Unsurprisingly, neither proposed mental construct landed very well with President Trump’s populist-nationalist base, and Ramaswamy was soon duly shuffled off to a term of exile in Ohio. In the one view, “America” is merely a glorified economic zone, just one part of a “competitive global market” in which labor and capital flow freely. In the other, America is a professional franchise whose sole objective is to maximize winnings. In both cases, America is viewed as analogous to a corporation. In such a corporation, management’s only responsibility is to profits; it has no inherent responsibility to employees or their wellbeing, something of interest only insofar as it translates into productivity.

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The corporate machine views employees merely as interchangeable human resources, to whom it owes no loyalty. Indeed, if it is to effectively devote itself to profit maximization the company can afford no permanent relational bonds with any of those who work for it, as it must be able to fire or replace them based on cold utilitarian calculus. There are thus few experiences employees find as irritating as that common workplace psyop in which management proclaims the corporate office to be a “family”. Employees know implicitly that it is natural affections and iron-clad mutual loyalties, or at least strong relational bonds, that are precisely what distinguish a family. Their corporate employer, in contrast, won’t hesitate to dump them by the wayside the moment they fall into the wrong column of a spreadsheet. For their part, employees are liable to return the sentiment and retain no lasting loyalty to the company – though perhaps plenty of resentment.

What angered many about the two CEOs’ comments was that — like so many among today’s elite class — they displayed no sense of loyalty or obligation to Americans as a nation. A nation is not a corporation. A nation is a particular people, with a distinct culture, permanently bound together by shared relationship with place, past, and each other. A house becomes a home through the relationship with the family that lives in it, a connection forged out of time and memory, between the concrete particularity of place and the lives of a specific group of people present, past, and yet unborn. We can say this house is home because it is our home. In much the same way, a country becomes our homeland because it is ours — and the we of that “ours” is the nation, which transcends geography, government, and GDP.

Unlike a corporation, a nation really is much like a family. And, like a family, it is characterized by strong relational bonds that are covenantal, not contractual. A nation establishes moral obligations of solidarity and subsidiarity that cannot be simply abandoned. Much as we naturally would, and should, put our own children’s lives and wellbeing ahead of others’, a nation is obligated to distinguish its own from others and to put the wellbeing of its own first. If it fails to do so, then it can no longer remain a nation any more than a family could remain a family were it to try to extend the fold of its care equally to all humanity. Only once our immediate duties to those closest to us are fulfilled can concern for the good of others be rightly extended further outward. And though we may choose to adopt a child into our family, we cannot as readily toss them. We cannot, say, swap out our child for a different one who is more likely to get better grades in math class or willing to perform chores for a lesser allowance. A nation-state is no more justly able to replace its own people or neglect its unique obligations to them simply because doing so seems more profitable or convenient.

Yet a family is hardly built on obligation alone. A healthy family is founded, ordered, governed, and sustained by love. It is love that binds its members together, forges their sense of responsibility, guides their conduct, and directs their proper care for one another. And it is love that directs us to rightly set our concern for these particular people above others, in the proper ordo amoris, or order of loves.

Love is not, cannot be, universal. It is born in particulars and defined by distinction. Should we say we love our neighbor, yet we do not love him for himself — with, or despite, all his unique eccentricities — but only insofar as we claim to love all people in the abstract, then we do not really love him. We cannot love our wife because she is a woman; we can only really love a particular woman. Thus, we believers find we must have faith that even the infinite God loves each of us in particular, numbering the very hairs on our heads; for his love to extend no further than to the mass of humanity as a species, as to a mass of sparrows, would be cold comfort indeed.

We love those people and those good things which are distinct and special to us, and those that are particularly our own all the more, but this hardly implies that we must then automatically hate all others. We do not hate other families’ children just because we love our own. Still, this twisted logic is today widely ascribed to one important expression of love: love for our own nation. Yet this is indeed what it means to be a nationalist: to love one’s own nation, in much the same way (if not quite as deeply) as one loves one’s own family.

As C.S. Lewis observed, patriotic love for one’s nation grows organically from that which is most local, familiar, and meaningful to us — from our love for our family, our land, and our community. From “this love for the place there goes a love for the way of life” of our nation, in all its many common particularities, all tied up together. In the case of Lewis’s England, “for beer and tea and open fires, trains with compartments in them and an unarmed police force and all the rest of it”.

None of this implies that we then desire to impose this particular way of life on the rest of the world. But it does mean that none should be surprised that men might lay down their lives to defend their own nation as their own, and for no other reason. They do so for the same reason they would lay down their lives to defend their children, or their friends: because they love them. Common loves are the source of common loyalties, and of common life. As Lewis reminds us (paraphrasing G.K. Chesterton), “a man’s reasons for not wanting his country to be ruled by foreigners are very like his reasons for not wanting his house to be burned down; because he could not even begin to enumerate all the things that would be lost”.

Yet, at least among our ruling classes, this natural reciprocal love between nation and citizen, which sustains our countries and our societies, seems to have long since frayed. This is no great shock, given that in our age the very idea of nationhood is itself decried, or outright denied, the nation-state stripped of the nation, the world reduced to a network of special economic zones. A man cannot love a special economic zone. Nor can its administrators possess any special feeling for its temporary inhabitants.

This grim status quo is no accident, however. It is the result of a deliberate, 80-year conspiracy against love, conducted out of fear. As I’ve argued elsewhere, after the Second World War, with trauma and totalitarianism haunting the world, the American and European leadership class resolved that these evils should never again threaten society. And they concluded that the emotional power of nationalism had been the central cause of the 20th century’s catastrophes, leading them to make anti-nationalism the cornerstone of the liberal establishment consensus that came to dominate culture and politics after the war.

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The philosopher Karl Popper, in his sweepingly influential 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, denounced the idea of national community writ large, labeling it disastrous “anti-humanitarian propaganda”, and smearing anyone who cherished his particular homeland and history as a “racialist”. Theodor Adorno, who set the direction of American psychology and education policy for decades, classified natural loyalties to family and nation as the hallmarks of the “authoritarian personality” that drove the common man inexorably toward fascism.

But the aversions of the post-war elite grew deeper than a philosophical anti-nationalism. As R.R. Reno writes in The Return of the Strong Gods (2019), the visceral imperative became to fully banish all the “strong gods” that fueled conflict, meaning all those “objects of men’s love and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that unite societies”. Strong bonds and strong loves of any kind — of family, nation, truth, God — came to be seen as dangerous, as sources of dogma, oppression, hatred, and violence. The peaceful and prosperous “open society” that the post-war establishment set out to instantiate would, as Reno puts it, “require the reign of weak loves and weak truths”, with all dangerous sentiment subordinate to the rule of cool rationality and tepid impartiality.

In this belief, post-war leaders embraced the legacy of Thomas Hobbes, who had viewed the wars which upended his own century as a product of the state of nature — the “war of all against all” — that constantly threatened to emerge from the pride and spiritedness (thumos) of mankind’s base natural personality. He saw the solution to this risk as man’s submission, out of fear, to the absolute power of a political leviathan — but also to an anthropological project, a program of metaphysical reeducation to turn man’s eye away from any summum bonum and downward toward only the fearful summum malum of struggle and death. As Matthew Crawford has succinctly explained, Hobbes believed that “any appeal to a higher good threatens to return us to the horrors of civil strife and must be debunked”, all our spirited passions and “vainglorious self-assertion” drained away so that we can consent to rule by Leviathan, “King of the Proud”.

With Hitler having firmly established himself as the summum malum of the post-war order, the liberal establishment embarked on their own version of Hobbes’s political-anthropological project. Seeking to dissolve the traditional “closed society” they feared was a breeding ground for authoritarianism, this “open society consensus” drew on theorists such as Adorno and Popper to advance a program of social reforms intended to open minds, disenchant ideals, and weaken bonds. New approaches to education, psychology, and management sought to relativize truths, elevate “critical thinking” over character development, cast doubt on authorities, vilify collective loyalties, break down boundaries and borders, and free individuals from the “repression” of moral and relational bonds. Soon only economic prosperity and a vague universal humanitarianism became the only higher goods that it was morally acceptable to aim for as a society.

As government joined forces with post-war psychoanalysis, this program of subtle social control soon solidified into the modern therapeutic state — a regime that, as Christopher Lasch noted, successfully “substituted a medical for a political idiom and relegated a broad range of controversial issues to the clinic — to ‘scientific’ study as opposed to philosophical and political debate”. This removal of the political from politics lay at the heart of the post-war project’s aims. Its central desire was to reduce politics to mere administration, to bureaucratic processes, legal judgments, expert committees, and technocratic regulation — anything but fraught contention over such weighty matters as how we ought to live, organize society, or define who “we” are.

Public contention over genuinely political questions was now judged to be too dangerous to permit, even — indeed especially — in a democracy, where the ever-present spectre of the mob and the latent emotional power of the masses haunted post-war leaders. They dreamed of governance via scientific management, of reducing the political sphere to the dispassionate processes of a machine — to “a social technology… whose results can be tested by social engineering”, as Popper put it. The operation of such a machine could be limited to a cadre of carefully educated “institutional technologists”, in Popper’s words, or rather to Hegel’s imagined “universal class” of impartial civil servants, able to objectively derive the best decisions for everyone through the principles of universal Reason alone.

>The result was the construction of the managerial regimes that dominate the Western world today. These are characterized by vast, soulless administrative states of unaccountable bureaucracies, a litigious ethos of risk-avoidance and “harm-reduction”, and a technocratic elite class schooled in social engineering and dissimulation. In such states the top priority is the careful management of public opinion through propaganda and censorship, not only in order to constrain democratic outcomes but so as to smooth over or avoid any serious discussion of contentious yet fundamentally political issues, such as migration policy.

Meanwhile, the common people of such regimes are practically encouraged to live as distracted consumers rather than citizens, the invisible hand of the free market and the inducements of commercial and hedonistic pursuits serving not only profits but a political function of pacification. It is preferable that the masses simply not care very much — about anything, but especially about the fate of their nation and the common good. That sort of collective consciousness, transcending self-interest and seeking higher order, was after all identified as a foreboding mark of the closed society.

Here, then, can we see the long historical roots of the open, neoliberal state pointed to as an ideal by Ramaswamy and Musk. Innocently or not, these libertarian-leaning businessmen’s conception of the polity is almost indistinguishable from the “post-national state” that devoutly Left-wing leaders such as Canada’s Justin Trudeau have set out to devolve their countries into. The “globalism” so often decried by populists is neither Left nor Right but the logical product of the rationalist universalism embraced by the 20th century’s post-war consensus. It is the inevitable result of treating people, and peoples, as interchangeable units in a mechanical system — that is, of regarding them without any distinguishing sense of love.

