Mexico, and we can assume that many other leaders around the world sat up and took notice, too. Some kind of rebalancing will happen, and that is not a bad thing.

While we should never underestimate the resilience of Zombie Reaganism, it, too, must eventually lose its grip on the brains of the Republicans, whose leadership is likewise very old, if not quite so old as that of the Democrats. They will realise that the market does not always correct itself, and that something will have to be done. The American context will provide its own tools for change. A new interpretation of the First Amendment, perhaps. Or a redefinition of the public square. Or the application of antitrust law to certain platforms. Or a re-examination of CDA 230 — the legislation that allows tech oligarchs to have their cake and eat it by granting them immunity from liability for what users post on their platforms, while also reserving for them the right to censor or withdraw services from users if they dislike what they post on their platforms.

If that sounds like wishful thinking, then remember that far more radical political evolutions have happened. After all, today’s Democrats may be closely allied with woke tech oligarchs, but they used to be rather friendly with the KKK, an organisation with a history of violence far worse than any of those currently being purged from social media platforms.

Thus, when Obama utilised “big data” and social media to win an election it was a hugely sophisticated, progressive thing; but when Trump did the same, it was a sign that Orange Man Bad was in cahoots with Sinister Putin to exploit the bottomless stupidity of the unwashed masses.

With Biden hiring former Facebook execs and current Big Tech mega bosses to his transition team, and around 98% of Internet company donations during the last election flowing into Democrat coffers, I cannot shake the suspicion that we may now see an administration which is quite friendly to Silicon Valley.

Meanwhile, America’s fascination with ultra-wealth means that the genre of puff pieces on tech billionaires and “unicorns” (startups valued at $1 billion or more) will continue to thrive in venues such as Fast Company, Fortune and Forbes, where “journalists” will continue to perform their valuable function as court stenographers for the charismatic founders building our shining future one app at a time.

And yet, despite all the useless stuff out there, we do from time to time get truly insightful takes on the world of tech. I still remember reading about grown men crying at their desks in The New York Times’  2015 expose of Amazon, and was fascinated by The Inventor, the documentary tracing the rise and fall of doomed-from-the-start blood test startup Theranos.

A few years ago, Dan Lyons’s Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start Up Bubble made a splash, as did Antonio Garcia Martinez’s Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley. For my money, however, the best take on Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley, the sitcom created by Mike Judge of Beavis and Butthead fame; its six seasons track the fortunes of the not terribly likeable founders of Pied Piper as they seek to protect their invention from a pretentious, megalomaniacal tech oligarch who is surrounded by unctuous boot-lickers. It is ruthless in its selection of targets and frequently hilarious in its ridiculing of Bay Area absurdities.

A more recent report from the tech interior, Uncanny Valley, is Anna Wiener’s memoir of several years spent working for startups in Silicon Valley. It is rich in detail about everyday life in startup land, but it is low on the high-grade weirdness of the sort some of tech’s more colourful CEOs can provide. Wiener always remains an outsider looking in; she did not, in the end, work for very interesting startups, never got close to any of the truly strange, charismatic/messianic types that gravitate to this environment, and, remarkably, fails to find any humour in the absurdities and grotesques of Silicon Valley.

Reeves Wiedeman’s Billion Dollar Loser, by contrast, is rich in high grade weirdness. One of those super dense examples of American journalism in which a magazine features writer talks to hundreds of people and then condenses all those voices into 300 or so pages of tightly packed narrative, the book tells the tale of the rise and quasi-fall of Adam Neumann, founder and erstwhile CEO of WeWork, the real estate leasing firm that somehow managed to pass itself off as a startup unicorn to rival the likes of Uber, and which by early 2019 was valued at $47 billion, despite never having made a profit, and having no proprietary technology of any significance.

Neumann’s is at first an almost too perfect immigrant-made-good-in-America story. Born to Israeli parents who split up while he was young, he was raised by his mother and had a highly peripatetic childhood, including a stint spent living on a kibbutz. After serving in the Israeli navy, he follows his super model sister Adi Neumann to the US at age 22, where he almost immediately sets about looking for the idea that will make him rich. His first — baby clothes with knee pads — is terrible, yet he has a knack for persuading people to believe in him and before long he has parlayed this into a luxury brand called “Egg Baby”. This is but a prelude to the main act, however, which is co-founding WeWork in New York with Miguel McKelvey, owner of an ESL website called “English, baby!“

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WeWork is a better idea. Neumann and McKelvey set about opening coworking office spaces where they hope cool, hip knowledge workers will rent a desk and work on their world-changing ideas all day, while getting to know each other and participating in a creative community. It is, however, not a new idea. In fact, coworking spaces were pioneered by a UK firm called Regus (est. 1989); Regus went bankrupt in 2003 but returned in rebranded form as IWG and by the end of 2014 was bringing in $2 billion in revenue from 2,000 locations.

