The American Right increasingly answers in the negative. In doing so, conservatives are staging their own version of the critical-theory doctrine deployed by progressives until recently to restrict speech.

The triumph of the Free Speech Movement appeared to accord students full rights to participate in the era’s public debate, which fit in with the broader dismantling of the in loco parentis paradigm, under which university administrators acted as parental authorities for students. Where the in loco parentis regime had consigned college students to a status of quasi-adulthood, the Berkeley protesters’ demands successfully redefined the campus as a space in which the full exercise of citizenship could occur; not coincidentally, the voting age was also lowered to 18 in many states during this period.

In more recent years, the campus Left became widely associated with an anti-free-speech stance, while the Right has often laid claim to the ideals of the 1964 Berkeley students. Hence in 2017, it was the Right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopolous who attempted to hold a “free-speech week” on the Berkeley campus, after an earlier talk he attempted to give there was shut down amid violent opposition from progressive activists.

It might seem, therefore, that Trump’s crackdown has returned us to the pre-1964 status quo, with progressives once again defending speech rights on campus and conservatives trying to limit them. But this isn’t the full story. In reality, the approach taken by the Trump administration has far more in common with the progressive speech regime than its enthusiasts would have you think.

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The Left’s turn against free-speech maximalism is often traced to a text that appeared soon after the Berkeley protesters’ apparent triumph, under the byline of one of the protesters’ heroes, the philosopher and New Left guru Herbert Marcuse. I refer to the essay “Repressive Tolerance”, in which Marcuse expanded on the central argument of his hugely influential 1964 book, One-Dimensional Man: that the ostensible freedoms of advanced industrial society masked its fundamental unfreedom.

Revisiting the foundational 18th– and 19th-century struggles for freedom of speech, Marcuse argued that their aim was not simply to establish a neutral public sphere. Rather, “the tolerance which enlarged the range and content of freedom was always partisan — intolerant toward the protagonists of the repressive status quo”. In other words, advocacy for unlimited freedom of speech was a tactic of opposition to dominant forces — a tactic that, according to Marcuse, had become obsolete. This is because unlike the ancien régime, the “repressive status quo” of advanced industrial society in fact benefits from a regime of “pure tolerance”.

This was because, as Marcuse’s Frankfurt School colleagues Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer had first argued decades earlier, the 20th-century culture industry had become a regime of propagandistic mass deception that manufactured consent for what they called the “totally administered society”. Accordingly, arguments for free expression and other liberal rights now amounted, as Marcuse put it, to accepting “the toleration of the systematic moronisation of children and adults alike by publicity and propaganda”.

In contrast to authoritarian societies, “totalitarian democracy” bestows formal freedoms on its subjects, but these freedoms are negated by the overwhelming force of technological mass communication that tip the scales in favor of dominant social forces. By this account, demands for free speech like those made in Berkeley might ultimately serve to reinforce this broader unfreedom.

Marcuse’s paradoxical response to this impasse was to replace the value of “pure tolerance” of all views implicit in free-speech protections with what he called “liberating tolerance”, which, as he stated explicitly, “would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left”. He characterized this proposal as “utopian”, since “no authority, no government exists which would translate [it] into practice”.

However, there was a way in which the approach he proposed was eventually put into practice. By gaining power and leverage within consensus-making institutions, especially universities and the media, the Left managed to tip the scales of tolerance against the Right, somewhat as Marcuse had counseled. The shift from an ostensibly neutral public sphere to one in which certain views coded as reactionary were subject to aggressive “intolerance” seemed to follow his prescriptions. Hence, Marcuse’s text has sometimes been read as a sort of ur-manifesto of cancel culture; the Left’s centrist and conservative critics have tended to fight back by reasserting “pure tolerance”.

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In the wake of the October 7 Hamas terror attack against southern Israel, however, conservatives dramatically shifted their criticisms of the progressive campus speech regime. From the Nineties battles over political correctness to the early 2020s wars over wokeness, their main concern was with universities’ censoriousness towards conservative-coded views. But their new focus is on the same institutions’ permissiveness towards extreme speech by Leftists — most notoriously, celebration of terrorist violence against Israeli civilians.

In other words, the criticism directed at universities shifted away from the “intolerant towards the Right” side of Marcuse’s equation, and toward the “tolerant towards the Left” side. Meanwhile, the Left correspondingly pivoted from demanding “intolerance towards the Right” — keeping Milo off-campus — to “tolerance towards the Left” — letting pro-Palestinian protesters protest, even if their speech may offend some.

However, this reversal of positions was possible in part because it’s not only the Right/Left polarity that came to determine the range of permissible speech on campus in the post-Sixties era. Indeed, the unofficial campus speech regime didn’t so much legitimize itself in Right/Left terms as in terms of victimhood and oppression. A programmatic statement of this rationale can be found in the pioneering critical race theorist Mari Matsuda’s article “Public Response to Racist Speech”, published in 1989. In Matsuda’s account, it is speech by members of or on behalf of “historically dominant groups” and against “subordinated communities” that should be subject to “intolerance”, while speech going in the opposite direction, even if hateful or violent, should be subject to “tolerance”.

Matsuda offered, in effect, an update on Marcuse’s “liberating tolerance”, processed through the classifications of civil-rights law. Instead of “the Left” being granted extra leeway, as Marcuse had demanded, it was members of oppressed groups who were to enjoy what Matsuda calls the “victim’s privilege”. In practice, this meant that when any speech generated controversy, the task was to identify oppressor and oppressed, then ensure that the latter is granted “the tolerance of hateful speech that comes from an experience of oppression”, whereas the former is subject to maximum intolerance.

This is how the attempts to shut down controversial speakers at the height of last decade’s Great Awokening were justified. For instance, in 2017, New York University provost Ulrich Baer argued in The New York Times that efforts to prevent figures like Yiannopolous and Charles Murray from speaking on campus “should be understood as an attempt to ensure the conditions of free speech for a greater group of people, rather than censorship”. Intolerance toward oppressors, that is, equals tolerance toward the oppressed.

Matsuda defined universities as a “special case” because college students are “at a vulnerable stage of psychological development”. Accordingly, “tolerance of racist speech in this setting is more harmful than generalized tolerance in the community-at-large”. Gesturing back at Berkeley and other Sixties protest, Matsuda reaffirmed support for the protesters’ speech rights, but not on grounds of “pure tolerance”. Rather, she appealed to the “power imbalance” between students and “university administrators, multinational corporations, the US military, and established governments”. In other words, insofar as students can be construed as victims, their speech must be protected — but once they can be construed as victimizers, they can no longer lay claim to that privilege.

The broader implication of the original Free Speech Movement’s demand was, again, that intramural speech be protected by the First Amendment in the same manner as extramural speech. The effect of this demand — like the other factors that eroded in loco parentis — was to merge the university with the broader space of rights-granted citizenship. But a further implication of this move, not necessarily evident to the student protesters when they made their demands, was to weaken the specificity of the university’s function within society: to form young adults.

It was perhaps an inevitable reaction to this drift and evacuation of institutional purpose that new forms of paternalism reemerged to substitute for in loco parentis, not least the differentiated speech regime outlined by Matsuda. This helped define a new moral, values-imparting mission for universities, which over decades became ever more explicitly oriented around social justice.

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Conservative and centrist critics of campus politics have documented the divisive and intellectually stultifying effects of this regime. Now that the Trump administration is attempting to force top-down change on the system, many who opposed it are celebrating.

Yet it should be clear from the administration’s single-minded focus on reining in pro-Palestinian protest — justified on the grounds of protecting Jewish students from harassment — that what it is offering is not at all a fundamental change from the status quo ante. On the contrary, Matsuda’s basic idea that speech must be regulated on the basis of whether it causes harm to a “subordinated community” remains fully in force; it is simply that a different minority group is now asserted to be in need of special protection. In other words, Trump is merely adjusting the dials of the prior campus speech regime, applying greater tolerance here and greater intolerance there.

The real problem with this shift isn’t the apparent inconsistency with conservative opposition to cancel culture, but that the administration is leaving the deeper assumptions of the prior system for regulating speech intact. Universities need to be reformed, and reimagined, on a much more fundamental level. The post-in loco parentis integration of campuses into the broader realm of citizenship has failed to facilitate the responsible exercise of the citizenship. Rather, it has only succeeded at evacuating institutional purpose in favor of an incoherent mix of anything-goes consumerism and tendentious moralism.

Trump’s heavy-handed actions will succeed in suppressing some of the campus radicalism to which conservatives object. But they will leave intact the divisive and infantilizing speech regime.

While ostensibly addressing an important issue — concentrated wealth and power — Biden ultimately offered a shallow and pettily partisan account in a way that embodied his political failure as he exits the stage of history.

As many have noted, there was plenty of irony to be found in the address. Democrats, not Republicans, have recently been favored — in donations and votes — by corporate America, including Big Tech, a few prominent defectors notwithstanding. But the issue with Biden’s speech wasn’t that it was hypocritical given his party’s fundraising prowess and increasingly upscale base. Ike himself, after all, had overseen the expansion of the very military-industrial complex he decried, but at least he ended his presidency with a memorable articulation of the problem that pointed the finger at an institution with which he was closely associated.

Biden, in contrast, followed up his comments on a real crisis that has been mounting for decades — a rising oligarchy — with some indications that the main such people he’s concerned about aren’t oligarchs writ large, so much as a few in particular: Donald Trump and his cronies. In this respect, he showed little understanding of why his presidency is ending in such lousy fashion: a governing vision that has vacillated between a broad critique of concentrated wealth and a far narrower one focused on the crisis represented by Trump.

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“Never let a good crisis go to waste”: This phrase, attributed to Winston Churchill, was notably repurposed by Rahm Emanuel, chief of staff to Biden’s old boss, Barack Obama. Emanuel’s reference was to the 2008 financial crisis, which brought an end to two decades of bipartisan optimism about the US economy. But as former Obama adviser Reed Hundt argued in his 2019 book, A Crisis Wasted, Obama failed to seize on the opportunity to remake the economic order. Infamously, he bailed out the banks but left homeowners underwater; he also initiated quantitative-easing policies that juiced the markets but redounded heavily to the benefit of the asset-rich; and presided over a dramatic worsening of inequality. Trump’s successful defiance of GOP economic orthodoxies around free trade and entitlements and his defeat of Hillary Clinton amounted to a belated verdict on Obama’s inability to deliver real reform.

The Biden presidency, which began amid the ongoing fallout of the pandemic, offered the possibility of a do-over. Many saw the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan, enacted under two months after Biden’s inauguration, as proof his administration had discarded the excessive caution that got in the way of Obama’s hope to be a transformative president. After campaigning mostly as a moderate with the modest goal of helping lead the nation out of crisis, Biden entered office promising to be the “most progressive president since FDR,” whose portrait he hung above the fireplace in the Oval Office.