But, as is increasingly obvious in our turbulent 21st century, our loveless machine-states are deeply unstable. It turns out that attempting to remove all bonds of affection from politics introduces some fundamental problems of political order. Most important, it has delivered us a leadership class essentially incapable of responsible leadership.

The noble classes of the pre-modern world’s closed societies were still capable of displaying a real sense of noblesse oblige: of having a sacred obligation to and responsibility for the people they ruled, because they were theirs. Though modern cynics may dismiss this sentiment as a myth, it was often genuine. It is a striking fact, for instance, that the last real generation of Europe’s aristocratic elite was disproportionately savaged in the trenches of the First World War, the flower of its youth voluntarily marching off to die leading from the front in defense of their nations at a significantly higher rate than ordinary soldiers. Eton, the nursery of the British aristocracy, lost more than a thousand of its students during the war — a 20% casualty rate compared to the army’s national average of 12%.

Today, our elites no longer betray any similar sense of special obligation to their people. But then we can hardly expect them to, given that all the strong bonds of loyalty that once tied them to their countrymen, transcending divides of wealth, education, and class, have been severed. They conceive of themselves as meritocrats, of no special birth and therefore no special responsibility. More importantly, they have been taught from birth that they ought not even conceive of their nation as particularly their own or to love it any more than any other portion of humanity; their self-conceived domain is one without borders, the global empire of the open society.

Whom does government serve? This is perhaps the most pressing question of politics. In theory the leadership class that rules us is supposed to represent and govern on behalf of the common people and their best interests. This is meant to be precisely what distinguishes our regimes from tyranny, “tyranny” in the classical lexicon meaning rule for private gain rather than for the common good. But no one can truly represent or act rightly for the wellbeing of another if they bear no particular concern for them. It is love, and only love, that can really guarantee that anyone acts in the best interest of another when they could do otherwise. Love is the only force capable of genuinely liberating us from selfishness.

It is a modern conceit that those with power are kept restrained, uncorrupted, and ordered to justice and the common good primarily by lifeless structural guardrails, by the abstract checks and balances of constitutions and laws. The ancients would have maintained that it is far more important that a king be virtuous, and that he love his people. And is this not plausible? Fundamentally, a father doesn’t treat his children well, refraining from abusing or neglecting them and raising them rightly, just because he obediently follows the law or some correct set of rules and standard operating procedures. He does so because he loves his family, and from that love flows automatically a spontaneous ordering of all his intentions toward their good. He would do so even in the absence of externally imposed rules. Love is an invisible hand all its own.

It is this invisible hand, not that of the market, that is so glaringly absent from the heart of our nations. If ours seems a cold and callous age in general, our ruling class, characterized by its indifference and our societies by division, dissolution, and despair, surely this lack is the real cause. As Reno writes, “the greatest threat to the political health of the West is not fascism or a resurgent Ku Klux Klan but a decline in solidarity and the breakdown of the trust between leaders and the led. Fearful of strong loves and committed to ever-greater openness, the postwar consensus cannot formulate, much less address, these problems”. With today’s elite “unable to identify our shared loves —unable even to formulate the ‘we’ that is the political subject in public life — we cannot identify the common good, the res in the res publica”.

The enlightened man, the conservative Russel Kirk once noted, “does not believe that the end or aim of life is competition; or success…” Nor does he hold any foolish political “intention of converting this human society of ours into an efficient machine for efficient machine-operators, dominated by master mechanics.” What he recognizes instead is that “the object of life is Love.” And, so, he knows, what’s more, “that the just and ordered society is that in which Love governs us, so far as Love ever can reign in this world of sorrows; and he knows that the anarchical or the tyrannical society is that in which Love lies corrupt”.

If the countries of the West are still capable of renewal, that renewal will come only when our leadership classes recover an uncorrupted love for the particular people — the nation — over which they govern and commit to placing their wellbeing first. We are fortunate then that, in the hearts of some of them at least, this recovery seems at last to have begun.

Vance delivered multiple messages with his speech, the broadest and most historic of which was that the era of “post-national” globalist liberalism is over. The United States, he indicated, now has a core interest in seeing a Western world that is collectively strong because its sovereign nations are strong, with the self-confidence to independently defend themselves physically, culturally, and spiritually. His emphasis on promoting free speech and democratic legitimacy tied into this message, but was about far more than “shared values”. Practically, it was an implicit warning that the role Europe has been playing as a proxy actor in the political and ideological conflict raging in the United States will no longer be tolerated. More specifically, it was a declaration that ongoing transatlantic institutional, technological, and legal support for America’s embattled Left-wing deep state must end — or else.

After Donald Trump’s election in 2016, America’s panicked establishment elites reacted by attempting to construct a system for managing public opinion through strict control of information, especially online information. The idea was that growing public support for populism was fueled by “low-information voters” and their consumption of “misinformation” and “disinformation”, including from foreign actors, and that if their “information diet” could just be controlled then they would stop voting wrong. The underlying assumption here was of course that the elite’s own increasingly radical policy preferences were the only rational path, opposable only by the stupid and easily manipulated. As Hillary Clinton would later put it, if social media companies “don’t moderate and monitor the content, we lose total control.”

This intended system of thought-control would later grow into the censorship industrial complex that was partially revealed following Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. But a big obstacle initially stood in the way: the US Constitution and its protection of free speech. The public might be receiving the “wrong” information on the internet, but “our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence,” as John Kerry lamented in a speech to the World Economic Forum.

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Under the Biden administration, this legal problem was partially solved by simply ignoring it, the federal government directly colluding with technology companies and a network of “independent” (i.e. state-funded) “fact-checking” organizations to impose mass censorship on American citizens. The result was effectively, as one federal judge later described it, “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”

A more subtle and sustainable work-around was also discovered, however. This was to circumvent the Constitution by outsourcing the policing of the internet and populist movements to other countries. This could be done because the internet is global and so the whole network is affected by government regulations on any local market of sufficient size. Leaders on both sides of the Atlantic immediately grasped that legal and regulatory structures imposed by the European Union, with the leverage of its huge unified market, could force internet companies the world over — including US companies — to change their behavior in order to comply and avoid losing access. This imperialistic regulatory strong-arming was dubbed the “Brussels Effect”, becoming Europe’s only significant innovation this century.

American “partners” quickly began setting up a network of structures to force global internet content “moderation” as part of a de facto counter-populist alliance. This began in 2016 when Brussels pressured Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube into signing the “Code of Conduct on Countering Illegal Hate Speech Online”, which required the “removal of illegal hate speech in less than 24 hours” and ordered them to “remove or disable access to such content” permanently. Decisions on what counted as illegal speech would henceforth be determined by a new category of “trusted reporters”, i.e. a network of ideologically aligned media organizations, often funded by the state. Others quickly joined in creating their own similar regulatory frameworks, such as Germany’s 2017 Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG), which criminalized a vast array of “misinformation”, or the UK’s “Online Safety Act”, which made illegal such vaguely hateful behavior as causing “needless anxiety” and “non-trivial psychological or physical harm”.

This process of regulatory political containment reached its ultimate form in the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which began to come into legal force in 2023 and is now fully operational. The DSA’s “main goal is to prevent illegal and harmful activities online and the spread of disinformation”, and it does so by threatening to fine any internet platform anywhere in the world (from social media to app stores) up to 6% of their annual global revenue if they fail to take down “false” or “harmful” content within a matter of hours. Information fit to be censored is determined by small committees of “experts” chosen by the European Commission. Overall the DSA is, as investigative journalist Matt Taibbi has rightly put it, “the most comprehensive censorship law ever passed in a Western democracy.”

For a long time, these regulatory methods worked. As revealed by the “Twitter Files” uncovered by reporters like Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and others, Twitter employees were for example regularly producing enthusiastic reports on the company’s global compliance with Germany’s NetzDG. Overall, Twitter’s legal policy office reported internally that it was “spending 50% or more” of its time “on global regulation” and compliance with foreign censorship demands by 2022.

The construction of this counter-populist system was formalized as a distinctly international project in 2019 with the “Christchurch Call to Action” summit, pioneered by New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern. This secured commitments from dozens of governments, online service providers, advertisers, and “civil society and partner organizations” to “eliminate terrorist and violent extremism content online”. These commitments were self-described as “wide ranging, covering everything from applying appropriate laws and regulation to specific technical measures, to efforts to address the underlying drivers of terrorism”. (“Underlying drivers” in practice here meaning Right-populist and anti-establishment political views, quickly expanding to include any dissenting views on Covid and misgovernance during the pandemic.)

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Following this, the world saw an explosion of hundreds of “non-governmental” organizations, think tanks, “fact checkers”, and academic misinformation “researchers”, all sprouting up to help coordinate censorship without borders. These organizations provided ready-made “expertise” on which governments and technology platforms could draw when deciding who to target for silencing or worse. Additionally, they could provide cover by giving the whole scheme a sheen of independence and scientific objectivity. They quickly became integral to the counter-populist project. In particular, these outfits became adept at coordinating campaigns to cut off financing for political opponents and ideological adversaries by pressuring advertisers into boycotting dissenting websites, platforms, and media outlets by smearing them as dangerous extremists.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a British Labour Party cutout, proved especially effective at this ploy, successfully cutting off ad revenue flowing to perceived Right-wing sites. It also managed to drive away many advertisers from Twitter after its acquisition by Elon Musk, with leaked CCDH documents later revealing the outfit had explicitly listed “Kill Musk’s Twitter” as a top strategic priority. CCDH did far more than this, however; it worked hand-in-hand with governments to provide enemies lists and custom-made excuses for censoring political opponents. When CCDH published a report labeling 12 influential Covid lockdown skeptics as the dangerous “Disinformation Dozen”, 12 Democratic Party attorney generals in the United States all inexplicably sent a letter on the same day to the CEOs of Twitter and Facebook citing the CCDH report and demanding the Disinformation Dozen be deplatformed. It was later revealed that the NGO and the Democratic Party had regularly shared drafts and coordinated their attacks in advance, which was of course precisely the point.

