Where Americans were born and who their parents are has always been much less important than how they greeted the present moment, with one eye fixed on the road ahead and the other on the stars. Walt Whitman’s great “Song of Myself”, written in 1855 and unfolding over 52 stanzas, including accounts of sea battles and slavery, mentions not a single word about the speaker’s parents, or even what their names were.

Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, in which “Song of Myself” is contained, is the fountainhead of American poetics, particularly in the 20th century. Its distinctive echo can be heard everywhere after the Second World War, from the Beats to the novels of Saul Bellow, to the highbrow confessional poems of John Berryman and Frank O’Hara. In Rock and Roll music, Whitman’s greatest late 20th-century heir was undoubtedly Bob Dylan, who eerily reproduced both Whitman’s continent-spanning meter and his love of playful self-contradiction. Try reading nearly anything Whitman wrote in Dylan’s distinctive nasal tone, and the kinship will be plain.

James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown is merely the latest of a series of films that have attempted to grapple with the sometimes gratifying, often alienating mixture of freedom and vertigo inherent in the American birthright through the character of the man from nowhere. If the bright side of this character can be glimpsed in Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, arguably the founding work of American literature, in Whitman’s all-embracing cosmic self, and in the rags-to-riches tales of Horatio Alger, the darkness that can accompany freedom from the past isn’t hard to find either. Natty Bumppo, the frontiersman-killer of James Fennimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, is the precursor to the ambivalent killer-hero of nearly every Western. Jay Gatsby’s invented self is ultimately more loyal and virtuous than the Long Island snobs who attend his glittering parties; it is also a lie that ends in death.

The character of Bob Dylan, the boy who ostensibly learned to play music from circus performers passing through Hibbing, Minnesota and then re-named himself after the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (a fact that Dylan strenuously denied for years before admitting to in his charming autobiography Chronicles) was more or less fully fashioned even before the young performer set off to New York City to find Woody Guthrie and set the often drearily earnest world of American folk music on its ear. America has never really known Robert Zimmerman, the man who invented Bob Dylan. It has only known Bob Dylan.

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So why did the 19-year-old Zimmerman choose to become Dylan? The answer, as he told 60 Minutes interviewer Ed Bradley 20 years ago, was because those are the rules of American selfhood. “You call yourself what you want to call yourself,” Dylan responded. “This is the land of the free.”

Dylan’s self-invented character of a punk Woody Guthrie, or as a rock and roll Walt Whitman, was wildly influential in his moment, for reasons that take a moment to recover. Meanwhile, his best songs have lost none of their immediacy. Working in the genre of “original folk music” that he more or less invented, he set the rules for rock songwriting for the next half century while writing two or three dozen major and minor classics that uniquely merited the awarding of a Nobel Prize for Literature, despite the formal and functional gulf that separates song lyrics from novels and poetry.

The rules of a “Dylan song” have remained remarkably consistent over time, bringing together the worlds of Woody Guthrie, hipster downtown New York, American roots music, the blues, country and western, into a kind of primordial soup that Dylan could dip his brush into at will; he created deceptively offhand-seeming compositions governed by a rueful romanticism and a bulletproof intelligence that twists and turns like a fish in order to avoid being caught.

It is also true that the alchemy by which singer-songwriters (itself an invention of the Sixties) do their thing tends to produce a period of startling peak creativity that lasts perhaps five years, often precluding the possibility of a second act. The Beatles produced all their great records within five years, as did the Rolling Stones. Jimi Hendrix’s entire career lasted four years, as did Kurt Cobain’s.

For artists who survive their creative peak, the reward is often an afterlife with lesser access to the divine. Part of Dylan’s spectacular self-awareness, which has only rarely faltered, is that he recognized the departure of the spirit much sooner than most; he never insisted that his newer songs were actually his best work. “I don’t know how I got to write those songs,” he admitted to Ed Bradley, of the classics he penned at his peak. “It’s a penetrating type of a magic, and I did it at one time.”

What’s left now, apart from the songs, is the distinctive voice, along with a repertoire of feints and dodges mixed with the occasional lip-curling hipster put-down. Onstage these days, the songwriter is often a gnomic shell, appearing to follow an internal logic by which he makes sense of himself to himself. Whatever those dialogues may be about, one suspects that the “real Bob Dylan” — whatever that means — of the singer’s youth was more sharper-edged and predatory than Timothée Chalamet’s cuddly, doe-eyed portrayal.

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Still, Chalamet gets the look and the gestures right. He also nicely conveys the capacity for menace that the self-made man inherently contains. After all, if a person invents themselves from scratch, discarding their flesh-and-blood parents and origins in favor of their own self-invented mythos, then how much is that person likely to care about you? Not much. In his portrayal, Chalamet is notably faithful to the first and greatest portrayal of the character of Bob Dylan on film, which was by Bob Dylan himself, in D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back — which smartly allowed Dylan to do the work of explaining himself. By contrast, I’m Not There, an annoying film by the supremely surface-oriented director Todd Haynes, a master of a colder type of irony, swallows the Dylan mythology whole, as some kind of sacrament of modern American selfhood — without understanding or explaining why that should be true, apart from the multiplicity and seeming discontinuities in the pop star’s character, which Haynes implies should each be respected individually, like a family of distinguished drag queens.

What Haynes misses, and Pennebaker viscerally understood — and Mangold clearly intimates, without wanting to emphasize it too strongly — is that Dylan, in both his music and his persona, found himself at the center of the great intergenerational battle of the Sixties over the American gospel of individualism. For Dylan, the young man from Hibbing, the self that he invented out of his own materials was at once an entirely personal creation and at the same time represented his connection to a shared vision of America. He was a distinctly American individualist, just as Whitman was, and most great American-born artists are.

The materials he chose to work from were coded in ways that the young Dylan didn’t entirely recognize, though. Woody Guthrie wasn’t just a great American songwriter who spoke and sang in his own half-invented popular. The way that the young Robert Zimmerman might have imagined him. He was also a member of the Communist Party, which had its own uses for Guthrie’s persona and his art. The same was true of the parents of Dylan’s Greenwich Village girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, who Dylan credited with educating him about racial discrimination and labor politics and other subjects that the young singer-songwriter professed to “not know much about.” While the great folk archivist Alan Lomax, whose materials became Dylan’s, was not a Communist, he was undoubtedly a preservationist who saw folk music not as raw material to be mined and re-mixed by a future rock and roll Whitman, but the rightful property of the oppressed.

In other words, as Mangold does a good job of showing, the American Left, centered around the Communist Party, used folk music as a cultural banner, and as a political instrument — and they were right to feel that Bob Dylan had used them, and scorned them. Or to put it in a way more partial to Dylan, the young singer-songwriter took the folk tradition that they had co-opted in the service of their version of Cold War politics and put it back into the place it belonged, which was music. Dylan’s sin was never simply going electric. It was in putting art above politics.

In doing so, Dylan turned his back on the certainties of Leftist politics in order to more fully become what he wanted to be in the first place, which was himself. Aside from being a singer-songwriter, who that person was was entirely his own business. “I’m a song-and-dance man,” he once told a press conference at the height of the mania surrounding his decision to become a rock and roll artist and release “Like a Rolling Stone”, “Baby Blue” and “Visions of Johanna”, instead of additional helpings of Leadbelly covers. Neither Dylan nor the gathered reporters seemed able to disguise their glee at the proposition that he could simply make music, free of politics or the demands of being a prophet. “Elvis, I could easily see myself as him,” Dylan mused more than once. “But a prophet? Nah.”

It is only fair to Bob Dylan, the man, however self-made, to acknowledge how much the decision to break free from the heavily politicized aesthetics of the American Left, and the expectations and demands that came with it, must have cost him, both as a human being and as an artist. The assertion of the greater truth of his own art over the demands of the collective must have been, in many dimensions, a never-ending nightmare. Such was the price of the creative freedom that he sought and gained.

Was it worth it? For Dylan and for America, the answer is yes. Dylan’s legendary Basement Tapes with the Band, which surfaced as a lost corpus of songs from somewhere deep in the American imagination, continue to speak to us now, as much as his albums from his creative peak do. The fact that he maintained his place in the national imagination up through his 80s, speaks to a personal strength that is uniquely visible now, and makes it possible for his music to be heard by a new generation. In an era in which cookie-cutter Leftist politics similarly declares its pre-eminence over the aesthetic whims of mere artists, whose job is to bend the knee and crank out Shepherd Fairey-like propaganda in the interests of the Party, Dylan’s struggle again resonates.

Dylan himself would most likely have as little interest in being portrayed as a refusenik against the demands of proto-wokism as he would in continuing to sing worker’s protest songs. He was more interested in being Elvis. Yet, his example feels especially potent now for the obvious reason that we are once again living in an age when the threats to the integrity of the self, and to artistic expression, from both the Left and Right are very obviously real, and it takes real courage to say no.

Dylan’s triumph in that fight was total. No one has ever been cooler than Bob Dylan, and no one since Walt Whitman wrote better lyrics that encompassed more of the American spirit. The folkies who wanted Dylan to continue to play acoustic folk and demonstrate for CORE, and who saw albums like Blonde on Blonde or Blood on the Tracks as betrayals of the party line, are plainly ridiculous figures, even as their present-day kin are easy to spot.

For those who knew Dylan, and who in one way or another had reason to see themselves as his peers, Dylan continues to represent the highest mountain in their American songwriting. Jimmy Webb, the great American songwriter, told me once of meeting Dylan at a party, whereupon Dylan pulled out a guitar and played Jimmy his version of “Wichita Lineman”, a Jimmy Webb song that could have also perhaps have been written by Dylan. When he was done, he looked at Webb expectantly. “What, now I’m supposed to play you one of your songs?” Webb shot back.

It’s weird to think that at 83, Bob Dylan is as relevant as ever to the country that gave him the freedom to invent himself. But it’s plainly true. That’s because America remained his greatest inspiration, and the place in the mind where he was always most at home. As he explained it, obliquely, in a long poem he wrote upon the death of his hero:

“You can touch and twist
And turn two kinds of doorknobs
You can either go to the church of your choice
Or you can go to Brooklyn State Hospital
You’ll find God in the church of your choice
You’ll find Woody Guthrie in Brooklyn State Hospital

And though it’s only my opinion
I may be right or wrong
You’ll find them both
In the Grand Canyon
At sundown”

As a patriotic American, and as a working journalist who believes in the sanctity of that role, I should note here that the only vote I’ve ever cast in a presidential election was for Willie Nelson, the country and western star and a symbol of reconciliation between rednecks and hippies. Still, I was eager to hear what Trump would say. To be more accurate, given my level of inebriation in sub-freezing Montana weather, with snow-globe snow gently falling outside the windows of a local bar, I was eager to mix the some whiskey with the tonalities of America’s greatest living bullshit artist and teller of tall tales. Trump’s voice is a powerful source of connection to the American literary and comic tradition, going back to the Rat Pack and to Mark Twain. I was ready to hear his magnificent instrument resonate with the promise of a better future, a future filled with laughter — and joy, even.

At 3am, West Palm Beach time, Trump’s large family stood with him onstage looking chipper and attractive. They were joined there by the celebrity validators that made Trump’s third run for the White House seem less angry and more inclusive than his prior one-man shows.

At 78, Trump’s relentless pitchman’s energy is at once diminished, and at the same more genial. And no wonder. Since his loss, in 2020, when he claimed that the election was stolen from him — and his opponents claimed that he tried to seize power through illegal means — Trump had been subjected to a whole-of-society assault by the American elite that would have killed most men 20 years younger, including those who don’t eat cheeseburgers most days for lunch. After 116 indictments, an armed raid on his home, the jailing of his business associates, and the looming threat of bankruptcy, followed by two and even three in-person rallies a day for the better part of a year, which led to him being shot in the head by a would-be assassin, the fact that Trump is still standing upright, let alone greeting a crowd as President-elect, is clearly a miracle – the biggest miracle since the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ, I can hear Trump saying. Now, he is about to speak. The TV above the bar remains silent.

“Honey, have you ever been in a bar before?” the bartender is asking me. For the past 10 minutes or so, we’ve been politely going back and forth about whether she can turn up the volume on the bar’s television set. All I can hear around me as Trump starts to speak is the noise of a late Tuesday night at the Wagon Wheel.

Sure, I’ve been in plenty of bars before, I answer. “Well, then you know that politics is a subject that men get angry over, and I don’t want that in my bar,” the waitress answers matter-of-factly. “You can read the captions on the TV.”

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As sensible as her precautions might seem, there’s an undertone to her replies that reminds me that I am in a town, and not in the countryside. Even out here in the West, in a solid red state that epitomises cowboy culture, it is the divide between urban and exurban places, not the division between so-called red and blue states, that is culturally defining. People living in Brooklyn Heights, or in Austin, Texas or in Missoula, Montana or in Grand Rapids, Iowa, all tend to have more in common with each other than they do with people living even a mere 20 miles away.

“For fuck’s sake, this is history,” I suggest, as I watch Trump’s lips moving. “It’s not politics. Everyone can all put their prejudices aside for five minutes s and hear the man.” She purses her lips, and signals it’s a no-go. Then she offers me a free seltzer.

“We must protect our geniuses, protect our super-geniuses”, the caption-writer translates, as Trump’s lips form grandiloquent and hilarious phrases introducing Elon Musk and his love for rockets. “We have so few of them.”

Trump is clearly one. He’s an American genius, an original of a type that began with P.T. Barnum, and also includes Elon Musk. But neither Barnum nor Musk could ever become President twice, and defeat the entire American power structure. I wish to God I could hear him speak. After overcoming 100+ indictments, and having his X account revoked, the man deserves to have his moment here, in this bar.

I don’t need to hear Trump’s stunned-looking critics in the Party commentariat speak, though. The expressions on their pallid faces say it all. They are reckoning with the extent of their loss, which is turn related to their collective sense of self-importance — which is belied both by tonight’s result and by their viewership numbers. Having cratered public trust in their profession over the past decade by routinely lying to their audience on behalf of the government, which they identified in turn with the Democratic Party, the country’s self-identified defenders of democracy can fume all they want about Trump’s authoritarian, anti-democratic, fascist, Hitlerian leanings. The rest of America is as deaf to their blather as I am.

Praising Elon Musk, the country’s most successful technologist, Trump looks more like an avuncular Caribbean vacation package or waterbed salesman than a would-be Hitler. Meanwhile, party hacks like Joy Reid and the political consultants turned “commentators” like David Axelrod, along with supposed “straight news” types like Jake Tapper of CNN, who had all long ago become indistinguishable from each other, by virtue of drinking the Party Kool-Aid are waving their hands at the cameras like they were calling for smelling salts. But once lost, the trust of an audience is hard to win back.

Trump has also lost a step or two himself. His speeches, once gorgeous arias of invective, innuendo and insult comedy, delivered with the snappy timing of a Vegas Rat Pack headliner, have been transformed into rambling arabesques, like the musings of a slightly dotty family patriarch at the Thanksgiving table. Let us bow our heads, while Loopy Uncle Donald tells us about the deal he made with a Saudi Prince on a golf course. Then everyone can eat more pumpkin pie.

Trump had also learned a trick or two along the way, though. He graciously shares the stage, and allows the importance and accomplishments of others to validate his own role as MC. His timing clearly couldn’t have been better. Five years of Covid laws, a stagnant economy, direct and indirect government censorship of social media, official lying and gaslighting on every subject from trans surgeries to the efficacy of masking to the startling numbers of illegal immigrants entering the country to the spectacle of a dottering Joe Biden being barely able to remember his own name, had left most of the country dispirited and ready for change.

As the evening ends, Trump and the political movement he founded will likely control not just the White House but also the Senate, the House, and also the Supreme Court, giving Trump an actual, real-world chance to fulfill his mandate to Make America Great Again. Even though, after a decade of near-constant repetition of the slogan by adherents and detractors, no one can say with any real certainty what it now means.

* * *

As it turns out, the American people are still allowed to vote, regardless of whether their betters decry their choices as racist, sexist, short-sighted, and above all anti-democratic. It’s a paradox that the country’s genius-level elites routinely fail to acknowledge, because they are all profoundly in agreement. We must protect our democracy from those evil anti-democratic forces, American voters, who vote for Donald Trump against the expert guidance of their betters, meaning us.

Meanwhile, the lurching of an increasingly overbearing and at the same time increasingly anarchic and incompetent American state had managed to alarm many Americans who were previously more alarmed by Trump. Over the past weeks, they have been turning out in larger numbers than anyone had imagined — defying the expressed preferences and instructions of the American’ elite’s chief tutelary figure, Barack Obama, who had campaigned very publicly and hard for Kamala Harris, often overshadowing the candidate herself. Obama’s role in the Harris campaign was truthfully less strange than the fact that the former President somehow remained in Washington after his time in the White House was over, instead taking meetings in his Kalorama mansion, which is hardly the most valuable entry in his bulging portfolio of luxury properties — which also includes high Gilded Age mansions in Hawaii and Martha’s Vineyard. But it was surely the most important, serving as the centre of his unprecedented Shadow Presidency.

As the leader of the Democratic Party, Obama was hardly a pretender to power in Washington. Rather, between 2008 and the evening of 5 November 2024, he was usually the foremost power in the land. After serving two elected terms in the White House, Obama then set up and captained the so-called “Resistance” to Trump — an activity that was contrary to all prior American norms and practices. After Trump left, Obama stayed in Washington and continued his role as unelected Party Leader during what had been advertised as the Biden Presidency.

Obama’s method of avoiding scrutiny from the pliant DC press was entirely in character, alternately drawing back into the shadows and then, out of whatever ego weakness, announcing that he was the true mover of events. Free from normative oversight or responsibility, he and his retainers could also avoid answering questions about the size or sources of his personal fortune, which was rumoured to amount to somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion. As a private citizen, Obama didn’t have to answer questions. He could have it both ways — state power, with no public responsibility.

Until he misstepped. By compelling Biden to withdraw in favour of Harris, who turned out to be an even worse candidate than a senile old man who had begun to resemble a badly taxidermied deer, Obama broke the unspoken agreement that had put him beyond scrutiny. Disappearing the sitting President from the Democratic Party ticket against his will, for reasons that were obviously contrary to what the press had been telling Americans about Biden’s incredibly acute mental functioning up, and replacing him with a candidate that no one in the party had actually voted for, required some sort of comment, however brief. It made it impossible, if only for a week or two, to maintain the fiction that Obama was simply living in Washington DC while staying out of politics. If Biden was senile, then who was actually running the country? Who had enough clout to order the President’s removal from the ticket?

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The answer in both cases was Obama. And now he was on the hook not only for Kamala Harris, but retroactively for the more general mess that he and his operatives had helped to make of the country. Everywhere from Harvard University, his alma mater, where he helped install a repeat plagiarist as the University’s President, to the Middle East, which went up in flames the moment he was able to re-animate his Iran Deal, which appeared to be even stupider — if not as expensive — as George W. Bush’s determination to transform Afghanistan and Iraq into Western-style democratic societies at the point of a gun, the Party Leader’s Midas Touch-in-reverse was evident, even if no one ever breathed a single word of criticism.

Yet Americans, of all races and creeds, felt themselves to be living in a dystopian version of Alice in Wonderland, controlled by an unseen hand — and they didn’t like it. If the elite pollsters and expert predictors who had failed to foresee a Trump win had familiarised themselves with American history, instead of parroting the talking points of Obama and his operatives, they would have seen a country eager for a renewal of the freedoms that the vast majority of Americans embrace as their birthright.

Seeing Americans as one people, with a common culture and character, shaped by a common history, is not something that America’s new elites know how to do, though. From kindergarten on, they are taught otherwise. Ivy League universities, the crucible in which the new class has been forged, base admissions and hiring decisions not on measures of objective performance, but on their ranking in the ever-shifting hierarchies of Party-sanctioned identity groups. The ability to sort Americans into bureaucratic categories like BIPOC, MENA, LGBTQ+ and other alphabet soup constructions is in fact the defining skill of Obama-era elites. It signifies mastery of in-group codes that help the Democratic Party manage its own top-down constituencies, which are regimented by political operatives and NGO organisers, paid for by billionaire foundations, and embodied in bureaucratic regulations, executive orders, census categories and other legally-binding schemes meant to overcome historical American notions of equality. That’s how the party machine operates.

Now, in one night, the Obama machine, which he built on the model of the Chicago Democratic Party machine, and which he used to run the country, including the prestige institutions and the media, through a combination of bureaucratic capture and social pressure, accentuated by control of large tech platforms, was finally melting down. No wonder the press was in shock. None of the lines that they had been given could be reconciled with the numbers onscreen.

A reckoning will surely come. At the very least, the time has now arrived for Barack Obama to leave Washington and exit American politics, now that his Shadow Presidency — which proved to be even more counter-productive and chaotic than Trump’s first term in office — has gone down in flames.

Meanwhile, the gap between what America’s elites believe, and what the rest of the country believes, has never been wider, probably not since the late 19th century. Back then, Gilded Age America was ruled by a tight group of tycoons and their retainers who positioned themselves as the heirs to the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, the President and the General who together led the Civil War. The further the Republican Party traveled from the Civil War, the more the busts of Lincoln and Grant resembled window-dressing for the extraordinary fortunes of a new oligarchy that traveled in private trains, summered in Newport, and bought every available Old Master painting in Europe to decorate their lavish houses. Economically and morally, the so-called Robber Barons — Morgans, Rockefellers, Goulds, Fricks, Carnegies, Whitneys, Harrimans — had an easy time of it, enjoying the benefits of cheap immigrant labour while flattering themselves as the rightful heirs of the Party that ended slavery. With the exception of Carnegie, a self-made Scotsman and innovative industrialist who gave away his fortune to establish America’s system of public libraries, history doesn’t remember them kindly.

The Democratic Party that Bill and Hillary Clinton built in the Nineties, and Barack Obama then took in a decidedly more radical direction after 2012, won’t be remembered kindly by Americans either. The father of the modern Democratic Party, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was the country’s greatest political leader during what became known as the American Century. Roosevelt kept the country going during the Great Depression, and set it on the path to victory in the Second World War while creating a social safety net for the poor. Remarkably, every American President up until Bill Clinton in 1992 was either a protegee of Roosevelt or at least a private in his army.

The political alliance between urban ethnic machine politicians, including black urban political leaders, and Southern whites that FDR led also undercut the power of the Wasp class, successors to the New England Puritans, who dominated America’s class system and the country’s economy following the Civil War. By curbing their cultural, political, and economic influence, Roosevelt made possible the rise of the American middle class, which made America great, and also more equal.

The Clintons’ embrace of Wall Street and of international trade treaties was the window through which America’s old elites — rooted both in the Northeast as well as in San Francisco — climbed back into history. The China trade flourished, as did Democratic Party’s new Wall Street clients — at the expense of the Party’s traditional working-and-middle class constituencies. Obama brought Silicon Valley’s formerly libertarian-oriented founders on board the gravy train by promising them protection from populists like Bernie Sanders and from his own crew of high-end Chicago shakedown artists. In return, they would pay taxes to the party through campaign and NGO contributions and DEI hiring. Through this new political wiring, Obama completed the transformation of FDR’s Democrats into Gilded Age Republicans.

It will be hard for Donald Trump to top that. But maybe he will. Maybe Elon Musk will entirely revamp the Federal government. Maybe he will actually colonise Mars. Meanwhile, if Trump understands one thing, it’s that America is not Europe, or Asia, or Iraq, or Brazil. American elites come and go, while the capacity for sudden, radical, wide-eyed self-invention and leaps of innovation remain the country’s defining trait.

What outsiders tend to miss is that America was never meant to be stable. It is and has always been an inferno, the epitome of the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of creative destruction. The wonder and freedom and heartbreak of American life is that, sooner or later, everything is consumed in the furnace. For all his wealth and success, Elon Musk’s children may worship other gods. His grandchildren may end up in a trailer park, smoking meth. McKinsey consultants with Harvard degrees may wind up unemployed or selling bottled war. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the country’s most eminent environmental lawyer and the closest thing the Democratic Party has to royalty, may become an antivaccine heretic, be broadly mocked and humiliated by the elite and by the less imaginative members of his own family, run for President, endorse Donald Trump, take on the Big Pharma and Big Ag, and Make America Healthy Again. Or not. All anyone can say for sure is that attempts to game the American system are doomed to failure.

The bigger lesson being that America is just too big — and too wild, and too destructive, and rooted in the idea of individual freedom — for any self-styled “elite” to ride the horse for very long, without being thrown off.

He is certainly right that restoring competitive balance between America and its trade partners abroad, and between monopolistic corporations and small producers at home, is essential to growing and maintaining healthy communities where Americans can work and raise children, who in turn might better their communities. It is hard to argue with the idea that reforming the country’s disastrous attempts at trade and industrial policy while getting poisons out of its food, water and air are necessary steps towards a better American future.

Whether tariffs and better trade deals will heal the deeper fractures in the American spirit seems much harder to predict, though. Having grown used to self-determining with bureaucratically defined “identity groups” whose purpose is to legitimise unequal treatment under the law, it is no surprise that Americans have also grown suspicious of each other and of institutions that have schooled them in a vision of the country, its history, and its laws as all being varying shades of deplorable. Without a usable common past, or shared values, it is hard to imagine a shared future – which is why the rise of “woke” thought in schools and workplaces was accompanied by a sudden and startling decline in the American birthrate. Why have kids, if the country you live in is evil, and the future is bleak?

It is also no surprise that the number of watchable films and television shows created by incredibly wealthy techno-monopolies such as Amazon, Netflix and Apple over the past decade can be counted on the fingers of one hand. American publishers, meanwhile, print thousands of books that no one in the world reads, while routinely losing money on over 95% of their titles. Here, the villain isn’t necessarily wokeness: it’s the monopolistic, profit-free structure of the culture industries, which made paint-by-numbers ideology an easy substitute for appealing voices, characters and plots. In a moment where no one could agree on what Americans shared in common, it was also no wonder that an ever-expanding class of DEI bureaucrats, sensitivity readers, and the like appeared to be in danger of replacing actual writers and scholars and editors at movie studios and universities and publishing houses.

“Wokeness” was ultimately a symptom of the ills of America’s culture industries rather than its cause. The cause was the monopolistic structure of the culture business. By using tech cash to take-over the culture business, which they repurposed as a way of providing free content to keep users penned inside their gated monopolies, where they could drop more cash, Amazon, Netflix and Apple cut the connection between cultural products and the marketplace — substituting in its place the taste of layers of cubicle-dwellers with fancy resumes from Ivy League schools. In doing so, they are responsible for perhaps the single most vacant decade in American cultural history.

Name an American band, or an American director, or an American novelist, who has authentically captured the imaginations of even a small number of dedicated fans over the past decade. Instead, content producers of all races and genders, working under the censorious eyes of Ivy League race-class-and-gender twits, turned out indistinguishable widgets for zombie-like viewers who unsurprisingly seemed to have little idea of what they were watching or why they should care about it.

The cratering of American accomplishment in the popular arts, like music, movies and cartoons — with the exception of rap music, whose markets remained stubbornly local, and therefore immune to bureaucratic intervention from above — arguably poses more of a threat to the American future than the fact that low-cost washing machines are being assembled in Mexico. To turn that around, America needs a cultural renaissance of the type it enjoyed during the 1850s, the 1890s and Twenties and the Fifties. That, in turn, requires a shared vision of the country and its future that inspires or at least infuriates large numbers of people.

What Trump’s election shows is not that we have arrived at such a moment, but that we are ripe for one. What it will look like remains a mystery, though. The alt-culture of the Right is every bit as polluted and stupid — and every bit as anti-American — as the repetitive conformity-culture of the woke Left. If you doubt that, take a look at the fearful idiocy of the New Christian Right, led by Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens; their ignorance of basic Christian theology, resentful hatred of Jews and Israel, and cosplay affinity for eastern orthodox churches is matched only by their desire to replace the common history of the West with bizarre revisionist nonsense, such as the idea that Winston Churchill was the great villain of the Second World War ; or that Bashar al-Assad was the Middle East’s great protector of Christians and a steely foe of Barack Obama, who sought to overthrow him; or that the nuke that the US dropped on Nagasaki targeting poor Japanese Christians praying in church. J.D. Vance’s celebration of the loserdom of poor whites — on whose behalf he opposes automation of loading docks at ports, and protests non-existent “massacres” of Christians in Syria — is in fact the mirror-image of the resentment-based identity politics he claims to oppose, in which Hillary Clinton’s white “deplorables” are substituted for the Left’s “people of colour” as objects of sectarian pity. The idea that a usable American culture can be extracted from such dregs is clearly a non-starter, since at its root it seeks to replace America and its founding exceptionalist doctrines with something else. So where might a true American Renaissance come from?

* * *

As social animals, individuals are reflections of the cultures that produced them. Whether they grew up rich or poor, or light-skinned or dark, or gay or straight, matters much less than where they grew up, and how they understood and reacted to the choices presented by the world around them. Michelangelo could not have been Dutch, any more than Rembrandt could have been an Italian, or Steve Jobs could have been a Frenchman, or Adam Smith could have been Russian, or Freud could have been a Catholic priest. The fact that human cultures are often not contiguous with national borders doesn’t make them any less powerful in determining how people imagine themselves and their place in the world — which in turn determines how they do business, raise children, pray, think, write and paint.