If we didn’t know Biden’s party had lost decisively after his ignominious withdrawal from the campaign, his farewell address might have sounded like a victory lap. To be sure, he can’t be faulted for an unwillingness to “go big”, between the stimulus packages, the revival of a trust-busting agenda targeting big corporations, and the industrial policy aimed at, as Biden put it, “creating new businesses and industries, hiring American workers, using American products”. Congressional progressives are happy to give him credit for all this. So why weren’t working-class voters, who not only didn’t bring back the FDR-era Democratic supermajority, but drifted even further from the party?

Many plausible answers have already been offered to this question: Biden couldn’t overcome the global anti-incumbency wave fed by inflation; he failed to control the border; the industrial and infrastructure projects he subsidized will take too long to come online to generate immediate benefits; his own senility and Kamala Harris’s inept candidacy doomed them; and so on. But Biden’s farewell address highlighted something more fundamental. Despite his administration’s sweeping economic reforms, it remained wedded to the Democratic Party’s main post-2016 sales pitch, which is roughly: whatever we are, at least we aren’t Donald Trump.

Consider the “real dangers” of the “tech-industrial complex” highlighted in Biden’s speech: not, for instance, the immense power wielded over employees by companies such as Uber (whose general counsel, as it happens, served as one of Kamala Harris’s main advisers in the 2024 race), but an “avalanche of misinformation and disinformation”. He went on to lament that “social media is giving up on fact-checking”, an allusion to Mark Zuckerberg’s recent announcement that he would retire Meta’s fact-checking program in favor of community notes.

The notion that the gravest crisis affecting the country is “misinformation”, to be countered by fact-checking, can be traced back to the frantic postmortems that followed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss. That Biden is sticking to this message up to his final day in office suggests his party has hardly evolved since then, even though the misinformation narrative has been widely disputed and the eight-year war on “fake news” utterly failed to achieve its main objective: preventing Trump’s return to office.

It is unsurprising that constant warnings about these supposed threats failed to turn many voters against their nemesis, and may have done the opposite. Misinformation worries political and media elites, but barely registers for most people — for good reason. The circulation of unapproved ideas, stories, and messages is symptomatic of gatekeepers’ loss of control. If you’re a gatekeeper, that’s a crisis for you; if you’re not, it isn’t. Not only that, the misinformation narrative exudes contempt for the ordinary citizen, who is treated as an ignorant rube in need of constant supervision. No wonder this message’s resonance barely extends outside a few small precincts.

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No less than Obama, then, Biden let a crisis go to waste. But part of the reason for this was he and his party, for self-interested reasons, misrecognized what the crisis was. A whole series of threats — Vladimir Putin’s Russia, fake news, authoritarianism, Covid — were conjured up or made to stand in for the crisis ostensibly represented by one man. Yet while Trump has been a crisis for the political class, most of the public hasn’t viewed him that way; even many who didn’t vote for him were unreceptive to the Democrats’ “saving-democracy” messaging. Moreover, in 2024 even more than earlier cycles, many saw his disruptive presence as a necessary response to crises they do care about, and the political class doesn’t: affordability, crime, out-of-control immigration.

The concentrated wealth of a man such as Elon Musk, who has now used it to buy himself a place in the president-elect’s inner circle, is a genuine concern — a crisis, perhaps. But Biden and his party have spent most of the past eight years claiming not that they will confront such influence-peddling, but posturing as the defenders of an establishment we all know was corrupted by the wealthy long before Trump first took control of the GOP.

In his 1936 re-election campaign, FDR could declare that “business and financial monopoly” were “unanimous in their hatred for me — and I welcome their hatred”. In 2024, Kamala Harris could say no such thing — and on the contrary, she regularly cited the plaudits she received from Goldman Sachs and other corporate interests as the ultimate proof of her competence. To anyone who remembers this, Biden’s warnings about oligarchy ring hollow.

Over the subsequent decade, the basic outline of this story has become all too familiar. But contrary to the widespread notion that cancellation is a Left-wing phenomenon, those who successfully demanded al-Gharbi’s dismissal were conservatives. They had taken umbrage at his argument that the United States bore heavy responsibility for destabilising the Middle East, and thereby enabling the rise of ISIS. The main impetus for his firing came from Fox News, which pilloried him as an anti-American jihadist. 

Some who’ve fallen victim to similar campaigns have built careers on denouncing their cancelers’ intolerance. Al-Gharbi took a different and arguably more interesting path: he sought to engage more extensively with right-of-centre audiences, writing a number of articles for conservative publications. As he explained later: “If I’m trying to convince people not to bomb Syria, then I should be writing to people who do want to bomb Syria.” 

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In the intervening years, al-Gharbi has gone on to become an advocate of viewpoint diversity in universities, as well as an outspoken critic of the liberal media’s ideological monoculture. His new book, We Have Never Been Woke, is a culmination of these efforts: a systematic critique of the dogmas that took hold in progressive culture over the past decade, and an examination of the institutional contexts in which they arose. Not, of course, that he’s alone here. Books scrutinising identity politics and Left-wing ideological intolerance have proliferated in recent years. But al-Gharbi avoids denunciation in favour of sober, rigorous analysis. For this and other reasons, I suspect it is the only book on the subject that will still be worth reading in a decade.   

Al-Gharbi’s cancellation squeezed him out of further work and study at Arizona, but he was later accepted into the doctoral programme in sociology at Columbia University, then as now a hotbed of social-justice activism. (As much ink was spilled on the performance art project of Columbia student Emma Sulkowicz in 2014 as on the university’s “tentifada” earlier this year.) His arrival there, in 2016, afforded him a front-row seat for the “Great Awokening” — which kicked off in the final years of the Obama administration and crescendoed after Donald Trump’s election.  

An older student, who hailed from a small-town Arizona military family, al-Gharbi sold shoes at a department store in between losing his job at Arizona and making it to the Ivy League. He arrived at Columbia as an outsider suddenly confronted the customs, taboos, and beliefs of an unfamiliar culture. What he discovered was a tribe that treated social — especially racial — justice as sacred, yet one that remained oddly blind to the apparent injustices in its own immediate surroundings. 

What al-Gharbi called a “racialized caste system” operated in plain sight. That is: “[y]ou have disposable servants who will clean your house, watch your kids, walk your dogs, deliver prepared meals to you,” and these servants are “mostly minorities from particular racial and ethnic backgrounds… while people from other racial and ethnic backgrounds are the ones being served.” 

The “Democratic-voting professionals” who are the beneficiaries of this arrangement “conspicuously lament inequality” at every opportunity — while never really doing anything to remedy it. 

Likewise, when Donald Trump won the election soon after al-Gharbi’s arrival in New York, he noticed that well-off students ostentatiously presented themselves as “somehow uniquely vulnerable to Trump and his regime”. They demanded accommodations to deal with their trauma and terror that fascism had arrived in America. But they didn’t demand any special treatment for, say, the immigrant labourers who served them their meals, who had a far more plausible case that they were at risk from the new president, what with his threats to ramp up deportation.   

Al-Gharbi saw the callow racial-justice concerns of affluent New Yorkers crest after George Floyd’s murder, even as the massive protests that flooded the streets in 2020 did nothing to address any of the inequalities they denounced. The author describes Black Lives Matter demonstrators crowding the medians of Manhattan thoroughfares, holding up signs to elicit honks from passing drivers. All the while, they were “literally right in front of” homeless black men without shoes.

The question animating al-Gharbi’s book, then, is this. If most elite social-justice activism isn’t doing what it claims to be doing — creating a more just and equal society — what is it, in fact, doing? This has long been of interest to sociologists. Consider Max Weber’s famous thesis that John Calvin’s theological argument for predestination served as a way for early capitalists to legitimise their own accumulation of wealth. As a-Gharbi puts it: “the practical ways that ideas function ‘in the world’ are often very different than what their creators may have anticipated.” 

This is why the most common recent approach to understanding “wokeness” — tracing it to the ideas of particular thinkers — ultimately offers limited insights. In al-Gharbi’s telling, wokeness doesn’t spawn from people reading dense philosophical tracts. Rather, it’s less important that students at elite understand the ideas of Foucault or Kimberlé Crenshaw than that they “interpret and mobilize these social justice discourses in ways that serve their interests” by “creating highly novel forms of competition and legitimation”. 

To explain his point, al-Gharbi borrows a phrase from Pierre Bourdieu. What the sociologist called “symbolic capitalists” are “professionals who traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis, ideas and abstraction”. To put it more simply, professions from journalism and education to social work and public health have always justified their existence on the basis that they served the public interest. From the Progressive Period onwards, al-Gharbi argues, they’ve purported to battle “capitalism run amok” and defend the masses from the greed of robber barons. In practice, of course, the exact ideological content has varied over time, but the basic self-serving purpose has not.

Taking a longer historical view than most critics of wokeness, al-Gharbi argues the “awokening” that peaked around 2020 was a symptom of the latest periodic crisis afflicting the symbolic professions. Along the way, he identifies four “awokenings” in the past century. The first, he says, happened from the late Twenties to mid-Thirties, when educated young Americans flocked to the Communist Party and other radical groups. The next happened in the Sixties, with the rise of the New Left. The third came in the Eighties and early Nineties: the era of political correctness. Our own awokening kicked off around 2015, peaked in 2020, and in al-Gharbi’s telling is now on the wane.

These cyclical moral ferments occur, the author argues, in periods “when symbolic capitalists find their own status or socioeconomic position threatened or highly precarious”. During such periods, a radicalisation of social-justice demands, a competitive striving for doctrinal correctness, a tendency to excommunicate heretics (“cancel culture”) all come to the fore. And certainly, these tendencies were present in prior awokenings: social media has simply made them more visible. 

The rational core of these seemingly irrational behaviours is simple to identify in the terms al-Gharbi proposes. Collectively, he writes, symbolic capitalists loudly advertise their own value, enabling them to extract concessions from the powers-that-be. One example might be the massive outlays of corporate and foundation funding through 2020. On an individual level, symbolic capitalists compete for status with each other through ostentatious displays of doctrinal purity. Not, to be clear, that this means their avowed beliefs are merely cynical ruses. As Weber understood of the Puritans, sincerely held beliefs can simply serve a different purpose than the true believers realise. 

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If periods of elite social-justice ferment have occurred cyclically, that means they have certain predictable effects. For one, not only do they fail to achieve purported social-justice aims, they actually “correspond with a perpetuation or exacerbation of inequalities”. By securing new sinecures for symbolic capitalists, al-Gharbi suggests, they augment the dominant role white-collar workers already play in society. Those outside this privileged caste, it hardly needs adding, are marginalised. Another predictable result is that public trust in elite institutions declines — which could ironically prove counterproductive to symbolic capitalists in the long run, even if it allows them to reassert their status in a more limited sphere.  