WeWork, it is true, had better design and branding, but coolness does not a different business model make. Wiedeman details Neumann’s attempts to find ways to fuse his real estate leasing business with technology, but these efforts are never integral to the business. In fact, when WeWork was founded its first CTO was a teenage boy not yet out of high school who went by the name of “Joey Cables”.

The fact that he is owner of a New York real estate leasing business does not, however, prevent Neuman from going full Silicon Valley CEO-guru in the grandiose yet vague utopian vision he pitches to employees and investors, or in the culture he builds, or the eccentric, New Age style-beliefs he adheres to. Having been introduced to the Kabbalah by his fiancé, Rebekah Paltrow (cousin of Gwyneth), Neumann goes all in for the ancient Jewish mystical tradition.

Only the version he adopts is the Hollywoodised Kabbalah, which was founded not in the 12^th century by Jewish rabbis, but in the 1960s by Philip Berg, an insurance salesman from Brooklyn, who sold candles to his followers with names such as Sexual Energy and Dialling God and later attracted those such as of Madonna and Demi Moore to his highly profitable esoteric operation.

Neumann drinks deep of this “spiritual technology” but in addition to raising his consciousness he also meets lots of wealthy people who become WeWork’s early backers. He also encourages WeWork employees to study the Kabbalah, and, according to Wiedemann, uses it as a “…guide to running an organization with devoted adherents”. Meanwhile he rambles on about “superpowers”, describes his life’s work as to “prepare for the the arrival of the messiah”, and treats WeWork as though it is not so much a machine for getting rich, as a vehicle for the spiritual transformation of the human race.

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WeWork, Neumann insists, is not a real estate leasing company but rather a “physical social network” à la Facebook or a “platform” à la Uber. He also establishes WeLive, to lease apartments designed to foster a more communal style of living, and WeGrow, a private school dedicated to “progressive” ideas. Towards the end of the book Neumann is even meeting with Elon Musk to suggest that they collaborate on establishing communities on Mars; the firm’s mission? To “Elevate the world’s consciousness”.

Neumann, clearly, is one of the great bullshitters of the age. According to Liedeman, WeWork employees described Neumann as having an “aura”, which they compared to the “reality distortion field” that an Apple employee “…once described as emanating from Steve Jobs, convincing anyone within its radius that the impossible was not only plausible, but exactly what they were going to do”.

This reality distortion field serves Neumann well for a long time, as he is able to deploy it not only to persuade millennials at the start of their careers to work for low wages, but also to get hard-headed Venture Capital types to pour money into his “unicorn”. It goes into hyper drive when he encounters Masayoshi Son, the founder of Japanese technology conglomerate SoftBank, who runs a mammoth VC fund and dreams of a 300-year plan that might culminate with SoftBank becoming a “telepathy company” rather than a mere technology company.

Indeed, it all goes wrong for Neumann when he is forced to engage with people outside of his reality distortion field. When he is unable to talk any more private investors into giving him more money, he is forced to go public and WeWork submits an investor pitch to the federal government’s Securities and Exchange Commission, which exposes just how much money the company is losing and that it is in fact a real estate leasing company after all. Confronted with bad press, Neumann embarks upon a speaking tour of investors, but his reality distortion field does not work on those predisposed to scepticism. From that point his downfall is swift, he barely lasts a month before he stands down as CEO and WeWork’s evaluation is revised drastically downwards.

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Billion Dollar Loser is a fascinating book, and even though, or perhaps especially because Neumann never developed a “killer app”, his story represents the apotheosis of Silicon Valley as idea, as pure myth. Whereas Anna Wiener saw life at the unglamorous ground level in companies that actually had technology to sell, Neumann, by combining mimesis with his own charisma and appeals to investor greed, was able to create an imaginary reality that, rather like Tlon in Borges’ famous short story, left the world of fiction and, for a moment, threatened to supersede reality.