Moreover, CCDH appears to have acted as a dedicated foreign lobbyist, meeting continuously with US legislative staff and reporting internally on making “progress towards change in USA and support for STAR” — STAR being a proposed “Global Standard for Regulating Social Media” that CCDH seemed convinced America could be cajoled into adopting if Democratic Party rule continued. Perhaps this is part of what Vice President of the European Commission Věra Jourová was referring to when, at Davos two years ago, she confidently asserted that European-style hate speech laws were something “which you will have soon also in the US”.

The US Department of Justice now appears to be considering whether CCDH has therefore engaged in a coordinated foreign influence campaign while failing to register as the agent of a foreign power (the UK). Given that the Labour Party was found to have sent as many as 100 staff to the United States to help campaign for Kamala Harris, something the Trump campaign blasted at the time as “blatant foreign interference”, the Trump DOJ seems unlikely to be sympathetic to arguments for the organization’s innocence and independence.

CCDH is just one of many similar organizations, however, including groups like Newsguard and the Global Disinformation Index. Collectively, these organizations have, as an UnHerd investigation found, successfully established a cartel of “invisible gatekeepers within the vast machinery of online advertising” and media “fact checking”. Their purpose has been to distort and control the factual information and narratives reaching the public. In other words, they were established as political weapons.

It is striking that a significant proportion of these organizations and similar outfits, such as the Atlantic Council and the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), are commonly both partially state-funded (often by multiple countries on both sides of the Atlantic) and maintain deep connections to the various agencies of the security state. ASD’s founding board, for example, notably included such figures as John Podesta, chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Presidential campaign, Richard Ledgett, Deputy Director of the National Security Agency during the Obama Administration, and Michael McFaul, Special Assistant to the President on the National Security Council for Obama.

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This overlap is no coincidence. As the reporter Jacob Siegel has expertly detailed, after 2016 the American security establishment began to turn the tools and tactics of counterterrorism, counterinsurgency warfare, and regime change that it had developed abroad back onto its own people. Particularly after the Christchurch Call, other Western intelligence and security services, especially among the “Five Eyes” Anglosphere intelligence sharing alliance, followed suit. They began to dramatically ramp up their direct cooperation to counter “disinformation” and leverage their own propaganda machines to “win hearts and minds”. In the US, for instance, the British Army’s 77th Brigade, a military intelligence unit tasked with “non-lethal psychological warfare”, began to surveil and report on British citizens (despite claiming operations were directed only overseas) while working with other British government agencies and cooperating with other Five Eyes intelligence services on influence operations.

These security services had folded the perceived domestic threat of populist movements into their emerging theories and doctrines of “fifth-generation warfare”, in which the digital revolution is believed to have transformed the world of geopolitical competition into a global “omnipresent battlefield” characterized by persistent cyberwarfare and a constant struggle over “information and perception”. In this view, the minds of citizens (or “cognitive infrastructure”, as governments began to unironically refer to them) are terrain that has to be constantly fought over with rivals like Russia. This made populists the equivalent of foreign adversaries, rather than merely normal domestic political opponents.

Such a pressing threat seemed to necessitate what was described as a “whole of society” approach, meaning the totalizing integration of government, military, private sector, and non-profit spheres, as well as international organizations, in service of defending “democracy”. This united front of public and private organizational power is the real “deep state”. And it is why we quickly began to see intelligence services working so closely with activist NGOs like CCDH, or with putatively private firms like Graphika, a for-profit “social network analysis” company that was initially funded by the US Defense Department to fight terrorist propaganda but then redeployed to identify and censor public discourse about Covid and other concerns.

In short, the transatlantic alliance has for years been waging a hybrid information war on the American public. Above all, its objective was to stop the rise of Donald Trump and the populism he represents. But that war failed: Trump is back and, as Vance warned the political and military leaders assembled in Munich, “there is a new sheriff in town”. The British and European allies of former president Joe Biden have been left stranded in digital trenches on the losing side of an American cold civil war. Vance was politely informing them that their cyber-soldiers had better pack up and leave the conflict zone immediately.

Vance reiterated this to UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer in the White House this week, saying: “Look, I said what I said, which is that we do have, of course, a special relationship with our friends in the UK and also with some of our European allies, but we also know that there have been infringements on free speech that actually affect not just the British but also affect American technology companies and by extension American citizens.” He was not just talking here about American discomfort with British and European disregard for the abstract value of free speech, he was referring to their active information warfare against the United States, its new government, its companies, and its citizens. So when Starmer stammered in reply that “certainly we wouldn’t want to reach across US citizens, and we don’t…” that excuse was both transparently false and unlikely to cut it with the new sheriff.

If Britain and Europe don’t want to be treated as enemies of the United States, they are going to need to retreat from the war they’ve been waging on behalf of Washington’s old regime and disarm their censorship machines. That means reining in their intelligence services, completely cutting off support for their non-state armies of transnational censorship organizations like CCDH, and backing off of legal frameworks like the DSA and the Online Safety Act that are designed to control information and political discourse across borders.

Washington’s message to its putative allies is clear: end the information war and get the hell out. Or else they may find that the new US government is willing to impose real political and economic consequences for any continued aggression.

Hundreds of thousands of PLA troops are about to make landfall in the largest amphibious operation since D-Day. The long-anticipated invasion of Taiwan has begun.

In Washington, the President is presented with an urgent and daunting decision. Extensive wargames have repeatedly indicated that Taiwan’s only hope for survival is for US military forces to intervene immediately and decisively, blasting much of the PLA invasion force out of the water while they are still exposed and vulnerable. Hesitation, they have learned, always leads to a grinding war of attrition that Taiwan is destined to lose. Indo-Pacific Command urges the President to unleash its “Hellscape” plan: using swarms of drones, anti-ship missiles, and attack submarines to temporarily turn the Taiwan Strait into a watery no man’s land, buying time for American reinforcements to arrive. But there is no way around the obvious reality: this will mean war between the world’s two largest nuclear-armed superpowers.

Moreover, the commanders of US air and space forces insist they be authorized to immediately attack China’s “kill chain”, the network of satellites, sensors, and command, communication, and control centers that allow long-range weapons to find and accurately hit targets. Both sides have a huge incentive to strike first, before the other does: leaving them effectively blinded. American military satellites, in particular, are invaluable, irreplaceable, and sitting ducks. The President knows his counterpart in Beijing is weighing up the same decision. But there’s a big problem: not only are many of these systems on the Chinese mainland, they’re often the same ones used to target nuclear weapons; destroying them could be interpreted as the prelude to nuclear attack — in which case the incentive becomes to “launch ‘em or lose ‘em”. The situation is already escalating out of control.

Meanwhile, China’s leader has already hesitated: he has declined to open his gambit with a Pearl Harbor-like attack on vulnerable US bases and carrier groups around the Pacific, hoping Washington may yet back down and surrender Taiwan without a fight. But he has resolved that if the US does intervene, he will immediately sign off on massive strikes against not only American forces but also the allied Japanese, South Korean, and Philippine ones as well. Russia and North Korea are awaiting a green light to play roles of their own. Suddenly, the world teeters on the edge of World War III.

***

Though this scenario is fiction, for now, the chance of a major conflict over Taiwan in the not-so-distant future is real, and growing. Xi Jinping has declared in no uncertain terms that the reunification of Taiwan with mainland China is not only essential but the very “essence” of the leader’s epochal vision for the “great rejuvenation” — making China great again by reestablishing it as the world’s number one superpower. For Xi and the Chinese Communist Party, the island democracy of 24 million people is already their territory, separated from them only by Western imperial meddling. Its return to their control is non-negotiable. As Xi thundered in a major speech in 2022, “The wheels of history are rolling on toward China’s reunification and the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. Complete reunification of our country must be realized, and it can, without doubt, be realized.”

Xi has assigned specific dates to this goal. He has declared that reunification must be achieved no later than 2049, the centenary of the People’s Republic of China, but has also named 2035 as the date when China’s rejuvenation should be “basically realized”. Given that in 2035 Xi will likely still be in power, albeit aged 82, and that retaking Taiwan would be the nationalistic triumph to cement his political legacy in China, this appears to be his real deadline. That makes him a man in a hurry, and so he has ordered China’s military to complete its modernization program and be ready to “fight and win” a major war over Taiwan with a peer competitor (like the United States) by 2027.

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The danger of copying China

By N.S. Lyons

Still, Xi would clearly much prefer to take Taiwan without fighting, if at all possible. China faces numerous internal challenges — including a slowing economy, a demographic crisis, widespread corruption, and social instability. And Xi seems to have prioritized these issues over external threats (to limited success). More important, though, is the fact that war is always an inherently unpredictable and risky business, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine demonstrated for analysts in Beijing. An invasion of Taiwan would be a risk of far greater magnitude, with the penalty for failure likely to be, at a minimum, the economic devastation of China, the political delegitimization of the CCP regime, and the end of Xi Jinping.

There is another reason for Beijing’s hesitation. It has long believed that the United States and the broader West is in terminal decline, that time is thus on China’s side, and that it can simply wait until American power collapses of its own accord. As a recent Heritage Foundation report details, “observation and assessment of Western civilizational strength or decline helps to shape almost every aspect of China’s policies, both foreign and domestic”. And it has paid close attention to the West’s “culture war” in particular. Viewing progressive “Left-liberal ideas as profoundly corrosive and destabilizing”, the CCP has concluded that “the West’s will and ability to put up a fight are degrading over time”, and that “if it remains on its present course, the West could even withdraw from the world stage, collapse, or split apart”. As long as China believes this, it has no logical reason to ever bother fighting the United States over Taiwan at all.

Yet this conclusion is precisely why we may now be entering a period of particular danger. Should Beijing assess that, under the Trump administration, America is successfully reversing its decline and entering an era of cultural, economic, technological, and military revitalization, then its strategic calculus is liable to flip. Like Imperial Japan, which before Pearl Harbor became obsessed by the motto “if the sun is not rising, it is setting”, China might conclude that its window of opportunity could be lost. In that case, China’s incentives would suddenly invert: it would seem advantageous to attack sooner rather than later, before its relative strength vis-à-vis the United States declined.

This danger is accentuated by the fact that China currently has a number of significant advantages in a war over Taiwan. In fact, the United States has “had its ass handed to it for years” in most wargames, as David Ochmanek, a senior RAND Corporation analyst and former deputy assistant secretary of defense, memorably put it. In particular, China possesses huge material advantages, including massive stockpiles of anti-ship missiles that can strike US surface ships from long range. Meanwhile America would run out of critical munitions within an estimated three to seven days and be unable to replace them, given that it currently takes its manufacturers nearly two years to produce a single cruise missile.