A further result is a backlash, which in turn generates new counter-institutions to accommodate those squeezed out of increasingly intolerant elite spaces. This is how al-Gharbi explains the emergence of conservative think tanks in the Seventies, a moment when the New Left seemed to have squeezed conservatives from academia. He says something similar of Fox News, with the Nineties a moment when the liberal bias of mainstream outlets had become intolerable. Perhaps unsurprisingly, al-Gharbi sees the recent proliferation of “anti-woke” media spaces through a similar lens. Interestingly, the author adds, these counter-institutions are often the most lasting legacy of awokenings. But as al-Gharbi says, to the extent these are also organisations run by symbolic capitalists, they end up reproducing many of the same tendencies, including proneness to ideological mania and cancel culture — as his own run-in with Fox suggests.  

Al-Gharbi declines to offer concrete recommendations. His conclusion that ideological ferment follows predictable cycles seems to suggest we’re doomed to suffer some other madness in a decade or two. Yet his personal behaviour — especially engaging in dialogue with a wide range of audiences — suggests a certain optimism that it’s possible to be a better symbolic capitalist, and perhaps also forge a healthier symbolic capitalist culture. His book’s diagnosis of that culture’s deep pathologies also serves that end.

“Critics,” al-Gharbi writes, “are united in the erroneous perception that there is something special about ‘woke’ ideology.” If woke beliefs serve to obscure the class interests of those who espouse them, anti-woke critiques often reinforce the confusion. To depict elite identity politics as a vehicle for the establishment of communism, or as a fundamental threat to Western civilisation, is merely to flatter the radical pretensions of its adherents. What We Have Never Been Woke offers, in contrast, is demystification. In eschewing the self-aggrandisement and moralism typical of woke and anti-woke literature alike, al-Gharbi offers a model for others to follow. 

Over the past 10 months, however, there has been a notable exception to this rule: at anti-Israel protests, where masks are still not just the norm but often mandatory. Sometimes, a keffiyeh will be fashioned into a balaclava; more often, a surgical mask or N95 respirator will be worn. All three were on show outside of last week’s Democratic Convention.

Yet it was more than 1,000km away, in a populous suburban region adjacent to New York City, that the latest battle in America’s mask wars was unfolding. Earlier this month, legislators in New York’s Nassau County signed the country’s first mask ban into law, a strange inversion of the mandates that prevailed state-wide between 2020 and 2022. Although exceptions for health and religious grounds may make the law unenforceable in practice, it threatens recalcitrant public maskers with a stiff fine of $1,000 and up to a year in prison.

The legislation was introduced by local lawmaker Mazi Pilip, a former IDF paratrooper who gained a national profile when she ran unsuccessfully for the congressional seat vacated by the disgraced George Santos, and signed into law by county executive Bruce Blakeman. To justify the new law, Pilip raised the alarm about Gaza protesters “hiding behind the mask and terrorising the Jewish community”, while Blakeman argued that the anti-mask bill “protects the public”. Like the mandates it inverts, then, the ban has been presented as a means of keeping the citizenry safe from a real and immediate danger.

Pilip and Blakeman are Republicans, so to a certain extent the ban reinforces the Covid-era partisan split over masking. But it’s not as straightforward as that. Indeed, the first high-profile New York politician to endorse such a measure was Democratic governor Kathy Hochul. In June, after a viral video seemed to show pro-Palestinian demonstrators harassing Jewish passengers in a subway car, Hochul was reported to be considering a ban on face coverings on public transit, and several Democratic state legislators drafted a bill doing just that.

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Versions of the same idea had also been floated on both the Left and the Right in response to an upsurge in shoplifting and other crime in the wake of the pandemic. Widespread masking clearly played some role here by enabling thieves to conceal their identities from employees and surveillance cameras. Though he stopped short of calling for a citywide ban, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, another Democrat, suggested to small business owners last year they should ban customers who refused to uncover their faces.

A paradoxical secondary effect of the draconian rules imposed during the pandemic was to create conditions for a severe collapse of public order in urban areas. For one thing, the collective retreat of much of the population from public spaces in effect abandoned large areas of cities to homelessness and delinquency. Meanwhile, universal masking norms — combined with cutbacks in policing —helped create conditions for impunity for petty crime.

But there are deeper roots, too. The Left-wing embrace of masking on public health grounds also coincided with the prominent role of antifa during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, another source of major public disturbances that year. “Black-bloc” masking, long practised by antifa militants, gained greater respectability as face-covering became nearly universal in pandemic-era Left-wing protest.

By the time of the October 7 attacks, the continued progressive attachment to Covid precautions and the greater acceptance of black-bloc-style tactics ensured that anti-Israel protests were heavily masked affairs from the outset. The concentration of protest on elite college campuses evidently strengthened protesters’ resolve to conceal their identities, given most were students worried that the public exposure of their activism might derail their promising careers.

The Nassau law, then, is a response to several highly contingent developments of the past few years. But even so, the bans themselves and the issues they raise aren’t new in American or New York politics. Indeed, prior to 2020, a mask ban had been on the state books since 1845. Back then, a law was passed to squelch the “anti-renter” movement of tenant farmers who had revolted violently against the harsh terms dictated by their landlords, donning elaborate Indian costumes when attacking their nemeses. The landlord-allied state government responded by making it illegal for three or more people congregating in public to mask, with an exception made for “masquerade parties”.

Nor did the ban fade entirely into obscurity along with the anti-renter movement. Over the recent decades, New York police used the 1845 law to arrest anti-globalisation protesters, Occupy Wall Street militants, and Pussy Riot supporters, as well as to constrain the activities of the Ku Klux Klan. Indeed, extensive litigation followed a 1999 Manhattan rally by the latter group, in which city officials prohibited them from covering their faces. Anti-masking laws in several other US states were devised specifically to rein in the Klan — a precedent sometimes cited by lawmakers advocating crackdowns on masked Gaza protesters, whom they claim are engaged in a campaign of racist intimidation.

These older mask ordinances have faced legal challenges, as the Nassau law likely will. So far, American jurisprudence has remained divided on their constitutionality, with some courts finding that masking is not a form of expression and thus enjoys no first-amendment protection, and others determining that the anonymisation enabled by face coverings offers a means of protecting the expression of unpopular views. Those arguing against the right of Klan members to mask have made a case critics of Gaza protests have repeated recently: that masks are a tool of intimidation. “[A] faceless figure strikes terror in the human heart,” as a 1990 Georgia Supreme Court decision put it.

Yet we are, of course, living in very different times. And what sets apart the new round of controversy isn’t just the conversion of the mask into a symbol of politicised public health, but the contradictory effects of the new electronic media landscape on how we conceive of our public identities. Perhaps most obviously, online existence has made younger generations of protesters take the constant availability of anonymous or pseudonymous modes of expression for granted. Today, every one of us, when we communicate by way of a digital profile, is at least partly “masked,” which makes our publicly exposed faces feel all the more naked. This is all the more true as facial-recognition technology becomes more ubiquitous and accurate.

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Thus a paradox emerges: at the same time as they furnish new means of anonymisation, digital technologies also elevate the risk of exposure. Political protesters in the late 20th century were unlikely to have their participation made public unless a news camera happened to capture them. Conversely, in today’s crowdsourced panopticon, any public activity is a viral video waiting to happen, which might well upend the life of anyone unlucky enough to become the main character of the day. Our technologies incite us to make our views public on a scale rarely possible for prior generations, and at the same time threaten us with dire consequences if the expression of those views provokes a backlash.

As long as these conditions hold, several things will be true. The availability of anonymous means of expression online, as well as the premium accorded by the attention economy to the extreme, will ensure that controversial and often hateful views enjoy a visibility they wouldn’t have otherwise. This, as well as the general decline of public order exacerbated by the collective retreat into digital life, will continue to provoke a general sense of unease and vulnerability, creating constituencies for various sorts of “safetyist” appeals — such as laws targeting disinformation, hate speech or masked protest.

And in the meantime, the conflict over mask bans will remain legally and politically unresolved because it pits two goods against each other: on one hand, freedom from intimidation carried out under the cover of anonymity; on the other, the protection of unpopular views from retaliation. As long as it can be plausibly claimed that both of these values are severely compromised, an end to this decade’s mask wars is unlikely to arrive soon.

This scorched-earth campaign has met with a mixed reception. Some have made the obvious point that getting random people fired for intemperate posts is what Raichik’s Right-wing milieu has long denounced as “cancel culture”; others were celebratory. Perhaps the most remarkable reversal came from the provocateur Milo Yiannopolous, once an advocate of what he called “cultural libertarianism”, who declared on X: “Shaming, shunning and public humiliation are necessary to maintain a well-ordered and pious society… Cancel culture is good. It is bad that good people don’t do it.”  

This declaration may seem at odds with Milo’s “dangerous faggot” antics of the past, but it’s a fair summary of certain long-standing conservative assumptions: that there must be shared norms for society to continue to function, and these norms should be enforced through social stigma. The Right-wing embrace of free-speech absolutism over the past decade or so was always in tension with these assumptions.

The question is not whether such a pivot is hypocritical — which frankly is true of all but a handful of participants in these debates — but whether the mechanisms of cancel culture, as we currently understand it, may serve these conservative ends.      

Right-wing supporters of tactics such as Raichik’s don’t seem to agree on what is meant to be achieved by them. While some admit they are mainly interested in revenge, others have claimed a détente could be achieved in the culture war through “mutually assured destruction”. The thinking seems to be that if Leftists fear that culture will come for their own, they will think twice about deploying such tactics against the Right. We might think of this as a pursuit of classically liberal ends — the protection of viewpoint diversity and free speech — by illiberal means. For others, conversely, the objective seems to be to forge a new cultural consensus in which Left-wing views are suppressed through stigma. 

Regardless, the assumption appears to be that the Left’s pursuit of cancellation has been effective at enforcing its norms, ergo the Right should follow suit — whether to achieve equilibrium or total cultural dominance. But there remains a question: has cancel culture really been a boon to Left-wing dominance? 

There have been other cancel cultures, of course, but this one has risen from the media environment forged by digital technology roughly a decade and a half ago. Consider the paradigmatic 2013 ordeal of Justine Sacco, a PR executive with 170 Twitter followers who posted the following joke while en route to visit family in South Africa: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” Unfortunately for her, this clumsy attempt at wit came to the attention of reporter Sam Biddle, who amplified it on the site Valleywag. The rest is history: Sacco became, for a moment, the main character on Twitter and beyond, lost her job, received death threats, and so on. 

This incident illustrates several features specific to the 21st-century cancel culture phenomenon. First, while a media outlet played a role, the key factor was the activation of the online swarm. It follows from this that the impetus for Sacco’s dismissal and reputational destruction did not proceed from any explicit rules of behaviour but from the spontaneous consensus of an emergent mob. Although this conviction reflected the view, often associated with the Left, that racism is a particularly condemnable offence, participation wasn’t limited to one political group. None other than Donald Trump joined in, declaring “Justine is fired!” and promising to donate to Aid for Africa. 