Reading about this period of madness that gulled so many, I feel grateful that we live in a society where prestige and power is attained through business rather than war or religion.

Had Neumann lived in a different time, where the incentives were different, who knows what he might have achieved? He certainly has some of the traits of a demagogue or cult leader. Meanwhile, there are far more skilled, and more ruthless, empire builders out there; we are fortunate that their energies are channeled into manipulating our desires and insecurities for profit and selling us shiny toys. It could be so much worse.

Yet as far as presidents go, it’s been a while since a majority of Texans voted for a Democrat — nearly half a century, in fact. The last time it happened was 1976, when residents of the state opted for Jimmy Carter over the Nixon-pardoning Gerald Ford. Back then, Emmanuel Macron was still two years away from being born and Joe Biden was but a bonnie wee laddie of 34, serving out the first of his seven terms in the Senate. We hadn’t yet hit peak disco, let alone gone through the backlash and subsequent revival, and nobody knew who Darth Vader was. Needless to say, things didn’t exactly end well for Carter and since then, Texans have steered well clear of Democratic candidates for president.

Until now, perhaps. With less than a week to go before the election, and at least one poll showing that Biden might be slightly ahead in Texas, the question of whether the Democrats could finally break a decades-long losing streak and score electoral victory in the Lone Star State is filling the party (and pundits) with a sense of nervous excitement.

A Biden victory in Texas is regarded as a prelude to flipping the entire state, reversing the Republicans’ vice-like grip on Lone Star politics, from the presidency downwards. In this scenario, the prophecy of The Emerging Democratic Majority will at long last be fulfilled: the Republicans will be reduced to a rump of elderly trailer-dwelling deplorables clinging to their guns and scratched Duck Dynasty DVDs, while the youthful, diverse, progressive Democrats shall enjoy political hegemony forever and ever, amen.

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Is their hope misplaced? Recently, it seemed that reports of the demise of the Republican Party in Texas were greatly exaggerated, to say the least. Consider, for instance, the lightning fast rise-and-fall of Democrat Wendy Davis, the Harvard-trained lawyer and Texas state senator who in 2013 became briefly famous for filibustering a bill that would have placed numerous restrictions on abortion in the state.

Davis not only made headlines on CNN and in the pages of the NYT but some parts of the British media also did that weird self-colonising thing where they reported on US regional politics with far more interest than they do their own. The Guardian in particular dedicated lots of column inches to Davis, including a particularly hard-hitting piece of reporting on how the trainers she wore during her filibuster had become the bestselling shoe on Amazon and an “unlikely feminist symbol”.

The attention went to Davis’s head: she published a memoir (17 copies going used on Amazon, from $0.08) and then, in 2014, ran for governor against the Republican incumbent Greg Abbott, only to lose by over 20 percentage points. Davis promptly vanished from the scene (although she is having a stab at entering the House of Representatives this year).

Yet despite Davis’s failure, her campaign for governor was significant in at least one respect: having achieved fame as an abortion rights campaigner she did not feel the need to represent herself as a “blue dog” or conservative Democrat. She was, essentially, very similar to the “progressive” type of Democrat you might find on the ballot elsewhere in America, except for her shameless pandering on guns (during her campaign Davis claimed to support the open carry of handguns, a position she denounced almost immediately upon losing.)

Because Davis’s campaign was so obviously a hallucinatory byproduct of Democrat wishful thinking and national media fantasising, I was initially equally dismissive of the “Beto” phenomenon. When the representative from El Paso announced he would challenge Ted Cruz for his Senate seat in 2018, nobody knew much about him; I read that he was from El Paso, spoke fluent Spanish and campaigned where other Democrats feared to tread, and that was about it. It was some time before I saw a photograph of him and was surprised to discover that, despite the Spanish nickname, “Beto” was actually Robert O’Rourke, an Irish-American almost as pale as myself — a Scotsman who didn’t see the sun until he was about 20 years old.

However, despite the fact that O’Rourke was the subject of giddy national media coverage just as Wendy Davis had been, his sudden rise to prominence seemed different. Despite the flood of endorsements from such incisive political thinkers as Beyoncé, Jim Carrey and Willie Nelson, there was also a genuine grassroots excitement around O’Rourke. “Beto for Senate” signs were proliferating on lawns like an invasive species and lots of people I knew were talking about him with cautious optimism. Texas Democrats, after decades of tilting at windmills, were allowing themselves to believe that it might finally happen this time. Betomania was certainly not at Obama ’08 levels, but the stakes were also lower — whereas Obama was running for leader of the free world, O’Rourke had merely set his sights on unseating Ted “No Mates” Cruz, a Tea Party obstructionist widely reviled even by fellow Republicans.