Starting in the Sixties, however, culture became a dirty word — a back-door for racism to re-enter academic disciplines that were eager to free themselves from the taint of past national colonial enterprises, which were now understood as the height of wrongdoing. Anthropology, which had been a fruitful meeting place for open-minded students of history, philosophy, linguistics and other disciplines including Claude Levi-Strauss, Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead and Clifford and Hilda Geertz, many of whom were also terrific writers, now re-defined as the handmaiden of colonialism, became a dead field of study, overtaken by narcissistic first-person meditations on the observer-position and other forms of post-colonial apologetics.

The reluctance to see culture as the governing force in human behaviour did more than deaden what was once one of the more rewarding sections of any university course catalogue. It is also the cause of some of the most obvious large-scale social failures of the past century, whether spearheaded by utopian Maoist revolutionaries, Islamist political actors, or liberal welfare state bureaucrats. Look at American inner cities, whose ills remain all but untouched by multi-billion dollar social welfare campaigns that began over a half century ago, or the continuing disaster of large-scale immigration from Muslim countries to Europe. This is the human price of ignoring the determining influence of culture in favour of universalist fantasies of whatever colour or stripe.

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Conversely, the ability to see through the governing frames of deterministic materialism and other faddish universalisms to the case-specific strengths and weaknesses of underlying cultures turns out to be a pretty reliable way of picking winners and building wealth — whether by investing in culturally advantaged, though resource-poor territories such as Singapore, Israel and Taiwan, or by betting on Silicon Valley upstarts like Microsoft, Apple and Google over the once-dominant IBM and Bell Labs.

Even before its emergence in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as an independent political force, America had emerged as an independent global cultural vector that sought to lead the world through the force of its unique example. The 1,000 or so Puritan colonists who traveled from England to North America in 1630 under the auspices of the Massachusetts Bay Company imagined themselves as the founders of “a city on a hill”, in the phrase of the Puritan John Winthrop; the Puritans hoped their example would inspire 17th-century Europeans to end their destructive religious wars and live peacefully together.

In reality, neither the Protestant nor the Catholic side of Europe’s religious wars gave a hoot about 1,000 English Puritans who had taken up subsistence farming in the North American wilderness. As a result of this failure of the European imagination, the attention of the Puritans and their progeny turned inward, seeking to discover the glaring faults that had led God to abandon them and their mission — thereby inculcating the still-recognisable American traits of communal self-obsession and soul-searching narcissism, according to the great Harvard scholar Perry Miller. Yet nearly four centuries later, it can still plausibly be argued that the global impact of American culture has been more significant than America’s direct attempts at conquest and colonial rule, which by traditional European (or Arab, or Chinese, or Mongol) standards have been relatively few and far-between.

America was the world’s first successful post-colonial state, separating itself from its European progenitors — who included not only Great Britain, the largest sponsor of colonies in North America, but also Holland, France and Spain. It was also the first state born of Enlightenment principles and aspirations, which were reflected in its democratic and anti-monarchical state structure, making it a uniquely welcoming home for immigrants of all cultural and religious — and eventually, racial — backgrounds. Because America was founded according to 18th-century Enlightenment principles, and not in 19th century romantic ideas of being rooted in the soil or in particular bloodlines, American nationalism has always been different from European-style nationalism. This is much to the displeasure of America’s home-grown blood-and-soil types, who look in vain to the national compact for invocations of native folk traditions or the privileging of English or European bloodlines or racial preferences or mandates for particular forms of worship. Unfortunately for them, these things don’t exist – because America was never that type of nation. Yes, America declared themselves to be one nation under God. Yet Jesus Christ, let alone the guidance or sovereignty of any particular Church established in his name, was notably absent from the country’s founding deliberations and documents.

America has also maintained a unique and particular affinity for the Jews. This affinity, which began with the Puritan colonists, who modeled their endeavor on the Old Testament Israelites, proclaimed themselves to have joined in a new covenant with the Israelite God, and taught their children to read and write Hebrew, was hardly just a passing metaphor. Absent the reality of God’s covenant with Israel, the Puritan mission to the American wilderness was meaningless. The American affinity for Jews, and with the Jewish relationship with the God of Israel, also extended itself to living Jewish refugees from European persecution, who arrived in the colonies in the mid 17th century, shortly after the Puritans, though they were strictly forbidden from settling in England; When the American nation was born, Jews were formally welcomed as citizens by George Washington, with open arms and none of the national soul-searching that accompanied the granting of citizenship to Jews in England or in revolutionary France, where it took the National Assembly three months of debate to finally decide the issue.

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The New Israel founded by the Puritans, to which the Founding Fathers gave life through the Enlightenment forms of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, quite deliberately separated itself from the European kingdoms and empires that came before it, and the nation-states that came after it, in that it was never defined by race, religion, or by the soil. American culture remains rooted precisely in the covenants and affinities of its founders, who made a determined break with Old Europe and its divisions and hatreds and form a new covenant, that might serve as an example to all of mankind.

Whether Americans choose to accept or reject the covenant made by their forebears is a question that every generation of Americans until now has always answered in the affirmative. That’s where American art and culture come from. Walt Whitman set out walking to discover America and his fellow Americans. Herman Melville sent Ishmael — if that was his name — to sea on a whaling ship. Mark Twain sent Huck Finn down the Mississippi River, with the success of his journey resting on his ability to escape from his father. Gatsby’s failure to banish the past may have been fated, but it meant his death — just as William Faulkner’s Quentin Compson’s attachment to his family past means his death. Augie March seizes his own life in his hands by leaving Chicago. Not even the most casual student of American culture can understand the future as anything other than the idol of every American, and the past as anything other than a trap.

Americans are free to reject the idea of a national covenant with God as nonsense and become more like the rest of the world, by hating Jews, celebrating strange Churches, embracing manufactured sectarian divisions on the basis of skin colour, religion, race and sexual preferences, and clinging to other ancient or post-colonial hatreds, whether in the name of the Left or the Right. But what both the anti-American factions of the American Left and Right should bear in mind is that you can’t have America without the covenant: the decision to reject the covenant, which gave birth to the idea of American exceptionalism, whether understood in its Puritan or Enlightenment forms, means the end of the American story.

It is indeed the adherence to and championing of the uniqueness of the American covenant that separates Donald Trump from both his ostensible allies such as Tucker Carlson and J.D. Vance on the Right, and his anti-exceptionalist opponents and critics such as Barack Obama and his progressive allies on the Left. If a renewal of American culture is indeed in the offing, it is likely to come from neither side in the present-day culture wars. Hilariously enough, it will come from the man at the top, leading by example.

As a patriotic American, and as a working journalist who believes in the sanctity of that role, I should note here that the only vote I’ve ever cast in a presidential election was for Willie Nelson, the country and western star and a symbol of reconciliation between rednecks and hippies. Still, I was eager to hear what Trump would say. To be more accurate, given my level of inebriation in sub-freezing Montana weather, with snow-globe snow gently falling outside the windows of a local bar, I was eager to mix the some whiskey with the tonalities of America’s greatest living bullshit artist and teller of tall tales. Trump’s voice is a powerful source of connection to the American literary and comic tradition, going back to the Rat Pack and to Mark Twain. I was ready to hear his magnificent instrument resonate with the promise of a better future, a future filled with laughter — and joy, even.

At 3am, West Palm Beach time, Trump’s large family stood with him onstage looking chipper and attractive. They were joined there by the celebrity validators that made Trump’s third run for the White House seem less angry and more inclusive than his prior one-man shows.

At 78, Trump’s relentless pitchman’s energy is at once diminished, and at the same more genial. And no wonder. Since his loss, in 2020, when he claimed that the election was stolen from him — and his opponents claimed that he tried to seize power through illegal means — Trump had been subjected to a whole-of-society assault by the American elite that would have killed most men 20 years younger, including those who don’t eat cheeseburgers most days for lunch. After 116 indictments, an armed raid on his home, the jailing of his business associates, and the looming threat of bankruptcy, followed by two and even three in-person rallies a day for the better part of a year, which led to him being shot in the head by a would-be assassin, the fact that Trump is still standing upright, let alone greeting a crowd as President-elect, is clearly a miracle – the biggest miracle since the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ, I can hear Trump saying. Now, he is about to speak. The TV above the bar remains silent.

“Honey, have you ever been in a bar before?” the bartender is asking me. For the past 10 minutes or so, we’ve been politely going back and forth about whether she can turn up the volume on the bar’s television set. All I can hear around me as Trump starts to speak is the noise of a late Tuesday night at the Wagon Wheel.

Sure, I’ve been in plenty of bars before, I answer. “Well, then you know that politics is a subject that men get angry over, and I don’t want that in my bar,” the waitress answers matter-of-factly. “You can read the captions on the TV.”

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As sensible as her precautions might seem, there’s an undertone to her replies that reminds me that I am in a town, and not in the countryside. Even out here in the West, in a solid red state that epitomises cowboy culture, it is the divide between urban and exurban places, not the division between so-called red and blue states, that is culturally defining. People living in Brooklyn Heights, or in Austin, Texas or in Missoula, Montana or in Grand Rapids, Iowa, all tend to have more in common with each other than they do with people living even a mere 20 miles away.

“For fuck’s sake, this is history,” I suggest, as I watch Trump’s lips moving. “It’s not politics. Everyone can all put their prejudices aside for five minutes s and hear the man.” She purses her lips, and signals it’s a no-go. Then she offers me a free seltzer.

“We must protect our geniuses, protect our super-geniuses”, the caption-writer translates, as Trump’s lips form grandiloquent and hilarious phrases introducing Elon Musk and his love for rockets. “We have so few of them.”

Trump is clearly one. He’s an American genius, an original of a type that began with P.T. Barnum, and also includes Elon Musk. But neither Barnum nor Musk could ever become President twice, and defeat the entire American power structure. I wish to God I could hear him speak. After overcoming 100+ indictments, and having his X account revoked, the man deserves to have his moment here, in this bar.

I don’t need to hear Trump’s stunned-looking critics in the Party commentariat speak, though. The expressions on their pallid faces say it all. They are reckoning with the extent of their loss, which is turn related to their collective sense of self-importance — which is belied both by tonight’s result and by their viewership numbers. Having cratered public trust in their profession over the past decade by routinely lying to their audience on behalf of the government, which they identified in turn with the Democratic Party, the country’s self-identified defenders of democracy can fume all they want about Trump’s authoritarian, anti-democratic, fascist, Hitlerian leanings. The rest of America is as deaf to their blather as I am.

Praising Elon Musk, the country’s most successful technologist, Trump looks more like an avuncular Caribbean vacation package or waterbed salesman than a would-be Hitler. Meanwhile, party hacks like Joy Reid and the political consultants turned “commentators” like David Axelrod, along with supposed “straight news” types like Jake Tapper of CNN, who had all long ago become indistinguishable from each other, by virtue of drinking the Party Kool-Aid are waving their hands at the cameras like they were calling for smelling salts. But once lost, the trust of an audience is hard to win back.

Trump has also lost a step or two himself. His speeches, once gorgeous arias of invective, innuendo and insult comedy, delivered with the snappy timing of a Vegas Rat Pack headliner, have been transformed into rambling arabesques, like the musings of a slightly dotty family patriarch at the Thanksgiving table. Let us bow our heads, while Loopy Uncle Donald tells us about the deal he made with a Saudi Prince on a golf course. Then everyone can eat more pumpkin pie.

Trump had also learned a trick or two along the way, though. He graciously shares the stage, and allows the importance and accomplishments of others to validate his own role as MC. His timing clearly couldn’t have been better. Five years of Covid laws, a stagnant economy, direct and indirect government censorship of social media, official lying and gaslighting on every subject from trans surgeries to the efficacy of masking to the startling numbers of illegal immigrants entering the country to the spectacle of a dottering Joe Biden being barely able to remember his own name, had left most of the country dispirited and ready for change.

As the evening ends, Trump and the political movement he founded will likely control not just the White House but also the Senate, the House, and also the Supreme Court, giving Trump an actual, real-world chance to fulfill his mandate to Make America Great Again. Even though, after a decade of near-constant repetition of the slogan by adherents and detractors, no one can say with any real certainty what it now means.

* * *

As it turns out, the American people are still allowed to vote, regardless of whether their betters decry their choices as racist, sexist, short-sighted, and above all anti-democratic. It’s a paradox that the country’s genius-level elites routinely fail to acknowledge, because they are all profoundly in agreement. We must protect our democracy from those evil anti-democratic forces, American voters, who vote for Donald Trump against the expert guidance of their betters, meaning us.

Meanwhile, the lurching of an increasingly overbearing and at the same time increasingly anarchic and incompetent American state had managed to alarm many Americans who were previously more alarmed by Trump. Over the past weeks, they have been turning out in larger numbers than anyone had imagined — defying the expressed preferences and instructions of the American’ elite’s chief tutelary figure, Barack Obama, who had campaigned very publicly and hard for Kamala Harris, often overshadowing the candidate herself. Obama’s role in the Harris campaign was truthfully less strange than the fact that the former President somehow remained in Washington after his time in the White House was over, instead taking meetings in his Kalorama mansion, which is hardly the most valuable entry in his bulging portfolio of luxury properties — which also includes high Gilded Age mansions in Hawaii and Martha’s Vineyard. But it was surely the most important, serving as the centre of his unprecedented Shadow Presidency.

As the leader of the Democratic Party, Obama was hardly a pretender to power in Washington. Rather, between 2008 and the evening of 5 November 2024, he was usually the foremost power in the land. After serving two elected terms in the White House, Obama then set up and captained the so-called “Resistance” to Trump — an activity that was contrary to all prior American norms and practices. After Trump left, Obama stayed in Washington and continued his role as unelected Party Leader during what had been advertised as the Biden Presidency.

Obama’s method of avoiding scrutiny from the pliant DC press was entirely in character, alternately drawing back into the shadows and then, out of whatever ego weakness, announcing that he was the true mover of events. Free from normative oversight or responsibility, he and his retainers could also avoid answering questions about the size or sources of his personal fortune, which was rumoured to amount to somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion. As a private citizen, Obama didn’t have to answer questions. He could have it both ways — state power, with no public responsibility.

Until he misstepped. By compelling Biden to withdraw in favour of Harris, who turned out to be an even worse candidate than a senile old man who had begun to resemble a badly taxidermied deer, Obama broke the unspoken agreement that had put him beyond scrutiny. Disappearing the sitting President from the Democratic Party ticket against his will, for reasons that were obviously contrary to what the press had been telling Americans about Biden’s incredibly acute mental functioning up, and replacing him with a candidate that no one in the party had actually voted for, required some sort of comment, however brief. It made it impossible, if only for a week or two, to maintain the fiction that Obama was simply living in Washington DC while staying out of politics. If Biden was senile, then who was actually running the country? Who had enough clout to order the President’s removal from the ticket?

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The answer in both cases was Obama. And now he was on the hook not only for Kamala Harris, but retroactively for the more general mess that he and his operatives had helped to make of the country. Everywhere from Harvard University, his alma mater, where he helped install a repeat plagiarist as the University’s President, to the Middle East, which went up in flames the moment he was able to re-animate his Iran Deal, which appeared to be even stupider — if not as expensive — as George W. Bush’s determination to transform Afghanistan and Iraq into Western-style democratic societies at the point of a gun, the Party Leader’s Midas Touch-in-reverse was evident, even if no one ever breathed a single word of criticism.

Yet Americans, of all races and creeds, felt themselves to be living in a dystopian version of Alice in Wonderland, controlled by an unseen hand — and they didn’t like it. If the elite pollsters and expert predictors who had failed to foresee a Trump win had familiarised themselves with American history, instead of parroting the talking points of Obama and his operatives, they would have seen a country eager for a renewal of the freedoms that the vast majority of Americans embrace as their birthright.

Seeing Americans as one people, with a common culture and character, shaped by a common history, is not something that America’s new elites know how to do, though. From kindergarten on, they are taught otherwise. Ivy League universities, the crucible in which the new class has been forged, base admissions and hiring decisions not on measures of objective performance, but on their ranking in the ever-shifting hierarchies of Party-sanctioned identity groups. The ability to sort Americans into bureaucratic categories like BIPOC, MENA, LGBTQ+ and other alphabet soup constructions is in fact the defining skill of Obama-era elites. It signifies mastery of in-group codes that help the Democratic Party manage its own top-down constituencies, which are regimented by political operatives and NGO organisers, paid for by billionaire foundations, and embodied in bureaucratic regulations, executive orders, census categories and other legally-binding schemes meant to overcome historical American notions of equality. That’s how the party machine operates.

Now, in one night, the Obama machine, which he built on the model of the Chicago Democratic Party machine, and which he used to run the country, including the prestige institutions and the media, through a combination of bureaucratic capture and social pressure, accentuated by control of large tech platforms, was finally melting down. No wonder the press was in shock. None of the lines that they had been given could be reconciled with the numbers onscreen.

A reckoning will surely come. At the very least, the time has now arrived for Barack Obama to leave Washington and exit American politics, now that his Shadow Presidency — which proved to be even more counter-productive and chaotic than Trump’s first term in office — has gone down in flames.

Meanwhile, the gap between what America’s elites believe, and what the rest of the country believes, has never been wider, probably not since the late 19th century. Back then, Gilded Age America was ruled by a tight group of tycoons and their retainers who positioned themselves as the heirs to the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, the President and the General who together led the Civil War. The further the Republican Party traveled from the Civil War, the more the busts of Lincoln and Grant resembled window-dressing for the extraordinary fortunes of a new oligarchy that traveled in private trains, summered in Newport, and bought every available Old Master painting in Europe to decorate their lavish houses. Economically and morally, the so-called Robber Barons — Morgans, Rockefellers, Goulds, Fricks, Carnegies, Whitneys, Harrimans — had an easy time of it, enjoying the benefits of cheap immigrant labour while flattering themselves as the rightful heirs of the Party that ended slavery. With the exception of Carnegie, a self-made Scotsman and innovative industrialist who gave away his fortune to establish America’s system of public libraries, history doesn’t remember them kindly.

The Democratic Party that Bill and Hillary Clinton built in the Nineties, and Barack Obama then took in a decidedly more radical direction after 2012, won’t be remembered kindly by Americans either. The father of the modern Democratic Party, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was the country’s greatest political leader during what became known as the American Century. Roosevelt kept the country going during the Great Depression, and set it on the path to victory in the Second World War while creating a social safety net for the poor. Remarkably, every American President up until Bill Clinton in 1992 was either a protegee of Roosevelt or at least a private in his army.

The political alliance between urban ethnic machine politicians, including black urban political leaders, and Southern whites that FDR led also undercut the power of the Wasp class, successors to the New England Puritans, who dominated America’s class system and the country’s economy following the Civil War. By curbing their cultural, political, and economic influence, Roosevelt made possible the rise of the American middle class, which made America great, and also more equal.

The Clintons’ embrace of Wall Street and of international trade treaties was the window through which America’s old elites — rooted both in the Northeast as well as in San Francisco — climbed back into history. The China trade flourished, as did Democratic Party’s new Wall Street clients — at the expense of the Party’s traditional working-and-middle class constituencies. Obama brought Silicon Valley’s formerly libertarian-oriented founders on board the gravy train by promising them protection from populists like Bernie Sanders and from his own crew of high-end Chicago shakedown artists. In return, they would pay taxes to the party through campaign and NGO contributions and DEI hiring. Through this new political wiring, Obama completed the transformation of FDR’s Democrats into Gilded Age Republicans.

It will be hard for Donald Trump to top that. But maybe he will. Maybe Elon Musk will entirely revamp the Federal government. Maybe he will actually colonise Mars. Meanwhile, if Trump understands one thing, it’s that America is not Europe, or Asia, or Iraq, or Brazil. American elites come and go, while the capacity for sudden, radical, wide-eyed self-invention and leaps of innovation remain the country’s defining trait.

What outsiders tend to miss is that America was never meant to be stable. It is and has always been an inferno, the epitome of the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of creative destruction. The wonder and freedom and heartbreak of American life is that, sooner or later, everything is consumed in the furnace. For all his wealth and success, Elon Musk’s children may worship other gods. His grandchildren may end up in a trailer park, smoking meth. McKinsey consultants with Harvard degrees may wind up unemployed or selling bottled war. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the country’s most eminent environmental lawyer and the closest thing the Democratic Party has to royalty, may become an antivaccine heretic, be broadly mocked and humiliated by the elite and by the less imaginative members of his own family, run for President, endorse Donald Trump, take on the Big Pharma and Big Ag, and Make America Healthy Again. Or not. All anyone can say for sure is that attempts to game the American system are doomed to failure.

The bigger lesson being that America is just too big — and too wild, and too destructive, and rooted in the idea of individual freedom — for any self-styled “elite” to ride the horse for very long, without being thrown off.

The challenge the Democrats face now is whether the public will ultimately be beguiled by their razzle-dazzle, or whether the effect of making so many audacious, hard-to-swallow moves in so short a period of time will be that none of them are ultimately believable. But that is a problem for another day. With Donald Trump looking like a bona fide hero, and their own candidate looking like a corpse, the Democrats had their backs up against the wall. They left Chicago with a spring in their step, their heads held high, and a new Queen.

Once the nets slung across the ceiling of the United Center were finally empty, after burying the likely next President of the United States, Kamala Harris, her running mate Tim Walz, and their respective families beneath a giant pile of red, white and blue balloons, it was clear to everyone in the arena that they had witnessed political magic. It wasn’t Harris’s acceptance speech, which was a solid B or B+, with most of that grade being awarded for simply fulfilling its purpose. By not being an obvious failure, the speech plausibly established Harris as a fresh character who might, maybe, if everyone closes their eyes all together and wishes on a star, transcend the scorched-earth narratives spun by Joe Biden and Donald Trump — two ancient political dinosaurs who probably remember the birth of the sun.

The truth is that Harris was there, too — having in fact been serving as Biden’s Vice President for the past three and a half years. But no matter. No one really holds Harris responsible for anything, the Democrats are betting, in part because she left so little visible imprint on events. The fact that few Americans have any real idea of who Harris is means that she could plausibly be branded as whatever people say they want right now, while Donald Trump, an ex-President whose imprint on the public consciousness is indelible, could be framed as the man responsible for all the bitterness and bad feeling that the country hopes to transcend through the magic of — what is her name again? — Kamala Harris.

It was telling that on the last night of the convention, the script doctors were still writing bits in which small children taught the audience how to pronounce their candidate’s name: “Kah-Mah-Lah”. The absence of name recognition this late in the game is a problem, yes — but is one that can be solved with a big-enough media megaphone. Luckily for them, the Party owns one.

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So, who is Kamala Harris again? Looking at her face on the United Center Jumbotron, one of the first things one might reasonably notice is that, nearing 60, she is, objectively, a strikingly beautiful woman, in a profession in which neither men nor women are particularly known for their physical charms. Saying that someone in Washington is attractive is like saying someone in Hollywood is a deep thinker. A heavy discount is assumed. As the old chestnut goes: “Washington is Hollywood for ugly people.”

The truly remarkable thing about Harris’s face, though, is how unfamiliar it remains to most Americans. The American political system is a machine for rocketing obscurities like Arkansas governor Bill Clinton or first-term US Senator Barack Obama or reality game show host Donald Trump to the heights of global power, but the reality of wall-to-wall media exposure means that each of these figures, or at least their brands, was a known quantity by the time they were nominated. For the better part of the past century, every major party candidate has slogged through the psychic and practical tests of two solid years of speeches and fundraising events with mega-rich donors and political bosses and ordinary union members, then winning a majority of delegates in hard-fought national primaries punctuated by three or five or seven lengthy debates with dwindling numbers of other candidates, before stepping out in the front of the general public as the Next New Thing.

Kamala Harris has done very little of that. Her abortive 2020 presidential campaign was a flop, and she dropped out of the race before a single vote was cast. Added to the ticket at the apparent behest of the Democratic Party’s eternal leader, Barack Obama — reportedly over the strong objections of Jill Biden — Harris had a single, forgettable vice-presidential debate with Mike Pence, which did neither one of them any favours. Thanks to Covid, the rest of the Biden-Harris campaign was nearly void of public appearances; upon taking office, Harris was probably the least-familiar vice president in modern American history.

The candidate’s past four years as Vice President have done little to make her more familiar to people living outside of Washington DC. A flurry of welcoming attention at the beginning of Biden’s Presidency was followed by a thankless appointment as the Administration’s “Border Tsar”. The disaster that followed was greeted with a series of negative profiles in reliably liberal outlets, which suggested that Harris was a capricious, unlikeable boss who had trouble retaining staff and was out of her depth in a policy role. Rumour also had it that she drank during the day. The Vice President was then shunted out of the spotlight — under the assumption that further large-scale public exposure was unlikely to do either her or Biden any favours.

That was true as recently as the end of June. When whispers about Biden’ cognitive decline became louder in the wake of his disastrous June debate performance against Donald Trump, whispers about dumping Harris from the ticket, which had circulated earlier in Biden’s presidency, began to gain more momentum. Some party figures began talking about an open convention, at which a familiar, tested figure like Hillary Clinton might ignite the enthusiasm of the party faithful.

Instead, through a mysterious mechanism that can be found nowhere in the US Constitution or Democratic Party by-laws, it was Joe Biden, the sitting President of the United States, who was forced off the ticket in July, only a month before the convention, which just happened to be held in Barack Obama’s political hometown of Chicago. Having an open convention was judged to be undesirable, or impossible. Instead, Harris would be the Party’s nominee, and the convention delegates — whose choice of candidate ostensibly reflects the democratic will of the Party — would rubber-stamp her candidacy by Zoom, avoiding any possibility of messiness inside the convention hall in late August.

As far as marriages go, the match between Harris and the Democrats was more of the five-week shotgun wedding variety than a romance for the ages. And with the wedding coming up fast, the Party’s new bride needed a makeover. In the three weeks before the convention, Harris was duly transformed from a surly, almost forgotten loser in DC power games to a shining new star whose watchword was “joy”. But all of that was a prelude to the great unknown of Chicago. Would there be riots? Would Kamala laugh in a way that alarmed the nation? How to squeeze so many plot reversals into such a short period of time, without fracturing the space-time continuum?

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As for the question of who Kamala Harris truly is, the answer was that even the overwhelming majority of her fervent supporters couldn’t care less. Before July, there were no fervent Kamala Harris supporters. In reality, Democrats aren’t voting for Harris, though they may learn to love her over time; they are voting for the Democrats, which is a powerful political vertical that can draw upon the best image-making talent in the country. The goal that the entire party could agree on was beating Donald Trump, which was the thing that Harris’s acceptance speech was engineered to achieve.

The first section of that speech was a masterpiece, which Harris inhabited perfectly. Written in a classic American voice, at once soaring and plainspoken, and inflected by newer immigrant stories, it told of Harris being raised along with her younger sister Maya in a working-class neighbourhood in gritty Oakland by their tough-minded doctor-mother who travelled all the way from India to America to cure cancer. There were touching memories of moving trucks, before the family found a home in a middle-class neighbourhood where a host of friendly neighbours stood ready to help out whenever Mom worked late.

No doubt the details of this story are all verifiable. But as an autobiographical narrative, they served to elide as much of Harris’s upbringing as they revealed — the early estrangement between her parents, culminating in a bitter divorce and custody battle, which was followed by her mother moving Harris and her sister from Oakland to, of all places, Montreal, where the official language is French. There was little mention of her African-American heritage, which the Party chose to emphasise through her sister Maya’s more performative blackness and hairstyle. What happened to her relationship with her father after she was a toddler? Are they at least on speaking turns? Didn’t her mother die of cancer, instead of curing it?

As prime-time soap opera, the Harris story still has some kinks to work out. From the cheap seats at the top of the arena, though, it was possible to imagine during the first quarter of the speech that one was watching history being made, like during Obama’s inaugural Convention speech in 2004, or his acceptance speech in 2008. We were watching something new, or at least the unveiling of a promising new product line, targeted particularly at the Party’s core demographic of single women, with growth potential among married women, too — Obama Lite.

Then it all came crashing down, thanks to whoever on the script-writing committee decided to abandon positivity and recycle old attack lines against Donald Trump, which is the type of work that is best left to surrogates at the wedding party. No one wants to hear the bride herself go negative. Harris’s manner audibly changed while delivering the attack lines, and her voice became unpleasantly insinuating and cynical. The writing itself was lazy, and made the candidate seem unpleasantly like a hack. The spell was broken.

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After digging herself into a hole, Harris then managed to climb out, by passionately, and with real feeling, endorsing both Israel’s right to real security and unlimited American backing and armaments, and, at the very same time, the absolute right of Palestinians to freedom and self-determination, presumably in a free and independent Palestinian state. That both these miracles can be achieved at the same time, and in fact make each other possible, is one of the magic formulas of American Middle East diplomacy that have no apparent basis in reality. But for a moment, Harris made the pairing seem convincing. More importantly, in doing so, she conveyed strength, passion and toughness.

One takeaway for the Party’s script writers should be that Harris is at her best when conveying strength. She sounds like a warrior. That’s because she’s a prosecutor at heart rather than a social justice advocate or a deep thinker. Conversely, she sounds worst when she seems cynical about the law, which is a professional risk of being a prosecutor, or when she tries to explain geopolitics, or spout poetry. Leave that stuff to Obama, who held the crowd in the palm of his hand on Tuesday night by uttering bromides about ending political division that might have been recycled from decade-old National Public Radio shows. It worked, though, because Obama wields his stiletto in the dark, and his level of political skill and feel is off the charts.