Another essential feature was what has been called context collapse. In a pre-social media age, someone like Sacco might have been fired from her job for telling a joke that offended a supervisor — but the power to do this was limited to a particular institutional context. Alternatively, she might have lost a friend for making an off-colour joke at a bar. In both cases, the consequences would have been limited to particular settings. Under the reign of cancel culture, they can amount to a near total reputational destruction, cascading across all realms of individuals’ lives while according them an unwanted public profile.

In the early social-media era, it wasn’t clear that the media dynamics that enabled the rise of cancel culture — those that combined context collapse with rapid mob activation — had any clear ideological valence. Take the case of Lindsey Stone, who faced similar consequences to Sacco after posting a photo on Facebook in which she made an obscene gesture at Arlington National Cemetery. The norms Stone violated, needless to say, weren’t exactly those of the Left. Making a racist-seeming joke could lay waste to your reputation, but so could making an unpatriotic-seeming one. 

Even if we fast-forward a few years into the Trump era, when cancel culture had become more obviously Left-coded, Left-wingers weren’t immune from its effects. In 2017, the academic George Ciccariello-Maher was forced to resign by a conservative mob outraged by a tweet he later — like Sacco — excused as a joke: “All I want for Christmas is a white genocide.” To be sure, it might have taken a far milder anti-black tweet from an academic to produce a similar impact — but fall Ciccariello-Maher did. There is also the fact that plenty of progressives have fallen victim to purity-obsessed denizens of their own ideological camp. See Ciccariello-Maher’s second cancellation: a post with a youthful-looking girlfriend incensed Leftists about the “problematic age gap”. 

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The rise of cancel culture, all of this suggests, was not some strategic Left-wing scheme to achieve ideological hegemony, but the chaotic emergence of social dynamics in a new media landscape. The norms enforced in the early cases just discussed — disapproval of racist jokes and disrespect for fallen soldiers — predated this development. Social media had incited the violation of these norms as a means of accumulating the currency of attention, but also created chaotic new mechanisms for policing such violations by exposing them to a broader public that could be easily galvanised into a virtual mob. 

But far from stifling norm-violating speech in a totalitarian manner, the rise of the digital panopticon induced new incentives for engaging in it — as the career of Milo Yiannopolous illustrates. The fact that mob actions, whatever individual scalps they were able to claim, failed to enforce Left-wing consensus in such a manner as to prevent, say, Trump’s election, explains why overt top-down censorship by digital platforms became so common after 2016. Although in some cases these actions enforced the same values asserted by cancel mobs, such actions took us out of the realm of horizontal norm enforcement — the realm in which cancel culture operates — and into that of indirect state tyranny.

If cancel culture were ever effective at enforcing a given set of norms, there is reason to think this efficacy has been on the wane. We have also seen a disaggregation and re-fragmentation into new platforms, meaning that becoming the main character of the entire internet for a day, as Sacco did, is now nearly impossible, and so is enforcing the same set of norms across the digital public sphere. Aided by this development, many ostensibly cancelled figures have reemerged unscathed and often very successful. 

As we hurtle toward a second Trump term, the future of public discourse will look less like a reversal of Left-wing hegemony into Right-wing hegemony, than an even more chaotic and incoherent version of the fractured present. The dissolution of shared norms into competing normative and digital spheres will proceed apace alongside the continued erosion of localised institutional procedures in the face of viral media. Whatever such a society might look like, it won’t be well-ordered or pious. 

Since then, writers from the Right, Left, and centre have all offered appreciative reassessments of his work, again focused mainly on The Culture of Narcissism and Revolt of the Elites. A third book, however, published 40 years ago this year, has received comparatively less attention.

The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times was framed by Lasch as a follow-up to Culture of Narcissism; his aim, in part, was to correct a widespread misapprehension that his 1979 bestseller had amounted to a secular “hellfire sermon” — as the New York Times review put it — castigating the moral failings of his contemporaries. Then-president Jimmy Carter, who invited Lasch to the White House to discuss the book, seemed to have read it this way. To Lasch’s frustration, he relayed what he took to be the book’s thesis in his famous “malaise” speech when he declared: “Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.”

In the opening pages of The Minimal Self, Lasch assured his readers that, to the contrary, they would “find no indignant outcry against contemporary ‘hedonism’, self-seeking, egoism, indifference to the general good — the traits commonly associated with ‘narcissism.’” His complaint that his diagnosis of a “culture of narcissism” had been misused as “a journalistic slogan that merely restates moralistic platitudes in the jargon of psychoanalysis” holds true for many recent repurposings of his work, whether it is liberals decrying Trump as “narcissist-in-chief” or conservatives citing Revolt of the Elites while ridiculing pampered Left-wingers. What is too often absent is the dimension of Lasch’s work that avoids the satisfactions of indignation and instead invites us to understand those we find contemptible — and the deep sources of our own contempt.

Our increasing “concern with the self”, Lasch explains in The Minimal Self, “takes the form of a concern with its psychic survival”. The issue with the contemporary narcissist, in other words, isn’t that he demands too much, but too little. “Under siege,” Lasch wrote, “the self contracts to a defensive core, armed against adversity.” This “minimal or narcissistic self,” he goes on, “seeks both self-sufficiency and self-annihilation: opposite aspects of the same archaic experience of oneness with the world.” The underside of what looks like narcissistic grandiosity is an implacable “sense of inner emptiness”.

The error of the “moralistic indictment of ‘consumerism’”, Lasch argued, was the failure to see it “as part of a larger pattern of dependence, disorientation, and loss of control”. This pattern derives from the fundamental modern restructuring of social, economic, and political life into systems far too vast for anyone to comprehend, much less exert any control over. Adrift in “a world of giant bureaucracies, information overload, and complex, interlocking technological systems vulnerable to sudden breakdown”. individuals have lost “confidence in their capacity to understand and shape the world and provide for their own needs”.

Liberal commentators trying to make sense of the 2016 election weren’t wrong to find in Lasch’s analysis of narcissism, as Dionne put it, “unflattering jolts of recognition about Trump himself — the lover of praise, the seeker after friendly audiences, the creator of a world in which he is always at the centre”. But too often, they fell into the moralising Lasch strove to avoid in their treatment of the President and of his followers, whom they framed as grasping, self-absorbed white men wounded by their declining power and privilege — a theme most recently reiterated in the controversial book White Rural Rage. The issue isn’t that there’s nothing whatsoever to this description: rural whites, like other demographics, are indeed reeling from what Lasch called the “diminishing expectations” of the present era, as is evident in the rise of deaths of despair. But the moralising accusation of narcissism obscures the deeper sources of such collective pathologies, as well as the extent to which the accusers exhibit comparable symptoms.

A less selective reading of Lasch helps to account for what many pundits take to be the great enigma of the 2024 election cycle: how is it that a man assailed by trials and scandals that would have long since tanked the career of many politicians before him retains a lead in most polling? The answer is that the once-and-possibly-future “narcissist-in-chief” dramatises more vividly than any other public figure the beleaguered condition of the self under present conditions. His enduring hold on his followers, as well as his ability to broaden his appeal to demographics previously claimed by his rivals, speaks to the general retreat of more aspirational political sensibilities in favour of what Lasch called “the imagery of victimisation and paranoia, of being manipulated, invaded, colonised, and inhabited by alien forces”. Trump’s key achievement, in this regard, is simply survival — in the face of the overwhelming forces arrayed against him.

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That the “survivalist” vision identified by Lasch four decades ago extends far beyond Trump and his supporters can be seen in the way his most fervent opponents appeal to it as well. Upon his election in 2016, they published endless guides to “surviving Trump”, and we can be sure this genre will be revived in the event of a second term. As an ACLU official recently told The Atlantic: “All we must do is survive four years.” And yet, because his liberal opponents are busy casting Trump in the role of would-be dictator, they often can’t see why many who share their general feeling of besieged helplessness might appreciate a figure who seems to withstand a constant onslaught by his enemies with verve and humour.

It isn’t surprising that Lasch’s sobering vision was forgotten until recently. The same year The Minimal Self appeared, Ronald Reagan’s re-election campaign ran one of the most famous ads in the history of presidential contests: “Morning in America.” The ad boasted of Reagan’s record of taming inflation and lowering interest rates, declaring that “our country is prouder and stronger and better”. Reagan went on to win 49 states and, over the subsequent decade, America came out on top in the Cold War while its booming tech industry fuelled a new era of growth that consigned the dark years of “malaise” to oblivion. There was nothing minimal about America’s ambitions at the high point of unipolar hegemony: rather than a retreat into pessimistic survivalism, at least up until the financial crash of 2008, the greatest risks facing the nation were overconfidence and overreach, from the housing bubble to the Global War on Terror.

Today’s Lasch renaissance, then, reflects a return to the bleak conditions the author evoked when he described how “American technology is no longer the most advanced; the country’s industrial plant is decrepit; its city streets and transport systems are falling to pieces”. Whether they promise to “make America great again” or to “build back better”, our leaders aren’t oblivious to this predicament. But when they encounter obstacles — the Deep State, congressional gridlock, or the many other abstract systems even the most powerful of us must contend with — it is far easier to retreat into the minimalist politics of survival and promise to fend off the feared enemy for a few more years. The indefinite perpetuation of this despondent state of affairs — and not the other spectres so often conjured up by political fearmongers of all stripes — is the gravest danger we face.

It didn’t matter that the book was critical of the Border Patrol; as the protesters saw it, to treat that agency’s operations with literary nuance and moral complexity was as obscene as doing so with the Gestapo. They tried to shame attendees into leaving, then repeatedly shouted down the author, derailing the discussion until the store manager called the police. After loudly denouncing her, they left.

I don’t know whether any of these hecklers called themselves “Antifa”, but their disruption of a minor literary event was just one small indication of the extent to which the movement’s values and tactics went mainstream during the Trump era. For decades, Antifa activists had focused their attention on shutting down the activities of fringe far-Right groups with violence if necessary. But with Trump in the White House, many concluded the domain of the struggle needed to be extended. In their panicked state post-2016, many liberals and mainstream progressives who might have once eschewed Antifa’s rejection of free speech and advocacy of violence against ideological opponents came to regard them as a last line of defence against a surging Right.

In reaction, Antifa became a central element of conservative demonology in the Trump era, especially during the riots set off by George Floyd’s killing in 2020, in which masked “black bloc” agitators were often seen setting fires and causing mayhem. As Minneapolis burned, Trump claimed on Twitter that his administration would designate Antifa a terrorist organisation. This never happened — and since the United States lacks a domestic terrorism law, it is unlikely it will in the event of a second Trump term.

At the local level, however, conservatives are now testing out other ways of cracking down on the movement. This month, the District Attorney of San Diego, California, brought conspiracy charges against two Antifa activists who were involved in street brawls in early 2021, in effect trying to prosecute them using a legal toolkit created to fight organised crime.