In general, a lack of domestic manufacturing capacity is the West’s most damning weakness when it comes to modern warfare. Even after three years of war in Ukraine, the United States and Europe combined still cannot match the capacity of Russia to manufacture basic munitions like artillery shells. Russia currently produces some three million shells per year, compared with 1.2 million by the US and EU together.

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By George Magnus

Unlike during the Second World War, today the United States is no arsenal of democracy. As it stands, were it to find itself in an extended war of attrition with China, an industrial titan which manufactures a full 29% of the world’s goods, the US appears likely to find itself at a shocking disadvantage. For one thing, China maintains an astonishing 232 times the shipbuilding capacity of the US, as a leaked slide from an Office of Naval Intelligence briefing starkly exposed in 2023. China already possesses the world’s largest navy, with more than 370 vessels, compared with the US Navy’s 296.

All of which is to say that, if the CCP comes to believe that the Trump administration will succeed in its stated goal of revitalizing America’s fortunes, then it may see the near future as the best time to challenge it over Taiwan. Although that is likely to begin with a series of intermediate steps designed to test US resolve, such as a blockade of the island, rather than a full-scale invasion, intentional or unintentional escalation is not out of the question.

The situation is not hopeless, however. The United States and Taiwan don’t need to be able to dominate China militarily to prevent a war; they merely need to make an attack on the island appear so exceptionally costly to China that it never dares pull the trigger. This is what Elbridge Colby, Trump’s nominee for Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, calls a “strategy of denial”, and it can be accomplished by focusing squarely on mass-producing and deploying asymmetric weapons such as drones, missiles, and sea mines to turn Taiwan into a veritable porcupine.

This plan is sensibly straightforward, yet still somehow manages to rankle much of Washington, including people within the conservative coalition. On the one hand, it offends the hawkish neoconservative remnant of the Republican Party, because, as Colby has explained, taking Taiwan’s defense seriously — along with the reality of China’s strength and America’s limits — will necessarily mean prioritizing Asia, requiring allies in Europe and the Middle East to provide more for their own defense instead of attempting to police the entire world ourselves.

Moreover, a focused strategy of asymmetric denial would mean reorienting billions of defense dollars currently being wastefully spent on those items most beloved by defense contractors and lobbyists: flashy big-ticket machines, such as aircraft carriers — which also happen to already be militarily obsolete. Like the battleships of old, these weapons are relics of a more ostentatious age, kept alive by Congressional pork politics, not military necessity. Finally, the strategy flies in the face of the Republican old guard’s neoliberal free-trade and free-market pieties, given that it will require a concerted, state-backed industrial and trade policy designed to quickly maximize American domestic manufacturing and rein in insecure globe-spanning supply chains.

On the other hand, the idea of defending Taiwan also causes a portion of the more non-interventionist MAGA base to bristle. Why, they ask, should America ever waste its blood and treasure to fight for an island on the other side of the world? This is a good question, but it has a good answer.

The stakes of a conflict over Taiwan are of an entirely different category than any of the wars of choice the United States has involved itself in this century. Although little Taiwan is a democracy facing down an authoritarian great power, defending an abstract ideal like democracy is not the real reason for the United States to intervene over Taiwan. Rather, the blunt truth is that if the United States fails to protect Taiwan (as it has done since 1949), this would, more than any other geopolitical catastrophe, demolish our credibility as a security provider, conclusively mark the decisive moment China achieved hegemony as the world’s new dominant superpower, and lead to the rapid collapse of the web of alliances and institutions charitably known as the “liberal international order” and less charitably as the American Empire.

And while many on the populist Right, myself included, are deeply skeptical of America’s sprawling empire and the vast costs of maintaining it, its sudden collapse would have swift and devastating consequences for the American nation at home. For one thing, our economy today is utterly dependent on running both a massive trade deficit of imports and gargantuan federal debts. The former depends on the latter, and both are completely dependent on the US Dollar maintaining its “exorbitant privilege” as the world’s reserve currency — a status it retains essentially only because the United States is the world’s top dog. A clear victory by China over Taiwan would end that privilege, with the world quickly reordering itself for a Chinese century. In the defeated United States, the result would be a simultaneous debt, financial, and economic crisis of a magnitude that would make the Great Depression seem mild. Americans’ standard of living might never recover.

The case for defending Taiwan is, therefore, firmly a matter of America’s national interest, not idealism. And to do so would be to maintain peace through strength — to avoid war through deterrence — not to seek forever wars abroad. The Trump administration should be prepared to make that case. Moreover, in so doing it can point out that all the steps necessary (bringing industry home, disciplining defense procurement, restoring military competence, and pushing allies to do more for their own defense) are fully in line with a broader America First agenda. This rearmament would be a campaign of nation-building at home, not abroad.

Still, even if political unity on the issue can be achieved, the Taiwan problem promises to be among the most pressing and consequential challenges President Trump faces throughout his second term. Taiwan lies at the center of the emerging new cold war between China and the United States, and the intensifying risk of that clash going hot is already reshaping the world. The looming specter of war over the island marks the end of one era — decades of naïve “end of history” idealism, unthinking globalization, and heedless military adventurism — and the beginning of a new age of renewed realism among nations. To deal with the next decade of acute peril, the United States will need to develop a new foreign policy to match, one that combines realism and resolve in equal measure.

Nothing better supports this argument than the rise of China and its economic influence around the world. The Chinese economic model notably makes no clear distinction between corporation and state; its government lavishes support on corporate “national champions”, while those corporations act not only in the interest of profit but as agents of Chinese strategic interests across the globe.

This model has been tremendously successful for China, helping to fuel its rapid economic expansion and allowing it to challenge American and European market dominance around the world. Even sectors traditionally considered critical to American national security, such as the defence and telecom industries, now see their supply chains dominated by Chinese companies.

In this context, the argument for some wise “corporate statecraft” — such as the concentrated application of industrial, technological, and trade policies to restore America’s defence-industrial manufacturing base — makes a lot of pragmatic sense. It may also simply be a necessity now in order to compete with China’s far more extreme use of the same model.

The public-private partnership approach, however, also comes with some significant dangers and risks that we ought to carefully consider and debate. There are of course the traditional arguments against state-corporate coordination from both the political Right and Left that have been heard before. From the Right, we are likely to hear warnings that state inference in the private sector risks undermining market mechanisms, and that “picking winners” risks creating significant inefficiencies and distortions. From the Left, we are more likely to hear that corporate influence risks distorting the government’s responsibility to adequately regulate corporate behaviour or to look out for the interests of workers or the poor — or that it enables corruption by the wealthy.

Both of these critiques and the risks they highlight are real. But there is a greater risk, which I believe is already producing significant and dangerous political and economic distortions visible across the Western world today.

The key problem with the public-private partnership model is that, despite the word “public” appearing in the name, far too often in practice the actual public seem to be left out of the approach entirely. That is to say, the alignment of corporation and state that occurs through the public-private partnership model seems far too often to operate entirely outside the system of democratic governance. The interests of various “stakeholders” — corporations, NGOs, state bureaucracies, and numerous self-interested officials — may be consulted, but the demos notably is not.

In fact, often the advantage of the approach — as perceived by said stakeholders of both corporation and state — seems to be precisely that public-private partnership allows for a convenient end-run around the obstacle of the broader democratic process and any potential concerns that the voting public may hold. And, once they are shielded from democratic accountability, policies and priorities pursued through the public-private partnership model naturally become particularly ripe for rent seeking, regulatory capture, corruption, and abuse. Or, worse, there develops a gross distortion of basic interests between the “agents” involved and their true “owners” — that is, the public.

More and more often today, we see one particular distortion above all coming to the fore with use of the public-private partnership model. That distortion is the synchronised advancement of so-called “global” interests over national ones.

It is impossible for those pursuing “global” interests to align them with the democratic interests of a particular people — a nation. There is no global democracy, only national democracies. So when multinational corporations and state bodies with supranational ambitions collude to pursue interests and objectives extending beyond the national level, the result is overwhelmingly likely to transgress and trample the interests of sovereign democratic polities. Which again far too often seems to be precisely the goal of such ventures.

Let me get specific with a few big examples. When millions of migrants illegally cross the borders of Europe or the United States each year, they do not do so without a vast, powerful network of institutional support that helps to facilitate that crossing. Hundreds of transnational NGOs guide, ferry, traffic, shelter, and run legal interference for these migrants every step of the way. These NGOs are in turn often funded by governments and international bodies, which seem to do almost everything in their power to enable — migrants’ entry and permanent residency as a matter of de facto policy.

In this they are abetted by the corporate sector, which stands to benefit, either directly — as in the case of hotels, developers, and contractors who are funnelled billions in taxpayer money to house and service new arrivals — or indirectly, as in the case of agricultural and other sectors that benefit from cheaper labour. Not coincidentally, corporate interests have been among the most influential stakeholders consistently lobbying against the implementation of readily available mechanisms that could prevent illegal hiring and deter migration, such as universal e-verify requirements for employment.

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As a result, there today effectively exists what might reasonably be described as an immense “migration-industrial complex”. And what is this complex other than what we can call a sweeping public-private partnership in action? It is a collusion of state and corporation, along with quasi-state-quasi-corporate NGOs that exist in parasitic relationship with both. All parties involved are working together to achieve a shared goal that stands to benefit each of them across an array of material, demographic, political and ideological interests.

But, of course, what no part of this partnership ever bothers to do is to democratically consult or even at all concern themselves with seeking input from national populations about this migration project. Doubtless because those populations happen to vocally object. Through joint public-private action, however, such democratic objections are simply circumvented and rendered irrelevant via fait accompli.

Similarly, governments, corporations, and NGOs have taken it upon themselves to jointly act in response to what they characterise as a global emergency: climate change. In initiative after initiative, we have seen these actors align together to eagerly push “green” energy transition schemes developed without real public input. Whatever their stated intentions, what these public-private partnerships have served to do in practice is mostly to significantly grow the scope of state power while also leveraging government mandates and huge subsidies to force into life entirely new, otherwise unviable sectors — sectors in which corporate players may extract profits from a captive public. Simultaneously, an innumerable swarm of non-profits circle endlessly around this heaping pile, bloating themselves on an unending feast of public and private grant money.

Whatever the threat from climate change, this vast exercise in public-private partnership in the name of green energy transition has produced little to show for it — except for making a select subset of well-connected people a whole lot richer than they would be in actual free-market conditions.