All told, the Chicago Miracle, as it will doubtlessly be known, was a reality-fracturing magic act, akin to seeing your grandmother get up from the dinner table and flawlessly replicate Olga Korbut’s famous “Doom Loop” from the 1972 Olympics. Less than two months ago, the Democrats looked to be in bad shape — and that was before Trump was shot at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and responded by pumping his fist in the air and yelling “Fight!”. That was magic, too.

Now a greater magic act has happened: Joe Biden is gone, and the three and a half years of his failed Presidency are gone along with him. As speaker after speaker emphasised, Trump represents the past, while the Party represents the future. Trump represents himself, while the Party represents us. The rhetorical opposition is an effective one. Magically, the Democratic candidate plausibly represents change and the people fighting against power, when the Democrats themselves are in fact the party in power.

The crowd helped, too. The green-haired gender gremlins, antifa rioters masked in keffiyehs, and accusatory and divisive racial rhetoric — all of that was magically banished. It was as if someone somewhere had flipped a switch, or threatened to cut off the checks to the Party’s radical organiser class, and made the Democrats the party of normal Americans again. Everywhere you looked in the United Center on Thursday night, there were Americans of all races and creeds waving the American flag and breaking out into spontaneous chants of “USA! USA!”. Moreover, the chants seemed entirely sincere. Yes, the people in the hall would dutifully follow the party wherever it led, but it turns out that most of them are more comfortable expressing pride in their country and waving the flag than they are in calling for abolishing the police or demanding that public-school children use genderless bathrooms. Maybe all the weirdness and seeming insanity of the past eight years was just a bad dream, or the product of some kind of Right-wing AI deepfake manipulation.

Or maybe the Party image-makers, faced with the sudden disintegration of the agreed-upon pseudo-reality in which Joe Biden was running the country so successfully that he was on the verge of becoming the greatest American President since FDR, used the awesome machinery at their disposal to construct a new pseudo-reality in the space of five weeks, and then jammed it into everyone’s brains. Yes, we lied to you non-stop for the past three and half years about who was running the country, and what we were actually up to — but cross our hearts, we are now telling you the truth. Kamala Harris will make tough decisions about a more compassionate and inclusive merit-based American future of opportunity while defending freedom around the globe Also, she’s a beauty queen. Also, we love football.

Faced with such wonders, the brain can’t help but rebel against familiar sensory inputs. Did I just see that? Of course not. Except, it’s right there in front of me. Is the world that I can see, feel, and touch real? Or is it simply a guided projection, engineered by unseen and potentially malevolent forces. And if nothing is real, why not believe in what everyone else also wants to believe in. Perhaps the safest choice, under the circumstances, is to hover somewhere between belief and disbelief while hoping that the people in charge of the big show come up with an even newer, better script once Donald Trump is finally gone.

Lost in the days of press attacks that followed was the fact that both Trump and his critics were stuck in an outdated American electoral calculus of identity politics grounded in race. In fact, the key to a Harris win in November won’t be the support of black Americans or Indian Americans or even “brown Americans” — though she has identified at various points in her political life as all three. Rather, Harris is a flesh-and-blood avatar of a much more numerous, powerful, and radically dissatisfied demographic: never-married and childless American women between the ages of 20 and 45.

Aside from mass immigration, the most striking demographic development of the past decade is the large cohort of American women who have embraced the helping hand of the state in place of the increasingly suspect protections of fathers, brothers, boyfriends and husbands. In doing so, they have become the Democratic Party’s most enthusiastic and decisive constituency. According to a recent Pew survey, these Brides Of The State (BOTS) support Democrats over Republicans by a whopping 72-24%, providing the Party with its entire advantage in both national and most state elections. Married American women, by contrast, support Republicans by 50-45, which more or less matches the pro-Republican margin in every other age and gender demographic. Without the overwhelming support of BOTS for the Democrats, in other words, America would be a solid-majority Republican country in which Trump would win a likely electoral landslide.

The Democratic Party’s political engineers first sensed the centrality of BOTS to the Party’s power base during Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012. The Obama campaign then duly rolled out a storybook ad called “the Life of Julia”, which explained how Obama’s policies, from Head Start to Obamacare to contraception coverage to Medicare reform, would care for Julia from graduation through motherhood and finally to the grave without her needing to form a human relationship with anyone outside the government.

Julia’s life was defined by her interactions with the state, with each step of her life tied to a particular government programme. She is able to pursue her chosen career as a web designer because, at age 27, “her health insurance is required to cover birth control and preventive care, letting Julia focus on her work rather than worry about her health”. At age 31, Julia changes her mind about birth control and “decides to have a child” — a decision that apparently involves no partner aside from the state. The resulting progeny, Zachary, attends a Race to the Top Federally-funded public school — which allows Julia to start her own business. At age 67, Julia retires with the financial support of Social Security and Medicare, and spends her partner-less golden years volunteering in a community garden.

While the Julia campaign was a subject of some mockery in 2012, the Obama campaign was in fact ahead of the curve. When Joe Biden was elected in 2020, he made the fictional “Linda” the avatar of his “Build Back Better” campaign. More blue-collar than Julia, in keeping with Biden’s lunch-pail Democrat persona, Linda earned $40,000 annually working at a manufacturing facility in Peoria, Illinois — an income that was a little more than $10,000 short of the city’s median salary. However, Linda had no need for a second income in her home, thanks to the government — which gave her $3,600 annually in the form of a Build Back Better tax credit. Her son, Leo, who like Zachary appears to have been fathered by an anonymous bureaucratic sperm donor, began universal pre-K by age three and enjoyed a free educational ride subsidised by the state — all of which enabled Linda to keep working and Zachary to obtain a “good-paying, union job as a wind turbine technician”. The saga wistfully concludes by describing how, later in life, Linda needs home and hearing care. But fortunately, help is at hand: “Thanks to President Biden’s plan,” it adds, “Linda can access affordable health care through Medicare, and Leo is able to afford at-home elder care for his mom.”

Kamala Harris can fairly be seen as the flesh-and-blood electoral successor to Julia and Linda. Childless, she remained unmarried throughout her professional career until a decade ago, when, aged 49, she tied the knot with a lawyer named Doug Emhoff while preparing her run for the US Senate.

Both Harris’s demographic profile and electoral appeal are, therefore, arguably quite different from the last woman that the Democratic Party nominated to take on Trump. For all those who derided Bill and Hillary Clinton’s marriage as a business deal, it was hard to question the reality that Hillary Clinton was a classic Seventies feminist who was entirely serious about the idea of having it all: she stayed married to her law-school sweetheart through very public ups and downs for nearly a half-century while raising a child and enjoying a notable public career. By contrast, Harris first attracted public notice as the mistress of flamboyant San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, a married man more than twice her age who rewarded her with an expensive car and public office — a relationship which in turn became a stepping-stone to other public jobs. Julia and Linda, take note.

Harris’s life and career are, therefore, clearly representative of a demographic shift that is remaking the Democratic Party and American society as a whole. An astonishing 22% of women aged 40 or higher in America have never been married, which is the highest percentage since data was collected in 1900. The rise in these numbers is both recent and startling. Throughout the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties, the percentage of American women who remained unmarried by age 40, as Harris was, had remained constant at around 6%. The percentage of black women who have never married by 40 is markedly higher, hovering at 46%. The overwhelming majority of these women vote for Democrats.

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The ballot box is hardly the only place that this new demographic is making its unique preferences felt. BOTS have demanded and received not only the female-targeted government grants, educational and jobs programmes, and social safety nets that benefited Julia and Linda and their singular progeny, but also a much broader set of social engineering measures that are fundamentally reshaping American mores. Since the Nineties, young American women have been positioned as the primary beneficiaries of neo-Victorian speech and conduct codes that have fundamentally transformed the behaviour of men and women everywhere from classrooms to workplaces to bars.

BOTS are also the primary beneficiaries of government affirmative action programmes in education and hiring. In fact, in the roughly 60 years since Civil Rights programmes to reduce racial and gender discrimination were introduced in higher education, women have surpassed men in earning four-year degrees, while black and Latino students remain underrepresented.

But have these efforts made BOTS happy? The answer, according to young women, is no. In fact, the demographic that has been the most highly socialised into core progressive values and would seem to benefit most directly from bureaucratic intervention in their lives is also the most miserable group in America. A startling 56% of liberal American women aged 18-29 have been diagnosed with a mental-health condition (the percentage for conservative women is 21%).

What is even more striking is that the enormous happiness gap between liberal BOTS and their conservative peers has only existed for the past decade or so. Analysing an NIH dataset of high school seniors, the researchers Catherine Gimbrone, Lisa Bates, Seth Prins, and Katherine Keyes found that, prior to 2012, when the Obama campaign rolled out Julia, there was no meaningful difference between male or female or liberal and conservative high-school students in internalising symptoms (depressive affect). “We hypothesise that increasing exposure to politicised events has contributed to these trends in adolescent internalising symptoms, and that effects may be differential by political beliefs and sociodemographic characteristics,” the researchers concluded. Noting that liberal female adolescents were by far the most depressed, they suggested that the new ideological lenses through which adolescents were viewing the political climate were affecting their mental well-being.

When the Gimbone study came out, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg rejected that view. “Barack Obama was re-elected in 2012. In 2013, the Supreme Court extended gay marriage rights,” she wrote, concluding: “It was hard to draw a direct link between that period’s political events and teenage depression, which in 2012 started an increase that has continued, unabated, until today.” The real culprit, Goldberg suggested, was social media and iPhones. Yet she didn’t explain why social media would have such disparate effects on young women and young men, or why its effects would differ according to political viewpoints.

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By blaming technology, Goldberg was clearly avoiding the implication that the victory of liberal ideas itself was helping to make young women miserable — a point made by the feminist writer Jill Filipovic: “Just about everything researchers understand about resilience and mental well-being suggests that people who feel like they are the chief architects of their own life… are vastly better off than people whose default position is victimisation, hurt, and a sense that life simply happens to them and they have no control over their response.”

If Filipovic’s point is persuasive, the Democratic Party’s message for the past decade has been exactly the opposite. Instead of promoting the goal of mental health in young women, and using unbiased research to determine what in fact makes women happy, progressives have instead been bent on implementing a set of evermore-intrusive top-down social policies that substitute state intervention and protection for the fellowship of human partners of whatever gender.

From the Party’s point of view, at least, the unhappiness and depression of younger, never-married women, which produces outcomes like never getting married or having children, may be less of a bug than a feature: that BOTS are both unhappy and dependent is what makes them a uniquely valuable energy source for the party. Conversely, adopting policies and encouraging social attitudes and outlooks that make women happier and less depressed and anxious would in fact negate the Party’s most significant electoral advantage, and thereby undermine its power — depriving the Party of its most loyal voters and foot-soldiers.

Paradoxically, then, the Party’s interest is in telling young women that they are miserable and alone without providing solutions that promote personal happiness, and then transmuting the resultant depression and anxiety into anger, which it then utilises as political fuel for empathy-based social justice campaigns from Ferguson to Gaza. This strategy, whether cunning or simply ad hoc, hardly benefits women, though — either individually or as a class. Instead, it undermines their sense of personal agency, while denying them the tools that any human needs to make themselves happy. That humans find happiness and satisfaction in community is as true for women as it is for men, if not more so. Yet only 35% of American liberals report being a member of a church or place of worship, and 37% of American liberals are currently married — a social arrangement that has been shown to have broad benefits for the mental and physical health of both adults and children at all stages of life (56% of conservatives are married). The idea that the state can make up this apparent happiness gap with Build Back Better grants and assertions of false consciousness on the part of conservative women is a chimera.

These numbers are also likely to get worse. According to Gallup, nearly 40% of young liberal women now identify as LGBTQ — a startling rise in a demographic that was presumed to be relatively constant across most societies over time, regardless of what people told pollsters. Partly as a result, fertility rates in the US, which had long hovered around replacement level (2.1 lifetime births per woman), have plummeted since 2008, to a new European-style low of 1.61. However, this sudden demographic sea-change does not appear to be the result of Americans not wanting to have children. Last year, the share of Americans who said that having three or more kids is the ideal hit its highest point since 1971, at 45%. In the simplest sense, young American women want what their mothers had — but have no idea how to get it.

Why is that? While one might blame everything from the internet to plastics in the water to the exploitation of female misery by the Democratic Party (even if some real share of that misery is caused by anti-family conservative social policy), a more concrete answer may be the impact of not having fathers, particularly on young girls. Here, too, Kamala Harris’s biography — she was raised largely by her mother, who moved her to Montreal from California, where her father still bitterly complains about being separated from his daughters — maps directly onto the larger social turmoil.

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When Americans do have children, they now do so out of wedlock more often than ever before in American history, with 69% of black children being born outside of marriage, 52% of Hispanics (up from 34% in 1990), and 28% of whites (up from 15% in 1990). What this means in practice is that an increasingly large percentage of American children are now growing up without regular contact with their fathers — thanks in some large part to the persistence of the “tender years” doctrine that gives mothers custody of young children.

The numbers here, too, are startling. In 1960, 89% of minor children lived with their fathers. The number in today’s America is 73%, with nearly half of African American fathers — like Kamala’s father Donald Harris, an economics professor at Stanford — living apart from their children. There is a plethora of studies that show that children from fatherless homes are more likely to be poor, become involved in drug and alcohol abuse, drop out of school, and suffer from health and emotional problems, with boys more likely to become involved in crime and girls more likely to suffer from anxiety and depression.

One under-appreciated reason why increasing numbers of young American women are confused and miserable, and failing to make choices that promote happiness later in life, may therefore be that increasing numbers of American children grow up without regular contact with their fathers. And contrary to popular stereotypes, the effects of paternal absence, especially in early childhood, are particularly negative for young girls. “In both self-reported and parent-reported data, we found a three-way interaction of gender, age, and parental divorce, indicating that with increasing age, parental divorce became more strongly associated with depressive symptoms among girls, but not boys,” one Dutch study has found. “These results suggest that girls with divorced parents are at particularly high risk to develop depressive symptoms during adolescence.” Subsequent studies have further localised the negative effects on girls to paternal absence in early childhood.

If governments want to stem the tide of misery among young women, which is affecting everything from voting to birth rates, they may wish to do more to keep fathers around — both inside marriages and also in cases of divorce. On the other hand, the Democrats might not win as many elections.

Trump’s heroic response to an attempt on his life is a reminder of the extent to which, even in our technologically-mediated universe, the arts of narrative manipulation and framing only reach so far. At the core of every story is a human being whose character, as expressed through his actions, will be judged favourably or not by his or her fellow humans — such stories being especially important in societies where people elect their leaders, as shown by the rapturous reception that Trump received at the opening of the party’s National Convention in Milwaukee.

Trump’s instincts under fire prove him to possess the courage of a leader, however dubious other aspects of his character may be. It is fair to surmise that there isn’t a single head of state on earth, from Emmanuel Macron to Vladimir Putin to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who wouldn’t trade a large part of their kingdoms for a photograph of themselves standing bloodied and defiant beneath their national flag, having taken an assassin’s bullet and lived. That kind of political charisma is impossible to counterfeit.     

The images of the bloodied but defiant Trump also clearly underlined the contrast between a man who at 78 retains the physical vigour and presence of mind to take a bullet in front of a crowd, then get off the ground and shape a lasting image in the moment, and his doddering rival. Now, the sport of reading the Beltway tea leaves to determine which party figurehead might head the Democratic ticket in November has been replaced by inklings of real panic. 

Even worse for the Democrats is Trump’s ability to seize the most valuable ground in American politics: the future. If most peoples on earth live their collective national lives somewhere between the past and the present, Americans have always been different. Their idea of their past is generally shaky and non-binding. Instead, Americans exist between the present and the future, which is why they do things like invent digital technology and the iPhone and send men to the moon and Mars.

In the 24 hours following the assassination attempt, Trump seized the future with two bold moves. The first was attracting the public endorsement of Elon Musk, the technologist and builder who also happens to be the single wealthiest man in America. By uniting his charisma with Musk’s, Trump showed that he is not simply the backwards-looking angry white man candidate of 2016 looking to “Make America Great Again”. Rather, he is seeking to Make the American Future Great, which is a different, more inspiring, and potentially more unifying, sentiment. To underline the importance of the future, Trump then chose a Vice Presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, who is 40 years younger than he is, anointing a successor who can inherit his movement — and who could in theory serve two terms as president after Trump’s term is done.

It’s been a while since an American political candidate was able to capture the future. Trump’s first campaign was an angry, backwards-looking affair that targeted the country’s feckless elites; Biden never bothered with the future at all. Obama, who ran his first campaign on the basis of “hope”, by his second term was largely looking abroad to repair supposed past American crimes everywhere from Iran to Cuba. A heroic Trump who has energised his base and proven his personal courage while laying claim to the future is likely to have significant appeal to American voters.

Yet, the Democratic Party is a well-functioning, massively-funded, centrally-directed machine, capable — as it did in 2020 — of rewriting election laws to its advantage and banking millions of absentee ballots in advance of the election. By contrast, the Republican Party is a ramshackle, decentralised affair whose local worthies tend to be car dealers or pillow salesmen rather than corporate Ivy League types and lawyers. The structural imbalance between the parties has suggested that Democrats could run a cardboard cut-out of Taylor Swift for the presidency in 2024 and still win — especially given the immutable presence of the polarising Trump at the top of the Republican ticket. In fact, some polls showed Biden doing better against Trump after his doddering debate performance.

Trump’s fairground heroics, therefore, hardly guarantee a win in November. To be clear, that’s because America is no longer home to a functioning two-party system, in which each of the two parties represent coalitions of regional interests and can count on the allegiance of local industries and opinion leaders. That’s a concept from political textbooks written 50 years ago. 

Since the Nineties, America has morphed from a sprawling, continent-sized democracy to a more European-style centralised federal state with a ruling class of coastal billionaires serviced by a unitary national elite. The Democratic Party is the home of the vast majority of America’s ruling oligarchy, and of the highly-paid, well-credentialed class of lawyers, consultants, researchers, media bosses, and others with degrees from a small number of elite universities who help the oligarchs do business, as well as the class of billionaire-funded NGO workers and “organisers” who harvest votes on behalf of the Party, which is both a self-enclosed life-world and a unitary socio-political machine. Unless you intend to confine your professional life to a few far-flung, largely rural states, being a Republican in such circles, or even being insufficiently “progressive”, is a sure-fire career-ender. 

By enforcing an ideological line that serves America’s billionaires in the name of the “oppressed”, and labelling discordant or disruptive views as either bigotry or Russian propaganda, the Democratic Party helps ease the glaring contradictions of the privileged classes it represents, while continuing on with the work of destroying the country’s middle-class and unionised labour markets and ensuring that the oligarchs don’t pay taxes. 

The structural importance of the Democratic Party to the new American system goes deeper, though. As the institution that mediates between the country’s oligarchy, its servant class elite, and masses of dispossessed voters, who are divided up into ever-multiplying numbers of identity groups and then set against each other, the party plays a key role in making the new American system run. It coordinates the activities of bureaucrats; the sprawling network of billionaire-funded NGOs that augments the power of the bureaucracy and the party alike; the media; and academia. The party also sets the policy and hiring agendas for America’s large corporations, to the point where, before the shooting, Trump had yet to attract the endorsement of the head of a single Fortune 500 company.

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With all that socio-economic and bureaucratic power at their fingertips, it is perhaps no surprise that Democrats had long ago argued away the need to be polite to their increasingly powerless Republican opponents. Whether you were a corporate CEO, a university president, a tech baron, or head of a major American law firms, endorsing Trump meant more than social suicide; much lesser offences have reliably resulted in being aggressively targeted by NGO-led pressure campaigns NGO-led pressure campaigns and having protesters show up at your home, as well direct targeting by a federal bureaucracy that has increasingly abandoned the pose of social neutrality in favour of enforcing Party diktats on gender, race and nearly every other subject under the sun. Republicans, with the exception of a narrow group of fellow Beltway elitists, were racist, sexist, transphobic white supremacists and insurrectionists.

One of the chief targets of the Democratic Party’s society-wide enforcement machine has been Trump himself. Since Trump left office in 2020, he has been relentlessly targeted by a series of cases that have been aggressively prosecuted by both local and federal prosecutors despite a glaring paucity of evidence to support the idea that his actions were, in fact, crimes. Actually, the legal basis for these cases was dismissed as such by authorities as various as former Democratic New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo and Democrat-appointed judges on the US Supreme Court. The recent federal case against Trump, alleging that he had committed a crime by retaining classified government documents, which resulted in a full-scale raid by armed FBI agents on his home in Florida, was thrown out yesterday by the presiding judge, Aileen Cannon, on the grounds that the appointment and funding of a special prosecutor in the case was itself “unlawful”. But the legality of the cases against Trump was never the point — which was to use the proceedings to prevent Trump from campaigning for months, while suggesting to voters that he was a criminal.

In turn, the legal onslaught against Trump and his supporters, which began even before he took office in January 2017, was only one part of a larger, incredibly well-funded, whole-of-society campaign that the Democrats launched against a man they have ceaselessly depicted not merely as the blustering, attention-seeking buffoon that he clearly sometimes is, but as a dark Hitlerian threat to democracy. In the wake of the attempted assassination, it is the other two major components of the elite anti-Trump campaign that appear most threatening to the American future.

In a pervasive information warfare campaign, Trump is depicted not as a political naif or a crude vulgarian, or as a deeply chaotic personality who can’t manage his way out of a paper bag, but as a sinister dictator-in-waiting, who must be stopped from attaining or exercising power at any price.

To support this dark view, Trump was placed at the centre of a whirl of conspiracy theories which were duly reported as front-page news on a daily basis for nearly a decade. Yet to date, there is no evidence that Vladimir Putin conspired with Trump to deny Hillary Clinton her rightful victory in 2016; Clinton lost because she was a terrible candidate who blew a perfectly winnable election. No, Trump was not a paid Russian agent who communicated with Putin through a secret server in the basement of the Alpha Bank branch in Kiev. No, Trump didn’t have a secret deal with Russian businessmen to build hotels in Azerbaijan, which allowed Putin to control him. No, Trump was not taking money from Putin through intermediaries representing the Chabad Lubavitch stream of Judaism in Russia.

Every conspiracy theory was wilder than the last, and was treated like the scoop of the century for a day or a week before disappearing without a trace. Nor was there any form of correction or consequences for the reporters and editors involved. Instead, they rewarded themselves with Pulitzer prizes. The result has been the wholesale and tragic destruction of the entire credibility of the mainstream American press. 

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Unsurprisingly, the decline in Americans being able to trust what they read, and the rise in apocalyptic political rhetoric, was matched by a corresponding rise in political violence. Trump himself was hardly innocent of involvement with political violence, even if he never exactly called the white supremacist rioters at Charlottesville “good people” — a charge that has been extensively debunked. Still, clashes between the Proud Boys (a Canadian-led Right-wing group) and other so-called patriot groups and Left-wing Antifa protesters were common in the first two years of Trump’s Presidency, lending credence to the idea that both parties were cultivating bully-boy militias. Yet, as Trump’s interest in the violent Right lessened after the first year or so of his Presidency, the Left’s reliance on violence as a political tool only increased.

Trump’s election was greeted by large-scale riots in every major American city, some of which went on for weeks. In June 2017, Steve Scalise, the Republican majority leader in the House, was nearly killed in a mass shooting by a Bernie Sanders supporter in what the Virginia State Attorney General concluded was “an act of terrorism… fuelled by rage against Republican legislators”. A year later, in June 2018, recently appointed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was targeted by a California man named Nicholas Roske, who arrived at Kavanaugh’s house with a rifle before giving himself up to police, and was then indicted for attempting to assassinate Kavanaugh. Roske told investigators that he was upset over the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade as well as the potential for Kavanaugh to help loosen gun laws in the country. 

The steady drum-beat of calls to public disorder from the Left during Trump’s Presidency reached its apogee in the run-up to the 2020 election, where rioters acting under various banners, from Black Lives Matter to Antifa, trashed the shopping districts of over 20 major American cities. In cities such as Portland, nightly battles between the police and Molotov-cocktail-wielding demonstrators went on for months, becoming a form of nightly street theatre in which young masked attackers threw bombs at police and federal buildings while teams of Democratic Party-aligned NGO lawyers stood ready to get offenders out of jail. As the damage mounted, and local panic increased, violent protesters in Democrat-led municipalities, most of whom turned out to be from upper middle-class Democratic families, seldom faced any consequences for their actions, with celebrities and others offering to bail them out. 

With the attempted assassination of Trump, the political and social stakes have once again been raised, in a system that seems ill-equipped to meet such a significant challenge. Any attempt at return to a procedural normalcy that was already badly weakened before Trump took office seems entirely beyond the capacity of America’s callow and insulated elites, which have lost themselves for nearly a decade in the fantasy cosplay of anti-Trump.

What we will witness over the next four months will be an election campaign pitting the hero figure of a bloodied but unbowed Trump, a man despised by nearly half the country, against the anti-democratic manoeuvrings of the country’s institutional elite, as exemplified by whichever hand-picked candidate Democratic Party insiders choose to field against him. The resulting campaign will be a game without limits, in which the level of violence seems likely to escalate — which will further diminish the interest or ability on either side to acknowledge a victory by the other. Americans are about to find out what it feels like to live in a country at war with itself — no matter who wins the presidency in November.

There may have indeed been members of America’s political and media elites who were shocked by Biden’s debate performance. Crediting the sincerity of their reactions doesn’t say much for their powers of observation, though. Biden’s shuffling gait, frozen facial expressions, babbling fabulist arabesques and inability to perform simple physical tasks without falling down have all been on public display since the first year of his Presidency — an office he won mostly in absentia while hiding out in the basement of his home in Delaware.

It is certainly possible that the American elite stuck its fingers in its ears and covered its eyes in order to block out Biden’s resemblance to late-period Leonid Brezhnev. Perhaps by repeating the ideas that Biden was not only sharp as a tack but also a geopolitical genius and probably even the greatest American President of any of our lifetimes, they came to believe that some version of these things were true, and had to be true — because everyone said so.

Those who favour psychodynamic in-group explanations can certainly find support in the rapid about-faces staged by America’s leading pundits. Earlier this year, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman was boasting of the personal time he spent with Biden, who he proclaimed to be “completely lucid and with excellent grasp of detail”. After the debate, Krugman called on Biden to step down. Senile dementia is a clever disease. Or maybe Krugman didn’t like the face he saw in the mirror the morning after Biden’s debate performance.

What astounded Krugman and his fellow bold-faced journalist types about Biden’s rotten debate performance wasn’t the obviousness of Biden’s mental decline, but the fear that they were now publicly shown to have been lying. Krugman’s fellow in-house NYT author of Soviet state propaganda, Thomas Friedman, who fancies himself an “old friend” of Biden’s, was writing fibs about Biden as late as last month while boasting of his long off-the-record conversations with the President about the future of the Middle East. It took Friedman less than 24 hours to proclaim that Biden’s debate performance had made him “weep”. Poor man — no doubt it did. David Remnick of The New Yorker, who authored a door-stopper-sized hagiography of Barack Obama during the President’s first year in office, was equally quick to go public with his discovery that Joe Biden was maybe not exactly up to sorting marbles by size or colour, just in time to become a virgin for the next election.

It’s hard to be revealed as a fibber — especially when your job is ostensibly to tell the truth. But the sight of journalistic worthies suddenly grabbing hand towels to cover their proximity to power was not by itself enough to explain the Night of the Journalistic Long Knives.

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Thank goodness, then, that Barack Obama emerged from the shadows the following morning, as he has done like clockwork after every significant moment of the Biden Presidency, to proclaim that everything was fine, and that he was in charge — another obvious fact of the Biden Presidency that America’s commentariat has firmly repressed. After having just led a confused-seeming Biden off-stage by the shoulder at a recent Hollywood fundraiser, Obama took to social media to reassure the Party faithful that “bad debate nights happen” and that “this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who cares only about himself. Between someone who tells the truth; who knows right from wrong and will give it to the American people straight… Last night didn’t change that.”

Who was that first “someone”? The absence of Biden’s name from Obama’s tweet wasn’t the only broad hint that America’s shadow President insisted on dropping. In fact, nothing had changed. The election still offered the same choice between someone and someone. Meanwhile, who did you people think was running things for the past three years? It’s me, Obama.

The corollary of Obama’s remarks was also clear. The shock and surprise were all for show: The Washington Post and NYT could save their tattered journalistic honour by pointing to their calls for Biden’s resignation, while donors could be assuaged by blaming Biden’s poor debate performance on his “insular senior team” of “long-time aides” who had “isolated” and “cocooned” the President, according to Politico. Meanwhile, “adults in the room” like Obama’s former Homeland Security chief Jeh Johnson made the rounds to patiently explain that “a Presidency is more than one man”. According to Johnson’s novel theory, who the President is actually doesn’t matter, even “on his worst day at age 86”. Instead, what matters is “the people around him”, presumably including Johnson’s fellow Obama White House veterans like Lisa Monaco, Merrick Garland, Samantha Power, Bret McGurk and Jake Sullivan.