Both the prosecution and the defence in the Antifa trial lay claim to free speech. In her opening statement, the Deputy District Attorney alleged that the defendants conspired “to shut down the speech and the assembly of a patriot group” (they were protesting a pro-Trump rally of the Proud Boys and other far-Right groups). In response, as well as arguing the prosecution is politically motivated — plausibly, given that the government opted not to prosecute any of the Right-wingers involved in the street fights in question — defence attorneys contend that the conspiracy charge threatens free political expression, because it will have a “chilling effect” on anyone protesting Right-wing gatherings.

The irony of the defence attorneys’ argument is that Antifa advocates are often explicit about doing what prosecutors allege — conspiring, or at least coordinating, to prevent those it defines as “fascist” from speaking and assembling. They are also open about the fact that they reject the liberal conception of free speech. In Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, the historian and activist Mark Bray writes: “At the heart of the anti-fascist outlook is a rejection of the classical liberal phrase incorrectly ascribed to Voltaire that ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’.” Bray, whose book is at once a history of Antifa, an apologia for its approach, and a how-to guide for aspiring militants, writes that the movement is “committed… to fighting to the death the ability of organized Nazis to say anything”. (“To the death” here is literal: Bray approvingly cites historical instances of murders committed by anti-fascists.)

Like many Antifa sympathisers, Bray directs much of his ire at liberal free-speech advocates, whom he believes are naïve devotees of the “marketplace of ideas”. The reality, though, is that after Trump’s election, many liberals and liberal institutions embraced Bray’s position. Indeed, the popularity of his book — which garnered many positive reviews in the mainstream press and scored Bray multiple NPR interviews — was an indication of this shift. The most dramatic about-face occurred at the ACLU, long notorious for defending the right of a Nazi group to hold a rally in Skokie, Illinois, in 1977. The organisation took the same consistent free-speech stance prior to the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, but after the deadly events of that day, it began to waver, with many of its employees publicly disavowing its prior position.

In another sign of the patina of respectability Antifa acquired in the Trump era, in early 2018 Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison — then the deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee — promoted Bray’s book on Twitter, saying it would “strike fear in the heart of [Donald Trump]”. This was quite a reputational upgrade for a movement that, as Bray’s historical account details, existed for many decades mainly as a minor skinhead subculture devoted mainly to brawling with equally marginal groups of neo-Nazi skinheads.

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For much of its existence, however, Antifa had a more ambivalent relationship with the liberal mainstream than its frequent denunciations of liberal proceduralism would imply. The movement first emerged alongside and in response to the rise of fascism in interwar Europe; the first anti-fascist militants were communists, socialists and anarchists who took to the streets to confront fascist paramilitary groups such as the SA in Germany and the Blackshirts in Italy. At this time, their violent struggle was part of a broader revolutionary agenda. Defeating fascists, viewed as the shock troops of capital, was one piece of the larger radical social transformation they sought, often inspired by the recent Bolshevik triumph in Russia (the fascists, for their part, saw their violent activities as justified by the threat of Bolshevism). Yet in nearly every country, they failed not only to bring about a communist revolution but to block the rise of the far-Right.

It was only in the post-war era, with the West settled under liberal-democratic rule, that Antifa re-emerged in something like its current form. With the dream of universal communist revolution deferred, the movement focused largely on beating back the scattered far-Right groups that persisted. While still deploying the rhetoric of the revolutionary Left, these militants were for the most part resigned to policing the outer fringes of acceptable discourse, following terms set by the liberal mainstream they despised. To the extent their use of political violence was tolerated, it was in large part because their far-Right targets had already been pushed to the margins of society by other means, or because they unfolded in subcultural spaces of little broad political significance.

In making the case for the efficacy of Antifa tactics, Bray and other apologists often point to concrete successes at preventing some particular neo-Nazi group from gathering or speaker from speaking. But it was the subtler, more comprehensive methods of enforcing ideological consensus employed by the liberal mainstream that rendered these fringe groups vulnerable to the antics of a handful of activists in the first place. Conversely, Antifa has had less success lately at shutting down Right-populist leaders and parties it dubs fascist, from Trump to Marine Le Pen and Giorgia Meloni — for the simple reason that it is unable to muster sufficient numbers to physically confront their mass base of support. Even Bray concedes the movement’s tactics are inadequate to take on this new enemy.

Hence, Antifa faces the problem that its approach is more likely to rack up successes when the stakes are lowest; when those it dubs “fascist” manage to command a broad base of support, it seems unable to scale up its approach. An approach calibrated to shutting down a bar show by a neo-Nazi hardcore band is unlikely to have much effect on a Trump rally. The liberal establishment, it would seem, began to embrace Antifa just as its tactics were becoming irrelevant.

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And yet, the possibility of effective collaboration between the centre-left and Antifa activists was on view this week, in the briefly successful attempt to shut down the National Conservatism conference in Brussels. Belgian anti-fascists had repeatedly demanded the conference be prevented from happening, and the local mayor used the pretext of potential violence from counter-protesters to justify asking the police to break up the gathering on public safety grounds. Ultimately, a court forced the city government to allow the conference to go forward, but the affair revealed something novel: that Antifa’s willingness to use violence can furnish sympathetic authorities with a useful rationale for limiting the freedom of speech and assembly of their enemies.

If Antifa has contributed anything to public discourse other than shrill slogans, it is having forced the consideration of what the limits of tolerance and freedom are in a society that claims to revere these values. But this question also applies to them too, as the San Diego prosecution’s case makes clear. Can a liberal society tolerate the activities of a group that openly seeks to deny the speech and assembly rights of whomever its members deem “fascist”? (In the final chapter of his book, Bray implies all Trump voters are “everyday fascists”, but doesn’t clarify whether he and his comrades therefore consider half the US electorate legitimate targets for violence.)

Lately, Antifa has lost much of the prominence it enjoyed in the Trump era but the questions raised by its activities persist. Amid the Gaza war, pro-Palestinian protesters have used Antifa-style tactics to prevent pro-Israel speakers and groups from holding events, but have also fallen victim to tactics long used by Antifa, such as doxxing. If the San Diego prosecution of Antifa succeeds, we can expect further crackdowns on Left-wing protest by conservative DAs along similar lines — but this, in turn, may only confirm fascism is imminent, prompting more aggressive action on the Left. The question, it seems, is less whether we are lurching into a new age of illiberalism than which side will go further, sooner.

The GOP’s restrictionist abortion platform appears to have played a major role in its subpar results in the 2022 midterms, even as spiralling inflation seemed sure to boost the party’s fortunes. In the months since, its vulnerability on reproductive rights has continued to play out in a number of statewide contests — most recently, in the commanding victory of pro-choice liberal challenger Janet Protasiewicz in Wisconsin’s State Supreme Court election.

All of this has proven frustrating to those who are convinced, with some reason, that the GOP should be winning — not only because of Biden’s economic woes but because of the Democrats’ commitment to unpopular positions on culture-war topics, from transgender athletes to racial preferences. How can the Republicans be bleeding votes on one culture-war issue when they hold a decisive advantage on so many others?

The answer, in part, is that there is no longer just one culture war, but (at least) two distinct battlefields with different terrains — let’s call them Culture War 1.0 and Culture War 2.0. Culture War 1.0, exemplified today by the abortion debate, dates to the conservative backlash to the sexual revolution in the Seventies. It has seen the cultural Right fight a series of losing battles — with the overturning of Roe v. Wade last year standing as an exception that proves the rule. Culture War 2.0, consisting of a varied array of race and gender-related conflicts that have consumed public life in recent years, dates back barely a decade, but it did not truly come to the fore until the convulsions of 2020.

The GOP’s attraction to this second iteration are obvious. The positions increasingly embraced by the Democratic coalition on the relevant cluster of issues — for example, that a woman is anyone who identifies as such, that biological sex is not real, or that present discrimination is needed to counteract past discrimination — are broadly unpopular outside certain affluent, highly educated settings. Moreover, those leading the charge against the new liberal consensus are often disaffected liberals and establishment centrists, which suggests there is a potential for the Right to make inroads beyond its traditional base. Abortion, in contrast, is of greatest concern to religious voters, who make up a rapidly declining share of the electorate.

So, why do the Culture War 1.0 politics of abortion remain so resilient within the GOP, even as it threatens to torpedo the party’s chances in many contests? The answer lies in the difference between these two battlefields. Consider Florida governor and likely presidential contender Ron DeSantis’s recent decision to sign a bill limiting abortion to the first six weeks of pregnancy. DeSantis has capitalised more than any politician to date on Culture War 2.0 issues, having declared war against critical race theory and gender ideology in schools, and against the progressive turn taken by corporations like Disney. These aggressive moves have polled well in Florida, even beyond the Republican base, and helped propel him to a midterm victory last year that set him apart from the mediocre performance of his party.

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Why, then, has DeSantis embraced abortion restrictions, which poll poorly in Florida and have proven a losing issue even in solidly conservative states such as Kansas and Kentucky? In a recent commentary on DeSantis’s decision, political scientist Eric Kaufmann voices an exasperation shared by many Culture War 2.0 advocates: why would the GOP’s rising star make such a “withdrawal of political capital” given that barely a third of Florida voters support the measure? According to Kaufmann, the pursuit of abortion restrictions reflects the preferences of the anti-abortion GOP donor and activist class — whose support would obviously be vital in a presidential primary — over and against those of moderate swing voters.

Kaufmann hints at an alternative approach centred around a Republican version of what some Democratic strategists dub “popularism”: ignore the moral manias of activists and insiders, and foreground proposals that poll well with the electorate — such as ending affirmative action and banning the teaching of critical race theory and gender theory in schools. A number of major Republican pundits have lately offered a similar assessment; as Ann Coulter exasperatedly tweeted: “Stop pushing strict limits on abortion, or there will be no Republicans left.”

But the weakness of popularism, whether Democratic or Republican, is that it emphasises polling at the expense of organisational and institutional dimensions of power; that is, it conceives of politics as a contest between aggregate individual opinions. Political success, for the popularist, comes from identifying positions that appeal to the largest number of individual voters and highlighting them to draw these voters in on election day.

This might seem obvious, but what it misses is the fact that any political coalition is made up of what are derogatorily called “interest groups” — not atomised individuals weighing their stances on a laundry list of issues (the model of citizenship implied by public opinion surveys), but individuals embedded in social formations with shared interests and preferences, and a particular positioning in relation to institutions: churches, parties, NGOs, the media, and so on.

This basic reality accounts for many phenomena that often seem mystifying in our polling-obsessed political culture. What accounts for the many policies that command broad support according to surveys but have no chance of being enacted? The answer often given is that the preferences of the wealthy and powerful override those of the broader electorate, and there’s surely something to that. But in the case of abortion — as opposed to, say, marginal tax rates — there is no obvious reason why rich donors would favour outright bans, or on the opposite side, the maximal liberalisation of abortion laws. The question, here as elsewhere, is how partisans of a particular cause that isn’t overwhelmingly popular have managed to organise and cultivate support in order to achieve their desired ends.