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Meanwhile, across Western nations, the common people suffer under an escalating tide of onerous and often absurd regulation, energy inflation, and deindustrialisation. But, whether they are farmers in the Netherlands, factory-workers in Germany, or lorry drivers in France, their cries of protest tend to be met only by the mobilised forces of the state.

To them, what public-private partnership looks like in practice is the forced redevelopment of the family farm at the barrel of a police water cannon.

Finally, there could be no more shameful and glaring example of public-private partnership gone wrong today than the censorship-industrial complex. A vast, transnational, wholly unaccountable network of international bodies, government bureaucracies, technology and media companies, and zealously ideological NGOs now works tirelessly together to systematically remove and censor politically inconvenient information from the internet, manipulate search results, algorithmic feeds, and AI models, boost chosen propaganda narratives, blackmail advertisers and financial institutions into sidelining political adversaries, and, increasing, to justify the outright authoritarian criminalisation of dissenting opinions — as we’ve seen recently in places like Britain, Brazil and, of course, Brussels.

Notably, the goal of this furious public-private effort seems overwhelmingly to be to manipulate and silence growing public criticism of elites’ anti-democratic use of public-private collusion on controversial issues like migration and climate change.

But, for much of the public, the cat is already out of the bag. In fact, we ought to recognise that the growth of so-called “populist” movements across the Western world can be seen as, in large measure, a democratic backlash against the increasingly widespread use of public-private collusion to “solve” nearly every controversial issue that arises today — that is, to sidestep democratic debate and accountability on these issues in order to force through ill-considered “progressive” policy changes which all-too often actively harm the interests of national populations.

Such behaviour is utterly corrosive to public trust and the democratic legitimacy of institutions of all kinds. Government and corporate leaders therefore had best be warned: if you don’t want to lose your heads — metaphorically, of course, though perhaps someday literally — you had best act now to regain that legitimacy by more carefully setting boundaries and safeguards on the use of public-private partnership as a tool.

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We must realise that if the West acts too much like China when it comes to the coordination of corporation and state, we risk becoming more like China in other ways as well — and much of the public already clearly recognises this trend as a real threat to their liberty and way of life. After all, we already have a word to describe when the fusion of corporation and state is taken to its ultimate, logical conclusion — and that word is “fascism”.

Yet, even so, this doesn’t mean that public-private partnerships are always bad and can never be used wisely. Some level of state-corporate cooperation on critical issues like industrial policy is probably both inevitable and potentially very beneficial — but how can this be done rightly?

Those seeking to wield benign and genuine corporate statecraft ought, above all, to adopt as their guiding principle the idea that public-private partnerships must always put the interests of the nation first. To push multinational corporations into subsuming their multinational interests in favour of the sovereign nation’s interests may be democratically legitimate, and even find much welcome among the public. To use state power to advance the multinational interests of corporate stakeholders over those of the very nation which the state supposedly exists to serve can in contrast never be legitimate. Sticking to this principle alone would help prevent a good deal of the damage currently being done by the wayward use of public-private partnership.

Simultaneously, private corporations must realise that allowing states to coopt them into serving anti-democratic ends, as in the case of the censorship-industrial complex, only risks harming their long-term interests by generating festering public anger, undermining political and social stability, and eroding the very institutions that form the necessary foundation for free-market capitalism to function smoothly. It is in their long-term material interest to resist such pressure as firmly and publicly as possible, not to enable it.

Finally, all parties must strive to be as publicly transparent as possible about public-private partnerships, their intentions and actors, and how they operate. Secrecy breeds well-founded suspicions of conspiracy.

Overall, state-corporate coordination may at times be necessary, but it is best treated as a necessary evil, to be approached with all due caution — and never as an unalloyed good.

***

A version of this essay originally appeared on The Upheaval on Substack.

To understand why, we need to take a brief detour back about five centuries — to Florence and the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli. He identified two archetypical psychological profiles of people who become leaders: the cunning but weak fox, who can outmanoeuvre his opponents but is “defenceless against wolves”; and the strong and brave lion, who likes to fight and can scare off wolves, but who is “defenceless against traps”. Machiavelli argued that a true statesman must embody both personalities, or risk destruction.

A distant student of Machiavelli, fellow Italian political theorist Vilfredo Pareto, would later expand the metaphor further. Observing history, he noted that the rise and fall of states and civilisations could be matched to a cyclical pattern in the collective personality of their ruling classes.

Nations are founded by lions, who are a society’s natural warrior class — its jocks, so to speak. They establish and expand a kingdom’s borders at the point of a sword, pacifying external enemies. Like Sparta’s Lycurgus or Rome’s Augustus, their firm hand often also puts an end to internal strife and establishes (or re-establishes) the rule of law. Their authority can be dictatorial, but it is relatively honest and straightforward in nature. They value directness and the clarity of combat. They are comfortable with the use of raw force, and open about their willingness to use it, whether against criminals or enemies. They have a firm sense of the distinction between enemies and friends in general — of who is part of the family and who is a prowling wolf to be guarded against. The security and stability they establish is what allows the nation to grow into prosperity.

Security and prosperity produce a proliferation of foxes. Foxes are unsuited to and deeply uncomfortable with the employment of force; they prefer intellectual and rhetorical combat, because they’re nerds. They will use physical force if necessary, but prefer to disguise its nature and are prone to use it ineptly. The brainy and cosmopolitan foxes have talents the lions don’t, however: they are good at managing complexity and scale, navigating the nuances of diplomatic alliances, or extracting profits from an extensive empire.

As long as peace prevails, civilisations come increasingly to morally prize the indirect and diplomatic methods of foxes and to avoid and indeed abhor the strength and violence of lions. As states grow larger and more complex, establishing new layers of bureaucracy, law and procedure, this quickly favours the Byzantine organising and scheming of foxes. In comparison, lions are inarticulate and unprepared for the traps of more underhanded mammals. So eventually, a wholesale replacement of the elite occurs: the lions who founded the nation are pushed out of its leadership, marginalised and excluded by a class of foxes who see them as brutish relics of a barbaric age.

But a curious thing then happens, Pareto observed: the instability of societies overly dominated by foxes begins to increase relentlessly. The foxes, reluctant to properly distinguish and identify real threats or to openly employ force even when necessary, find themselves defenceless against wolves both internal and external. When faced with escalating challenges, the foxes tend to resort to doubling down on their preferred strategy of misdirection and manipulation, and attempt to bury or buy off threats rather than confronting them directly. This does nothing to solve problems that require the firm use of force, or the threat of it, such as keeping packs of wolves on the other side of the borders. Eventually, when things get bad enough, foxes may desperately lash out with violence, but do so indecisively, ham-fistedly, or in entirely the wrong direction. The wolves, for their part, can instinctively smell weakness and just keep coming.

Like the rest of the West, Britain has been ruled for decades by an effete managerial elite whose system of technocratic control is absolutely characteristic of foxes. There could be no better example of this than how the Government has attempted to manage immigration and the ethnic tensions it has brought with it.

It has attempted to manage the perception of it, in classic fox-like fashion, via careful control of media and online information. Those who continue to speak out on the issue are then smeared with reputation-destroying labels such as “racist”, “xenophobic”, or “far-Right” in order to deflect others from listening to them. This reflects foxes’ consistent instinct to turn first and foremost to information warfare and narrative manipulation over direct confrontation. Hence the immediate reaction to the latest riots: to blame them on “misinformation” and “unregulated social media”. The implication being that nothing at all would be amiss if the information common people had access to could just be better suppressed.

This controlling instinct is also reflected in the UK’s “Neighbourhood Policing” model, which, as Aris Roussinos has noted, makes state-managed avoidance of ethnic conflict the top priority of the police forces. In practice, this means deploying police to swiftly shut down anything that might provoke unsightly public disturbances in minority ethnic communities, such as “openly Jewish” men walking too near pro-Palestine demonstrations, people criticising Hamas, or Englishmen holding the English flag. Meanwhile, inciting rhetoric and open violence committed by the same ethnic communities is met with studious non-confrontation or polite de-escalation in order to avoid upsetting “community relations”.

This means British police now operate much less like a conventional crime-solving and deterrent force, as Ed West has pointed out, and far “more like that of a colonial [police] force, charged with preventing community relations from spilling over into violence”, while keeping multi-cultural imperial possessions  stable despite the natives’ displeasure.

The British elite’s habitual reliance on these techniques of information control and relationship micromanagement have combined most spectacularly in the Home Office’s “controlled spontaneity” programme, which aims to pre-empt any backlash to terrorist attacks and violent crimes by “pre-planning social media campaigns which are designed to appear to be a spontaneous public response to attacks”, such as candle-lit inter-faith vigils and people handing out flowers “in apparently unprompted gestures of love and support”. This is of course all a façade that government “contingency planners” and their “civil society” partners rush to impose in order to, as Roussinos writes, “present an image of depoliticised community solidarity” meant to head off any potential escalation of ethnic tensions and violence. Or as one planner described it, the whole effort is intended to serve as “an anaesthetic for the community”.

The result is what Matthew Crawford has noted is essentially government by psyop, or soft managerialism. The ruling elite, Labour and Tory wings alike, would rather try to manage the British public’s whole perception of reality than ever use force to stop illegal immigration, actually police crime, or attempt — in the longer-term — to salvage the cratering popular legitimacy of their regime. Such is the way of the fox.

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But this way now seems to be reaching its inevitable failure point. The explosion of violence in the streets is proof enough of that. Pareto and Machiavelli would not be surprised, as this is exactly how just about every other fox-ruled regime in history eventually collapsed.

So, what is likely to happen next in Britain? We should first expect the foxes to immediately double-down on soft managerialism, including by restricting even further the digital information space, expanding surveillance and financial restrictions, and using the techniques of obfuscation and manipulation to control dissent — all of which Keir Starmer has already committed to doing.

His government has also already demonstrated its willingness to lash out with naked force against the disgruntled “far-Right” that it blames for disturbing the peace (doubtless along with the broader political opposition). And we should certainly expect to see more of this in the future. But the flailing response, and the resulting escalation in Britain’s state of anarcho-tyranny (“law and order for thee, but not for them”), will hardly solve the deeper problems driving the nation further into chaos.

That would take lions. But the foxes of the Western elite are even more scared of lions than they are of wolves — and perhaps for good reason: again and again in history, the oligarchic rule of foxes tends to end when the people finally get fed up enough to turn to a lion to save them from wolves.