Whether Obama runs Joe Biden’s “Weekend at Bernie’s”-style Presidency from his basement in his sweats while watching ESPN, as he fantasised to Stephen Colbert on national television about doing, and no matter how often Biden’s cabinet secretaries make trips with Secret Service escorts to Obama’s Kalorama mansion, what remains startling is the seeming absence of any curiosity on the part of the country’s elite about how the country is actually being run. In the minds of the people who ostensibly run things, or at least pretend to know who runs things, it’s been enough to dismiss observations about Biden’s health, or Obama’s role in his Presidency, however large or small, as “conspiracy theories” — a term of art that has become something like “premature anti-fascist” in Stalinist nomenclature.

To extend the analogy: There is a point in the arc of failing regimes where the language they habitually use to describe themselves is so at odds with reality that propagandists and apologists no longer try to resolve contradictions or argue details. They simply lie. It doesn’t matter what you see, think, hear or believe. The sky is blue. Or maybe it’s orange. Maybe the sky is Fruit Loops. They can say any nonsense that they want, and they are powerless to say otherwise. The more obvious the lies they tell, the more powerful they are — and the more powerless you are. That’s what it means.

By that logic, the point of letting Biden onstage to stumble and mutter incoherencies was precisely to underline to people what they voted for in 2020, and are now being asked to vote for a second time. Better to elect a corpse than a convicted felon who will destroy American democracy. Besides, we all know the corpse isn’t really in charge of anything. As for who is in charge, someday, someone will surely write a book about it.

And lest we forget: Barack Obama always wanted to be a writer, although that part of his career didn’t turn out as wonderful as he had hoped — at least not yet. At 63, there is still time for him to buckle down and become Jorge Luis Borges or even Mario Vargas Llosa. As a politician, however, he has accomplished exactly what he set out to do, which was to become Abraham Lincoln. As President, Obama advised his speechwriters to model his sentences and paragraphs on Lincoln’s, and to keep copies of Lincoln’s collected speeches on their desks.

Why Lincoln? The answer is simple, of course. Lincoln freed the slaves. More than that, he founded a new American Republic, of which there have been exactly five, just like in France. The fact that American historians present the country’s history as an unbroken chain of glory (or more recently shame), beginning with the Constitution and continuing through every successive Fourth of July holiday weekend, is simply a narrative device meant to imbue earnest grade-school students and their instructors with the country’s progressive historical bias. Yes, children, America is always moving towards realising a more perfect union with equal rights for everyone. The one notable exception being Native Americans, whose story, unlike that of illegal migrants or members of historically oppressed BIPOC trans communities, can’t be accommodated into anyone’s idea of progress. Native Americans lost, and were more or less wiped out, and then confined to miserable reservations in empty parts of the country where they are denied many basic federal benefits, have minimal opportunities for education or employment, and drink themselves to death in large numbers. It is much more pleasant to talk about slavery.

Dividing up American history into five Republics is another good way of showing that the story spun by historians of the progressive school is bunk. The First American Republic, the one founded by the rich Norther traders and bankers and Southern planters who financed the American Revolution against the British crown, was an elite construction based on Greek and Roman models that aimed overtly to constrain popular democratic power, which it viewed as a destabilising evil. That Republic was shattered by the election by Andrew Jackson, a Trump-like figure who inveighed against bankers and elites and founded the second American Republic as a rude people’s democracy.

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But Jackson’s Second Republic later foundered on the incompatibility of the slave economy of the South and the manufacturing economy of the North, which became first an economic crisis and then a political crisis, and finally a Civil War. Abraham Lincoln, President of the North, then founded the Third American Republic, rooted in a strong federal state, the dominance of Northern elites and the abolition of slavery, while continuing the Jacksonian push to settle the West. This Republic lasted the longest, from 1860 until 1932, when it collapsed in the face of the Great Depression. The Fourth American Republic, founded by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the most powerful and enigmatic of all American Presidents, excised the New England elites in favour of the “New Deal alliance” of Southerners and northern urban immigrant voters — and more or less conquered the entire planet.

When exactly the Fourth American Republic ended is a plausible subject for historical debate. One might pin the tail on Bill Clinton’s embrace of global trade treaties like NAFTA and GATT, and China’s entry into the WTO, which blew up the broad middle class that FDR’s party had spent decades building and turned the Democrats into the party of Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan. Or you could blame the technologies that some argue made globalism inevitable, and make Bill Gates and Steve Jobs the poster-boys for the Fifth American Republic, which is the country that Americans are living in now.

What’s missing from both these accounts, though, is America’s obsession with race, identity politics, quotas, ideological and personal purity tests, and other hallmarks of what is called “wokeism” — all of which became part of American culture under Obama. In turn, it is the harnessing of these tools to the rule of fantastically wealthy oligarchs who operate politically through the Democratic Party that characterises the current American system, a development that again took place under Obama. Without Obama, it is hard to see the current system operating as it does, or having the features that it has — making his actual day-to-day involvement in the affairs of the Biden White House something of a moot point.

Let the conspiracy theorists debate whether and how Obama pulls the strings of Biden’s corpse. This Fourth of July, Americans can celebrate the founding of the Fifth American Republic and its founder, Barack Obama, who has lived up to his goal of becoming the 21st-century Abraham Lincoln — at least as far as his impact on American political history goes. History, however, also tells us that Lincoln also jailed his political opponents, and that the Republic he founded quickly became a kleptocracy that eventually imploded amid a massive social crisis, before a new Republic arose. Hopefully, Americans will get lucky a sixth time, too.

Welcome to the new America. In this strange new country, Taylor Swift fans are interested in football, while American football fans have been obliged to take cognisance of the existence of Taylor Swift, and even grudgingly admit that at least some of her music is actually quite good.

The Swift-Kelce singularity has already proved so powerful that there are dark mutterings from corners of the American Right that the celebrity couple is part of a plot to get Joe Biden re-elected, engineered by the US Department of Defense. Donald Trump is said to be personally miffed by Swift’s popularity, and to privately insist to unnamed advisors that his fan base is larger than hers.

Trump is right to take Swift seriously. I encountered America’s reigning pop princess on the last leg of her Eras tour — the music event of the summer, soon coming to Europe, with tickets selling for $1,500 and up — through a music-lover friend who, proclaiming himself tired of my unthinking prejudice against his teeny-bopper idol, offered me a ticket to see her show in Seattle. I alighted from my Uber outside the Lumens stadium in the company of a mother, in her 40s, and her daughter, in her mid-teens, wearing matching white glittery dresses. The middle daughter, in her early twenties, wore black, with a row of maybe a dozen friendship bracelets on her right arm.

By compelling the allegiance of all three generations, Swift has become the closest thing that America has these days to a national hero who connects the entire country, the country-club set included, together, and to a common mythos. F. Scott Fitzgerald would have loved Taylor Swift. A little bit cracked, a little bit reckless, bound for disappointment, but protected by invisible cushions of race and class, her tragedy is at once pre-ordained and, at the same time, affirms the country’s battered-but-still-existent social order. If “Cruel Summer”, Swift’s summer radio anthem, isn’t exactly Cole Porter, it’s easy to imagine F. Scott humming the tune.

But Taylor Swift is also something more than a pop star. Neither a brilliant singer nor a gifted dancer, she is the author of memorable lines and couplets that seemingly emerge from a stream-of-consciousness story-telling voice whose seeming artlessness is a calculated effect of her craft, of which she is a master. Her persona is a disenchanted version of the girl-next-door, who is overly labile, loses control of her emotions, gets dumped, and then pours out her simmering anger and hurt to her diary, as well as to her millions of fans, for whom she serves as a kind of substitute for family. What makes her persona stand out from the usual run of injured females is her awareness of her own failings, which is in turn the whetstone upon which she sharpens her daggers, which she thrusts into the eyes of those who have injured or betrayed her. Her actual family is an upscale affair, consisting of her young brother Austin; her mother Andrea, a former marketing manager at an advertising agency; and father Scott, a stockbroker-turned-vice-president for Merrill Lynch, who manages his daughter’s money.

Awaiting her arrival, the crowd was an explosion of cut-off-jean shorts over fishnets, prom dresses, glitter tops, shimmery metallic leggings, glittery tiaras, henna tattoos, rainbow glitter tops, glittery cowboy hats, and more glitter. It was like Planet of the Apes for Women Wearing Glitter. Perhaps half the crowd were seriously overweight, which is more or less the same ratio I’d expect to find among the men at a football game. Where male football fans wear team jerseys, the Swifties are dressed for a summer prom, proving once again that the audience for female finery is other females. Maybe one out of every 10 here is a man. Relations between the sexes are cordial.

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Swift’s opening act was the Haim sisters, who rock a more physically and mentally healthy Sarah Silverman-type vibe. What they lack, however, is the comedienne’s awareness of her own brokenness, which was the source of her charisma and wicked sense of humour. Silverman knows that the world can be a mean, cruel place. Where young American men are generally forced to internalise the lessons of their own insignificance in unpleasant ways by the time they hit puberty, young women are encouraged by schools, older women, and every form of entertainment on the planet to believe they can have it all. To believe otherwise is to let down the side, which consists of all other women on the planet. The result being, at least here in America, the near-certainty that young women will fail to achieve even basic levels of happiness, as the gap between their expectations and reality proves impossible to bridge. Which is where Taylor Swift comes in.

Part Khaleesi warrior goddess, part stripper, part show pony, part Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, part sorority sister, part Country Western singer, part Daisy Buchanan, part woman scorned, and part broken toy, her presence is effortlessly authoritative. She just stands there, commanding the stage. Through the power of her persona, one she has assembled with her own magpie creativity, she takes colourful bits of string from the nests of her producers and song-writing partners and fuses them together in a way that is always uniquely her own.

Swift’s craft as a songwriter comes from her rootedness in the themes and rhythms of country music, which is the genre in which she began, and which she has seamlessly adapted to pop. The marriage of these two forms allows Swift to escape the emotional confines of pop, and channel the stresses and resentments of a generation of women who are hopelessly torn between the demands of the workplace and ingrained ideas of romance and femininity, and above all by the knowledge that the scripts don’t match, and never will match. Swift’s job in the culture is to take the toxic life-trap these women feel caught in and reflect it back to her audience while still making them feel special. Her songs mirror the brutal inner monologues of a generation of caged female animals who grew up with the language of girl power and are now unwilling to either fully endorse their condition or abandon the possibilities of romance with men.

Swift has a charming way of presenting her life as a movie while at the same time fully inhabiting the characters in her songs. She’s a better actress than Madonna, in part because her persona rests on being the girl next door rather than Superwoman. This persona is convincing because she suffers. She suffers because she wants too much, often from men whose inadequacies force her to settle for less, or much less, until she explodes, and leaves them long drunken answering machine messages, or stalks them at bars, or becomes obsessed with their new girlfriends. Costuming aside, she’s pure Nashville.

Swift is America’s Female Id, taking the feminine emotional range and insight of country music and injecting it into pop without compromising the virtues of either. “Oh wow, you know,” she said at the Lumens, returning to her safe place, which is her 70,000-strong audience. “Musically speaking, we’ve got a lot to catch up on. It’s been five years. But let’s not talk about me anymore. Let’s talk about you. There are performances I see in this crowd tonight that are Tony Award-level.”

What separates the performer from her audience is not that her inner life is any more elevated. It is that she’s a hugely talented songwriter who works incredibly hard at her craft, and there is something endearing about Swift’s need to keep making that point plain. “I’ve been writing songs since I was 12,” she said, matter-of-factly. “My way of coping with stuff is that I go through something, and then I write songs about it.” The fact that the stories in her songs are real is part of what makes them good though, just like any rap star, a fact she underlined by launching into “champagne problems”, a song inspired by her ill-fated liaison with Conor Kennedy, RFK Jr’s son. She’s a nightmare dressed like a daydream, or so the song says. “She would’ve made such a lovely bride,” she sings. “What a shame she’s fucked in the head.”

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Maybe she is, and maybe she isn’t. Maybe it’s all her fault. Or maybe it’s the guy’s fault. Either way, it’s impossible not to be struck by the perfect construction of the line, and by the delicate emotional line that the song walks — between seeing herself through the eyes of her detractors and admitting that she is nuts and being a survivor who in the end will always win out, by turning the pain of being unwanted into pop chart success. Swift is a talented emotional acrobat who is continually walking lines that are finer than they look, feeling from the inside while describing herself from the outside. The combination of those talents makes her a star.

If it was exhausting, for a man in the audience, that nearly three hours of non-stop female emotional shadowboxing and politicking, there is also no denying how completely Taylor Swift has mastered the art of being a pop star, at a moment when Americans in general, and single American women in particular, seem paralysed by a pervasive uncertainty. Meanwhile, Swift is free to return to her roots. Which brings us to folklore, the alt-country pop record she released in 2020, at the height of Covid lockdowns.

“I hit my peak at seven feet / in a swing / over the creek / I was too scared to jump in,” she sings to a childhood friend, before wondering if there is still sweet tea to drink and other beautiful things left in this world.

This is Taylor Swift taking her stand. She’s still the most famous woman in the world, even if her job — as a songwriter and a pop star — is to be miserable. She can be famous and live in a mansion by the sea in Rhode Island, a safe distance from the Kennedys, but she can’t have it all. The rules won’t allow it.

Swift never stops trying, though. Her Nashville work-ethic, like her lunges at her exes, root her in a place that Americans look to for salvation from their present ills. Not to billionaire fantasies about colonising Mars, or the insistence on abolishing borders and gender, but to the Fifties America of Leslie Gore, where women could still call out the men who betray and control them, and assert the fierceness of their own inner lives, with the assurance that there is some greater form of structure, which, regardless of the constraints it imposes, might offer an alternative to being alone. After spending the past 50 years tearing down the structures of families, churches, local government, ethnicity, gender, nations and borders, a very large number of Americans now find themselves struggling to find rhythm and meaning to their lives.

The idea that Taylor Swift, of all people, can find happiness cheering for her boyfriend, a burly, bearded football star seems well-deserved. It is also an embodiment of the kind of healing synthesis that is hard to find in Trump’s angry bluster, or Biden’s senile ramblings, or activist campaigns to shut down bridges and highways, or mandate the exclusive use of electric cars, or otherwise force one’s views and practices on others. What Taylor Swift finally has for herself is what a large majority of Americans want for themselves. Or maybe it’s all a clever promotional stunt, cooked up by Swift’s handlers and the country’s most popular sports league to sell their respective products. Which would also be entirely and even comfortingly American.

“Hi, I’m the problem,” she announced in Seattle bluntly, before softening the blow with an eruption of glitter. “When I walk in the room / I can still make the whole thing shimmer.”

While it is impossible to predict the military, diplomatic, political and economic consequences of a rapid-fire series of American defeats abroad, the defeats themselves are easy enough to foretell. If the US succeeds in its attempt to halt Israel’s military campaign in Gaza with Hamas still in power, and pivots to international recognition of a Palestinian state, as the US State Department has recently signalled it hopes to do, it would be impossible for either Israelis or their regional enemies to see the October 7 terror attacks, backed by Iran, as anything other than a massive Iranian victory and US-Israeli defeat.

Ukraine appears to be on a similar glide path towards military and diplomatic defeat, made in the US. While Washington has shovelled over $100 billion in military and related aid into Ukraine, it has refused to provide the Ukrainians with the offensive weapons they need to repel Putin’s offensive. As a result, the Ukrainian army has begun to bleed out, while appearing to lack any serious capacity to hit targets of military or political significance inside Russia. Come springtime, it seems likely that Putin will go on the offensive, seize the remainder of the Donbas region, and then use his overwhelming superiority in airpower and missiles to bombard Ukrainian cities until Zelenskyy shows up at the negotiating table. The likely result of such negotiations is Ukraine ceding large chunks of Ukraine to Putin, who will declare victory in the war he started in 2022.

Barring major shifts in tactics on either battlefield, both of the above scenarios, in which Iran and Putin emerge the victors, and recipients of tens of billions of dollars in US military aid and diplomatic support are the losers, seem more likely than not — and no amount of blather will be able to disguise them, especially during the upcoming US election season. Israel’s ties to the Gulf States will evaporate, as their oil-rich kingdoms seek to cut deals with Iran in the hope of protecting themselves from another October 7 on their own soil, while the goal of wiping Israel off the map will seem plausible again to a new generation of poverty-stricken young Arabs in shattered countries like Syria, Iraq, Libya and Egypt. A similar dynamic will likely take hold in Europe, where Germany and other EU states will be incentivised to cut deals with Putin at the expense of their smaller, weaker Eastern neighbours. In both regions, America will cease to function as the local hegemon.

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But the bad news hardly stops there. Seeing major US military allies in Europe and the Middle East defeated, Chinese military planners may spy an excellent opportunity to blockade Taiwan, or even invade the island, and then dare the US to evict them. Having already lost two major proxy wars — and being unlikely to risk direct military confrontation with China in her own backyard — it seems safe to predict that the US would decline to fight.

Taken together, these near-simultaneous defeats would be a setback of an entirely different order from the botched US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, or even the collapse of America’s fantastical nation-building enterprise in Iraq. Yet the most frightening thing about the above scenario is not the fact that each component of the catastrophe seems plausible enough, but that all three of these likely disasters is the product of an Alice-in-Wonderland approach to reality that defines America’s global vision. In each case, the defeats of key American proxies over the next 12 months can be understood as the products of tactical failures rooted in failed US military doctrine, which is in turn grounded in strategic choices and assumptions that have proven to be wildly delusional and yet stubbornly and mystifyingly resistant to change.

Israel’s war in Gaza and Ukraine’s war with Putin’s Russia have a lot in common. Both conflicts are bloody. Both countries are fighting defensive wars against foes who targeted civilians in surprise attacks across internationally recognised borders with the hope of causing the political and social collapse of their enemies. In both cases, the attackers — Hamas and Putin — openly proclaimed their genocidal intent, and then committed large-scale atrocities in the hopes of terrifying their foes into submission. Allowing that strategy to succeed would have horrific consequences for potential conflicts around the globe — of which there are dozens. More concretely, failure in either theatre would threaten major global arteries and US trading partners in the EU and the Gulf States. In other words, both Ukraine and Israel are conflicts in which America’s interest in supporting its allies is crystal-clear.

To his credit, Joe Biden, one of the last true products of Cold War politics still active in American political life, had no problem recognising that both wars were worth fighting. Yet the way that America demanded that each war be fought — expensively, predictably, with a focus on minimising the loss of civilian lives on the side of the aggressors — has been a recipe for its allies to lose. In exchange for accepting US aid, both Ukraine and Israel have found themselves trapped in the distinctly American paradigm of managed conflict, in which the idea of actually winning wars by inflicting maximum pain and destruction on one’s enemy is seen as a relic of barbarism. As a result, the US has somehow managed to give Ukraine the incredible sum of $150 billion in military aid over the past two years, while denying it the real-world weapons systems that it would need to achieve any semblance of battlefield parity with Russia. It is frankly impossible to see how Ukraine is supposed to win the war it continues to fight, which raises the question of why the US is encouraging the Ukrainians to fight on.

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The same insistence on fighting an American-style war in exchange for military aid and diplomatic backing has badly hamstrung Israel’s campaign in Gaza. In Mosul, the US and its allies rooted out 3,000 Isis irregulars at the cost of killing more than 10 times that number of civilians while reducing the city to rubble. In Gaza, the Israelis are facing a battle-hardened army of 30-40,000 Hamas troops ensconced in an underground fortress that stretches through 300 miles of tunnels beneath one of the world’s more densely populated urban areas. By accepting the use of American-style tactics to fight a war for its own survival, Israel has managed to bring upon itself the twin disasters of global obloquy and military stalemate. Why suffer both?

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the Hamas attack on Israel share something else in common, too, which is their common origins in Barack Obama’s Iran Deal, the greatest US strategic blunder since George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. While Bush’s attempt to re-make Iraq as a democracy in the wake of 9/11 was a gigantic unforced error by the world’s only hyper-power, Obama’s Iran Deal, designed to rectify the expensive failure of Bush’s policy, has arguably proved to be an error of even greater consequence. While Bush’s failure in Iraq was the result of a shallow and overly optimistic understanding of the region he blundered into, it also showed that the US was capable of fielding an enormous army and wreaking havoc on its foes — thereby encouraging those foes to be cautious. By contrast, Obama’s parallel fantasies about reformists in Teheran have emboldened America’s most aggressive enemies, resulting in the global spread of chaos.

What Bush’s botched attempt to remake the Middle East by force and Obama’s failed attempt to re-make the Middle East by courting America’s enemies both share in common is a similar set of delusions about the nature and uses of American power that in both cases were widely shared across the political spectrum in Washington. As insane as it now seems, Bush’s belief that Iraqis would embrace democracy if only they were freed from the tyrannical yoke of Saddam Hussein was more or less an article of faith across Washington, with liberals and conservatives both pointing to the experience of Eastern Europe after the Cold War.

I once had the opportunity to directly question that analogy in an interview with one of Bush’s closest advisors, Condoleezza Rice, during which I pointed out that countries like Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia had been functioning democracies before Nazi and Soviet armies occupied them. In response, she asked me if I thought that people in Muslim countries were inherently different from Europeans. To suggest that the histories and cultures of Iraq and Gaza might lead people in those places to react differently to attempts to create or impose Western-style democracy, Rice implied, was a form of racism. As intended, our conversation ended there. However, following the loss of a trillion dollars and perhaps 300,000 dead Iraqis, and the conquest of Gaza by Hamas, it has turned out that Rice was wrong: Like Czechs and Poles, Iraqis and Gazans are also the products of their own histories and cultures, which apparently resist one-size-fits-all solutions.

Obama’s arrogance proved to be of a very similar academic-imperial type, inflected by technocratic-leftist apologias for America’s past sins rather than triumphalist neoconservative blather. On the surface, though, the Middle East policies of Bush and Obama seemed nearly opposite, Where Bush fought a massively expensive and destructive war, Obama promised peace. Where Bush imagined reshaping the Middle East in America’s image, Obama talked about eschewing militaristic adventurism while allowing the peoples of the region to realise their own destinies. What both visions shared, however, were their origins in a vision of geopolitics in which other people in faraway lands have no choice but to enact their assigned roles in the fantasy-play of Washingtonians, and in which America’s superior economic and military power allow it to bend reality to its will.

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Obama’s policy of rapprochement with Iran was ostensibly centered around an arms control agreement called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), colloquially known as the Iran Deal. For all the technical talk about centrifuges and uranium enrichment rates, though, the agreement was less about arms control in any conventional sense. Rather, it was a device to take Iran’s nuclear programme off the table so that Tehran could be cajoled into becoming an American client, thereby defusing regional tensions and helping to prevent the US from being drawn into future Middle Eastern wars.

The JCPOA therefore did little to halt Iran’s progress towards testing, manufacturing and deploying nuclear weapons. Instead, it put the nation’s nuclear programme under US protection, in exchange for the Iranians agreeing to adhere to a set of sunset clauses that would allow it to build up its capacity to manufacture and test a bomb once Obama was safely out of office. In addition to offering the Iranians a more secure pathway to a bomb than the one that they were pursuing, Obama also promised Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei that the US would guarantee Iran’s “equities” in the region — meaning that Iranian assets like the Assad regime in Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon would be placed under US protection.

Behind this rather generous package of geostrategic chips was a grand plan that Obama described as “balancing”, which, under the term “regional integration”, became formalised as official policy in the Biden White House. According to this vision, the US would no longer simply side with traditional allies in the Middle East such as Israel, the Gulf States, Turkey and Egypt, each of whom had in different ways displeased or disappointed the US President. Nor would the US see Iran as an enemy. By seeking to “balance” its one-time allies against its one-time enemies, America would thereby avoid getting sucked into regional wars, while continuing in its role as the regional powerbroker.

Obama’s idea of a US-brokered regional “balance” was indeed a novel approach to maintaining security in the region. That’s because a strategy premised on punishing your friends while strengthening your enemies would strike any sane strategist as insanity. The inevitable result of forcing allies and enemies to constantly compete for imperial favour is greater chaos, leading to endless regional warfare. Which is exactly what happened.

The unravelling of the Middle East under Obama began from pretty much the moment that he started his “balancing” act. First came the “Arab Spring”, where Obama backed the Muslim Brotherhood against US-allied governments in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere. When the resulting Muslim Brotherhood governments failed to keep their hold on power, Obama switched sides a second time and turned to Iran. As part of his courtship, Obama kept his promise to recognise Iran’s “equities” in Syria by breaking his own “red line” against the use of chemical weapons by Bashar al-Assad’s Iranian-backed government — effectively abandoning the Syrian rebels to a horrific large-scale slaughter whose scale was between 25 and 50 times larger than the current death toll in Gaza.

It was in Syria that the flaw in Obama’s strategy of appointing Iran as the new US-backed local hegemon became apparent. Namely, that the Iranians weren’t actually strong enough to fulfil the role that the Americans had assigned them. While capable of destroying weak states like Lebanon and Iraq by providing training and arms to sectarian Shiite militias, Tehran was too weak to project decisive force in Sunni-majority regions. When Assad proved unable to crush the rebellion in Syria, even with substantial help from Iran and foot soldiers from Hezbollah, Obama opened the door for Russia to intervene in the Syrian war under the guise of monitoring the disposal of Assad’s chemical weapons, in order to prop up the bet he had made on what now appeared to be the losing side.

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By Chris Arnade

Putin’s willingness to help Obama out of a jam came at a price. In addition to achieving Russia’s long-time goal of a port on the Mediterranean, Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine — an open violation of international borders that Obama let pass. Not content with gobbling up Crimea, Putin then seized a large portion of the Donbas region, setting the stage for his future invasion. Again, Obama’s response was purely pro forma. All this, for the sake of Iran maintaining its Syrian “equities”, as a precondition for signing the JCPOA and becoming enmeshed in the US-led regional security order.

A decade later, it seems safe to say that the results of Obama’s grand strategy of “balancing” have been predictably dismal for both the Middle East and for Europe. It is no wonder that Biden has attempted to change course by backing Israel and Ukraine in their defensive wars against the regional bullies that Obama unleashed. Yet Biden’s half-measures in each case have manacled US allies with failed Bush-era counter-insurgency tactics while at the same time leaving the cornerstone of Obama’s grand strategy — the Iran Deal — untouched.

The beneficiary of the topsy-turvy incentive structure that Obama created has turned out to be the world’s worst actors: Vladimir Putin, and an Iranian-led alliance structure that includes Qatar, Hezbollah, Syria and Hamas. The idea that the US will bring an end to the Ukraine war by “balancing” Putin’s triumphant Russia against the terrified and militarily impotent states of the EU is similarly a recipe for more chaos and destruction.

In theory, a new American President could reverse Obama’s mistakes by executive fiat, which is more or less what Donald Trump did when he took office in 2017. After all, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Asia were all notably more peaceful, more stable and more prosperous during Trump’s presidency than under Obama or Biden. Yet the continuing political crisis afflicting the US, which began with Trump’s presidency, suggests that Washington lacks the capacity to see the world clearly, or act effectively. The Democratic Party’s strange allegiance to Obama’s failed notions of “grand strategy” has notably made it impossible for the US to respond to Iranian-backed militias that have halted shipping in the Red Sea and repeatedly injured and killed US servicemen. A second Trump presidency, meanwhile, will plunge America into even greater internal chaos that will likely make the sane conduct of foreign policy — or any other kind of policy — impossible.

But the Israelis and Ukrainians do not have this luxury. Unlike American advisors and soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, they have no other homes to go back to. At this moment, the only way out of America’s current cul-de-sac is for Israel or Ukraine, and preferably both, to defy American advice and strategic aims — and actually win the wars they are fighting.

Today’s American crack-up springs from similar sources. Imagine a time-traveller from any decade in recent memory arriving in America in January 2024: they would encounter a country that would appear to have gone nuts. Millions of migrants stream illegally into the US at the highest rates in history, while the government in Washington prohibits border states from enforcing Federal law. Meanwhile, major cities such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles are routinely paralysed by angry demonstrators whose causes change from month to month (this month’s cause is “intifada”). Questions like “should doctors perform surgery on children to change their gender?” and “is it ok for the President of Harvard to routinely plagiarise the work of other authors?” are now seriously debated by reputable media outlets.

It all depends on where the time-traveller happens to land, though. By many objective criteria, today’s America could not be in better shape — a global hyper-power that continues to lead the world in innovation, with flagship companies such as Google, Apple and Meta continuing their reign as the most valuable human creations on Earth. America’s billionaires are its new millionaires. Someday soon, Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, both of whom are among the richest men in history, will establish the first human colonies on the moon and on Mars.

The idea that two such different Americas exist at once is hard to take in, because of the country’s polarising political warfare — even if both visions are solidly grounded in fact. How have two diametrically opposing Americas come to inhabit the same space at the same time? That question can be answered in a single word that is generally missing from American civics textbooks: “Oligarchy.”

Contrary to the country’s powerful democratic mythos, which imagines American democracy ceaselessly expanding to include workers, women and minorities — not to mention the inhabitants of many far-flung countries — Americans now find themselves living in an oligarchy administered day-to-day by institutional bureaucracies that move in lock-step with each other, enforcing a set of ideologically-driven top-down imperatives that seemingly change from week-to-week and cover nearly every subject under the sun.

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Is Iowa the next step to civil war?