The anti-abortion cause remains politically potent within the GOP because it has emphasised the slow, unglamourous work of building networks of single-minded activists and establishing institutional power where it mattered. The fact that it achieved a key goal despite its relative unpopularity — polling prior to Dobbs suggested fewer than a third of Americans supported overturning Roe — is the crucial sign of the movement’s formidable force.

And yet, Culture War 2.0 will likely prove irresistible to GOP candidates in general elections in the coming years, as the need for culture-war appeals clashes with the unpopularity of Culture 1.0 issues with moderate voters. As The New York Times recently reported: “Polling suggests that the public is less likely to support transgender rights than same-sex marriage and abortion rights” — the same goes, as Kaufmann notes, for teaching critical race theory in schools and racial preferences in admissions and hiring. Surely, given losses like Wisconsin, such a pivot would be prudent.

But in the long run, Culture War 2.0 may prove a paper tiger, because beneath its polling strengths and prominence in the news cycle, it lacks organisational depth, clear institutional ambitions, and even coherent political objectives. Organisationally and institutionally, it heavily consists of political influencers of various sorts: podcasters, YouTubers, Substackers, and the like. To the extent the movement includes people engaged in contests over power, rather than the battle of ideas, these tend to be imperfect proxies for a generalised opposition to contemporary liberal ideology. Overturning Roe, for instance, strikes at the heart of a practice the anti-abortion movement views as evil. In contrast, bans on teaching critical race or gender theory in schools, transgender athletes competing in school sports, or even youth gender transition only chip away at the object truly targeted by Culture War 2.0: the nebulous “woke” ideological complex, which, due both to its vague contours and speech protections, cannot itself be banned.

All of this is compounded by the fact that Culture War 2.0’s broad coalition is internally incoherent in its long-term aims — in what it hopes will supplant progressive hegemony. It includes people who desire colour-blind policies and adherents of “race realism”; people who want to abolish gender and people who want to reinforce traditional gender roles. The strength of Culture War 2.0 — its broad base of support — is thus also its weakness.

That is not to say any of this is permanent. Culture War 2.0, as already noted, is new; the movements under its umbrella could theoretically evolve into forces as durable, well-organised, and ruthless about the pursuit of institutional power as the anti-abortion movement was over the decades leading up to Dobbs. But the incentives of the media and political landscape differ immensely from the period when Culture War 1.0 took shape: winning the news cycle and achieving maximum virality now take precedence. The anti-abortion movement, incubated in a different cultural landscape, learned to ignore most of this in its single-minded pursuit of a clearly defined, difficult objective. Rather than dismissing insiders, donors and interest groups, those attempting to build any political movement would do well to follow suit.

Writing in the early months of the Trump administration, he prophesied that at any moment, a “symbolic event” involving a “sacrificial victim” might ignite the powder keg of political violence and plunge the nation into bloody strife. Turchin cited the 1969 FBI murder of Fred Hampton, which inspired the insurgency narrated in Burrough’s book, and the 2011 self-immolation of the Tunisian fruit vendor Mohammed Bouazizi, credited with setting off the Arab Spring, as examples of such an event.

Just over three years later, the murder of George Floyd and the barely precedented wave of unrest that came in its wake seemed to fit the bill. Suddenly, Turchin’s warning of “the coming violence spike of 2020” looked remarkably prescient. As a result, he enjoyed a period of minor celebrity, and his dark prognoses spawned a small cottage industry of think-pieces. This was understandable: the chaos that erupted in the summer of 2020 left many bewildered, and Turchin’s treatment of it as a new iteration of familiar historical patterns was, in a way, reassuring — despite the fact that he claimed instability and even civil war were on the horizon.

Two years on, Turchin’s prophecies seem less apt. In the end, the nation avoided the escalating spiral of violence he asserted would follow from a “sacrificial” event like Floyd’s murder. Certainly, back in 2020 we saw an astonishing amount of property destruction and a smattering of isolated violent incidents, notably Kyle Rittenhouse’s fatal shooting of three men in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

But soon enough, most of the activist energy as well as the organisational prowess on display that summer was re-enlisted into the effort to elect Joe Biden. Since that was achieved, nothing comparable has occurred. The January 6 Capitol riot, for all its shock value, was a one-off event whose “body count” was made up mostly of rioters who died of natural causes; Rittenhouse’s acquittal late last year, contrary to predictions, led to no major unrest.

Rather than a “chain of revenge and counter-revenge” of the sort Turchin warned about, whatever sporadic instability has followed 2020 looks like an incoherent jumble of disconnected crises and panics, none of which has ever seemed to reach a definitive resolution. Claims of impending civil war continue to resurface now and again, but they seem to serve mostly as periodic ritual invocations ​​useful to a ruling elite that legitimises its rule by invoking states of emergency and must keep an array of spectral threats in reserve for this purpose.

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In fact, the story that hovers behind all of the sound and fury of the past two years is the post-Trump reconsolidation of what some call “the regime”: the diffuse power structure consisting of the two major party apparatuses, government bureaucracies, the corporate media, and the nonprofit-industrial complex. Trump’s presidency posed various challenges to these structures, albeit ultimately more on a symbolic than a practical level. Nowhere has this renewed solidity been clearer than in the broad consensus in support of Ukraine. But perhaps surprisingly, the origins of this renewed stability may be traced back to the aftermath of George Floyd’s death.

As Turchin anticipated, in death, Floyd became a galvanising collective symbol, comparable to other quasi-sacrificial victims who have energised mass movements across history. A man who in life had been a precariously employed former aspiring athlete and rapper and who spent a decade drifting in and out of jail became, after the viral broadcasting of his death, a global icon. Transfigurations like this are not unheard of in history, but are more common in the realm of myth and religion than modern politics. It is fitting that so much of the Floyd iconography that suddenly appeared across the world framed him as a martyr, a saint, and even Christ himself.

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A good deal of ink has been spilled over the question of whether “wokeness” — closely identified with the cause of racial justice given impetus by Floyd’s death — should be described as a religion rather than a mere political movement. But the question proceeds from an overly neat distinction between these two phenomena. Any political formation that succeeds in assembling an enthusiastic public must partake of “religious” elements. In other words, political groupings must be forged and renewed through experiences of “collective effervescence”, the sociologist Émile Durkheim’s term for the shared experiences of the sacred that bind people together.

This is what George Floyd’s quasi-sacrificial death offered to a large portion of the liberal public as well as to a centre-Left establishment struggling to counter the threat posed to it by Donald Trump. No doubt, the 2020 protests were often destructive and divisive, but contrary to Turchin’s prognosis of social fracturing, their ultimate effect was to channel previously scattered and demobilised popular energies into the anti-Trump coalition. In this light, it’s unsurprising that all the figureheads and institutions of this establishment, from politicians to corporations to NGOs to universities, were so desperate to associate themselves with Floyd’s image and memory.

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Hence, the ironic result of the largest protests in US history was the political triumph of two politicians who had once implemented the same tough-on-crime policies the 2020 protesters decried. Two years after Floyd died, the upward transfer of wealth accelerated by the pandemic shutdowns that deprived him of his livelihood continues apace. Inflation is driving up the cost of living for ordinary people, black neighbourhoods are bearing the brunt of an upsurge in crime, and record numbers of Americans are overdosing on meth and fentanyl — both drugs in George Floyd’s system at the time he died. In a cruel paradox, his death, in meme-ified form, furnished a new ideological legitimation for the same ruling elite that created the conditions for it.

The recent exposure of how Black Lives Matters’ leaders enriched themselves with George Floyd-inspired donations suggests the movement’s lustre is wearing off. But in the meantime, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has offered our ruling cadre yet another noble cause for rallying the public — once again, making good use of a crisis partly of its own making.

In the long run, perhaps Turchin’s and others’ doomsaying will be borne out. But the restabilising function ultimately served by George Floyd’s murder reveals the resilience of an establishment capable of repurposing the fallout of its disastrous policies into ad hoc new means of justifying its rule.

In fact, the statement appeared just over 50 years ago, in a polemical analysis of Disney cartoons written by two Marxist militants, the Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman and the Belgian sociologist Armand Mattelart. How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic was published in Chile during the brief rule of Salvador Allende as part of an attempt by Allende’s leftist allies to push back against American cultural influence. The book became a bestseller, but after Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup, it was banned and publicly burned.

The Right’s current lament for the betrayal of “traditional families who want to hold onto innocent entertainment for their kids” proceeds from the premise that this “woke Disney” is a deviation from the company’s benevolent past. But Dorfman and Mattelart, all the way back in 1971, contested this assumption of innocence. Although their methodology is Marxian and their aims overtly anti-capitalist, their allegations foreshadow the American Right’s current concerns in surprising ways.

Much of the analysis from the two socialist radicals concerns the printed comic strips that circulated widely in Latin America, where movies and TV were less accessible to the impoverished majority. In particular, they focus on Donald Duck and his extended family. As they note, this is an odd family: Donald Duck, along with Mickey Mouse and much of the rest of the Disney pantheon, exists in a “universe of uncles and grand-uncles, nephews and cousins”. Indeed, “there is one basic product that is never stocked in the Disney store: parents”. The “innocence” of this world, it turns out, required even the exclusion of normative heterosexual coupling.

But the consequences of this exclusion are by no means innocent. “One is forced to the paradoxical conclusion,” they argue, “that in order to conceal normal sexuality from children, it is necessary to construct an aberrant world” — an “asexual sexuated world” that is nevertheless “suggestive of sexual games and innuendo”. The real significance of the disappearance of parental relationships is to universalise the capitalist “law of the jungle”.

In other words, the elimination of the nuclear family unit reduces all Disney characters to “island-individuals”, strivers for whom “all that is left . . . is to compete”. The patriarch of Duckburg, after all, is none other than Uncle Scrooge, who takes his name from the Victorian icon of cruel rapacity and avarice; the adventures of his nephews tend to concern the acquisition of even more treasures for his horde.

The point of all this, according to Dorfman and Mattelart, is to “lend innocence to the adult world”. In the dominion of Uncle Scrooge, “[g]old, criticized ever since the beginning of a monetary economy as a contamination of human relations and the corruption of human nature, mingle[s] with the innocence of the [child].” The riches he and his nephews acquire always lack a material origin: gold simply appears, with no source or origin, just as the children are parentless. This “simultaneous lack of biological reproduction and direct economic production is not coincidental”: Disney’s “innocence” requires eradication of “all reference to the real world”.

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How to Read Donald Duck contains many of the expected Left-wing criticisms of patriarchy and gender roles, but it also includes observations that might be surprising to ideologues today. Notably, as one illustration of the propaganda functions taken on by Disney in the Global South, the authors remark that the US Agency for International Development has circulated films featuring Disney characters promoting contraception. They reinforce this association with the title of their chapter on Disney family dynamics: “Uncle, buy me a contraceptive…”

Like many radicals at the time, Dorfman and Mattelart saw the US state’s growing interest in controlling fertility in the developing world as consistent with a broader campaign to suppress the value placed on family in the subject nations of its economic empire; this was deemed to be in tension with values such as efficiency, productivity, individualism, and competition. Disney’s exclusion of references to reproductive sexuality, in this light, looks less like an attempt to protect childhood innocence, than part and parcel of the larger modern decoupling of sex from reproduction.