Given the ample evidence of the Biden administration’s sweeping censorship efforts in recent years, many legal observers assumed the case was a done deal. And yet, during the hearing, it quickly became apparent that a majority of the court’s justices were sympathetic to a counter-argument that, actually, it’s the Government who’s the real victim in this case — because what “free speech” really means is that the Government has a right to tell Facebook that you need to shut up.

The court’s newest and most innovative justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, stole the headlines with comments about how she was “really worried” about “the First Amendment hamstringing the Government in significant ways in the most important time periods” — i.e. elections involving Donald Trump. But even some of the court’s allegedly more “conservative” justices such as Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett appeared openly sympathetic to the idea that it’s more important to preserve the national security state’s uninhibited power to bully platforms into silencing information they consider “harmful” than it is to preserve fundamental individual rights. In short, although a ruling on the issue won’t be released until this summer, as of now the Supreme Court seems poised to effectively enshrine the legality of mass state censorship and deliver what could be a mortal blow to America’s tradition of free speech.

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Many conservative and classical-liberal American political commentators seem genuinely shocked by this development. They assumed this should be a pretty open-and-shut case, with the Federal Government’s behaviour — being a clear violation of the First Amendment of the Constitution — sure to be righteously smacked down by the conservative-leaning court. But this assumption was deeply naïve. In fact, their broader, rather quintessentially American faith in the Constitution’s ability to establish and protect foundational liberties was probably always badly misplaced.

Perhaps this unfortunate moment can at least offer an opportunity to induce some much-needed realism about the Constitution, and its relative impotence in the face of tyranny today. In the naïve schoolhouse view, the Constitution remains a sacred, quasi-magical text spelling out our rights and protecting them by limiting the powers of government. The words on its pages have been elevated to semi-transcendent status, as if they were a form of scripture endowed with their own sovereign authority. This authority sets the rules of what is permissible, and the robed wise men of our courts interpret, sola scriptura, these national tenets to determine if new laws and practices conform to or have overstepped the authority granted to them by the Constitution. In this sense, the Constitution forms the foundation for the rule of law.

Those still holding to this view may further believe that the words of the Constitution’s text also established the foundational character of the American nation, becoming the enduring wellspring of our unique national culture and way of life. Finally, they are likely to assume that it is precisely the fact that the American Founders took the step of codifying well-reasoned ground rules in writing that has made the United States an exceptional nation inherently more resistant to tyranny than those which failed to develop clear written constitutions.

Sadly, however, while this is a comforting myth, it is a myth nonetheless. Most obviously, the Constitution does not, of course, have any sovereign authority of its own. It doesn’t make its own decisions as could, say, a living monarch. And although officials may swear oaths to uphold and defend the Constitution, it cannot hold them accountable or enforce the rights and limitations it delineates. Only other people can do that; only individuals can rule. This is a rather simple point, but many Americans seem to want to actively ignore its reality, preferring to see power as something that flows from and is constrained by the Constitution, rather than as something which can determine its meaning and application. The Constitution has no more intrinsic power than any other piece of paper.

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What is even more important to understand is that the Constitution isn’t actually our constitution. In fact, it has never been America’s true constitution. That’s because the Constitution (the written document) is only a representation of something real — or rather, in this case, something which used to be real. Its words were an attempt to encapsulate the Founders’ expression of the young Anglo-American nation’s implicit, unwritten constitution. By “constitution”, I mean — as most of Western history’s great philosophers would have understood that word — the unconscious, historically accumulated essence of the nation’s organic and fundamental collective character: its public spirit, way of life, and common understanding of authority and the moral laws of right and wrong. In this, the Founders succeeded wonderfully in their day. But the document they produced was and is a map, a symbolic representation of a cultural and spiritual territory; it is not the territory itself.

No one understood this distinction better than the political philosopher Joseph de Maistre. Writing in 1809, he scoffed at the idea that any document written by mortal hands could ever design and establish genuinely new foundational laws. The spirit of any such laws was invariably already written on the hearts of those men who attempted to crudely reduce them to mere lines on a piece of paper. “Precisely what is most fundamental and most essentially constitutional in the laws of a nation cannot be written,” he wrote. The true constitution of a strong and functional nation was always “that admirable, unique, and infallible public spirit, beyond all praise, which directs everything, which protects everything. What is written is nothing.”

“Only when the society is already constituted, without it being possible to saw how, it is possible to declare or to explain in writing certain particular articles” of a particular society’s true, unwritten constitution, he argued. But attempting to capture these principles in writing is largely pointless. In fact, he believed that such “writing is invariably a sign of weakness, ignorance, or danger”, in that “every written law is only a necessary evil” that “is of no authority at all unless it has received a previous and unwritten sanction”, and in “so far as an institution is perfect, it writes less”. (Here he echoes that famous motto of Tacitus, pessimae reipublicae plurimae leges: “the more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state.”) He scorned the “profound imbecility” of “those poor folk who imagine that lawgivers are men, that laws are a piece of paper, and that nations can be comprised of ink”.

These days I suspect he was right, and that his insight can help explain a lot about the degeneration of society and governance that has since occurred in the United States (and various other Western nations as well). When the Founders drafted the Constitution, they were giving expression to an essential constitution of the American nation that already existed in unwritten form, and which continued to endure for a long while. But in time, even as the written Constitution continued to reign in official law, the spirit that governed the American people changed as they changed, and the corresponding unwritten constitution withered away and was replaced by a new intrinsic constitution. In fact, it’s probably accurate to say this happened multiple times, or in multiple stages. Yet in any case the unwritten constitution animating the American state today bears almost no resemblance at all to that preserved in the historical relic of the Constitution.

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The West and China share the same fate

By N.S. Lyons

What is America’s implicit constitution today? Naturally, it’s never been fully captured in writing, though some authors, such as Christopher Caldwell, have variously attempted to nail it down here and there. If pressed to summarise, I might say it is one that values safety and security over freedom; top-down control over self-governance; empty egalitarian posturing over excellence; material comfort over virtue; entitlement over responsibility; bureaucracy over accountability; narcissistic emotivism over duty; fantasy over reality; global ambitions over national loyalty; dreams of progress over eternal and transcendent truths — in short, the same spirit that animates our out-of-control managerial regime. It’s the spirit which saw that regime not hesitate to impose Covid lockdowns, or trash the rule of law and attempt to jail political opponents (and for half the country to view this as acceptable or even admirable); it’s what has produced Supreme Court justices who fret free speech would undermine the security state.

Much of what we’re seeing today in our seemingly revolutionary times is the outline of this new unwritten constitution becoming increasingly visible in law and government as the chasm of difference between it and the original American constitution becomes too wide to conceal any longer. More and more often now, the new regime fails to keep up appearances by successfully wrapping itself in the confining ritual pretences of the Constitution. Its mutated form is simply growing too hulking and twisted to fit.

It may be true that a remnant of the old constitution — the old American nation — remains alive in the hearts of some portion of the American people. But if so, it is now battered and bloody, struggling for breath as the new constitution seeks to finish it off once and for all. Perhaps this is the best way to describe the true cause and nature of the existential political and cultural clash that has riven the American body-politic and continues to grow fiercer by the day: it is indeed, as Joe Biden has put it, a final “battle for the soul of America”.

This is the real reason why the Constitution can’t and won’t save us now: in today’s struggle it no longer has any real power over men because it no longer corresponds to the unfortunate new inner reality of America’s unwritten constitution. The old “infallible public spirit, beyond all praise, which directs everything, which protects everything”, which the document once embodied, is no longer there to give it substance.

John Adams once warned that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people”, and that, should that national moral character disappear, the resulting political passions “would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net”. Adams was of course referring primarily to Christianity and its system of moral order, and Maistre would have very much agreed. In his view, the origin of a strong, stable and legitimate constitution could rest only in God and what we might call the popular fear of God: a sincere (even if subconscious) belief that to transgress the constitution (written or unwritten) was in a way to transgress divine law, an act liable to be punished accordingly. Ultimate authority then effectively rested above any man or document. Without this source of higher authority, the constitution would crumble and only the whims of petty tyrants would remain.

It sure seems that this is what we’re witnessing today. Whether or not we attribute the key role to Christian belief or to some broader but less easily defined national moral character, it seems clear to me that the Constitution is no longer alive with any such frightful sacred authority; it has been thoroughly profaned, and therefore opened to abuse. Nor is there today even a shared national understanding of its meaning and unwritten spirit. Whereas once few people would have dared try to blatantly twist its words to mean something that all would know implicitly they could not mean, our rulers no longer hesitate to do so — and often succeed. They succeed because that implicit constitution has been replaced.

I know that for Americans, who put so much faith in our Constitutional tradition, this is probably a particularly difficult and demoralising reality to accept. But accept it we must. Otherwise, we won’t be able to grasp the nature and extent of the challenge facing us. No amount of legalistic quibbling about the details and original meaning of the Constitution will rescue us from our present situation; nor could the nation’s highest court, even if it weren’t full of quislings. Even if the Supreme Court were to strongly reaffirm the principle of free speech, it would provide at most only a temporary reprieve — a ruling which the regime and its institutions would in all likelihood simply proceed to ignore, knowing they could get away with it.

No court has the power to define America’s true, unwritten constitution. If we want to change that constitution, and so restore any substance to the Constitution, then what will be called for is nothing less than a sustained and determined national cultural, intellectual, religious, and political counter-revolution sufficient to re-mould the very animating spirit of the state. It would, in other words, require an effort just as sweeping as the long revolution which dismantled and subordinated our original constitution in the first place.

I find this idea ridiculous, but also telling. Telling in that many apparently find the notion that Israeli Jews were deliberately betrayed and allowed to be murdered by their own fiercely nationalist government to be a more readily believable theory than that complex technological systems could possibly fail. This fact speaks to something important about how we moderns have come to misperceive how things work, misplace our faith in systems, and often accidentally make ourselves more rather than less vulnerable to chaos.

Over the last few years, Israel spent more than $1.1 billion to construct a sprawling security barrier along the entirety of its nearly 40-mile border with Gaza. This was, allegedly, to be the fence to end all fences. In addition to 20-foot-high multi-layered wire, steel, and concrete barriers, the “smart fence” integrated a vast network of cameras, motion and other sensors, radars, and remote-controlled weapon systems, all monitored by dozens of towers that served as data hubs and high-tech observation and listening-posts. An underground wall and sensor system, designed to stop infiltration by tunnels, was extended far below the earth along the whole border, at great expense. Meanwhile, Israel’s advanced, exceptionally costly “Iron Dome” missile defence system protected the skies. “The barrier is reality-changing. What happened in the past won’t happen again,” the then-IDF chief of staff Aviv Kohavi declared at a ceremony marking its construction in 2019.