By Michael Auslin

The new American system has little in common with the process of balancing regional interests through the two-party system, as described by 20th-century American political scientists. Today, power flows from the top down, from a set of fantastically wealthy billionaires, to a national administrative class, and to a new layer of non-profit administrators, foundation executives and NGOs, which in turn employ a floating class of hundreds of thousands of grant-makers, organisers, case-workers and protesters who serve as the shock troops of the Democratic Party.  In this role, they regiment the party’s identity-driven interest groups while receiving large amounts of funding from the billionaire class and the Federal government — thereby enabling the Party to serve as the broker between the oligarchs and the “disenfranchised” poor.

By trashing institutions that once protected their interests, and cutting them out of the national power equation, the new American system deprives America’s working and middle classes of opportunities to build wealth or otherwise exert meaningful control over their lives — an observation borne out by a wealth of harsh statistical evidence. After 2008, America’s rich continued to get wildly richer while the middle class lost ground, along with the poor. Unsurprisingly, income mobility has fallen radically, from 90% for children born in 1940 to less than 50% for children born in the Eighties. American life expectancy — perhaps the most basic gauge of how people are actually doing — is also experiencing a sharp decline, despite (or because of) the fact that America adopted a universal health care system more than a decade ago. What these grim statistics still fail to capture, though, is the feeling of utter, disorienting madness that pervades so many sectors of American life these days, from universities to corporate boardrooms to social media, where people seem to find themselves advocating causes which they are often at a loss to explain.

So where did it start? The collapse of the 20th-century print pyramid and its replacement by the cracked mirror of the internet clearly had something to do with the current madness. The election of Donald Trump, and the subsequent rise of the Russiagate conspiracy theory, which was promoted by Trump-phobic elites as fact, both helped to make insanity and illogic the coin of everyday political discourse. Once that happened, it didn’t take much to drive the entire country mad.

Covid lockdowns led to the creation of a broad quasi-governmental censorship apparatus to police “disinformation” under the guise of public health. The George Floyd riots revealed that lockdowns had become a convenient fiction, while wholesale looting and property crimes, along with the incineration of downtown Minneapolis, were embraced by the American power structure as healthy social justice rituals. A wider attack on American monuments, history, and culture followed.

A sane, constructive political class would have recognised the dangers posed by the emerging oligarchy, and increasingly insane public discourse, and worked to build bridges between the two Americas and help create the basis for a healthier society. Instead, Barack Obama, like Bill Clinton before him, saw an opportunity to rubbish Republicans by making Democrats the party of the rich in the name of the poor. The policy of aligning the Democrats with the wealthiest Americans, while taking from the middle class and rewarding the poor with symbolic identity politics victories, was Obama’s creation — hardly a surprising coinage from a BLM-promoting Harvard Law School graduate who once told an intimate that the two things he wanted, as he left the White House, were a private jet and a valet. Obama’s continuing influence as a tone-setter for the Democratic Party, and within the Biden administration itself, should not be underestimated; there’s a reason why he became the first (healthy) former US President since George Washington who refused to retire to his farm (or the equivalent), instead keeping a large mansion in the heart of Washington.

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America’s pop-culture armageddon

By David Samuels

Obama’s central position in the Democratic Party is both practical and symbolic: in his person, he represents both the elite institutions such as Harvard Law School and the large American foundations and billionaire funders who backed his political rise in Chicago. Obama represents the new American elite, which is composed of the people who populate the types of institutions that produced and backed him, and which is the main instrument of oligarchical rule.

What members of the new American elite share is a sense of placelessness, which is also embodied by Obama, a fatherless child who grew up in Indonesia and then in Hawaii, after being sent to live with his grandparents by his mother. Where former US elites represented the upper tip of multiple local pyramids of influence and wealth (see Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was born and died on the same patch of land in the Texas Hill Country), the new American elite is the product a small set of homogenous institutions which are all sponsored or owned by billionaires. The result is a class of shallowly educated people — of whatever race, gender or sexual preferences — with a set of uniform values imposed by self-infatuated academics and diversity gatekeepers which are of very little help in sensibly administering a continent-sized republic, which was not designed to be run by a national elite in the first place.

America’s callow hothouse elites plainly lack either the temperament or the necessary language or experience to deal with the new social and economic reality they face, let alone the yawning social divisions engendered by 50 years of laissez-faire economics accompanied by the growth of surveillance and censorship technologies. Lacking any real understanding of the new technologies that have fundamentally transformed the American social and economic structure, or how those technologies, and new concentrations of wealth, are re-shaping the lives of ordinary people, they seek to cast the country’s ever-expanding range of social problems in the only language they understand, which is race — and to haughtily and self-righteously dismiss everyone who disagrees with them as bigots.

Yet the unending stream of obvious policy failures that America’s elites have authored, both domestic and foreign – from the country’s immigration, income and education crises, to its failures in the Middle East and Ukraine — can hardly be blamed on old-fashioned bigots, of whom there are thankfully few in Washington. In reality, the identity-based vitriol of the country’s political, academic and media elites is not shared by most normal Americans — who actually have to live with each other on a daily basis. Which in turn suggests that the national obsession with race and group identity is a tool being employed from the top down, to fracture the possibility of democratic opposition to large concentrations of wealth and the rule of the bureaucrats.

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Beauty has become our enemy

By David Samuels

As the fearful servants of a fearful oligarchy, America’s elites don’t trust the people they rule. It’s no surprise, then, that one thing that most of the social innovations of the past five years — from open borders to the new language of race to the attack on meritocracy — have in common is that no one voted for them. When major shifts in elite ideas contradict existing laws, American institutional leaders have learned that ignoring these contradictions is a smart move, lest one find one’s own elite status revoked, or cancelled.

In the meantime, new holidays, identity group flags, unwritten laws and new governmental powers continue to proliferate, flattering the elites and enshrining their vision of the reality that they administer. “Each year on November 20, the world recognises Transgender Day of Remembrance,” US Secretary Antony Blinken solemnly announced at the end of last year, “a day to commemorate the transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming persons who are targeted and killed for living authentically and courageously.” President Joe Biden issued a similar proclamation on the same day — a national holiday which has been observed by the United States government and the entire world since when, exactly? Why, ever since the President and the Secretary of State made their pronouncements on November 20, of course.

So is America experiencing a pogrom against transgender and non-binary people? According to the advocacy group GLADD, a total of 33 trans, non-binary and gender-non-conforming people died by violent means in America in one year. Given that there were a reported 21,156 homicides in America during that time, and transgender and non-binary individuals are said to make up 1.6% of the US population, the law of averages would suggest that one might expect that approximately 338 transgender and non-binary individuals would have been murdered — or 10 times the number that were actually killed. The fact that transgender and non-binary people are approximately 10 times less likely to die violent deaths than the average American would appear to be a cause for celebration rather than commemoration.

Yet in Year Zero America, defiance of basic maths can often seem like a precondition for gaining one’s rightful place on the social justice calendar. In 2019, the last year for which statistics were available before the George Floyd riots, a total of 13 unarmed black men were killed by police throughout all of America, according to statistics compiled by the CIA-linked, oligarch-owned Washington Post. According to the Post, the number of unarmed, non-violent black men killed by white police officers in 2019 may have been as low as three, or as high as seven. No doubt both numbers are painfully high — but not nearly as high as the total of 7,300 black American homicide victims in 2019, the overwhelming majority of whom were killed by other black Americans, not to mention the hundreds of white Americans killed by black Americans that same year. So perhaps America’s murder problem isn’t mainly the product of racism after all.

The consequence of America’s new “anti-racist” math can be measured in lost lives and shattered families, nearly all of whom are black. On 31 May 2020, a week after George Floyd died in police custody in Minneapolis, for example, 25 black Chicagoans were murdered and another 85 injured — which is the kind of daily death toll that one might see in a war zone. Nevertheless, George Floyd’s death set off what was widely described as a “national reckoning” not only with brutal, ostensibly widespread policing techniques but with the large-scale effects of “white supremacy” and “structural racism” — supposedly pervasive phenomena so lacking in objective correlatives like discriminatory laws and observable practices that they can best be described as conspiracy theories.

You can blame Barack Obama. Or you can blame America’s feckless race-and-identity-obsessed elites. Or you can blame the internet and the fortunes it gave rise to. The larger picture that one gets from America’s multiple and interrelated failures is of a country suffering from terminal brain-rot — and wildly unequal to the task of running the planet.

Yet at the same time, America remains by far the most powerful country on Earth, with a plethora of great minds who invent great stuff. Most Americans long for a sense of common purpose, and share a strong desire to get along with each other. Lately, even leading oligarchs such as Elon Musk and Bill Ackman, cocooned by their enormous wealth, find the system they live in to be insane enough to be worth putting their fortunes at risk to publicly oppose it.

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Is Obama sabotaging Biden?

By Kat Rosenfield

Historically, America has generally been bad at producing European-style elites, because the country is so large, and elites are inherently anti-democratic. Previous attempts by self-appointed elites to rule the country have generally resulted in the rider being thrown off the horse by furious populists. Yet an enraged Donald Trump seems like an equally unlikely saviour for American democracy, especially since it is hard to imagine that the country’s Trump-hating elites, who control its governing and judicial bureaucracies, would allow him to take power.

As we enter another election year, what threatens America’s future prosperity and fading democracy the most is neither Trump nor his enemies. Rather, it is the thickening linkage between America’s incapable elites and a fearful oligarchy that owns the key communications platforms and pipelines that are the source of the country’s largest fortunes, and which provide the context in which large numbers of Americans live their lives and understand reality.

The cure for today’s American Crack-Up is to defuse the affair between our bureaucratic elites and a Big Tech oligarchy that is mediated by the diversity barons of the Democratic Party. The way to do that is to remove the legal protections that have allowed for Big Tech’s monopolies, and which killed off the independent American press, and then to curb the power of national elites by letting individual states make and enforce their own laws, as the US Constitution intended. Once the causes of the country’s current madness are removed, Americans may be able to see their own virtues and weaknesses plainly — and start acting like grown-ups again.

If America has produced only the occasional James McNeill Whistler or Charles Ives who might make a plausible case for inclusion in the Western high-art canon, it has produced no shortage of geniuses whose works have delighted hundreds of millions if not billions of people around the world. America’s greatest composer, George Gershwin, wrote jazz, just as America’s greatest artists, from Jackson Pollack through Andy Warhol, were undeniably pop. The list goes on, from Hollywood writers, directors and stars; to Louis Armstrong, Robert Johnson and the other founding geniuses of American jazz and blues; to Walt Disney, who gave us Mickey Mouse; to Chuck Jones, creator of Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig and Daffy Duck; to Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix, the Velvet Underground and dozens of other songwriters and performers who shaped rock and roll. What makes art American is the exuberant marriage of high and low, often at a large profit.

This summer is no exception, with transcendent work from the country’s two greatest pop talents. What has defined the director Christopher Nolan’s genius to date from Memento to Inception to Batman Returns to Tenet has been his endlessly inventive manipulation of the inner workings of the feature film form to tell stories in ways that reshuffle your brain — a talent founded on an acute awareness of the way the medium uses time. It should be mandatory viewing in all undergraduate philosophy seminars. With Oppenheimer, Nolan has transcended both the normative frame of Hollywood cartoon blockbusters and his own puzzle-palace constructions to make a big film on a world-shaping subject, centred around one of the 20th century’s most important and enigmatic characters. The result is a once-in-a-decade film that marks Nolan as perhaps the most dazzlingly brilliant directorial talent that Hollywood has produced since Orson Welles.

American pop music audiences have also been enjoying a generational talent this summer in Taylor Swift, who is perhaps both the single most gifted and also the most routinely downplayed and ignored pop music icon that America has produced over the past three decades. The mature version of Swift is a brilliant songwriter-storyteller who can hold large football stadiums containing 50,000 or more people spellbound while standing alone on stage for large portions of her three-and-half hour-long shows, which she performs without any breaks.

Only a few individual stars in the history of pop music have been able to mesmerise stadium-sized audiences by standing on a stage alone: David Bowie and Michael Jackson both come immediately to mind. But where Bowie and Michael Jackson were both great dancers, Swift is not — which makes her stage presence all the more remarkable. Her charisma comes from her singular focus on songwriting as a vehicle for mastering her own feelings and communicating them to her audience, which has proven fanatically and deservedly loyal.

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We wouldn't want Oppenheimer today

By Tom Chivers

The multifarious reasons why Swift has not received her due from America’s pop culture taste-makers over the past decade, despite her near-unimaginable level of global fame in the end all boil down to one thing: Swift is a single white woman in a pop medium at an identity-obsessed, politically-divided moment when her particular identity is deeply unfashionable. The fact that she seems as utterly devoted to her craft as Christopher Nolan makes her even less sympathetic to critics who would prefer that her talent wasn’t so outsized, or that her songwriting wasn’t rooted in the storytelling tradition and strong female characters of country music, or that her skin was a different colour, or that she was a gay man or lesbian instead of a straight woman who develops needy crushes on men, or that she was an outspoken proponent of sex in marriage instead of wreaking vengeance on her long list of ex-boyfriends, or whatever else. Good luck to them.

But beneath the triumphs of Nolan and Swift, American pop culture hasn’t been looking particularly healthy this summer. A case in point is the writer’s strike that has paralysed Hollywood for months, and was recently joined by the guilds representing directors and actors. The strike, which shows no signs of being resolved any time before autumn, is a fearful response to the impact of new technologies on the industry, which are in part a response to the cratering of the film and TV business over the past four years. In turn, Hollywood’s problems are only the latest in a series of culture industry cataclysms that have overtaken American journalism, book publishing and the music business, and which make both Nolan and Swift seem more like the freakish end-products of bygone eras (Nolan released his first feature film in 1998; Swift’s eponymous first album came out in 2006) than harbingers of future glory.

While the implosion of each of America’s culture industries may look different up close, it is not hard to see the common factors at work. These range from the consolidation of once-thriving industries and the monopolisation of distribution channels to the stamping-out of competition, the ongoing detachment of monopolistic conglomerates from their audiences and the pursuit of lowest-common-denominator blockbusters to pay for the resulting losses. As America’s culture industries have decayed into anti-competitive, risk-averse monopolists, they have imposed layers upon layers of mind-numbing and increasingly politicised bureaucracy on their productions that make real creativity all but impossible. Looming above all these developments is the threat of push-button culture-production driven by AI, whereby studio executives can fulfil their dystopian dreams of licensing the likenesses of dead actors and actresses and feeding them into software owned by tech conglomerates. This would dispense with the need to negotiate for the services of pesky writers, directors and actors, along with Hollywood’s century-old hodge-podge of unionised guilds.

That’s what the strikers are fighting against. And from a distance, it is easy to wish them good luck. As a consumer, though, it is easier to wish that a giant fault-line might open up beneath Los Angeles and swallow the creators of endless hours of unpalatable dreck along with their bosses at Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Google, and other industry giants which, as their names indicate, are no longer entertainment companies but tech companies, pursuing the filmed entertainment business as a sideline to their insanely profitable monopolies.

Among the other things that Hollywood’s new industry leaders have in common is that they produce oodles of stuff that nobody seems to be watching. In the second quarter of last year alone, Netflix lost 1.3 million subscribers in the US and Canada, while earning a total of $4.3 billion on the year. Yet even that relatively modest net profit is deceptive, since Netflix amortises its content over a period of four to five years, while spending close to $20 billion each year on new productions. In reality, then, the company is burning cash in the hopes of a future profit while losing subscribers, a business model that is clearly headed for the rocks. When Hollywood writers and actors demand their “fair share of the profits”, they might think twice about what it is they are asking for.

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By David Samuels

The dirty secret of the Hollywood strike, then, is that no one is making money. How did that happen? The short answer is that Americans have stopped going to the movies. In 2022, movie theatres sold more than 800 million tickets – nearly twice the number sold in 2021, but less than two-thirds the number sold in 2019, before Covid. In 2002, movie theatres sold nearly 1.6 billion tickets, or nearly twice the current number. These numbers are even more depressing when one considers that, prior to the dual release of Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig’s less exceptional woke doll movie, Barbie, this summer’s two biggest box office attractions were the latest Raiders of the Lost Ark movie starring a now 81-year-old, digitally-enhanced Harrison Ford, and the new Mission: Impossible, starring Tom Cruise, each the 7^th sequel in a series.

Similar declines can be seen throughout the American culture industries. Total album sales in the recording business 2001 were 762.8 million. In 2022, the recording industry sold 100 million albums, in all formats. Besides Swift, who as a 17-year industry veteran is a comparatively fresh face, the acts who make money touring overwhelmingly made their reputations many decades ago, when the industry was still healthy enough to create stars such as the Rolling Stones, Elton John, Bruce Springsteen and the Eagles. Revenue from periodical publishing, whether in print or online, declined from $40.2 billion in 2002 to $23.9 billion in 2022 — a loss in raw dollars of almost 50%. Factoring in inflation, those numbers are again much worse.

Innovation-wise, the last great American pop culture decade was the Nineties — the last decade of the century that saw America’s rise to global pop culture pre-eminence. In television, the Nineties were book-ended by The Simpsons (1989), which kicked off a surge in witty, prime-time animation, and The Sopranos (1999), which ushered in quality scripted cable television. There was plenty of fare such as Dawson’s Creek (1998) available, too. In Hollywood, the Nineties was decade of indie studios such as Miramax, and birthed the world-class writers and directors Stephen Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino along with stars such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts and Matt Damon. Alternative rock birthed dozens of highly creative and financially successful new acts, from Nirvana to the Red Hot Chili Peppers to Alanis Morissette and Gwen Stefani, while rap music reached new creative and commercial heights with Biggie Smalls, Tupac Shakur, Snoop Dogg and Jay Z. The last two American literary fiction writers who have attracted any real critical attention, David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen, made their debuts in 1987 and 1988, respectively.

So what accounts for America’s pop cultural collapse? The short answer is digital technology, which led directly or indirectly to monopolistic stagnation in every one of America’s culture industries in response to disruptions of prior business models.

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By Kat Rosenfield

Hollywood’s main initial antagonists were the streaming services; these have since eaten old-fashioned movie studios and production companies whole by spending billions of dollars on content regardless of whether or not there was an audience. The race to become Hollywood’s Uber left smaller competitors without the ability to competitively distribute their products, with the resulting monopolistic structures imposing top-down uniformity on an industry that had formerly boasted about the audience being king.

In turn, the transition from the big screen to the small screen that streaming services and their users demanded made it near-impossible to create stars, who depended on big-screen magic and the industry’s promotional cycles. The strategy of overspending and then dumping new content into the marketplace made it hard for even the most original creators to stand out from the surrounding oceans of sludge. Cashing big checks from Hollywood’s would-be monopolists may have helped writers, directors and actors to pay for their swimming pools, but they also helped to kill the golden goose.

The extent to which these practices have alienated large parts of Hollywood’s traditional audiences may never be entirely clear, since the streaming services refuse to release even basic audience numbers for their shows. In part, that’s because companies such as Apple and Amazon are content to see entertainment as a loss leader. In Apple’s case, it’s an adjunct to the company’s marketplaces, which are linked in turn to its hardware; in Amazon’s case, entertainment is largely a way to draw some segments of consumers to the company’s immensely profitable marketplace, and keep them there. Freed from workaday competitive constraints, and with access to nearly unlimited piles of cash from their patrons’ primary, profit-oriented businesses, new Hollywood’s culture bureaucrats can give free rein to fashionable pre-occupations such as conducting Me-Too corporate witch hunts, ensuring equity in writer’s rooms, and injecting woke politics into shows that audiences refuse to watch.

Unlike Hollywood, the music industry has been largely unimpressed by the advent of woke-ism. Their business is rebellion, which took a weird turn when free file-sharing services such as Napster and Limewire started encouraging users to routinely violate artists’ copyrights. The result in the Nineties was music industry-wide campaigns in which aging rockers testified before Congress in the hopes of convincing or else forcing their fans to obey copyright law, and buy records. Brilliantly sensing an opportunity, Steve Jobs created the iPod, iTunes and the iPhone, essentially using sleek hardware to take control of the music business. Waving his hardware around like an old-time gangster, Jobs explained to the moguls that they were no longer in the music business: They were in the 99-cent singles business, with Apple getting the biggest cut.

After Jobs’s iPod, and its accompanying iTunes software, ate the music business, by essentially establishing a version of file-sharing that was now under Jobs’s control, the big music companies woke up and decided to go into the streaming business, taking pieces of Spotify and leaving the artists they had once nurtured on steaks and cocaine with a diet of pennies in return for their back catalogues. As record sales plummeted, the music industry stopped paying big advances or otherwise investing in the music they were putting out, and artists could no longer get paid for recording songs. As the star-making machinery broke down, scouts looking to sign the next big thing went to YouTube, and nurtured new talent on social media platforms such as TikTok. Needless to say, none of these platforms select for songwriting talent. Today’s Taylor Swift might find a home in Nashville, but would be an unlikely candidate to be nurtured by one of the major labels, which are no longer in the business of finding talent and making stars.

Book publishing saw successive waves of consolidation, which left four conglomerates competing to publish the same best-sellers while dumping mid-list authors — the vast talent pool from which authors such as Wallace and Franzen had emerged. As the audience for literary fiction shrank, the products of the big four publishing houses became ever more formulaic. In turn, the publishers began to rely on sales to institutions that could turn their products into mandatory reading. This new linkage, once reserved for niche textbook publishers, meant that the publishing houses were more easily swayed by academic fads, and by the censorious doctrines of younger woke employees who had more recently graduated from high schools and universities.

The failure of American book publishers to produce interesting new work, and new literary stars, was also linked to the destruction of America’s once-thriving ecosystem of newspapers and magazines, which had formerly employed hundreds of book critics who served as independent gatekeepers and taste-makers, on behalf of their readers. Today, the number of full-time book critics employed by independent newspapers and magazines in America is perilously close to zero.

Aside from gazing longingly at the night sky in the hopes of spotting the occasional shooting star, like Oppenheimer or the next Taylor Swift album, it is hard to see how America’s culture industries imagine they will escape from their decades-long spiral of anti-competitive practices, creative sterility and dwindling audiences. In order to return the culture industries to health, what is needed is kind of broad anti-monopolistic legislation aimed at the tech industry that has often been promised but seldom actualised over the past two decades. While both Democrats and Republicans like to talk about punishing monopolists, such talk has so far proven to be a way of driving up the size of the checks they receive in order to further polarise the country while cementing Big Tech’s monopolies over pipelines and platforms that connect creators to their audiences.

If Hollywood’s striking writers and actors are serious about benefitting their audiences in addition to paying for their swimming pools, they might start by demanding an end to the stranglehold of monopolistic practices and same-think over the products they produce. Now that would be a show worth watching.

This piece was first published in July, 2023.

Known as DJ Kool Herc (a shortened version of his nickname, Hercules), Clive was locally famous for his physical size and strength and for a style of DJing that involved using multiple turntables and records to stitch together short, percussive passages of R&B music called “breaks” into extended loops of sound, a technique that he called “The Merry-Go-Round”. At his sister’s party, he cued up two copies of James Brown’s Sex Machine album and went back and forth, extending the break from “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose” while exclaiming street phrases over the music to encourage the dancers. And so, hip-hop was born.

As with most origin stories, the tale of how Kool Herc invented hip-hop is actually a set of clues that point in several directions at once. First, there is the fact that the Campbells were from Jamaica, where the practice of DJs rhyming over extended instrumentals had been part of the island’s musical culture since the Forties. By the late Fifties, “toasting”, or the art of boasting and telling stories over instrumentals and encouraging dancers, had become central to the fierce, island-wide competition between mobile sound systems sponsored by Kingston producers such as Duke Reid, Coxsone Dodd and King Tubby.

King Tubby, a protégé of Reid, showed a particular genius for taking the instrumental B-sides of R&B, ska and rocksteady records, and isolating and emphasising specific elements of the instrumentals and beats to create hypnotic music. As American R&B labels began to fade, reducing the supply of imported instrumental B-sides, Jamaican producers began to specialise in the production of original one-off instrumental recordings called dubplates which their DJs could toast and rhyme over. Arguably, then, hip-hop was simply a late American inner-city variant of a style of music that had originated in Jamaica at least two decades earlier.

Yet the realities of life in the Bronx in 1973 were equally important to the development of hip-hop. Jamaica was largely an island of farming towns where people gathered outside to listen to music. New York was a city of totemic skyscrapers caught in a seemingly irreversible spiral of crime, drugs and social decay. If the formal innovations that define hip-hop nearly all originated in Jamaica, the spirit and texture of the music clearly came from New York.

To grow up in New York City in the Seventies, as I did, was to experience the Biblical ten plagues on a more or less daily basis. There were rats everywhere, as city workers often failed to pick up the garbage. Alcoholics and drug addicts slumped against the sides of buildings in pools of their own urine. Playgrounds were littered with syringes, and later crack pipes. Summer evenings were regularly punctuated by gunfire, as police refused to get out of their cars. The terrifying rapidity of the city’s social breakdown sent around two million middle-class and professional residents, not all of them white, fleeing to the suburbs of New Jersey, Westchester, Connecticut and Long Island.

Those of us left behind — the city’s forgotten working class, elderly survivors of every type of historical trauma, ethnic minorities who refused to leave their neighbourhoods — adopted a kind of battle-scarred tolerance towards the state of permanent chaos that was apparently now our fate. If the city’s once-pristine and orderly facades were now covered in graffiti, it was possible to find beauty in what could be understood as a new art form. If the subway staircases lined with unconscious, half-naked bodies suggested a descent into hell, it was also fun to imagine how daring night-raiders had contorted their bodies into impossible shapes in order to spray-paint their names on the trains. Abandoned buildings were taken over by squatters and artists who used the energy of the streets to create in a new graffiti-influence vernacular that would become world-famous through the work of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Clubs such as CBGB’s featured bands like The Ramones and Talking Heads who could easily find rehearsal spaces and pay rent while creating great new music. If the Seventies were one of the worst decades in the city’s history — socially, economically and criminally — they were also a time of undeniable creative ferment.

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Yet the sense of danger, hopelessness and decay that pervaded the city was all too real. Along with the addicts and petty criminals, the streets were home to thousands of mentally ill people who became guinea pigs in a vast social experiment that liberated them from the oppression of state mental institutions to the “care” of communities that lacked any kind of infrastructure or funding to help them heal. Suburban flight cost the city tens of thousands of jobs, and devastated the city’s tax base.

The people hardest-hit by the city’s decline were the poor, especially the black poor, who lived in ghettos from which jobs and basic social services had disappeared. The only available sources of income in poorer city neighbourhoods were welfare payments or the drug trade. Public schools eliminated shop classes and music programmes, as city budgets no longer offered room for anything beyond teaching the basics and taking attendance. If being working-class or elderly in New York City in the Seventies meant running a menacing gauntlet of crime and decay, being poor and black was its own separate circle of hell.

Hip-hop was the music product of a world whose inhabitants had been forgotten but were no less human than anyone else in New York. It showcased a scavenger’s inventiveness in the face of deprivation, and a capacity for inventiveness and joy that the rest of the city had largely forgotten. If there were no more musical instruments or music teachers in the city’s public schools, kids could still make music in the parks with a pair of turntables and records that they bought for a dollar. The early stars of the music were the DJs with the best record collections and coolest breaks. The rappers were hype-men, who rhymed about their zodiac signs and moved the crowd.

There was more to the music, though. As new beats travelled from the Bronx, to Harlem, to Brooklyn, they became a kind of semaphore code that signalled first and foremost that the city was still alive. White kids travelled on the subways to uptown parks and clubs to hear the new music, while black DJs and performers migrated to downtown clubs, where they met the Talking Heads. Barriers of geography and race that had been raised even higher by budget cuts and the decay of the city’s social fabric and institutional structures began to come down. Break-dancers appeared on the subways and in parks in the hope of getting paid, spinning on their heads, popping their limbs, and performing other impossible-seeming feats, making themselves physically and psychically visible to their fellow New Yorkers as something other than likely muggers.

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It is not my intention to recapitulate the entire history of hip-hop here. It is enough to say that in every decade since, someone has declared rap to be dead, only for the music to respond by generating new and bigger and arguably even more talented stars. The Eighties saw the rise of national acts like Run-DMC, LL Cool J, Rakim, the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy. In the Nineties, hip-hop’s centre of gravity moved to the West Coast, with the rise of gangsta rappers like NWA, Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Tupac, a dancer from Baltimore who re-incarnated himself as the most fervent voice of LA’s brutal gang culture. The East Coast responded with Brooklyn’s Biggie Smalls, aka the Notorious B.I.G. (my personal nominee for the greatest rapper of all time), along with Nas, an artistic genius, Jay Z, a commercial genius, and the Wu Tang Clan, a collective of geniuses from Staten Island who fearlessly crossed hip-hop with everything from coke-addled scat singing to old kung-fu movies.

In the 2000s, Dr. Dre fathered Eminem, the white Elvis of rap, who sold more records than anyone else by marrying uniquely complex rhyme patterns with a bratty sense of humour that did more than his skin colour to help rap go pop. Eminem was followed by Jay Z’s old producer, Kanye West, hip-hop’s Mozart, who used his unique ear for sound and love of fashion to turn himself into hip-hop’s first global brand before being eaten alive by mental illness, which announced itself (to those who hadn’t been paying attention) in the form of antisemitic outbursts and his bizarre embrace of Nazi iconography. For each of these stars, there were dozens more who created new patterns out of words and sound, all of which referred back from one angle or another to DJ Kool Herc’s groundbreaking performance at his sister’s party.