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But there was another significant difference. Where Obama’s rise represented something new and genuinely progressive in American politics and culture, so O’Rourke’s was a variation on a very old theme. The wunderkind from nowhere was actually the pampered scion of the establishment; not only was he the son of Pat O’Rourke, an El Paso judge and Democrat Party apparatchik, he was also the step-grandson of Fred Korth, JFK’s secretary of the navy. After receiving the obligatory Ivy League education, he worked for his family or ran businesses where members of his family were either financial backers or significant clients, and along the way married the daughter of a real estate billionaire.

He then ran for the El Paso city council, where he distinguished himself by supporting a plan to redevelop a Hispanic neighbourhood in which his real estate mogul father-in-law was an investor. Then, when this horny-handed son of toil decided he’d like a seat in congress, one of his father-in-law’s companies contributed $37,500 to a $240,000 campaign against the incumbent, farmer’s son Silvestre Reyes. Inspiring!

Of course, most people weren’t looking all that closely at O’Rourke’s bona fides and in the end he couldn’t quite get it over the line. He did, however, spend a ton of money and set a new record for the most votes ever cast for a Democrat in Texas, finishing a mere two percentage points behind a very nervous Cruz. Like Davis, O’Rourke had not disguised his progressive leanings, but unlike Davis he managed to inspire hope among Texas Democrats that victory was within reach. In Williamson County, where I live — traditionally a conservative stronghold — O’Rourke beat Cruz by almost three points in 2018. The Democrats did not get the “blue wave” they had hoped for, but they made Republicans anxious in a way they hadn’t been for decades. O’Rourke had put them on notice.

Which brings us to 2020. Things are changing so rapidly it is difficult to keep up. O’Rourke, of course, jumped the shark in the eyes of many following his spectacularly unsuccessful campaign to win the Democratic nomination for president, but he still has believers in Texas. The Democratic candidate for my district touts his endorsement. His portrait is bigger than hers on her own posters. With the exception of Fort Worth, all the major cities in Texas — Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio and El Paso — have Democrat mayors, and as Texas attracts more and more emigrants from California to the cities and suburbs, it is common to hear complaints that these new arrivals are changing the political culture by voting for the very same high tax, regulation-heavy progressive policies that would turn Texas into the type of place they just left. Meanwhile, polling indicates that white, college-educated voters in the hitherto reliably red-voting suburbs are shifting towards the Democrats and that up to a third of Texas’s Republican congressional seats may be up for grabs.

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If Texas turns blue, or even a shade of purple, it could have a major impact on national politics long-term. Today, Texas is second only to California for electoral votes (38 to 55) and thanks to its growing population, it will have 41 by the next election (while California might actually lose influence). Meanwhile, not only is the population of Texas growing, but its demographics are changing; it is already a majority-minority state.

That the Republican establishment will now have to contend with a more competitive state seems undeniable. The extent to which they are willing or able to adapt to a changing Texas without alienating their base will be key to their fortunes. Yet the overall picture may be more ambiguous than it seems.

One of the most striking things about O’Rourke’s Senate campaign was that he actually polled higher among native born Texans in his Senate race than he did among those who have moved to the state. Therefore, rather than turning the state blue, it may well be that some of those new arrivals, having fled progressive strongholds, are aligning with rural voters with Trump flags flying over their properties and actively resisting the drift towards the Democrats. It also remains to be seen whether the shift in the suburbs represents an epochal turn towards the Democrats or simply disgust at the hi-jinks of this particular president and his enablers. Trump, meanwhile, has made gains among black and Latino voters. Could a less obnoxious populist a few years from now build on those gains and chip away further at the Democrats’ lead among minority voters?

As for whether Texas will finally elect a Democrat for president, well — even Biden seems doubtful. Having splurged a lot of cash earlier in the campaign he is resisting pleas to spend more money in the state,  so that well-known billionaire of the people, Michael Bloomberg, a man with no fear of setting fire to his own money, has chipped in to make up the shortfall. And yet regardless of the outcome next Tuesday, I think the Democrats can be sure of at least one thing: they will not have to wait the century the Republicans did before they start winning elections in Texas again.