Some former members of the IDF have in recent days testified on social media that the fence really was a technological marvel. Not so much as a stray cat could get anywhere near the border without setting off alarms, they recalled. And the Israeli government and military certainly seem to have believed it was impenetrable, which partly explains why, by the start of this month, they had redeployed most of their regular military forces to guard the West Bank and northern border instead.

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But of course, on 7 October, this great wall of silicon proved almost totally useless, overcome in a matter of minutes by Hamas, which was then left to rampage across southern Israel almost unopposed. At least 1,400 Israelis lost their lives as a result. What happened? Let’s lay aside Israel’s broader strategic intelligence failure — having been falsely convinced that Hamas had been successfully pacified and was no longer interested in attempting attacks — which this certainly was. The border’s defences were expected to detect and repel even an unexpected assault — or at least were billed as such. How and why did they fail?

At the simplest level, we could say the IDF was overconfident in its defences and underestimated its enemy. “The thinning of the forces [stationed near the Gaza border] seemed reasonable because of the construction of the fence and the aura they created around it, as if it were invincible, that nothing would be able to pass it,” recounts Brig. Gen. Israel Ziv, a former head of the IDF’s Operations Division and ground forces commander in the south.

We could also say that the IDF had allowed itself to become strategically rigid and was ill-prepared to adapt flexibly when things went wrong. From the moment the fence was proposed, some military officers warned that pouring resources into it — along with the Iron Dome — was a mistake, because it would ultimately degrade the military’s ability to manoeuvre offensively and pre-emptively neutralise the enemy’s capacity to conduct attacks. Col. Yehuda Vach, commander of the IDF’s Officer Training School, warned in 2019 that “because we don’t cross the fence, the other side has become strategically stronger”, as they’d been handed operational initiative. “The enemy will seek in the next campaign to carry out an operation to kidnap soldiers and harm civilians in the towns near the fence, thus enjoying the first achievement of the campaign,” he ominously predicted. “The fence creates an illusion and gives a false sense of security to both the soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces and the residents near the fence,” he said.

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These are both classic military mistakes, warned against repeatedly by strategists from Carl von Clausewitz to Sun Tzu. In this case, however, the even greater mistake may have been that the IDF came to rely far too heavily on technological solutions, methods, and ways of thinking.

One of the most famous sayings of the U.S. Air Force pilot and strategist Col. John Boyd, who helped to develop modern manoeuvre warfare, was: “People, ideas, machines — in that order!” While warfighting devices were and are important, as are doctrines, tactics, and stratagems, these are all less important than the people doing the fighting, planning, and organising — as well as being far less adaptable and reliable. As Boyd would often harangue generals in the Pentagon, usually to no avail: “Machines don’t fight wars… Humans fight wars!”

Boyd had seen for himself the perils of overreliance on Big Brain tech wizardry in Vietnam. The latest generation of US aircraft, designed by geniuses who insisted that the age of aerial gunfights was long over, had been stripped of their guns and manoeuvrability — and built to be flying missile and bomb platforms. But in combat, the missiles proved horrifically unreliable — and the planes were no use at all in a dogfight. When they ran into lightweight North Vietnamese MIGs, they got destroyed: the US air-to-air kill ratio fell from 10:1 in the Korean War to 1:1 in 1967.

While technologies can certainly offer solutions to discrete problems, they are typically not flexible and adaptable enough to function as intended when things go sideways. Moreover, fragile technological solutions can produce entirely new liabilities that did not even exist before. In the current case, the widespread reliance of the IDF’s defences on wireless data transmission became a critical weakness that the enemy was able to exploit to great effect.

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In fact, it seems likely that Israel was actually worse off with all its high-tech border gadgetry than it would have been without it. These over-engineered solutions to guarding the border were not cost-effective, instead representing an opportunity cost that could have been better spent elsewhere — such as on maintaining a far greater number of disciplined, sharp-eyed soldiers with guns. When the tech failed, it was only such men who were able, eventually, to adapt and respond. By reversing Boyd’s admonition and putting machines first and people last, the IDF actively degraded the capability of those people to respond to disaster when it most mattered.

But even this understates the bigger problem exposed by the folly of the “smart fence”. Israel’s smart border defences should be understood as the adoption of a needlessly complex system. “Complexity” here must not be mistaken to just mean “complicated”. Rather, a complex system is a technical term defining a system composed of such a great quantity of component parts, in such intricate relationships of dependency and interaction with each other, that its composite behaviour in response to entropy cannot be predictively modelled.

When things go wrong in a complex system it can’t be easily solved, because each sub-system relies on many other sub-systems, and pulling any one lever to try to solve one problem will produce entirely unexpected effects. This means complex systems are vulnerable to failure cascades, in which the failure of even a single part can set off an unpredictable domino effect of further failures. Even if the original failure is fixed this cannot reverse the cascade, and the whole system may soon face catastrophic collapse.

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This is essentially what happened to Israel’s border defence system. The replacement of low-tech solutions with high-tech ones needlessly added additional layers of complexity to the system, making it more, not less, fragile. Under pressure, the system then collapsed more completely and with more devastating consequences than if a simpler, more robust system had been used.

This doesn’t mean, to be clear, that I think technology can never be useful. Obviously, technological change has always played an important role in the realm of war — to my disappointment, no army would be able to win today with the cheerful simplicity of the good ole’ sword and shield. But on close inspection, those technologies that have the most transformative and lasting impact are almost always those that are the most simple, robust, adaptable, and scalable, and which generally work in accord with the human element, rather than attempt to totally replace him with a complex system. The cheap little drones that Hamas used so successfully, and which have already revolutionised warfare in Ukraine and elsewhere, are a perfect example of this.

This is true, too, beyond the world of warfare. In all aspects of life, we have come to worship technology and complexity for its own sake, believing it to be the sorcery that can solve our problems once and for all. Except far too often, it doesn’t — it just creates the illusion of having done so, while our own capacities have diminished and our vulnerabilities to systematic collapse have increased. In this way, technology has become a false idol, squatting in the place of or even preventing genuine human ingenuity, innovation, and adaptability.

Just as complex systems are vulnerable to collapse, so are empires and civilisations. And empires fall the same way most complex systems do: by becoming too complex to bear their own weight. They come to span the globe, and have too many alliances and commitments, too many “vital national interests”, too many IOUs, too many enemies, to ever handle at once. This is what “imperial overstretch” really means: not just that there is too much budgeted for the treasury to pay for, but that overall complexity has reached such a level that the empire has become impossible to manage. Trying to solve one problem only creates another. The empire may still appear strong, but it has become fragile. The potential for even a single point of failure to ignite a catastrophic failure cascade grows more and more acute.

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Today, as the United States and its allies rush with increasingly visible panic to try to put out one fire after another around the world, I’m afraid that a global failure cascade may be exactly what we’re witnessing. The number of lights blinking red is growing faster and faster as more dominos fall. If this is the case, then just solving existing problems will never be enough: every effort to fight one fire may just set off new fires. Might America, by embroiling itself in two regional wars at once, prompt China to invade Taiwan when it otherwise wouldn’t have dared, for example? It seems like a possibility. But then we can’t know for sure: growing unpredictability is now the defining feature of the system.

There are many people who, witnessing this chaos play out, will predictably argue that the empire needs to redouble its efforts, to yield no ground anywhere, and to show everyone the power of its “global leadership”. The encroaching jungle must be forced back everywhere because to retreat would be to demonstrate weakness and invite calamity. Needless to say, doing more will only add more complexity to the system, and thus more vulnerabilities. It won’t do anything to prevent or stop a failure cascade — only increase its ultimate scope, momentum, and unpredictability.

Naturally, a wiser method would be to simplify: to deliberately pare back commitments and overextended positions, concentrating on conserving strength and defending only the most critical nodes of the system, until the balance of capabilities and commitments can reach a stable new equilibrium. But reform of this kind is extremely difficult, as untangling the imperial Gordian Knot one thread at a time often proves to be impossible. Historically, this type of impasse is typically only ever resolved, and simplicity restored, with one decisive stroke: by systemic collapse.

***

This essay is an extract from a longer piece on The Upheaval.

In some ways, this picture is accurate: a geopolitical competition really is in the process of boiling over into open confrontation. But it’s also fundamentally shallow and misleading. When it comes to the most fundamental political questions, China and the United States are not diverging but becoming more alike, with both superpowers converging on the same not-yet-fully-realised system of technocratic-managerial governance.

This system, described by James Burnham and George Orwell as “managerialism”, is the product of a new class of professional managers bound together by a shared self-interest in the expansion of technical and mass organisations, the further proliferation of managers, and the drawing of society into the meddling embrace of managerial expertise. At its heart is a conviction that all things — even the complexity of society and Man himself — can be understood, managed and controlled like a machine with sufficient scientific technique.

It was managerialism that emerged as the true winner of the 20th century’s ideological battles. As Orwell prophesied in 1945: “Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralised society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic.” China is just a bit further down the path towards this same totalitarian future. The West is following.

To get a sense of but one aspect of this ongoing convergence, we should travel back to Fengqiao (“Maple Bridge”), once a picturesque little township in China’s Zhejiang province. Chinese leader Xi Jinping and his officials like to muse wistfully about the pleasures of the “Fengqiao experience” (枫桥经验), but I’m afraid it is not a tourism package. Rather, in the Sixties, Fengqiao distinguished itself as a model town in the eyes of Mao Zedong. While usually Communist Party thugs had to go around identifying and rounding up “reactionary elements”, in Fengqiao the people handled it themselves: “Not one person [had to be] rounded up, and still the vast majority of enemies were dealt with,” as a report from the town informed Mao.

Here at last was a true example of the “dictatorship of the masses” that Mao hoped to establish. Mao encouraged the party to learn from the experience of Fengqiao, and in doing so planted a seed that would take root in the hard soil of the CCP imagination: a dream of a population so thoroughly conditioned by Chinese socialism that someday it would practically manage itself.

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Today, Xi has revitalised and modernised this idea by marrying it to newly available tools: those of the digital revolution. Traditional methods of Fengqiao-style social mass monitoring and control, also known as “social governance”, have been combined with internet-wide mobilisation and a vast digital surveillance apparatus.