Today, rap has secured its place alongside rock, country and pop in the American popular music pantheon with its own category at the Grammys, an outdated music awards show that no one watches. There are plenty of more recent rappers who do unique and original things with the form, such as Drakeo the Ruler, who was murdered in December 2021, and 03 Greedo, who is thankfully still alive. Stars such as Houston’s Travis Scott fill arenas while topping the pop charts.

Still, it was reasonable, until very recently, to see hip-hop as a 20th century cultural artefact that was gently ageing into oblivion. Anyone with a legitimate claim to having bobbed their head at jams in parks back in the day in Brooklyn, Queens or the Bronx is now pushing 60, which in pop-culture land is pretty much the equivalent of death. Snoop Dogg’s pop-culture partner is Martha Stewart. And while fans may still crowd arenas to hear an 81-year-old Paul McCartney sing and play bass, it is hard to imagine them doing the same for an 81-year-old Ghostface Killah, may he live long and prosper.

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Yet on the 50th anniversary of its putative birth, hip-hop suddenly feels fresh again. In a culture in which free expression is increasingly marginalised and depicted as dangerous, even as criminal, hip-hop has proven to be the only native cultural form to successfully resist the sterility of the enforced monoculture that is strengthening its hold on the formerly glorious cacophony of American pop. What passes for American popular culture today is the product of a new regime which uses the tools of social pressure and censorship, combined with ever-more overt intrusions of political and bureaucratic power, to threaten anyone who refuses to conform. But no one can cancel hip-hop stars, because the spirit of the music won’t allow it — and neither will the fans. In a Puritan landscape of fearful, politically driven conformity, hip-hop sounds even more radically original and freedom-loving than it did when it was born.

The idea that hip-hop artists are the last real Americans may seem ironic. After all, they are predominantly urban and black, and spoke their truth in opposition to a dominant white political and musical culture. But anyone who thinks that the blackness is somehow outside the definition of “Americanness” doesn’t know much about either. Black culture is American culture, and hip-hop’s aesthetic, and the values it transmits, could not be more American.

It is the right of every American to invent themselves from scratch. It is the right of every American to not be defined by their given name, by the colour of their skin, or by the government, and to tell their own story in their own tongue. If you shoot at me, I will shoot back. These rights, whether they are written down in the Constitution or not, are what allow Americans in every generation to fashion a new language and new forms out of the materials at hand. That’s what being an American is about.

Today’s America is a country whose elites have turned their back on its foundational promises, preferring to preserve their fortunes while attempting to police and control a society whose size and energy makes them afraid. Hip-hop’s refusal to abide by this is the essence of the American spirit and the foundation of any free society. Which is how a musical form that was once defined as “the black CNN” came to speak for the vast majority of Americans, regardless of their skin colour or whether they were from Brooklyn or the Bronx. Hip-hop continues to speak its own truth, vastly enriching the American language, American music and American culture. This is why it will survive, in some form or another, for at least another 50 years. Happy birthday.

If America has produced only the occasional James McNeill Whistler or Charles Ives who might make a plausible case for inclusion in the Western high-art canon, it has produced no shortage of geniuses whose works have delighted hundreds of millions if not billions of people around the world. America’s greatest composer, George Gershwin, wrote jazz, just as America’s greatest artists, from Jackson Pollack through Andy Warhol, were undeniably pop. The list goes on, from Hollywood writers, directors and stars; to Louis Armstrong, Robert Johnson and the other founding geniuses of American jazz and blues; to Walt Disney, who gave us Mickey Mouse; to Chuck Jones, creator of Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig and Daffy Duck; to Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix, the Velvet Underground and dozens of other songwriters and performers who shaped rock and roll. What makes art American is the exuberant marriage of high and low, often at a large profit.

This summer is no exception, with transcendent work from the country’s two greatest pop talents. What has defined the director Christopher Nolan’s genius to date from Memento to Inception to Batman Returns to Tenet has been his endlessly inventive manipulation of the inner workings of the feature film form to tell stories in ways that reshuffle your brain — a talent founded on an acute awareness of the way the medium uses time. It should be mandatory viewing in all undergraduate philosophy seminars. With Oppenheimer, Nolan has transcended both the normative frame of Hollywood cartoon blockbusters and his own puzzle-palace constructions to make a big film on a world-shaping subject, centred around one of the 20th century’s most important and enigmatic characters. The result is a once-in-a-decade film that marks Nolan as perhaps the most dazzlingly brilliant directorial talent that Hollywood has produced since Orson Wells.

American pop music audiences have also been enjoying a generational talent this summer in Taylor Swift, who is perhaps both the single most gifted and also the most routinely downplayed and ignored pop music icon that America has produced over the past three decades. The mature version of Swift is a brilliant songwriter-storyteller who can hold large football stadiums containing 50,000 or more people spellbound while standing alone on stage for large portions of her three-and-half hour-long shows, which she performs without any breaks.

Only a few individual stars in the history of pop music have been able to mesmerise stadium-sized audiences by standing on a stage alone: David Bowie and Michael Jackson both come immediately to mind. But where Bowie and Michael Jackson were both great dancers, Swift is not — which makes her stage presence all the more remarkable. Her charisma comes from her singular focus on songwriting as a vehicle for mastering her own feelings and communicating them to her audience, which has proven fanatically and deservedly loyal.

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The multifarious reasons why Swift has not received her due from America’s pop culture taste-makers over the past decade, despite her near-unimaginable level of global fame in the end all boil down to one thing: Swift is a single white woman in a pop medium at an identity-obsessed, politically-divided moment when her particular identity is deeply unfashionable. The fact that she seems as utterly devoted to her craft as Christopher Nolan makes her even less sympathetic to critics who would prefer that her talent wasn’t so outsized, or that her songwriting wasn’t rooted in the storytelling tradition and strong female characters of country music, or that her skin was a different colour, or that she was a gay man or lesbian instead of a straight woman who develops needy crushes on men, or that she was an outspoken proponent of sex in marriage instead of wreaking vengeance on her long list of ex-boyfriends, or whatever else. Good luck to them.

But beneath the triumphs of Nolan and Swift, American pop culture hasn’t been looking particularly healthy this summer. A case in point is the writer’s strike that has paralysed Hollywood for months, and was recently joined by the guilds representing directors and actors. The strike, which shows no signs of being resolved any time before autumn, is a fearful response to the impact of new technologies on the industry, which are in part a response to the cratering of the film and TV business over the past four years. In turn, Hollywood’s problems are only the latest in a series of culture industry cataclysms that have overtaken American journalism, book publishing and the music business, and which make both Nolan and Swift seem more like the freakish end-products of bygone eras (Nolan released his first feature film in 1998; Swift’s eponymous first album came out in 2006) than harbingers of future glory.

While the implosion of each of America’s culture industries may look different up close, it is not hard to see the common factors at work. These range from the consolidation of once-thriving industries and the monopolisation of distribution channels to the stamping-out of competition, the ongoing detachment of monopolistic conglomerates from their audiences and the pursuit of lowest-common-denominator blockbusters to pay for the resulting losses. As America’s culture industries have decayed into anti-competitive, risk-averse monopolists, they have imposed layers upon layers of mind-numbing and increasingly politicised bureaucracy on their productions that make real creativity all but impossible. Looming above all these developments is the threat of push-button culture-production driven by AI, whereby studio executives can fulfil their dystopian dreams of licensing the likenesses of dead actors and actresses and feeding them into software owned by tech conglomerates. This would dispense with the need to negotiate for the services of pesky writers, directors and actors, along with Hollywood’s century-old hodge-podge of unionised guilds.

That’s what the strikers are fighting against. And from a distance, it is easy to wish them good luck. As a consumer, though, it is easier to wish that a giant fault-line might open up beneath Los Angeles and swallow the creators of endless hours of unpalatable dreck along with their bosses at Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Google, and other industry giants which, as their names indicate, are no longer entertainment companies but tech companies, pursuing the filmed entertainment business as a sideline to their insanely profitable monopolies.

Among the other things that Hollywood’s new industry leaders have in common is that they produce oodles of stuff that nobody seems to be watching. In the second quarter of last year alone, Netflix lost 1.3 million subscribers in the US and Canada, while earning a total of $4.3 billion on the year. Yet even that relatively modest net profit is deceptive, since Netflix amortises its content over a period of four to five years, while spending close to $20 billion each year on new productions. In reality, then, the company is burning cash in the hopes of a future profit while losing subscribers, a business model that is clearly headed for the rocks. When Hollywood writers and actors demand their “fair share of the profits”, they might think twice about what it is they are asking for.

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The dirty secret of the Hollywood strike, then, is that no one is making money. How did that happen? The short answer is that Americans have stopped going to the movies. In 2022, movie theatres sold more than 800 million tickets – nearly twice the number sold in 2021, but less than two-thirds the number sold in 2019, before Covid. In 2002, movie theatres sold nearly 1.6 billion tickets, or nearly twice the current number. These numbers are even more depressing when one considers that, prior to the dual release of Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig’s less exceptional woke doll movie, Barbie, this summer’s two biggest box office attractions were the latest Raiders of the Lost Ark movie starring a now 81-year-old, digitally-enhanced Harrison Ford, and the new Mission: Impossible, starring Tom Cruise, each the 7^th sequel in a series.

Similar declines can be seen throughout the American culture industries. Total album sales in the recording business 2001 were 762.8 million. In 2022, the recording industry sold 100 million albums, in all formats. Besides Swift, who as a 17-year industry veteran is a comparatively fresh face, the acts who make money touring overwhelmingly made their reputations many decades ago, when the industry was still healthy enough to create stars such as the Rolling Stones, Elton John, Bruce Springsteen and the Eagles. Revenue from periodical publishing, whether in print or online, declined from $40.2 billion in 2002 to $23.9 billion in 2022 –— a loss in raw dollars of almost 50%. Factoring in inflation, those numbers are again much worse.

Innovation-wise, the last great American pop culture decade was the Nineties — the last decade of the century that saw America’s rise to global pop culture pre-eminence. In television, the Nineties were book-ended by The Simpsons (1989), which kicked off a surge in witty, prime-time animation, and The Sopranos (1999), which ushered in quality scripted cable television. There was plenty of fare such as Dawson’s Creek (1998) available, too. In Hollywood, the Nineties was decade of indie studios such as Miramax, and birthed the world-class writers and directors Stephen Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino along with stars such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts and Matt Damon. Alternative rock birthed dozens of highly creative and financially successful new acts, from Nirvana to the Red Hot Chili Peppers to Alanis Morissette and Gwen Stefani, while rap music reached new creative and commercial heights with Biggie Smalls, Tupac Shakur, Snoop Dogg and Jay Z. The last two American literary fiction writers who have attracted any real critical attention, David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen, made their debuts in 1987 and 1988, respectively.

So what accounts for America’s pop cultural collapse? The short answer is digital technology, which led directly or indirectly to monopolistic stagnation in every one of America’s culture industries in response to disruptions of prior business models.

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Hollywood’s main initial antagonists were the streaming services; these have since eaten old-fashioned movie studios and production companies whole by spending billions of dollars on content regardless of whether or not there was an audience. The race to become Hollywood’s Uber left smaller competitors without the ability to competitively distribute their products, with the resulting monopolistic structures imposing top-down uniformity on an industry that had formerly boasted about the audience being king.

In turn, the transition from the big screen to the small screen that streaming services and their users demanded made it near-impossible to create stars, who depended on big-screen magic and the industry’s promotional cycles. The strategy of overspending and then dumping new content into the marketplace made it hard for even the most original creators to stand out from the surrounding oceans of sludge. Cashing big checks from Hollywood’s would-be monopolists may have helped writers, directors and actors to pay for their swimming pools, but they also helped to kill the golden goose.

The extent to which these practices have alienated large parts of Hollywood’s traditional audiences may never be entirely clear, since the streaming services refuse to release even basic audience numbers for their shows. In part, that’s because companies such as Apple and Amazon are content to see entertainment as a loss leader. In Apple’s case, it’s an adjunct to the company’s marketplaces, which are linked in turn to its hardware; in Amazon’s case, entertainment is largely a way to draw some segments of consumers to the company’s immensely profitable marketplace, and keep them there. Freed from workaday competitive constraints, and with access to nearly unlimited piles of cash from their patrons’ primary, profit-oriented businesses, new Hollywood’s culture bureaucrats can give free rein to fashionable pre-occupations such as conducting Me-Too corporate witch hunts, ensuring equity in writer’s rooms, and injecting woke politics into shows that audiences refuse to watch.

Unlike Hollywood, the music industry has been largely unimpressed by the advent of woke-ism. Their business is rebellion, which took a weird turn when free file-sharing services such as Napster and Limewire started encouraging users to routinely violate artists’ copyrights. The result in the Nineties was music industry-wide campaigns in which aging rockers testified before Congress in the hopes of convincing or else forcing their fans to obey copyright law, and buy records. Brilliantly sensing an opportunity, Steve Jobs created the iPod, iTunes and the iPhone, essentially using sleek hardware to take control of the music business. Waving his hardware around like an old-time gangster, Jobs explained to the moguls that they were no longer in the music business: They were in the 99-cent singles business, with Apple getting the biggest cut.

After Jobs’s iPod, and its accompanying iTunes software, ate the music business, by essentially establishing a version of file-sharing that was now under Jobs’s control, the big music companies woke up and decided to go into the streaming business, taking pieces of Spotify and leaving the artists they had once nurtured on steaks and cocaine with a diet of pennies in return for their back catalogues. As record sales plummeted, the music industry stopped paying big advances or otherwise investing in the music they were putting out, and artists could no longer get paid for recording songs. As the star-making machinery broke down, scouts looking to sign the next big thing went to YouTube, and nurtured new talent on social media platforms such as TikTok. Needless to say, none of these platforms select for songwriting talent. Today’s Taylor Swift might find a home in Nashville, but would be an unlikely candidate to be nurtured by one of the major labels, which are no longer in the business of finding talent and making stars.

Book publishing saw successive waves of consolidation, which left four conglomerates competing to publish the same best-sellers while dumping mid-list authors — the vast talent pool from which authors suc as Wallace and Franzen had emerged. As the audience for literary fiction shrank, the products of the big four publishing houses became ever more formulaic. In turn, the publishers began to rely on sales to institutions that could turn their products into mandatory reading. This new linkage, once reserved for niche textbook publishers, meant that the publishing houses were more easily swayed by academic fads, and by the censorious doctrines of younger woke employees who had more recently graduated from high schools and universities.

The failure of American book publishers to produce interesting new work, and new literary stars, was also linked to the destruction of America’s once-thriving ecosystem of newspapers and magazines, which had formerly employed hundreds of book critics who served as independent gatekeepers and taste-makers, on behalf of their readers. Today, the number of full-time book critics employed by independent newspapers and magazines in America is perilously close to zero.

Aside from gazing longingly at the night sky in the hopes of spotting the occasional shooting star, like Oppenheimer or the next Taylor Swift album, it is hard to see how America’s culture industries imagine they will escape from their decades-long spiral of anti-competitive practices, creative sterility and dwindling audiences. In order to return the culture industries to health, what is needed is kind of broad anti-monopolistic legislation aimed at the tech industry that has often been promised but seldom actualised over the past two decades. While both Democrats and Republicans like to talk about punishing monopolists, such talk has so far proven to be a way of driving up the size of the checks they receive in order to further polarise the country while cementing Big Tech’s monopolies over pipelines and platforms that connect creators to their audiences.

If Hollywood’s striking writers and actors are serious about benefitting their audiences in addition to paying for their swimming pools, they might start by demanding an end to the stranglehold of monopolistic practices and same-think over the products they produce. Now that would be a show worth watching.

The reasons for the Nobel Committee’s snub, which occurred at the height of the award’s geopolitical if not literary significance, are not hard to fathom. Most obviously, Kundera was never particularly interested in or engaged by politics. Instead, his work was a passionate defence of the right to pursue one’s own individual desires and lusts against bureaucratic maniacs of whatever stripe who wished to colonise individual experience on behalf of the state. To his critics on both the Right and the Left, Kundera’s stance was borderline immoral, not to mention hopelessly bourgeois. While the Left preferred Che and the Right preferred Solzhenitsyn, Kundera insisted on the human right to be left alone.

As alienating as Cold War ideologues found Kundera’s bourgeois anti-politics, there were also plenty of writers and critics who objected to the qualities of his prose. The intense musicality of his sentences could seem like an artefact of a romantic moment that had passed. His world-class talent for aphorisms could seem similarly dated, a parlour trick that impressed college students on their junior year abroad: “there is no perfection only life” (The Unbearable Lightness of Being); “to laugh is to live profoundly” (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting). He objectified women, in a way that grew increasingly detached from dominant Anglo-Saxon sensibilities. Surely the world had better things to do with its time than to vicariously wallow in the lusts of yet another ageing male writer.

Kundera never saw himself as a political man, as a moralist, a liberal, a conservative, or as an author of texts whose highest destiny was to become movie scripts. He was, quite simply, a novelist. For him, the novel was the highest form of aesthetic endeavour, a kind of anti-scripture representing the sensibility of the individual, containing “an outlook, a wisdom, a position; a position that would rule out identification with any politics, any religion, any ideology, any moral doctrine, any group”. The faith he placed in the novel as a compass that can be used to negotiate life’s big questions can seem hopelessly antiquated. Yet if you don’t believe that, why bother to write one?

In choosing to write his later books in French, Kundera pulled off the near-miraculous feat of being expressive in a second or third language at a world-class level, putting him in the company of Vladimir Nabokov. The French returned the favour, honouring Kundera, protecting his privacy, and appreciating his uncompromising defence of the individual aesthetic at a point in history when other Western literary cultures had ceased to take novels quite so seriously. “We already had novels with a thesis,” wrote his friend and admirer, the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy. “We had so-called ‘committed’ novels in which at least one character served as spokesman for the convictions of the author. Kundera’s response was that a conviction is not novelistic, that it cannot shed the awkwardness (or worse, the vulgarity) of concepts rendered in images unless it is immediately relativized, broken, put on hold.”

It is both fitting and also a bit frightening that Kundera’s breakthrough novel, The Joke, published in 1967 in Czech, may be his most accessible — and might have a hard time getting published today in London or New York. The novel tells the story of a Prague university student named Ludvik, whose life is destroyed by a single, ill-timed joke poking fun at the progressive politics of a pretty female classmate who ignored him. When Ludvik returns to school after vacation, he is summoned before the school’s humourless ideological commissars who insist that his words were offensive. When none of his fellow students dares to speak up on his behalf, he is expelled from school.

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Sound familiar? Of course it does. And with decades of communist cancel culture under his belt, Kundera can tell us what happens next. Injured and embittered, Ludvik is exiled from the class of successful young urbanites and spends the subsequent decades of his life nursing a furious grudge against those who wronged him, and plotting his revenge.

Harbouring a special contempt for a state official named Zemanek, who actively pushed for Ludvik’s expulsion from university, he returns to Prague and strikes up an affair with Zemanek’s wife. But their tryst fails to yield the compensation that Ludvik hoped for. Instead, it ends with an affable encounter with Zemanek, who appears to have no recollection of their shared history. Ludvik concludes that holding on to bitterness towards the past is futile, and that he must reconcile himself to the idea that he will never right the wrongs he has suffered.

The idea that the act of forgetting binds together both perpetrators and victims in the common pursuit of survival is at once deeply humanistic and at the same time deeply unsatisfying to moralists who prefer heroes who win out and villains who receive a timely come-uppance. But such endings made little sense to people in places such as Czechoslovakia, for whom learning to live with injustice and defeat was a geographical requirement. Kundera followed The Joke with Life is Elsewhere, a brilliant though largely overlooked satirical novel that posited a different type of forgetting through the story of a poet named Jaromil, who escapes his surroundings by devoting himself to poetry.

The twinned necessities and dangers of memory and forgetting would occupy Kundera for the rest of his life. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, published in 1977, was a recognisable masterwork of dissident literature, addressing the forced forgetting of the communist state through seven interlocking stories that brought together historical-political and personal narratives of forgetting in a modernist style with touches of magical realism. What made the book really sing, however, was the combination of these hallmarks of serious world lit with hot, entirely un-Soviet sex scenes, including a long-term ménage à trois and a concluding orgy, which announced the primacy of individual desire over politics in a way that shocked Puritans of both the Right and the Left.

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Kundera deepened his exploration of forgetting to Tolstoyan depths in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Published in 1984 in French and set during the 1968 Prague Spring, a philandering surgeon named Tomas is stuck in a love triangle with his wife, Tereza, a dissident photojournalist, and his favourite mistress, a painter named Sabina. Tereza is heavy; Sabina is light, finding release in sex and in the act of betrayal. Sickened by the tightening political noose, the dangers facing Tereza, and the meaningless of his existence, Tomas escapes with her and their dog Karenin to Zurich. When the homesick Tereza leaves Tomas and returns to Prague with Karenin, Tomas is heartbroken, and follows them back home, where they are blacklisted. Moving to the countryside, Tomas abandons both his work and his womanising, and finds love with Tereza. In a touching scene that prefigures the novel’s end, Karenin develops cancer and dies on the operating table, while smiling at her owners’ attempts to save her life.

What was perhaps most shocking to sophisticated readers after the postmodernist playfulness of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was Kundera’s determination in The Unbearable Lightness of Being to tell a Tolstoyan-existentialist love story without reference to either God or politics. In fact, our lives do have meaning, Kundera insisted, if we choose to make it so. For some, Kundera’s erotic philosophy was compelling. For others, it was a retrograde abandonment of both art and life. Clearly, Kundera himself was compelled by both Tereza and Sabina, which is what gave the novel its force.

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There are readers and critics who acclaimed Kundera’s Nineties novels, beginning with Immortality, ostensibly the conclusion of a trilogy composed of his prior two novels, and Slowness, as masterworks. I am not among them. I find them bloated, pompous and self-indulgent. In some sense, I understand Kundera’s genius to have itself become a victim of history. Once the Eastern Bloc crumbled, the author unavoidably lost touch with the driving necessity of making human sense out of the cruel illogic of totalitarian systems of control, which had been replaced by an everlasting peace made out of bourgeois liberal individualism and oodles of Nutella.

Alas. The paradise that staunched Kundera’s art has proved to be as illusory as the acts of remembering and forgetting can be in his fiction. Luckily, we have Kundera’s masterworks as guides to the new-old world in which the people of the West increasingly find themselves embracing the unfreedoms of the East, in what is surely one of history’s greatest jokes — a joke that Kundera the novelist would have greeted with liberating irony.

The country once defined by its powerful middle class is now a flagship of inequality that looks more like a high-end version of Brazil or Nigeria than the mid-20th century bastion of strong unions, churches, civic associations and inclusive political parties. In place of the promise of the American Dream, which was geared towards ordinary men and women, the new America now offers a paradoxical mixture of extreme wealth and glaring disempowerment, which is both intimidating and dispiriting. A glittering oligarchy of a type not seen since the late-19th-century Gilded Age, during which American robber barons plundered the art treasures of Europe, presides over a simmering landscape of uncontrolled low-skill immigration, drug addiction and dead-end service jobs.

More worrying than record levels of inequality — whether measured in income, or in the ability to exert any meaningful control over the circumstances of one’s own life — is the sense of an irrevocable fracturing, which seems to gain strength from month to month, regardless of the fact that most Americans prefer some version of the old America. Propelled by the rise of identity politics, the fragmenting logic of market capitalism or the force of new technologies that reconfigure space and time — or all three forces working hand-in-hand — America has become the prize for a set of tribes engaged in a zero-sum contest for power and spoils.

That a central aim of the American experiment was to create a sense among disparate peoples of belonging to a single whole has been a relatively uncontroversial statement throughout even the worst periods of the country’s history. The agreement that every citizen inherently possessed the same rights as every other citizen, however incomplete in practice, has been a powerful engine for social change, from the fight to end slavery to the campaigns for women’s rights and gay marriage. Yet while the slogan e pluribus unum — “out of many, one” — retains its place in the American currency, it is hardly embraced by most of the country’s leading social and political voices, who depict the country’s history as an unrelieved march of racism and oppression, opposed by the forces of justice.

Where the idea of an American nation or community is increasingly rejected as a remnant of a hegemonic and oppressive past, the celebration of particularity reigns. There is the mandatory replacement of the American flag by sectarian banners — the Black Lives Matter flag for Black History Month; the ever-changing LGBTQA+ symbols for Pride Month — along with elaborate ceremonies of printing new postage stamps, and rewriting history books to focus on the laudable achievements of tribal heroes. These rituals of civic replacement are eagerly embraced by both the oligarchs and the state, and celebrated by large corporations, city halls, the US Congress and US Embassies around the world. Meanwhile, the failure to participate — by, say, flying a large American banner instead — is cause for suspicion of allegiance to a bygone order that has turned rancid, like the bitter-enders down South who decorate their pick-ups with Confederate flags.

The paradoxical nature of the current American predicament is therefore hard to miss. On the one hand, Silicon Valley has cemented America’s place as the wealthiest and most powerful nation on Earth, the unchallenged global leader in fields like AI and biotech — capable of disintegrating any would-be rival by pushing a button and detaching them from the global banking system and the internet. On the other, the digital revolution propelled by American technology and finance is visibly disintegrating America itself. The meritocratic universities and other institutions that once made America the envy of the world are hostages of a new political system in which rote repetition of Democratic Party catechisms about race, class, gender and identity has replaced institutional values such as intellectual independence and critical inquiry. Such ambitions, along with the pursuit of beauty and other forms of excellence, are now signs of Right-wing heresy, to be stamped out by party administrators who administer, well, pretty much everything.

The Democratic Party plays a central role in the new American order, serving as a kind of shadow state, or state-within-a-state — the supremacy of the former being characteristic of so-called revolutionary regimes overseas. Once a vehicle for working Americans to achieve tangible goals such as home ownership, decent healthcare, national parks and a dignified old age, the Democrats under the presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama found a new place in the sun as the address to which the oligarchs pay protection money and do deals with the security agencies in Washington — after endorsing a global trade regime that cost millions of Americans their jobs and flooded their towns with fentanyl.

The Republican Party, meanwhile, once the party of America’s richest moneymen and biggest industrialists, now poses as the party of small business and the dispossessed, under the leadership of an oft-indicted figure who surrounds himself with the dregs of American political life. Whatever threat Donald Trump once posed to the robber barons and the bureaucracies they have allied themselves with, he long ago revealed himself to be a clownish figure, alternating populist rhetoric with self-pitying conspiracy theories while repeatedly failing to protect himself or his followers from forces that mean them harm. The result has been political suicide for Republicans who support him, as well as those who oppose them.

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If one side of the new American coin is oligarchy and political failure, then the other is sectarian rule — another of those recognisable miseries that afflicts revolutionary countries, along with poverty, ignorance, corruption, the use of security agencies to fight personal battles, state censorship and the jailing of political opponents. Perhaps the overwhelming characteristic of such places is the colonisation of every aspect of life that might otherwise provide solace to ordinary people — the arts, academia, law, office life, even family life — by “politics”, a word that is carefully chosen to obscure the absence of coherent thought, which is in any case impossible, since the only fixed principle of such revolutionary politics is sectarian warfare, a danger that the country’s founders worked mightily to avoid.

Yet to claim that America has succumbed to a revolutionary coup seems more than a little overheated. Nigeria doesn’t dominate the global banking system or run the internet — America does. Brazilian presidents may indict and jail their political enemies, as American presidents of both parties clearly itch to do — but America’s favelas are wildly more luxurious than their Brazilian equivalents. Unlike Cuba or Venezuela, America is the home of Starbucks, Microsoft, Apple, J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs, as well as Tesla and Elon Musk. In recent decisions on abortion and affirmative action, the country’s conservative Supreme Court has provided a powerful counterweight to the progressive enthusiasms of the moment, just as the country’s founders intended.

Meanwhile, Americans continue to invent new ways of seeing and being, just as they have always done — even though other Americans may experience them as noxious. In other words, the simple narratives of national decline, the rise of tribalism and even the fracturing effects of revolutionary new technologies hardly suffice to explain the scale and totalising nature of the changes America is experiencing, which are entirely real.

A clue to the real nature of the sweeping and convulsive changes that have overtaken the familiar American social and political order can be found in the aftermath of the killing of a black man by a white policeman in the city of Minneapolis in 2020. A petty criminal who was high on fentanyl and suffered a fatal heart attack while a police officer named Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck to restrain him, George Floyd was an ideal symbolic victim for both sides of the American political divide: a black martyr who incarnated the ills of a community whose members saw themselves as historical victims of an organised system of white supremacy enforced through police brutality. Chauvin was sentenced to over 20 years in prison after being convicted of murder.

Surprisingly, given the massive street demonstrations and accompanying riots that followed Floyd’s death, virtually no public attention nor energy was devoted to the underlying economic and social inequalities that helped destroy his life. No public programmes were announced to fight drug addiction or promote job training, employment or education. Even as the Democratic Party leadership knelt down in the hall of Congress with pieces of colourful kente cloth around their necks to confess their own culpability for the evils of racial inequality, the Party embraced prolonged Covid lockdowns and school closures — measures which had a particularly negative impact on children in marginalised and underserved communities.