It all suggests that the supposed sexual innocence of Disney’s dreamscapes was never aligned with “family values” in the first place and the Right’s current war on Disney isn’t about family — it is simply the latest phase of its realisation that corporate America has now largely aligned itself with the values of the cultural Left.

For, in fact, Disney’s vast influence on the imaginations of children has been enabled by market society’s weakening of the authority of the family. With parents overburdened by the demands of work, important aspects of child-rearing are entrusted to the entertainment industry. Disney has capitalised on this exploding demand more than any other company. If we take “grooming” to simply mean instilling values alien to the family into children, Dorfman and Mattelart would suggest that Disney has never been innocent of this charge.

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One might ask how much distance there really is between the de-sexualised world of the classic Disney cartoons and the ideals animating the newfangled “woke Disney” — which have lately exercised the Right. Notoriously, one of the core elements of contemporary “gender ideology” is to erase biology. The reigning orthodoxy now holds that to be a boy, girl, man, or woman is no longer a question of physiological features but of internally felt identity linked to stereotypes. This is not unlike the “asexual sexuated world” Dorfman and Mattelart found in Disney’s comic strips, in which gender stereotypes prevailed but the material reality of sex had been occluded.

The latest permutations of the Disney universe may be the result of “ideological capture” by woke employees, but they also reveal a continuity with the company’s past. Just as it was back in 1971, Disney today is a propaganda organ disseminating ideological narratives that legitimise the global economic order. At the postwar height of industrial capitalism, tales of deracinated treasure-hunting ducks instilled acquisitive individualism in children at the expense of older communal and familial values. In the new era of global, dematerialised speculative capital, Disney is simply purveying new dreams, where what is to be acquired is a commodified form of identity.

The Left has, unsurprisingly, come to Disney’s defence in recent weeks, and even Dorfman, who had a prominent career in US academia after his forced exile from Chile, has softened his views on his old antagonist. Commenting on the appearance of a new English edition of How to Read Donald Duck, he remarked: “The Disney Corporation itself has evolved under pressure from minorities and feminists, and has distinguished itself by defending LGBTQ rights.” The Right, convinced of Disney’s original innocence, has no critique of its propaganda function, only the uses it is currently being put to. The company’s imperial power over the global imagination, vaster today than ever before, faces no credible challenge today from either side.

Kang and Yglesias both consider the possibility that “misinformation” and “disinformation” are misleading frameworks for making sense of the world today. Indeed, Yglesias argues that the “misinformation panic could, over time, make discerning the actual truth harder”. This is because “misinformation” talk seems to lead inexorably to the suppression and censoring of dissent.

But Yglesias’s title — “The ‘misinformation problem’ seems like misinformation” — hints at a more paradoxical possibility: what if these concepts are the result of a deliberate and coordinated attempt to mislead the public?

In an earlier critique of the “misinformation” and “disinformation” framework, cited by Kang, tech journalist Joe Bernstein argued that the broad acceptance of these ideas reflects the rising influence of what he calls “Big Disinfo”: “a new field of knowledge production that emerged during the Trump years at the juncture of media, academia and policy research.” Its ostensibly neutral agenda offers ideological cover for centrist and liberal politicians by aligning them with values like objectivity, science, and truth, while defaming their opponents as conspiracy theorists.

Bernstein argues that Big Disinfo covertly serves the interests of the major tech platforms themselves, whose profit model relies on digital ads. This might seem counterintuitive, since the misinformation panic helped generate the “techlash” that tarnished Silicon Valley’s previously benign reputation among liberals and centrists. But the notion that online content is highly effective at changing people’s views is crucial to the sales pitch companies such as Meta (formerly Facebook) make to advertisers and investors. Hence, for Bernstein, the tech industry’s embrace of Big Disinfo’s claims is “a superficial strategy to avoid deeper questions” — and also valorises tech platforms as guardians of the information ecosystem.

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Alongside journalists like Bernstein, Yglesias, and Kang, some academics are beginning to question the prevalent account of misinformation. Social Engineering, a new book by communications scholars Robert Gehl and Sean Lawson, helpfully reorients the discussion about these issues by offering deeper historical context and a new conceptual framework.

Terms like “misinformation”, “disinformation”, and “fake news”, Gehl and Lawson argue, fail “to grasp the complexity of manipulative communication” because they “reduce everything to a stark true/false binary” and thus disregard “the blurry lines between fact and falsehood”. Moreover, these terms imply a radical discontinuity between pre and post-internet worlds: they cast the former as a halcyon realm of clear, accurate, truthful communications, overseen by benevolent eminences like Walter Cronkite, while depicting the latter as a cesspit of lies and delusions. Bernstein parodies this view: “In the beginning, there were ABC, NBC, and CBS, and they were good”. This short-sighted perspective disregards the widespread concerns about propaganda that prevailed when network TV was at the height of its influence, which recent anxieties often echo.

The alternative terminology Gehl and Lawson propose is “social engineering”, a term that, as they show, has a two-stage history. The first widespread use of this phrase began in the early 20th century. Progressive reformers began to envision the possibility of employing mass communications technologies to reshape thought and behaviour on a vast scale. Their vision informed the coevolution of state propaganda and private-sector public relations, advertising, and marketing. Initially an optimistic project of benevolent technocratic rule, mass social engineering fell into intellectual disrepute by the late 20th century, although industries such as advertising and PR never abandoned its basic premises.

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In the Seventies and Eighties — the same era when the older, top-down project of social engineering was being discredited as elitist and paternalistic — a new, bottom-up understanding of the same concept took hold among a loose cadre of hackers and “phone phreaks”. As Gehl and Lawson document, these communications outlaws developed an array of personalised techniques, such as impersonating clients and obtaining data under false pretences, to gain illicit access to technological systems belonging to phone companies, banks, government agencies, and other entities.

Applying the term “social engineering” to these sorts of tricks may seem grandiose, but Gehl and Lawson argue that they are continuous with the older technocratic enterprise: both types of social engineers “hide their true purposes, use sociotechnical knowledge to control others, and seek to manipulate others into doing things”.

The “hacker social engineers” of the past few decades have an easier time proving the efficacy of their techniques than mass social engineers, not least because their aims are typically more modest and practical. Consider an infamous incident from the 2016 election, part of the larger sequence of events that prompted the misinformation panic. The phishing scheme targeting Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta — a classic act of hacker social engineering — was a success in that it achieved the limited practical goal of gaining access to his email account. Conversely, the attempts by the Trump campaign and its allies at mass social engineering (including via the publication of Podesta’s hacked emails) had no clear effect on the outcome of the 2016 election. There were too many other causal factors at work.

It’s not surprising, given the demonstrable successes of hacker social engineers at manipulating thought and behaviour, that larger entities have attempted to scale up their personalised techniques. This is how Gehl and Lawson recontextualise two of the most notorious alleged cases of “misinformation” from the 2016 period: the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica and Russia’s Internet Research Agency. The first claimed, dubiously, to be able to perform “psychographic microtargeting” of voters based on data obtained under false pretences; the second deployed hacker techniques (like phishing) as well as paid trolls and fake accounts. Both “demonstrated the same ambitions of the older mass social engineers, but… also used the more targeted interpersonal techniques developed by hackers”.

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Gehl and Lawson coin a term for these contemporary efforts that fuse mass social engineering with more personalised hacker methods: “masspersonal social engineering”. Although the aim of their book is to document the emergence of masspersonal social engineering, they concede that it’s unclear whether it has influenced thought and behaviour enough to, for instance, alter the results of elections. However, they caution that “future masspersonal social engineering may better implement the successful model of interpersonal hacker social engineering on a large scale”.

But they follow this warning with a more intriguing observation: many “sociotechnical developments that did not have particularly great immediate effects… are now recognised as having been vitally important despite (or perhaps because of) their failures.” One way to interpret this is that while the direct impacts of Russian hackers, Cambridge Analytica, and “fake news” have been modest, they have had a major indirect effect. They furnished the pretext for the misinformation panic, which offered embattled corporate media outlets, centrist politicians, and tech platforms a way of restoring their reputations and asserting more direct control over the information sphere.

As Gehl and Lawson note, “those in power are the ones in a position to wield the… capacities of social engineers”. This is why, historically, “publicity, propaganda, public relations, and consent engineering all have deep ties to the national security state”. In the face of inchoate populist tumult, declaring war against “misinformation” has enabled establishment institutions to shift legitimate anxieties about the manipulative use of media technologies towards upstart entities that, however unscrupulous, cannot claim anything like the influence of state-aligned media organisations or, for that matter, the tech platforms themselves.

Behind all talk of “misinformation” and “disinformation” is the tacit assumption that these terms designate exceptions to an otherwise pristine media landscape. Gehl and Lawson’s alternative framework points to the messier reality: a contest between “social engineers” (many of them only aspirational) operating at a variety of different scales and targeting populations, individuals, and everything in between. The misinformation panic, which has obscured this reality over the past half decade, is itself one of the most effective social engineering campaigns of our time.

This policy divergence created an opportunity to examine the impact of mask mandates. Those areas that rescinded their mandates could function as control groups for evaluating the effect of the policy on cases and mortality. But neither public health experts nor any of the major media outlets took up this opportunity. The reason, most of them would likely have said if pressed on the subject, was there was nothing to learn: “the science” was settled.

For their part, critics of masking and other Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) typically relied on principled assertions of freedom. This gave them little reason to examine the evidentiary basis of these policies, since they would have rejected them on moral grounds even if they worked. Only a few sceptical observers drilled into the data that could be found on sites such as the New York Times — even if the paper’s own reporters made little of it. The most prolific of these was Ian Miller, who over the past two years has published copious data-driven commentary on the track record of various Covid public health interventions.

Miller arrives time and again at the same conclusion: that the ad hoc pandemic mitigation policies rolled out since 2020 have systematically failed to achieve goals. Miller has now compiled one subset of his graphs and commentaries into a book titled Unmasked: The Global Failure of Covid Mask Mandates which focuses solely on the most ubiquitous pandemic containment strategy deployed by governments worldwide: masks.

The endorsement of masking by medical bodies and public health authorities worldwide, Miller shows, entailed the abandonment of a longstanding view that masks were a useless and even harmful intervention. Over the previous decades, numerous randomised controlled trials had assessed the efficacy of masks in controlling the spread of respiratory viruses like influenza, and pandemic simulations had evaluated their potential.

A document published by the World Health Organisation in 2019 framed the results of these studies in no uncertain terms: “there was no evidence that face masks are effective in reducing transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza”. It’s unsurprising, then, that when the CDC briefed reporters on the pandemic in February of 2020, masking was not even mentioned among the NPIs that might be deployed. The UK government, too, stated early in 2020 that there was no evidence to support masking.

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After the CDC and other agencies revised their guidance in April 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci, by then a staunch advocate of masks, claimed that he and other officials had discouraged the public from obtaining masks to ensure there were adequate supplies for health care workers. Ever since, promoters of masking have cited Fauci’s “noble lie” to account for the abrupt reversal of prior guidance. But as Miller notes, it was not just during the early months of the pandemic that officials said masks were ineffective. They had said so for years, and Fauci had advised against masks not just in public statements but in private emails in early 2020.

In light of the earlier consensus, Miller’s findings in Unmasked should not be surprising. As we might have predicted based on a plethora of trials and meta-analyses published prior to the pandemic, mask mandates have had little to no demonstrable impact on curbing the spread of the virus. Miller reaches this conclusion by comparing areas with mask mandates of longer and shorter duration with each other and with areas that never imposed mandates at all. The results, he shows, simply do not support the standard adage that “masks save lives”.

For example, Los Angeles County, the most populous county in the US, imposed one of the earliest mask mandates in the United States, just after the CDC released its new guidance in early April 2020. By May, the county was requiring masks outdoors as well as indoors and enjoying 96-97% compliance. (It also imposed an array of other strict mitigation measures.) But it had case and mortality rates well above the national average throughout 2020 and 2021. LA currently ranks 3rd among California counties in its Covid death rate, faring worse than numerous counties with mask mandates of shorter duration and lower levels of compliance.

It’s possible to quibble with Miller’s methodology. As he readily acknowledges, we don’t know precisely how LA and other heavily masked areas would have fared against Covid in the absence of mandates, and the fact that mask mandates have tended to be deployed alongside social distancing and other NPIs muddies the water. Miller’s comparisons of LA’s outcomes with those of neighbouring Orange County, which has had no mask mandate since last year but has had lower case and death rates, seem rather conclusive, but a sceptic might note confounding variables such as demographic differences, population density, and so on.

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Such criticisms would be more damaging to Miller’s case if the officials and experts who have embraced mask mandates were more modest in their own assertions. Not only did they jettison years of prior research pointing to the minimal efficacy of masking, they also made empirically indefensible claims that masks alone could end the pandemic.

For instance, Miller compiles the astonishing claims made by Dr. Robert Redfield, who directed the CDC until just a year ago. In September 2020, Redfield described masks as “the most powerful public health tool we have”, claimed they offered “more Covid protection than vaccines would”, and stated: “If we [wore masks] for 6, 8, 10, 12 weeks, we’d bring this pandemic under control.” While they may not rule out some small effects of masking, Miller’s charts expose claims such as Redfield’s as delusional propaganda.

Likewise, those sceptical of what Miller’s comparative graphs can teach us should be even more suspicious of the shoddy studies published by the CDC over the past two years. For example, one study claimed to show a decline in Covid cases in certain Arizona counties as a result of mask mandates. But it failed to note that cases declined at a similar rate over the same period in Arizona counties without a mandate. In the months following the completion of the study, moreover, cases rose well above prior levels in counties with mandates still in place. Such studies produced a mirage of success by limiting the period of study, conflating correlation and causation, and avoiding comparisons with non-mandate counties.

The most disastrous failing of the experts has been their lack of curiosity about the actual results of the policies they have staked their reputations on. Mask mandates have been, in Miller’s phrase, “a population-wide experiment”, but few within the US scientific and medical establishment have seemed interested in parsing the resulting data, leaving that task to outsiders like Miller. Astonishingly, there have been just two randomised controlled trials on masking published since the pandemic began. One found no significant effect at all, while the other found a small effect of 11% for surgical masks and no significant effect for cloth ones. The first was largely ignored or dismissed, while the second was optimistically glossed as proving that masks work.

Moreover, even the most bullish case for the technical efficacy of at least some higher-quality masks does not constitute a case for mask mandates, a distinction that most commentary elides. The only way to measure the efficacy of mandates is to look at their actual track record. This is what Miller has done, and the result, he argues, is clear: “mask mandates have demonstrated very little impact, if any, on case curves throughout the United States and in many other international locations.”

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Miller is justifiably derisive about the experts who have oversold dubious policies at every turn, but the ironic implication of his book is that much of the expert guidance from prior to 2020 has been vindicated. Before Covid appeared, scientists and officials advised time and again that masks would be ineffective at containing a pandemic respiratory virus, and the evidence Miller has compiled suggests they were correct.

Two years into the pandemic, the experts are now the last to acknowledge the accuracy of their earlier predictions. This raises the question of why they changed course and sacrificed their own credibility in the process. Miller confines himself to the data, and if there’s a limitation to his book, it’s that he does not offer any compelling explanation of why the expert class threw itself a policy it once regarded as worse than useless.

It is not difficult to see why mask mandates proved irresistible to politicians. Masks are the perfect form of hygiene theatre, conveying an intuitive sense of safety regardless of demonstrable efficacy at scale. They also offload responsibility for controlling the pandemic to ordinary people. The overcrowding of ICUs can be blamed on the bad behavior of “anti-maskers”, rather than on the allocation of resources by governments and hospital CEOs. When cases and deaths spike, it is the fault of the citizenry, not the leadership.

The scientific and medical establishment’s uncritical support of masks and other dubious policies is just the latest manifestation of its lack of independence from political imperatives. After several years of finding themselves at the receiving end of rhetorical assaults from rising Right-wing populists, the experts seized on the pandemic as an opportunity to reassert their own status and authority — and that of the liberal-technocratic politicians with whom they are largely aligned.

In the long run, however, the temporary political advantages they gained from this will be outweighed by the discrediting effect of their embrace of censorship, propaganda, and rule by decree. Making us all put masks on was the expert class’s mask-off moment — and what we can see now isn’t pretty.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The journalist Glenn Greenwald, one of the most vocal Left-wing critics of the tech companies’ actions, asserted that they “never wanted this role.” Instead, he said, “[i]t was foisted on them by people, led by journalists, demanding they censor.” And indeed, since the 2016 election, much of the Left-of-centre media has faulted social media platforms for what they see as overly permissive policies on political speech.

As many have previously pointed out, support for restricting speech is a sharp pivot away from principles once common on the Left. Notably, one of the most iconic protest events of the 1960s was the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, a revolt against the University of California’s limitations on political speech. (In recent years, in contrast, student radicals have been more likely to protest their universities’ unwillingness to restrict expression on campus.)

What’s less well-remembered about the Berkeley Free Speech Movement is that then, as now, debates about the freedom of expression revolved around technology — specifically, information technology. A hint of this emphasis is apparent in the movement’s best-known statement: the famous speech in which activist Mario Savio proclaimed: “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious — makes you so sick at heart — that you can’t take part”.

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Today, most would probably interpret Savio’s use of “machine” as metaphorical, but to its audience at the time, it would have also had a literal referent: the IBM computers that were increasingly central to the university’s operation in the 1960s. For course registration and other purposes, students were issued IBM punch cards, which were the prevalent means of digital data storage prior to magnetic disks.

The radicals seized on these objects as a symbol of the repressive institution they were fighting. As Savio put it in an interview with Life magazine, “[a]t Cal, you’re little more than an IBM card.” He elaborated: “the university is a vast public utility which turns out future workers in the military-industrial complex. They’ve got to be processed in the most efficient way to see to it that they have the fewest dissenting opinions.”

In line with Savio’s thinking, Berkeley militants turned the ubiquitous IBM punch card into the object of many gestures of rebellion. They burned piles of the cards in public spaces; they punched out the words “Free Speech” on them, then hung them around their necks and attached them to their lapels. They adopted the phrase “do not fold, spindle, or mutilate,” which appeared on IBM’s cards, as a slogan, putting it on placards to indict a system that valued the smooth functioning of the machine over the full expression of humanity.

In satirical cartoons, they represented the university as a factory flattening human beings into two-dimensional punch cards. An album of protest songs from the movement featured punch cards marked with slogans on its cover art. The Free Speech Movement activists, it would seem, intuitively viewed centralised information systems like IBM’s as inimical to freedom and individuality. For them, the punch card embodied the prospect of the “one-dimensional man,” in the phrase of philosopher Herbert Marcuse, whose book of that title appeared in the same year as the Berkeley protests.

Marcuse’s account of how advanced industrial society turned people into mere commodities profoundly influenced the 1960s Left. Computerisation, which seemed to insert individuals into abstract mechanisms subject to hierarchical control, offered a particularly vivid illustration of the dangers he identified.

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More than 50 years later, the coordinates of this argument look both strange and familiar. In the 1960s, people feared the reduction of their identities to the size of a punch card issued by an institution; today, most of us have willingly allowed ourselves to be slotted into flat, standardised profiles controlled by private corporations with far more reach and influence than IBM ever had in the 60s. Far from resisting this fate, we embraced it as a means of enhanced individuality and freedom — or so we imagined.

A shift in the popular perception of information technology made this possible. In From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner details the remarkable evolution by which California radicals went from rejecting computers as instruments of state oppression to hailing them as vehicles of collective liberation. “Two decades after the end of the Vietnam War and the fading of the American counterculture,” he writes, “computers somehow seemed poised to bring to life the countercultural dream of empowered individualism, collaborative community, and spiritual communion.”

By the time social media emerged in the early 2000s, this positive view of information technology, surprisingly in line with the values of the Free Speech Movement, had become default. We felt that slotting ourselves into graphically enhanced virtual punch cards was a new means of self-expression, rather than a danger to it.

As Twitter and Facebook lurch towards more extensive control over content posted on their sites, we are in the midst of a new and even more disorienting shift in public opinion. What has emerged lately is a bewildering synthesis of the techno-dystopian views of the old counterculture and the techno-utopianism of the later cyber-culture documented by Turner.

In recent years, plenty of voices across the political spectrum have decried the power accrued by the major tech corporations, echoing 60s-era anxieties about IBM. On the other hand, those on the Left in particular now worry less about the repressive capacities of new technologies than their excessive permissiveness. This puts them in the peculiar position of, in effect, wanting to grant more power and control to the same unaccountable corporations they might otherwise criticise.

Information technology does not enable either freedom or control: it facilitates both at once. Because they did not recognise this dual potentiality in 1964, Savio and his fellow activists could not foresee that that the insertion of human beings into technological systems would not be imposed by faceless, repressive power structures.

Rather, the public would eventually embrace this integration, ironically seeing in it the realisation of a countercultural dream of free expression and enhanced individuality. For their part, the techno-utopians who brought us the internet were naïve about the dangers of placing mechanisms that now govern much of human life under the control of large private companies.

As the inheritors of these two outlooks, we now suffer from both blind spots. Most of us can agree that big tech has accumulated too much power, regardless of how and to what degree it chooses to use it. But no one is in a position to challenge this power effectively, because we all still want what big tech promises us — for ourselves, if not for our political enemies.

Recent developments suggest that many are willing to cede far more power to Silicon Valley, under the impression that this will preserve the dream of the internet it once sold us. This view is just as short-sighted as the ones that preceded it.