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Instead, the response to Floyd’s death consisted of a public campaign targeting symbols of “white supremacy”. This campaign centred on attacks on America’s Civil War past, including taking down statues and portraits of Confederate generals and officeholders, removing funeral monuments from cemeteries, and even exhuming Confederate bodies from their graves. As part of this nationwide burst of iconoclasm, universities and other institutions issued long reports apologising for slavery, and solemnly “reckoned” with the crimes of past donors. A cynic might have observed that issuing apologies for crimes committed 160 or 300 years ago provided a convenient cover for universities such as Harvard and Yale to continue accepting hundreds of millions of dollars from individuals and governments around the world whose activities today are no less criminal and exploitative.

Yet, as universities scoured their walls for depictions of historical figures who had directly or indirectly profited from the slave trade, and large corporations and media companies embraced the wholesale adoption of language such as “white supremacy”, it became apparent that something deeper was at work. “White supremacy”, a term that had only recently been the province of historians and a handful of contemporary academic race theorists, became a primary target of the FBI, despite the absence of any evidence that white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other race-conscious extremists had become any more common or acceptable in America today than they were 10 or 20 or 50 years ago. Displays of the Confederate banner, which had been a part of Southern culture to the point where they had in most cases become generalised symbols of rebellion, were suddenly forbidden. To a historically-minded observer, the renewed obsession with race, the attacks on symbols of the Confederacy, the agonised institutional self-searching, all pointed to a single overarching theme of the cause that had captured the imagination of the country’s elites: refighting the American Civil War.

The decision to reignite a conflict in which more than 600,000 Americans died, and which resulted in a resounding Northern victory, the end of slavery and the continuation of a national project that would benefit hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century, might seem like a perverse choice. As far as I know, no one in England or France calls for refighting Cromwell’s Revolution, say, or the French Revolution, on account of their victories being incomplete. Moreover, the monuments that the iconoclasts removed in 2020-21 were not erected by the Confederate government, but under Union rule; they were symbols of the national truce that followed the war, in which Southerners acknowledged defeat and Northerners let them bury their dead and rejoin the Union. So why reignite a conflict in which the good guys won, after nearly drowning the country in blood?

The answer, of course, is that while the national truce that followed the Civil War may have benefited the nation as a whole, it did not meet the aims of some of the victors — Southern slaves, whose descendants are rightly more concerned with economic progress and the safety of their children, and Northern abolitionists, whose heirs had apparently retaken power, and whose true radicalism had been largely edited out of the American story.

While Abraham Lincoln’s chief war aim was to preserve the Union, the hymn of the Northern abolitionists was “John Brown’s Body”, which commemorated the death of the firebrand who was executed by the US Government in 1859 for his attempt to initiate a Southern slave revolt through a suicidal raid on the town of Harper’s Ferry, in which 17 people died, most of them freed blacks. Northern soldiers with abolitionist sympathies sang the hymn as they marched into battle, announcing themselves to be soldiers in a holy war in which “John Brown was John the Baptist of the Christ we are to see”. Rewritten by Julia Howe, who cleansed the song of any mention of John Brown, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” became the most popular marching song of the American military after the Civil War, attesting to America’s new sense of national purpose:

“In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.”

Northern Abolitionists, the direct heirs of the New England Puritans, could claim to be entirely consistent in their rejection of the national truce, both in the aftermath of the Civil War and also 160 years later. The civic compact that followed the war was not of their making. Neither was the original compact on which the Union was founded in 1789, following the successful American Revolution against the British. Both compacts were secular instruments, in which the demands of God and justice were subordinated to the requirements of getting disparate peoples — including New England Puritans and Southern slaveholders — to somehow live together.

For the Puritans and their contemporary heirs, the successes of the earthly compromises on which the country was founded — the US Constitution, victory in the Civil War, the rise of America to Great Power status, victory in the Second World War, the success of the Civil Rights movement, the defeat of Soviet Communism — were immaterial. Puritans understood evil as a foe to be rooted out without compromise, on pain of endangering one’s soul. While earthly wealth was nice, the Kingdom of Heaven was far better.

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What made the 17th-century Puritans who settled New England unique in their moment was the transmutation of religious militancy from opposing earthly foes to internal struggle. According to Perry Miller, the great historian of New England Puritanism, the Puritans — themselves a radical faction of the English Puritans who won, and then lost, the Glorious Revolution — arrived in New England with the goal of building a “city on a hill”, in the words of their leader John Winthrop. The Puritans imagined their settlement as a model community that would serve as a beacon to Europe, which was then mired in seemingly intractable religious wars. Through the shining example of the small New England colony, old Europe would come to realise its folly and embrace the truth of Puritanism.

When Europe predictably ignored the Puritans’ example, New England was engulfed by a spiritual crisis, which resulted in a collective turning-inwards — an attempt to relocate the crashing failure of their mission into the American wilderness within the inner lives of the colonists themselves. The resulting turn from outward-looking grandiosity towards a narcissistic obsession with the scouring of one’s own soul in search of sin would remain characteristic of the American Puritan consciousness, and of the country that was at least partly built on the foundation they established.

Today’s America, caught in a war between the demands of national coexistence and absolutist obsessions with racial sin, is a place that the country’s Puritan ghosts would easily recognise. And despite the careful clockwork of the country’s Enlightenment founders, the Puritan ghost has never ceased to exist within the national machinery. Sometimes, the ghost presents itself as the nation’s conscience, as it did during the Civil Rights movement. During the Great Depression, FDR sought to contain this impulse by refounding the Democratic Party, and mid-20th-century American culture, as an alliance between Northern ethnic Democratic Party machines and the Old South, breathing new life into the country’s original Constitutional forms — but also renewing its anti-Puritan compromise with evil.

The current American revolution, by contrast, represents another outbreak of the Puritan spirit, which is guilt-ridden and self-obsessed, and at the same time determined to realise the kingdom of heaven on earth. At once deeply and inherently American, it is also opposed to what has been the American social and cultural order of the past three centuries. It is a mistake to believe that the Puritan ghost can ever be satisfied, especially through compromise. Puritanism is a revolutionary, iconoclastic and totalising movement, whose truths are religious and uncompromising. The question for Americans now is which of the country’s two founding visions they will choose: that of the country’s rationalist Enlightenment Founders, whose imagination of a great, continent-sized American nation has already been achieved, or the wilder visions of its founding saints.

Over two decades later, the flaws in Holbrooke’s grandiose plan for a global propaganda war directed from Washington are glaringly obvious. At the heart of Holbrooke’s conception of what became known as the Global War on Terror (GWOT) was the idea that the crucial post-9/11 battles would be won or lost not in physical locations in Afghanistan and Iraq but rather inside the heads of ordinary Muslims. The truth was that bin Laden and his terrorists understood their target audience far better than the White House, the CIA and the FBI ever could or did. Yet bizarrely, the dream of controlling reality through semiotic and technical means remains current in Washington and other Western capitals, even as the battlefields of the Middle East have gone silent. What started out as a way to fight a far-away foe has quietly metastasised into a totalitarian fantasy of endless warfare against the erroneous thoughts and feelings of ordinary citizens closer to home.

The idea of “information warfare” was born in the Seventies, when Pentagon war colleges began to take notice of the role played by so-called information operations in Soviet military planning, particularly in promoting third-world insurgencies. In 1991, American military planners included a heavy “information operations” (IO) component in the first Gulf War, which, despite featuring large set-piece tank battles in the desert, was widely labelled “the first information war”. In American military doctrine, IO was defined as a toolbox of capabilities consisting of computer network operations, electronic warfare, operational security, psychological operations, and deception. It was these capabilities, merged with high-flown Cold War rhetoric about freedom and democracy, that Holbrooke, President George W. Bush and others imagined would ultimately win the war against Al Qaeda.

America’s withdrawal of its military forces from Iraq and Afghanistan under Barack Obama left many with a less optimistic view of US IO capabilities. “Many analysts have concluded that the new media conditions are tilted in favour of non-state actors, such as insurgent militias or terrorist groups,” wrote Amy Zalman, an expert who frequently consulted for the Pentagon. “When information is restricted, the remaining void is quickly filled with conspiracy theories and distorted facts. These theories balloon and proliferate with startling speed, because it is so cheap and easy for most of us to access the means of digital communication.”

Yet the failure of the American war in Iraq, launched 20 years ago this month, and the seeming futility of IO efforts when confronted with the ungovernable spaces opened up by the internet and mobile phones, only seemed to strengthen the Pentagon’s underlying belief in the fusion of information operations (IO) and counter-terror (CT) tactics as the future of modern warfare. “In cognitive warfare, the human mind becomes the battlefield,” summarised an article in The Nato Review in May 2021. “The aim is to change not only what people think, but how they think and act. Waged successfully, it shapes and influences individual and group beliefs and behaviours to favour an aggressor’s tactical or strategic objectives. In its extreme form, it has the potential to fracture and fragment an entire society, so that it no longer has the collective will to resist an adversary’s intentions.”

A key turning point in transforming these tactics from a war-fighting technique to a new theory of Western governance happened quietly a decade ago, when large-scale spying on US citizens by the NSA was licensed by the Obama White House. Documents leaked in 2013 by Edward Snowden alerted the public to a series of domestic spying programmes, as well as the fact that the NSA was routinely mining social media platforms to build profiles on Americans without judicial review. While the NSA had previously been required to stop searching the contact chain of a foreign target when it reached a US citizen, a change in policy allowed intelligence services to continue tracing the online contacts of Americans so long as there was a “foreign intelligence” purpose to justify the snooping.

In the wake of the Snowden revelations, hints of further centralised US government surveillance activities using private technology companies began to emerge. The Obama administration routinely spied on reporters by monitoring their private telephone records and using that information to issue subpoenas to force them to reveal their sources. In 2014, Twitter filed a suit against the US Department of Justice and the FBI, stating that it had been served FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) warrants to collect the electronic communications of its users. Some of these efforts were apparently focused on the Obama administration’s attempts to sell the Iran Deal, the centrepiece of his second term.

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Twitter’s lawsuit, which asked the court for permission to release a public report containing the precise number of warrants it had been served, was filed by Perkins Coie, the prominent Democratic Party-aligned DC law firm. The firm’s lead attorney in the case was a former DOJ cybersecurity expert named Michael Sussmann. Then-FBI General Counsel James Baker, who was friends with Sussman, refused Twitter’s request. Crucially, the entire cast of characters involved — including Obama, Twitter, the FBI, Perkins Coie, James Baker and Michael Sussman — would soon play important roles in a startling expansion of the US government’s nascent efforts to wage information warfare against its own citizens.

The device by which this transformation was effectuated was the so-called Russiagate conspiracy theory, which falsely claimed that Donald Trump had been handed the White House by agents of Vladimir Putin. Even if the evidence for Russiagate was often only legible to true believers on social media, who often sounded like characters in a Philip K. Dick novel, its function in Washington was entirely practical. By identifying Trump as an extension of Putin, the Russiagate theory neatly transformed a foreign threat into a domestic one — thereby legitimising all-out warfare by the Washington establishment against a President that many believed to be a dangerous lunatic.

Russiagate began when Perkins Coie, then employed by Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, paid a company called Fusion GPS, run by an ex-journalist named Glenn Simpson, to produce a dossier of dubious reports under the by-line of a British ex-spy named Christopher Steele. Before leaving office, Obama ordered his spy chief John Brennan to draft an official assessment claiming that the Steele dossier was real — and that Putin had helped put Trump in the White House. Obama then signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, targeting Putin, and by extension Trump.

If the Global War on Terror was founded on a profound misapprehension of America’s ability to control how other people interpret reality, Obama’s war on foreign propaganda and disinformation was founded on an outright lie that was kept alive for years by a pliant media addicted to taking handouts from nameless operatives who waged information warfare against their political enemies — and a majority of the country. “The Russian intervention was essentially a hijacking — of American companies like Facebook and Twitter,” a typical 2018 feature in The New York Times falsely asserted. The extent of the “massive fraud” that had occurred on social media platforms suggested a “plausible case that Mr Putin succeeded in delivering the presidency to his admirer, Mr Trump”. Yet according to exhaustive investigations by Robert Mueller and the US Department of Justice, the only fraud that occurred was the promotion by every normative authority and publication in the county of a hallucinatory conspiracy theory that allowed the DC establishment to bring the GWOT back home and use it an instrument to control the American public.

In the autumn of 2017, the FBI increased its leverage over the content of social media by establishing the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) “to identify and counteract malign foreign influence operations” through “strategic engagement with US technology companies”. The Department of Homeland Security set up the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to serve a similar purpose. Together, these and similar nodes in other agencies helped knit together US intelligence agencies, Big Tech companies, civil society institutions, and major media organisations into a single warfare behemoth whose job it was to “secure” the US information environment. And since “Russia” equalled Trump, stopping “Russian disinformation” meant censoring Trump, his supporters, and anyone else opposed to the bureaucratic takeover of domestic communications infrastructure.

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CISA’s censorship of Twitter, which is now a matter of public record, provides one example of how the new public-private information warfare partnerships worked. One such partnership was the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a censorship consortium consisting of the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and Graphika, a DC-based company made up of former national security officials and employed by the Senate Intelligence Committee. According to the recent Twitter files dump, CISA regularly censored information by filing requests with EIP, which relayed them to Twitter, Facebook, and other tech companies.

By this point, Twitter had given up suing the US government. In fact, James Baker, the former FBI chief counsel who had refused to allow Twitter to spill the beans on the US government’s use of its platform, and then authorised the FISA warrant that laid the basis for Russiagate, was now Twitter’s own in-house lawyer — one of at least a dozen former FBI and intelligence community operatives working to actively promote censorship policies based on a conspiracy theory that the platform’s own internal metrics showed was a lie.

In pressuring technology companies to do their bidding, the US security bureaucracy and its external allies in the Democratic Party and anti-Trump circles utilised two key levers of power. The first was the threat to regulate digital monopolies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter. The second was to label the technology companies that had supposedly been leveraged by Putin as national security threats. Both these tactics relied on the wording of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, a law originally intended to punish the distribution of child pornography, which exempted Google and Facebook from libel and other claims for which publishers of newspapers, magazines and other editorial products remained liable — on the theory that tech platforms were not publishers.

Monopoly platforms such as Google and Facebook were now caught in a bind. Facing potentially ruinous regulation, and at risk of being labelled national security threats, the platforms were prohibited from engaging in editorial decision-making that would turn their shiny liability-free monopolies into ordinary publishing pumpkins under the terms of Section 230 of the CDA. What the technology companies needed, in other words, was an external authority that would make editorial decisions for them, on a basis that would be acceptable to Democrats and national security bureaucrats.

Enter the fact-checkers. As a profession, fact-checking was once a minor ornament of the grand edifice of mid-20th-century American journalism. As that edifice collapsed in the face of competition from internet platforms, which hoovered up all their advertising dollars, fact-checkers began to replace actual journalists. Between 1990 and 2017, US newspapers lost more than a quarter of a million jobs, a decline of more than half. Meanwhile, between 2014 and June 2021, the number of fact-checking organisations in the US — employing mostly freelance workers with no particular qualifications or prior experience — rose from 44 to 341, an increase of nearly 800%, the vast bulk of that rise having been funded in order to support the false assertion that “foreign disinformation” had swung the 2016 election in favour of Trump.

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On November 17, 2016, an organisation called the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) published an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose company’s acceptance of $150,000 in Russian-linked ads supposedly resulted in Trump’s victory. “We would be glad to engage with you about how your editors could spot and debunk fake claims,” the IFCN suggested on behalf of the 20 fact-checking organisations belonging to its network. The following month, Facebook announced that the IFCN would be its main partner in fact-checking all claims made on the world’s largest social media platform.

The IFCN was launched in 2015 as a division of the Poynter Institute, a media non-profit. Initial funders of the IFCN included the National Endowment for Democracy, the Omidyar Network, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. The partisan nature of “fact-checking” activity provided by the IFCN and its partners and similar agglomerations was not hard to spot: analysis from 2018 of fact-checks by the Associated Press found that 94% were made on Republican and conservative statements. The new “fact-checking” system allowed the major internet platforms to keep their monopolies, at the price of binding them to the Democratic Party and the DC bureaucracy.

The pandemic only tightened the elite nexus between bureaucrats, the Democratic Party, and technology companies in the attempt to make information safe for Americans. In February 2020, for example, The Washington Post denounced Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton for promoting a “debunked” “conspiracy theory” that Covid-19 had escaped from a Chinese lab in Wuhan. In May 2020, the Post’s head “fact-checker”, Glenn Kessler, a member of the IFCN advisory board, said it was “virtually impossible” for the virus to have come from a laboratory. The head of the FBI, Cristopher Wray, has now acknowledged that scenario as likely. Heretical information on the failure of lockdowns in halting transmission of Covid and the regressive inefficiency of masking children in schools was treated the same way, skewing public opinion in favour of bureaucratically convenient falsehoods and radically decreasing public trust in doctors and public-health authorities.

In October of 2020, the new domestic information security complex showed its overt partisan political purpose by massively censoring news reports about the contents of the hard drive of a computer belonging to Hunter Biden while his father was running for the presidency. In addition to lurid footage of Hunter Biden smoking crack and having sex with prostitutes, the hard drive, which had turned up in a Delaware repair shop, contained politically-damning information about business dealings between the Biden family, including Joe Biden, and companies with ties to the governments and spy services of China and Ukraine. It was, in other words, a huge political story of the type that decides elections — except very few Americans saw it in time. When they did see it, they were told that the story was a fake, the likely product of a Russian disinformation campaign.

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At Facebook, Andy Stone, once the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee press secretary, explained that the reduction of Facebook’s “distribution” of the article would go into place while it was looked over by Facebook’s “third party fact checking partners”. Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey, and his top attorney, Vijaya Gadde, kept the article from being shared on their website on the grounds that the material potentially constituted an invasion of Hunter Biden’s privacy. Meanwhile, the Twitter files show that the FBI paid Twitter nearly $3.5 million for the platform’s work censoring “dangerous” content.

The FBI unit designated to coordinate with social media companies during the 2020 election was the Foreign Influence Task Force, which was led by agent Elvis Chan and corresponded with Twitter and other tech companies to identify alleged foreign influence and election tampering. Chan openly pushed the theory that the Hunter Biden laptop was a “Russian disinformation operation” — a theory underwritten by an open letter signed by no fewer than 50 distinguished US intelligence officials. Yet former head of site security Yoel Roth, himself an impeccable leftist, claimed to have found little evidence of Russian activity on Twitter. According to Roth, the FBI primed him to attribute reports about Hunter Biden’s laptop to a Russian hacking operation. Needless to say, the FBI’s reports — and subsequent “disinformation” claims — were disinformation invented by the FBI, which had been in possession of the laptop for nearly a year and therefore knew the material on the Bidens to be authentic.

Donald Trump may indeed be a dangerous lunatic, or simply a crackpot — but the attempt to “secure” the US information environment from his supposedly malign influence has proven to be far more destructive than anything Trump actually did as President. As our brains were turned into battlefields by political operatives and government bureaucrats, using their power over private companies to manipulate and censor information in the service of what they regarded to be publicly beneficial falsehoods, it is hardly surprising that public confidence in the American press has fallen to the lowest levels ever recorded. Only 16% of American adults in a recent Gallup poll expressed “a great deal” of confidence in the information they receive from newspapers, with 11% expressing similar levels of confidence in what they see on television. Among Republicans, the number expressing confidence in newspapers is 5%. This decline in confidence has no parallel in any other Western country. Americans, it turned out, were no more susceptible to domestic information operations than Muslims were in the Middle East two decades earlier.

Now America, just like Afghanistan and Iraq, must face the challenge of how to govern a country in which trust has been comprehensively shattered, and all that is left is a landscape of endless information operations run by warring tribes who define their opponents as “insurrectionists” and “terrorists”. None of these efforts to define reality seem likely to do much to promote social peace in the US, any more than they succeeded in bringing peace and democracy to the Middle East. Twenty years later, it would appear that bin Laden’s paradoxical understanding of asymmetric warfare was right: the most powerful weapon against the West is the West.

Still, Spiegelman’s Maus seems fated to wind up one day in its own Dead Sea Scrolls-like wing in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which stands on the National Mall in Washington DC, a stone’s throw away from the gorgeous Yoruba crown of the American Museum of African American History. Since the Holocaust Memorial Museum opened in 1993, fewer and fewer American Jews seem to question the wisdom of putting a gruesome and terrifying act of mass murder at the centre of their collective identity. In a recent Pew Research Center study, 76% of American Jews said that “remembering the Holocaust” was a key component of what being Jewish meant to them — far ahead of other ostensible pillars of communal life such as “working for justice and equality” (59%), “caring about Israel” (45%), “having a good sense of humour” (34%), or “observing Jewish law” (15%).

The centrality of the Holocaust to American Jewish self-definition is also a surprisingly recent phenomenon. The invisible barrier that partitioned the American Jewish success story from the terrors of the Holocaust only began to dissolve in the late Seventies, with the airing of the 1978 mini-series Holocaust, starring Meryl Streep. Conceived and sold as a kind of Jewish Roots, Alex Haley’s sweeping drama about American slavery which had aired the previous year, Holocaust was seen by large mass audiences in both the US and Germany, breaking the informal ban on portraying Nazi crimes through the lives of their Jewish victims. In that same year, the Polish Jewish writer Issac Bashevis Singer, who lived in Manhattan and wrote movingly in Yiddish about the vanished world of European Jewry and the lives of émigré Holocaust survivors in America, was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, leading to broader interest in his work in the US. The following year saw the publication of two taboo-breaking American novels that brought the Holocaust into mainstream literary culture, Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer and William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, both of which underlined the uneasy continuities between Europe and America (Streep also starred in the movie version of Styron’s novel).

In the context of these cracks in the cultural ice, which would culminate, in 1993, with the opening of the Holocaust Museum in Washington and the release of Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List, the appearance of Art Spiegelman’s autobiographical cartoon strips about Jewish mice and Nazi cats in the underground comics magazine Raw in 1980 — the strips were published in book form as Maus in 1986 — did not cause much of a stir. Yet for those of us who were kids in New York and read Raw, Spiegelman’s strips were the ultimate Holocaust Samizdat. Were they sacrilegious? Were they art?

When I asked Spiegelman that question a few years back, he sighed, and gave his stock answer: “The Holocaust trumps art every time.” Spiegelman, whose name can be translated as “art mirrors man”, is the owner of a stunningly fertile graphic imagination that over the past 40 years has produced dozens of formally innovative and often searingly self-reflective strips in various magazines, including Arcade and Raw, which he co-founded and edited with his wife, French artist and editor Francoise Mouly. In his day job at the Topps trading card company, he created and edited the Garbage Pail Kid series before moving on to a more upscale day job at The New Yorker, where he created some of the magazine’s most iconic covers of the past three decades, including a Hasid and a black woman kissing on Valentine’s Day and the famous post-9/11 “black cover”, which, when you held it at an angle to the light, showed the outlines of the vanished Twin Towers.

Spiegelman came by his interest in the Holocaust naturally enough, as a child of parents who survived Auschwitz and settled in New York City after the war. Spiegelman himself was born in Stockholm, Sweden; his brother Rysio was poisoned in a bunker in Poland along with two other small children by his aunt, so that they wouldn’t be taken to an extermination camp. When Spiegelman was 20, he was confined in a mental hospital, whereupon his mother killed herself. Spiegelman was released from a state mental institution in Binghamton, N.Y., to attend her funeral — an event that would become the basis of one of his early, devastatingly personal cartoons. Spiegelman’s father then burned his mother’s diaries about her experiences during the war and in the camps, which she had intended for her son to read after her death.

His impulse to rid himself — and his son — of the burden of the Holocaust was not unusual, either among survivors or American Jews in general. The Holocaust was largely a taboo subject among American Jews, most of whom were glad to have left Europe and the experiences of European Jewry behind, especially given the opposing fates of Europe’s Jews and America’s. Where European Jews had faced total annihilation, American Jews had gained unparalleled social acceptance in a more open and democratic country that they were eager to embrace, and which seemed increasingly, and even unusually, willing to embrace them.

The key to Jewish social acceptance in America, which included access to higher education, jobs, and housing that had routinely been denied to Jews before the war, was their military service during the Second World War. More than 600,000 American Jews fought in the Allied Armed Forces to defeat Hitler, who was both a national enemy and a particular enemy of the Jews he sought to exterminate. The fight against Hitler therefore united American nationalism and Jewish particularism in a way that helped liberate Jews from the prejudice they had suffered before the war. The Manhattan Project, which gifted the United States rather than Nazi Germany with the most terrifyingly destructive weapon known to mankind, was led by the Jewish physicist Robert Oppenheimer and a team of émigré scientists, most of whom were also Jewish, and was grounded in a theory of matter whose outstanding progenitors were physicists Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, who were also — well, you get the point. Another half million or so American Jews fought in Korea.

The replacement of images of American Jewish wartime patriotism, heroism and strength with images of European victimhood struck Jews in the Fifties as a dubious, undesirable and even potentially dangerous trade-off. Far from being a pillar of communal identity, the Holocaust was mostly a kind of terrifying in-group secret that accompanied the great movement of Jews from urban ghettos to tennis clubs in leafy suburbs like the one that Philip Roth portrayed in Goodbye, Columbus. Speak too loudly about the Holocaust, or so the whispered communal voices suggested, and friendly post-war Americans might recall that before 1939 many of them — especially at the higher echelons of society — had been fervent antisemites. Survivors such as Art Spiegelman’s parents, who came to America after the war with numbers tattooed on their arms, speaking broken English and haunted by terrible memories, were unwanted guests at the banquet of post-war American Jewish success, bearers of the grim message that it could all vanish tomorrow.

A good part of the energy of American Jewish culture after the war can therefore be seen in part as the product of an act of profound and even generative repression of a tragedy that after all, had happened somewhere else. In Hollywood, where Jews, individually and collectively, exerted an enormous cultural presence, it took until Schindler’s List for an A-list Jewish director or executive or star to make a major film about the destruction of European Jewry. Neither The Naked and the Dead nor Catch-22, the two classic American Second World War novels, written by the Jewish novelists Norman Mailer and Joseph Heller respectively, mentioned the Holocaust. The 1959 movie version of The Diary of Anne Frank was directed by George Stevens and otherwise carefully de-natured to avoid seeming like a Jewish story.

For an American kid like Spiegelman, who was nevertheless unable to avoid the subject of the Holocaust because of the ways they had shaped his own life, it was necessary to find non-mainstream cultural forms in which to express his terrors. Spiegelman credits Mad magazine and the sensibility of its founder Harvey Kurtzman for shaping his early desire to use cartoons to express his sense that something was not entirely right with the way the world around him worked or was portrayed in mainstream acceptable culture. His first Mad anthology, which he studied with the intensity that some of his peers brought to pages of the Talmud, was a gift from his mother, the Auschwitz survivor who killed herself.

Starting in 1978, Spiegelman, then a well-known underground cartoonist, began interviewing his father about his wartime experiences. In the early Eighties, he began creating strips that narrated his father’s stories and portrayed his own relationship with his father, a miserly and compulsive yet deeply sympathetic character; the strips were published in Raw under the title “Maus”. Both the title and the device of portraying Jews as mice and Germans as cats had been used by Spiegelman before, in a three-page strip he had published in 1972 and that was later published in his collection Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!, which attracted the admiration of hundreds of dedicated alternative comics fans but few buyers.

Today, it seems clear that Maus and Maus II, Spiegelman’s continuation of the first collection, are the most powerful and significant works of art produced by any American Jewish writer or artist about the Holocaust. While their enduring popularity is a tribute to Spiegelman’s deep honesty about his emotional experience of his upbringing and of his graphic and narrative talent, it is also a reflection of the way in which the Holocaust has morphed from a threatening and largely repressed communal trauma to the glue that binds the American Jewish community together. If Art Spiegelman is a genius who created a work of searing originality and insight out of his familial and personal suffering, it is also hard not to worry about the anti-aesthetic and communal consequences of his achievement. If he is right to complain that the Holocaust trumps art, it was Maus that opened the floodgates.

Of course, Jews are hardly the only group of Americans who seek to define themselves through historical trauma. In America’s flourishing victimhood Olympics, to be a black American is to be the descendent of slaves, who were whipped and chained — even if your Nigerian parents came to America to study medicine on Fulbright Scholarships. To be Asian is to have been sent to labour camps during the Second World War — “Asian” being one of the catch-all American identity groupings like “Hispanic” that lump together the experiences of widely differing nationalities, population groups and tribes. To be gay is to be persecuted for your sexual preferences, like Oscar Wilde, or be denied treatment for Aids. In all these cases, the moral virtue and practical wisdom of inculcating identities centred around the traumatic experiences of people who, in most cases, are no longer alive is simply taken as an article of faith.

Yet Jews remain a special case, in part because the trauma inflicted on them was so recent and totalising; in part because they are in fact a tribe, with a continuous collective historical memory stretching back to the Old Testament; and in part, because they are also, simultaneously, an unabashed American success story. The apparent contradictions between the American Jewish success story and the Holocaust victimhood narrative can be unsettling, both for purveyors of victimhood ideology and for American Jews. For if historical trauma begets present-day ills, then why are Jews so successful — and were they ever truly victims? And what if Jewish success in fact begets Jewish victimhood, in which case America’s special status as a safe haven from the terrors of Jewish history is illusory?

The fact is, neither the Left nor the Right in America can get what they actually want from the Holocaust, which is a simple and gratifying victory over their political enemies. Fantasies about rural Trumpers gleefully carting liberal American Jews off to the gas chambers have more in common with fetish porn than they do with American social or political reality. Similarly, the poor inner-city teenagers who physically attack poor urban religious Jews with sickening regularity have little in common with goose-stepping would-be Übermenschen.

The eagerness with which both sides in America’s inane political wars seek to deploy the Holocaust as a weapon is not a sign of any great respect for the dead. Nor does it do anything to help living Jews, whose position as a small minority in an increasingly fractured and unstable country seems unlikely to improve anytime soon, no matter how often the Left and Right accuse the other side of being Nazis.

Perhaps Art Spiegelman’s parents understood something important about the past that today’s balkanised and trauma-obsessed Americans can no longer credit: that the greatest gift you can give your children is to free them from the past, so that they can become something new. For Art Spiegelman’s parents, the demand that they not pass on their incalculable suffering to their son was simply too great. The rest of America has no such excuse.

David Samuels contributed an essay to Maus Now, a new essay collection edited by Hillary Chute (Viking).

The joke was on me, I thought. Or maybe the joke was on Calvin Klein. Faced with a grotesque sight that I could just as easily have viewed in my own bathroom mirror, I resolved to eat less and exercise more often — and to stop buying Calvins.

But was the billboard actually a joke? On reflection, I had my doubts. If there is one aesthetic experience that defines the present, it is the feeling of being under more or less constant attack by the anti-beauty impulse — the kind of deliberate ugliness that I saw on the billboard. Examples of this style of defacement are everywhere, and particularly in commercial ad campaigns, from Calvin Klein ads to the cover of Sports Illustrated. Their omnipresence suggests that something more radical is afoot than an attempt to expand beauty standards by, say, showing us that men and women of different races, genders and sexual preferences might all partake of a common, more inclusive set of ideals. There is in fact an overriding difference between appreciating the beauty of men and women of different races and physical types, which at this point in history seems like a lesson that adequately-educated children learn in grade school, and asserting that a grossly overweight woman on a motorised chair — as featured on another Calvin Klein billboard — is a beauty object. The former expands and enriches a common ideal of beauty; the latter says that beauty doesn’t exist, shouldn’t exist, isn’t important, is the enemy of virtuous behavior and thought.

The anti-beauty impulse is iconoclastic, not in the playful mid-20th-century sense, but in the literal sense of destroying icons. It is dour, tight-lipped and totalising. Sex is forbidden, as are desire, playfulness, and pleasure. What’s left is the feeling of someone spitting in your face and forbidding you from wiping it off. The aim of such gestures is not to expand anyone’s aesthetic. It is to punish you for being attracted to what is now forbidden.

Iconoclasm has its own history. A few years ago, I visited John Calvin’s church in Geneva, whose brutalist interior was achieved by smashing the statues that had once been inside. I am not a Catholic and have only a passing acquaintance with the glories of Renaissance art, but still, it was hard not to feel the destructive force that had been unleashed in the interior of what had once been the city’s largest cathedral, even as a children’s choir sang hymns in the background. As the authors of that particular bout of heady vandalism no doubt intended, it was not a particularly peaceful or pleasant experience. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.

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The idea that destruction should be pursued programmatically, as a virtue, with beauty as the enemy, is what separates puritanism from punk, an aggressive aesthetic that rejected prevailing standards of beauty and other norms and instead sought to release energy by smashing things. Punk was a studiously primitive expression of the life-force. The Calvinist vandals of Geneva, like their latter-day successors in the Taliban, sought to repress the life-force by denying the validity of any experience or standard outside their own fixed notions of virtue.

The assault on beauty that we are seeing today is more puritan than punk; its authors defend their actions as expressions of the millenarian urgency of their supposedly secular beliefs. When climate activists deface paintings by Monet, Klimpt, Vermeer, Picasso, Van Gogh and others, they are not merely attacking paintings; they are saving the planet. Activists in the United States who tear down sculptures memorialising Confederate war dead are not merely attacking works of art, or rejecting the achievement of peace between warring sectional armies; they are posing as warriors locked in a death-struggle with racism and white supremacy. Putting photographs of overweight women, or trans women, on the covers of men’s magazines is said to be a way of fighting misogyny or saving trans lives, even as it is also obviously a way of expressing contempt for the readers of those magazines and the universe of desire they inhabit.

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The motivation behind these acts would be recognisable to the inhabitants of Calvin’s Geneva: to attack images and objects considered by others to be beautiful or sacred. Why beauty should find itself the target of a culture-wide rage for destruction is a question to which no single answer is likely to suffice. A short list of such candidates might include: widespread feelings of misery and powerlessness caused by rampant inequality; the disillusioning reach and effect of new technologies; and the desire to build a better world, save the planet, and put an end, once and for all, to racism, sexism, homophobia, misogyny and other barriers to equality.

A more sweeping answer can be found in the Russian science-fiction novel We, written nearly a century ago by Yevgeny Zamyatin. We is set in a future utopia run by engineers whose rage for equality mediated by algorithms would be familiar to many of today’s puritanical activists. The novel is presented as the diary of a state mathematician named D-503, who falls in love with a woman named I-330, whose particular combination of black eyes, white skin, and black hair strike him as beautiful. D-503’s feelings of attraction for I-330, and his desire for an exclusive relationship with her, in turn draw him into a conspiracy against “the Only State”. Zamyatin’s totalising utopia is a centralised surveillance state governed according to a highly-advanced mathematics of happiness incarnated in the Integral, a giant computing machine/spaceship that will soon “force into the yoke of reason other unknown beings that inhabit other planets, perhaps still in a wild state of freedom”.

Love has been banned by the Only State as inherently discriminatory and unjust. Sex has not. According to the Lex Sexualis, the government sex code: “Each number has a right towards every other number as a sex object.” Citizens are issued ration books of sex tickets. Once both numbers sign the ticket, they are permitted to spend a “sex hour” together and to lower the shades in their glass apartments, becoming temporarily invisible to surveillance, which is how the romance between D-503 and I-330 begins.

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We is chiefly known today in the West as the inspiration for Orwell’s most famous anti-utopian fiction, 1984. Orwell’s reading of We was heavily coloured by his revulsion for both the fascist and communist real-world versions of the one-party state, which he had come to loathe during the Spanish Civil War. “The guiding principle of the State is that happiness and freedom are incompatible,” Orwell wrote in his 1946 review of We. “Now the Single State has restored [mankinds’s] happiness by removing his freedom.”

Yet key aspects of Zamyatin’s book puzzled Orwell. “Writing at about the time of Lenin’s death, he cannot have had the Stalin dictatorship in mind, and conditions in Russia in 1923 were not such that anyone would revolt against them on the ground that life was becoming too safe and comfortable,” Orwell observed. “What Zamyatin seems to be aiming at is not any particular country,” he concluded, “but the implied aims of industrial civilization.”

Yes, but. If the opposition between happiness and freedom that Orwell found in We became the central theme of 1984, Zamyatin had introduced a third term, which he believed to be more revolutionary and also more inherently human than the desire for freedom: Beauty.

By eliminating freedom and all causes of inequality and envy, the Only State claimed to guarantee infinite happiness. The real threat to this ideal isn’t sexual envy, which is rampant in the Only State, or the existence of an invisible elite that in fact rules the city. It’s beauty. For D-503, dance is beautiful, mathematics is beautiful, and the contrast between I-330’s black eyes and black hair and white skin is beautiful. Beauty is the answer to D-503’s urgent question, “What is there beyond?”

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The subjective human perception of beauty, Zamyatin argued, was not reconcilable with utilitarian calculations of social justice. Beauty is unequally distributed, and therefore manifestly unjust. At the same time, no one loses anything because someone or something outside themselves is considered beautiful by others. My perceptions of beauty in a person or a piece of music are entirely my own, yet at the same time they in no way preclude others from the same enjoyment; the enjoyment of beauty is therefore at the same time wildly unequal yet universally available.

Beauty, Zamyatin believed, was an inherently stubborn human force that is rooted in our biology, and therefore in external absolutes, like the mathematical ratios that determine D-503’s perceptions of the beauty of I-330’s face, which are at the same time both fixed and irrational. It is something real we perceive in the world, and not, or not merely, an arbitrary “construct” determined by power relations. The ultimate example of human un-freedom and un-reason, beauty is key to our humanity.

Human beings want what we want because we are human. Therefore, we will never stop seeking beauty, and will reject and destroy any attempt to reorder our desires according to the logic of machines. Machines can be programmed to weigh out exact measures of equality, but they can’t be programmed to feel what humans feel when looking at other humans in their underwear. Nor can machines feel envy, spite, or the impulse to desecrate things that other people find beautiful.

It is no accident, then, that in a moment when Zamyatin’s vision of a technologically-advanced society whose chief value is equality seems to be within our reach, that beauty would present itself as an obstacle to that vision — and as a primary target of egalitarian rage.

Whether Roosevelt’s Republic properly ended with the social chaos of the late Sixties or with America’s victory in the Cold War, and whether we are therefore currently living in the Fifth, Sixth or arguably even the Seventh American Republic, is the type of question that future history students in Beijing or Singapore are bound to contemplate on their final exams. The more immediate point is that another American Republic is collapsing, and also that we’ve been here before. In recent years, as in the Sixties, we’ve seen the take-over of large sections of American cities by armies of drug-addicted zombies, riots in Washington, dirty political tricks by the FBI and the CIA, the capture of universities by militants obsessed with race and gender, dire warnings about the fate of the planet, and the wholesale abandonment of American military allies. The difference between now and the Sixties is that today the people with Angela Davis posters on their walls are living in gated communities, rather than communes.

More troublesome, however, than the sight of America once again shedding its skin, is the shape of the American Republic to come — and the question of whether it will be a republic at all. Since the end of the Cold War, America has transformed itself from a country in which most citizens proudly imagined themselves to be “middle class” into a bi-coastal oligarchy. The hallmarks of this new republic’s politics are the sorts of pathologies that used to be associated with the countries to America’s south: a wildly unequal distribution of wealth, choking bureaucracy, paranoid mass politics, the weaponisation of the security apparatus, and the merger of monopoly capital and invasive state bureaucracies.

The beginning of the current crisis can be dated to the election of 2016, in which a large majority of voters expressed their rejection of the American socio-political order by voting for either Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump over the neoliberal establishment candidate, Hillary Clinton. Trump’s election was followed by coordinated attacks on his flailing presidency by large sections of the American power structure, including the national press, corporate monopoly internet platforms, and a security apparatus that used the press as a megaphone for a series of conspiracy theories and lies that were often spread under cover of anonymity. The media’s already-tattered credibility with the public was plunged into the toilet.

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This toxic combination of widening political polarisation and institutional failures was contaminated further by the country’s disastrous response to Covid-19, which crushed small and medium-sized businesses while padding the profits of large investors and internet-based monopolists. The result was the largest single transfer of wealth in American history since the Civil War, and the disenfranchisement of a significant portion of the American middle class — accompanied by a steady drum-beat of “woke” discourse that gleefully demonised the losers as “white supremacists” and “insurrectionists”.

The election of Joe Biden in 2020 was supposed to restore the legitimacy of the American political system and bring a measure of social peace. Instead, President Biden went in the opposite direction, attacking his opponents as “white supremacists” and “fascists”, setting the FBI on domestic foes, and endorsing a banana republic-style raid on Trump’s home.

Yet to blame America’s woes on either the 79-year old Biden, who strikes even sympathetic domestic observers as senile, or Trump, who continues to be a font of ugly and delusional politics, is to dangerously mistake the nature of the crisis. America’s toxic partisan politics are a symptom of deep changes in the American socio-economic structure that date back to the early Nineties, in the aftermath of America’s victory in the Cold War — when President Bill Clinton set out to take Reaganomics global with a series of trade deals that included NAFTA and GATT, and destroyed the American middle class that Roosevelt and his successors created.

From the standpoint of the Democratic Party of the Nineties, Clinton’s trade deals were a huge success, bringing major sectors of Wall Street and large American corporations into the party camp. For traditional Democratic constituencies such as industrial labour unions and their members, they were a disaster, permanently depriving millions of Americans of their jobs and turning large swaths of the country’s industrial base into rubble-strewn reservations for zombified meth-heads.

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Among the writers, thinkers, and reporters who tried to analyse the travails of the American working and middle classes during Bill Clinton’s presidency, perhaps the most acute was the Pentagon-linked geo-strategist Edward Luttwak. For Luttwak, the problem with America wasn’t market capitalism or the failure of American workers to compete with their peers in Mexico and China. Rather, it was the unholy conjunction of Right-wing libertarian Reaganomics with selfish Left-wing baby boomer mantras about free trade, technology, and open borders.

What both the Left and the Right shared, in Luttwak’s analysis, was their disdain for the kinds of Bismarckian social bargains that keep states strong. Luttwak called the unholy alliance of the libertarian Left and Right “Turbo-Capitalism”, and he warned of its disintegrating effects on the American middle class, which he saw as the foundation-stone of American stability, prosperity, and geo-political dominance.

In his concern for the disintegrating American middle class of the Nineties, Luttwak was hardly alone. The troubles of middle-and-working-class Americans were a common theme during that era among a cohort of perceptive American thinkers including Robert Bellah, Barbara Ehrenreich, Michael Lind, Robert Putnam, and Robert Reich. What made Luttwak a rarity among his peers, Lind excepted, was his embrace of European-style welfare state capitalism in the context of an overtly nationalist politics — ie the American status quo before the Reaganites and the Clintonites set out from different directions to destroy it.

The America of the Obama-Trump-Biden years now looks a lot worse than the America that alarmed Luttwak and Lind in the Nineties. At the top of the narrowing social pyramid is a tiny class of mega-billionaires who personally own and control a staggering percentage of the country’s wealth, resources, and power, and make their money from the globalised economy. Then comes the professional class that services the billionaires, ranging from highly paid lawyers and investment bankers to chefs and fashion designers and real estate salesmen. Below them is the servant class of bureaucrats, teachers and other lower-status employees whose salaries are paid by the state or non-governmental organisations and foundations, who funnel money back to their political patrons in the Democratic Party in the form of free campaign labour and contributions.

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Finally, there are the working poor, many of whom formerly considered themselves “working class” or “middle class”, but who are now forced to rely on government programs and subsidies covering everything from rent, to school tuition, to health care, to food. The glue that holds this power vertical together is the Democratic Party, which now regularly outspends the Republican Party — an incoherent mix of Trumpists, Christians, and other socio-economic losers — by margins of three or four to one.

In addition to being an oligarchy, the new American social pyramid is also a gerontocracy, in which both political power and wealth are wildly skewed in favour of people above the age of 60. Biden (79) and Nancy Pelosi (82) lead the Democrats, while Trump (76) and Mitch McConnell (80) lead the Republicans. Where the average American over the age of 55 has a net worth of somewhere between $1.2 and $1.5 million, the average American adult under the age of 35 is worth approximately $75,000, with the vast majority having no significant assets at all.

Understanding the new America as a decaying oligarchy run by old people is essential to understanding the increasingly bizarre mutations of Left and Right in American politics. The “Left”, in the United States, now represents the new oligarchy and its dependents. The resulting “Left-wing” preferences for free trade and open borders in turn make it impossible for American workers to earn a living wage. The fact that the new American Left is funded by billionaires such as George Soros (92) and Warren Buffet (91) ensures that Left politics is focused not on decent pay for workers but on the ever-mutating math of woke identity politics.

In place of tangible goods, such as a living wage and the chance to buy a home, groups of dispossessed Americans are offered official “recognition” of an ever-expanding set of “identities” rooted in race, gender and sexual preference, which pits them against other groups of Americans who suffer from much the same woes. Wokeness, as an ideology, can be seen as a function of the ascendent Turbo-Capitalist order — a means for controlling the working and middle classes to ensure that they can’t unite against their increasingly all-powerful masters.

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The digital technologies on which the new American mega-fortunes are based offer historically unprecedented opportunities for surveillance, censorship, and social control — and have allowed the oligarchs who own them to merge with the state. Jeff Bezos of Amazon, for example, owns the Washington Post, which the security apparatus used as a megaphone to spread the Russiagate conspiracy theory to undermine Trump. Amazon also holds a lucrative cloud computing contract to manage all the CIA’s data, which it administers from a centre in Northern Virginia where over 20,000 people work, many of whom were formerly employed by the government. While tech giants such as Oracle and Palantir have large contracts with the US security apparatus, public-facing companies such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter regularly censor news and opinions at the behest of the White House while funneling private user data to the security services for free.

If techno-monopolists have merged with the security bureaucracies in Washington, the human instrument of elite control is the “professional-managerial class”, which forms the backbone of the lay Democratic Party. But how did this relatively narrow group of lawyers, professors, teachers, nonprofit workers, bureaucrats, and lower-level editors gain the power to anathemise, exclude, condemn, and generally lord it over much larger sectors of the population?

One answer is its ability to leverage digital tools, particularly social media — a medium in which small numbers of activists can wreak havoc on hundred-billion-dollar corporations or prestige institutions. By this logic, the Woke is a vanguard movement that seized control of a new technology and used it as a force multiplier to discipline and terrorise the larger institutional landscape.

A more subtle version of this answer is that woke-ists use the threat of reputational damage to impose uniformity of opinion on the class of people like themselves, whose careers exist only insofar as they are backed by sufficient reputational capital. Unlike previously dominant forms of capital (like, say, land and cows), the reputational capital that is the professional class’s stock in trade — the ticket to the next job or fellowship — can be vaporised by a single tweet. In turn, the uniformity of opinion that the woke imposes within its own cohorts allows it to control those cohorts, and use them to bend powerful institutions to its will.

This explanation of wokeness, though, is to imagine that the tail is wagging the dog. But, media companies have stockholders, just as universities have wealthy and powerful trustees to answer to. These stockholders and trustees should be more powerful than broke 20-somethings with Twitter accounts. Surely, at some point, market forces should begin to punish institutions that chose to ignore reality. If Princeton University, say, were to embark on a programme of persecuting faculty who dissent from faddish doctrines, then those faculty members — and the donors who support them — could migrate to Harvard, which would accumulate money and prestige at Princeton’s expense. But that never happens. Not just institutions of higher education, the entire professional layer of society — from the professions, to corporate management, to non-profits, to media and publishing — moves in lock-step.

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So who does control the new American system? The answer isn’t broke woke-ists. It’s the monopolists who own the platforms where the woke-ists live. Elon Musk and Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett and Sergei Brin and Larry Page and Lorraine Jobs don’t care about mean tweets. They care about the hundreds of billions of dollars in their bank accounts, their lavish mansions and private jets, and pursuing rich person hobbies like colonising Mars. Their primary political goal, as a class, is to prevent the state from ever getting strong enough to tax their fortunes, break up their monopolies, or interfere with the supplies of cheap immigrant and offshore labour from which they profit. The more fractured, dejected, and heavily surveilled the America public is, the less likely a strong state is to emerge.

In the contest between the oligarchs and the fading Rooseveltian state, the woke are a useful tool— not an independent power. They are the foot soldiers of the Democratic Party, whose job it is to organise the dispossessed into groups that are narrow, factional, and divided enough that they can’t come together into a force that threatens oligarchical control. Discontent with the Turbo-Capitalist order can be usefully turned against anyone who refuses to follow the ever-changing party line — beginning with the “deplorables” who are now regularly portrayed as murderous, undemocratic racists and fascists, and extending to JK Rowling and Margaret Atwood. The result is a closed circuit in which Turbo-Capitalist oligarchs and Woke activists make common cause against formerly independent institutions like universities, professional associations, and the press. All of these institutions rely on guarantees of individual and collective rights by the state, which the Turbo-Capitalists and the Woke seek to capture and use as an instrument to enforce their own privatised social bargain: everything within the Party, nothing outside the Party, nothing against the Party.

The unprecedented reach of the technologies that the new oligarchy commands has already destroyed the press and replaced it with a government-corporate censorship regime that has no parallel in peacetime America. Combined with what appears to be a healthy appetite for humiliating others, this power does not bode well for the future of social peace in America, or for the health of the next American Republic.

In the years since, the novelist once dismissed as a gutter pulp sci-fi weirdo has steadily climbed the ladder of posthumous literary reputation. The case for Dick’s genius has never rested on his dystopian vision of technology, which he shared in common with masters like HG Wells and Stanislaw Lem, and with hundreds of sci-fi writers since. Good science fiction — as opposed to fantasy novels set on other planets — is defined by a quasi-philosophical examination of interactions between men and machines and other products of modern science. It is part novel and part thought-experiment, centered on our idea of the human.

What made Dick a literary genius, then, was not any special talent for predicting hand-held personal devices or atom bombs the size of a shoe which might have led him to a job in Apple’s marketing department. His gift was for what might be called predictive psychology — how the altered worlds he imagined, whether futuristic or merely divergent from existing historical continuums, would feel to the people who inhabited them. Dick’s answer was, very often: “Not good.”

Dick’s dystopian-psychological approach marks him less as a conventional science fiction writer than as a member of the California anti-utopian school of the Sixties, whose best-known members include Robert Stone, Thomas Pynchon, Ken Kesey, Joan Didion and Hunter Thompson. Seen from this angle, Dick was perhaps the most powerfully and sweepingly paranoid of a group of writers whose stock-in-trade was conspiracy and paranoia, the hallmarks of a society marked — at that moment, and this one — by violent street crime, drug-induced psychosis, and visionary promises gone terribly wrong. Of his anti-utopian peers, Dick’s sci-fi genre background made him the only one who had any particular feel for the proposition that technology was inseparable from, and would therefore inevitably alter, our idea of the human.

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Technology was and is perhaps the most Californian aspect of the American mythos. The idea that the universal constants of human nature were at war with the mutilating demands of technology-driven systems was a very Sixties Californian conceit, to which Dick’s fellow anti-utopians each adhered in their own way: In Kesey’s showdown between man and the castrating nanny-state; in Didion’s emphasis on the vanishing virtue of self-reliance; in Pynchon’s degenerate Ivy League Puritanism; in Thompson’s drug-addled primitivism; and in Stone’s Catholic idea of devotion to a God that might somehow salve the wounds of the survivors once the great American adventure goes bust.

What Dick saw, and what his fellow anti-utopians did not, was that human psychology and technology are not separate actors, and that whatever emerged from the other side of the future would be different to the human thing that entered it.

* * *

Seeing and describing how large numbers of people will perceive reality before anyone else does requires imagining states of consciousness that, in the moment, seem deeply strange. It is no accident that the greatest of works of speculative psychology were written by revolutionaries whose outlook was often bleak to the point of despair. The negative tone of these works often led future generations to describe their authors as conservatives, though artistically and psychologically speaking, they are radicals. Or rather, in their rejection of the dominant order, they are radicals and reactionaries at the same time.

The anti-utopian tradition emerged in earnest in 19th-century Russia. The Russian pioneers of the genre were superior to their rivals in England and elsewhere because the latter’s visions were constrained by attachments to a settled society, which one can argue never really existed in Russia — and because the ideas of revolution and violent reaction have always been so closely allied in the Russian psyche. Fyodor’s Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Underground struck many of its initial readers as a kind of artless mental vomit, before revealing itself as a Rosetta Stone for the century of Adolf Hitler and Lee Harvey Oswald. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We is probably the greatest of at least a dozen weirdly prophetic novels written in the years immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution. In We, Zamyatin predicted what a surveillance society run by engineers would feel like to its inhabitants with a nauseating accuracy that did not become fully apparent until the rise of the modern tech surveillance complex.

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The Dick novel that directly predicted our information-addicted, socially-networked 21st-century society, A Scanner Darkly, was both a prophecy of future psychological states and a half-veiled memoir of Dick’s own experiences in the California drug culture. Published in 1977, the book was a detective noir set in a druggy future in which large portions of the population appear to spend their lives scheming and snitching on each other to feed their addictions to a drug called Substance D — the “D” standing for Death, of course.

A Scanner Darkly, a reference to the line in Corinthians in which men at first see God “as in a glass, darkly”, is Dick’s rawest book and the one that reads least like science fiction. The book’s protagonist is simultaneously a narcotics agent known to his peers as Fred and a Substance D addict named Bob Arctor. Fred/Arctor lives in a house — his former marital abode — with two fellow addicts, and is in love with another addict named Donna, who comes to visit him there. Donna helps Arctor obtain Substance D, which he consumes, while Fred uses Donna to attempt to climb higher on the drug distribution ladder. At the end of the novel, Donna turns out to be a drug agent, who is spying on Bob Arctor.

What’s so striking about the book is not Dick’s heartfelt, if futuristically bent, portrayal of the evils of Sixties drug culture. For that, read Stone, who was a master of connecting the physical, mental and moral corruption of drug dealing and dependency, and the fantasies those pursuits inevitably engender to the deeper corruption of man’s nature.

What Dick uniquely captured was something else: The degenerative effects of the split-screen existence of a human brain ceaselessly spying on and doubting and implicating itself while at the same time being spied on by others, all of whom are embedded within machine systems that record everything for reasons that humans cannot understand. Over the course of this machine-and-chemical fed process of human self-contradiction and self-destruction, of which Fred/Arctor is only intermittently aware, we see his thoughts and perceptions being short-circuited and reduced to gibberish.

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Drug-induced paranoia aside, the psychology of Dick’s addicts and narcs is as good a description as exists of the spreading incoherence of today’s information ecosystem, which none of us are able to fully see or understand. As a thought experiment, it doesn’t matter that Dick chose a drug rather than the stories we tell about ourselves and our world. It’s not the technology; it’s the psychology. What Dick saw was that the process of splitting ourselves in two — into subject and narc — was a brutal assault on the idea of being human and would make thoughts and communication impossible.

“What does a scanner see?” Arctor wonders, after examining the surveillance apparatus that has been planted, with his knowledge, in his own home. “I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infra-red holographic scanner like they used to use, or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me – into us – clearly or darkly? I hope it does, see clearly,” Arctor continues, “because I can’t any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone’s sake, the scanners do better.” They don’t.

* * *

Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, which the English philosopher sketched out in a series of letters between 1786 and 1788 while visiting  the Mogilev district of the Russian Empire, was an architectural system of control in which all inmates of an institution could be made visible to a single guard. Bentham’s utopian-utilitarian idea was widely applied in Victorian England to a range of public and private spaces including prisons, asylums, hospitals, factories and even schools. The unique horror of the Benthamite set-up was not the power imbalance inherent in places like prisons and factories, whose existence is obvious to guards and prisoners alike. It was the attempt to eliminate privacy, which is a necessary precondition for being human.

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Over the last decade, Bentham’s architecture of unfreedom has been replaced by the architecture of machines. This has created a new social reality where everyone is at once inmate and guard; a panopticon where nothing is private and no one is free. The invisible operations of the machines and programmes we use every day to buy books or food or communicate, which are linked to each other and to the surveillance operations of large government agencies in a single net, induces in most sentient beings a kind of free-floating paranoia of the type that destroys the inhabitants of A Scanner Darkly. On the one hand, everyone knows that everyone is being watched. On the other, it is necessary to deny that knowledge in order to appear to be functioning normally.

One of the most unpleasant characteristics of the weird split-screen mentality of our times is how people must routinely speak against themselves — deny what they see, hear, feel and believe  — in order to maintain the appearance of sanity. It is now routine, for example, to hear Americans on the Left and the Right deride their political opponents for believing in far-reaching conspiracy theories — while in the next breath revealing their own.

No doubt both sides are at least half right. During lockdowns, it became normal for public officials in Western countries to issue draconian edicts in the name of “science” for the supposed good of large numbers of people, only to violate those edicts themselves. The meaning of “science”, it turned out, had nothing to do with the “common good”, or with demonstrating a theory through evidence; it was “one rule for me and another for thee”.

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The flagrant doublespeak that is nurtured in the surveillance societies of the West, which have sprung up around us unnoticed, is characteristic of totalitarian societies and mental asylums. The difference is that both totalitarian societies and asylums allow for nonthreatening zones of privacy in order to make life easier for the guards. What we live in today is something else, a set of mirrors into which we are encouraged to look so that our reflections can be distorted and then returned to us. As Bob Arctor puts it, reflecting on the words of Corinthians: “it is not through glass but reflected back by a glass. And that reflection that returns to you: it is you, it is your face, but it isn’t.”

Powerful people in Western societies have lately become convinced of their ability to accomplish great feats of moral and social engineering by controlling these mirrors, altering our reflections and selling them back to us, while undermining our ability to think coherently. The mirrors are not meant to help anyone think; they are systems of control. They are mechanisms of profit, which foster dependence. They are used to mete out punishment, and spy on us.

What’s alarming is that the people who delight in their mastery of these devices seem not to have thought very hard about the damage they are doing to the people who shoot up, a category that includes those who shoot up schools and malls. None of them seem to calculate what creating a miasma of nonsensical conspiracy theories will do to the psyches of their own children, who will inherit “the murk”. They appear to believe that people with minds that have been permanently broken by their gibberish machines will make the perfect workers on their farm. Let’s see how that turns out for them.