The jewel in the crown of this approach is intended to be China’s blossoming social-credit system. The system intends to assign each person, company or organisation a unique aggregated “social credit” score. This is much like a financial credit score: based on observed behaviour and other “risk factors”, the score can be adjusted up or down to designate an individual or business as more or less “trustworthy” or “untrustworthy”. Those with higher scores are rewarded with escalating perks, such as priority access to travel, loans, housing, higher education or even healthcare. Those with lower scores face escalating punishments, such as losing access to the financial system, being prohibited from buying luxury goods or real estate, or having their children denied admission to certain schools and universities.

Importantly, the system is deliberately social in nature. Those with low scores are publicly listed and shamed online or on public billboards; even some dating apps have trialled incorporating social-credit scores. Most significantly, since having too many relationships with low-scoring people risks lowering one’s own ranking, people avoid associating with the “discredited” at all, accelerating their progressive unpersoning by society. The goal of this gamification of the mind is to create a “New Man” to fit into its managerial machine; this is always and everywhere the inexorable object of managerialism’s obsession with control.

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Such social engineering has already been effective. I vividly recall, for example, how, when I visited China as late as the 2000s or mid-2010s, everyone used to jaywalk to cross the street. It was simply a fact of life, a cultural constant seemingly ingrained by who knew how many centuries of the Chinese peasantry’s wonderfully incorrigible pragmatism. Today, nobody jaywalks (at least in the city), because if you do, your identity is captured by a facial recognition camera, your face, name and ID number are plastered on a billboard of shame next to the intersection, and a fine is sent to your bank. All those centuries of evolved cultural attitudes have been successfully overwritten by only a few years of conditioning by the machine.

This is not a million miles away from what is happening in so-called Western liberal democracies. In June, the British bank Coutts closed the account of Nigel Farage without explanation. Farage was subsequently refused service by 10 other banks. Internal “reputational risk” documents obtained by Farage soon after showed Coutts’s reasoning for “exiting” him from his account: he had been found to no longer be “compatible with Coutts, given his publicly-stated views that were at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation”. The terrible sins listed on Farage’s rap sheet included: being friends with Donald Trump and unvaccinated tennis champion Novak Djokovic; campaigning for Brexit; being “anti-Net Zero”; being “seen as xenophobic and racist”; and having been a “fascist” when he was a schoolboy, according to some second-hand rumours.

In this case, caught red-handed “debanking” a prominent and savvy politician for political reasons, the bank was forced to apologise and some of its top officials to resign. Such consequences are an exception to the rule, however. Debanking has in recent years become increasingly routine practice across the West; in the US, mere days after the Farage scandal, JP Morgan Chase shuttered the accounts of anti-vaccine proponent Dr Joseph Mercola, as well as his business’s CEO, CFO, their spouses and all of their children. Farage says he has begun assembling a “very large database” of potentially thousands of similar cases from the UK alone.

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Much debanking is politically motivated. Most memorably, Justin Trudeau’s Canadian government invoked emergency powers to freeze the bank accounts and seize the assets of the truckers protesting his destructive vaccine mandates and demagoguery. Yet banks are not the only ones involved; online payment platforms have joined in too. GoFundMe, for instance, seized money donated to the truckers through its platform. PayPal, meanwhile, in one of the more symbolic instances of its prolific debanking habit, cut off the Free Speech Union for promoting “intolerance”. PayPal also attempted to slip language into its user agreement allowing it to confiscate $2,500 from users each time they spread “misinformation” or said or did anything “harmful” or “objectionable” (all defined at PayPal’s “sole discretion”).

Why is this happening? Why would private banks and other businesses force out paying customers like this? Because it is in their interest to do so if they want to survive and thrive, and indeed they have little choice. These banks are not really fully “private actors” — they are part of the managerial economy in a budding managerial party-state much like China’s, where an oligarchic elite class seeks to preserve its rule. Critically, there can be no neutral institutions in a party-state. The party-state’s enemies are the institution’s enemies, or the institution is an enemy of the party-state (which is not a profitable position to be in). This is what “reputational risk” really means: the risk of appearing to be on the wrong side of the party line.

In a society as digitised as ours, control over digital transactions means surveillance and control over nearly everything. When someone is debanked — and then inevitably blacklisted from all other banks — they are cut off from participation in almost every aspect of modern life. They will have no easy way to receive pay from a job; they cannot buy property and may not even be able to rent. They will be unable to purchase almost any digital service and, increasingly, will be prevented from buying everyday goods offline as well. Once the ongoing war on cash is won, they will be well and truly screwed. Debanking therefore serves as an extremely effective means to isolate and silence a targeted person or group, quickly breaking any presence and influence they may have once had within society. Which is, of course, the point.

This appears to be a lesson taken directly from the Chinese method of dealing with dissidents. Indeed, the West’s managerial elite seem to have concluded that they now have the tools and latitude to begin implementing a Chinese-style social credit system here. Although not yet anywhere near as comprehensive, this nascent system shares the same fundamental characteristics: using public-private coordination and “social governance” to collapse any distinction between public and private life, thereby greatly raising the risks for public non-conformity and dissent from the narrative. Utopia is doubtless just around the corner.

In fact, we can see transparent steps towards the construction of something like a social credit system in the now widespread use of such innovations as ESG (environmental, social, and governance) scores. Major financial institutions wield them to vocally conform to specific social and ideological practices required to access capital. Similar NGO-led scoring schemes such as the Corporate Equality Index and UK-based Diversity Champions programme also threaten those businesses that fail to conform with “reputational risk” blackmail and de-platforming.

How far might this all go? While the powerful realm of financial flows is today’s focus, there is no reason to think that, on the current trajectory, the same dynamics won’t eventually be applied to every other sector of our economy and society. We shouldn’t be surprised if someday soon apartment leases come with ideological morality clauses, airlines unite to ban customers with the wrong beliefs from travelling, or people find themselves evicted from their insurance policies for speaking out of turn online. This will simply be the behaviour of a hardening managerialism seeking stability through mechanistic control over all the details of life.

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New technologies such as AI and, especially, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) will only continue to make this kind of granular control easier. A few months ago, an American man found himself completely shut out of his digitally controlled “smart home” by Amazon after a delivery driver accused his doorbell of saying something racist. Why would Amazon bother to do this? Because they can; and so, under a managerial regime, they must. As our managers find that every day it feels easier and easier to “solve” problematic people with the click of a button, they will not be able to resist hitting that button, hard and often.

Such is the very Weltanschauung — the whole way of seeing and believing — of the managerial mind. As more and more powerful technology comes within the grasp of the managerial machine, its grip will only continue to tighten. For, as C.S. Lewis understood, “each new power won by man is a power over man as well”.

Today, as Orwell predicted, the great super-states struggle for possession of the earth. But for all past speculation that the 21st century would be defined by a “clash of civilisations”, there is now only one, smothering form of modern civilisation that has stretched itself across the face of the globe, its multiple personalities vying for imperial supremacy. In the West, progressive managerialism softly strangled democracy to death over a century of manipulation, hollowed it out, and now wears its skin. In the East, the imported virus of communist managerialism wiped out a once-great civilisation in a river of blood, then crystalised into the cold, hard machine that now rules the lands of China.

This is the truth behind why China and the West, for all their proclaimed differences, share the same managerial hubris, are tempted by the same growing technological powers, and are sheltering the same elite insecurities and delusions. Even as they roil and clash, they are converging on the same destiny: the same socially engineered submission of everything human, real and free to technocratic nihilism and the false reality of an all-encompassing machine-government — to a total techno-state.

***

This essay is an extract from a longer piece on The Upheaval.

In this view — as strongly argued recently by the journalist Glenn Greenwald, for instance — the US arms manufacturing industry, the military, and our politicians are all essentially engaged in a circle of corruption and collusion to make each other rich. This common understanding of the military-industrial complex — and of how politics in Washington works in general — is essentially conspiratorial. The theory goes something like this: big defence contractors bribe the politicians with large donations, and the generals and other government officials with board seats and other lucrative positions, and they in turn come up with reasons to justify shovelling ever-increasing piles of taxpayer money into buying new weapons from the arms makers.

Washington has thus become a “multi-tentacle war machine”, Greenwald says, because “no matter what is going on in the world, they always find — or concoct — reasons why the military budget must grow no matter how inflated it already is”. (Emphasis mine.)

Let’s call this the Corrupt Conspiracy Model of how Washington functions (or dysfunctions). It is a model that can be powerfully convincing, because it taps into the truth that people really are naturally flawed and self-interested creatures, demonstrably prone to corruption. From this viewpoint, Washington politics is all basically a con game led by a pack of greedy psychopaths. As Greenwald notes with some frustration and confusion, this used to be a characteristically Left-wing critique of government and corporate power, but following the Great Political Realignment it’s now become more common to the disaffected Right.

Reading his argument made me recall how, back when I was younger and Left-leaning, I too believed in this model, at least implicitly. As noted, it can be quite persuasive, even satisfying, in its simplicity. It’s also a subtly idealistic and optimistic theory: the American system would work great, just as it was designed to, if not for all the selfish bad actors taking advantage of the system. The only problem was that, after enough time in Washington, I had no choice but to re-evaluate. Because what I found is that the swamp is populated almost wholly not by cynics, but by true believers.

True believers in what? Answering that will require trying to nail down a second, more complex model to explain how people in the Imperial City make decisions.

First, let me qualify by acknowledging that yes, Washington is indeed awash with lobbyists, corrupt politicians, psychopathic executives, cynical operators, and backstabbing climbers. It is a veritable hive of scum and villainy. They just aren’t what really makes the place tick. In fact, all these people conform themselves parasitically to that which does.

The real issue to contend with is that almost no one in Washington actually thinks in the terms of the Corrupt Conspiracy Model; i.e. they don’t think: “I will advocate for a hawkish, interventionist foreign policy so that the resulting wars will benefit the arms industry and make me and my friends rich…” The reality is more disturbing than that, honestly.

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What runs Washington is a Spirit. Or, alternatively, a Story.

No one wants to live a meaningless life. Humans are meaning-seeking creatures and they desperately want, need, what they do to have meaningful value. If they cannot find inherent meaning in life, they are liable to come up with a narrative framework — that is, a story — that imbues what they do with some sense of higher meaning. Since everyone wants to be the hero of their story, the story becomes central to their personal identity. And no one wants their identity to be dull (even if they’re a government bureaucrat).

But while a few very special people can create and maintain their own personal stories indefinitely, living life entirely in their own self-sustained dramatic reality, for most people the much easier and more reassuring route is to simply adopt a collective story that already exists. The more popular or high-status this story is, the more attractive and self-reinforcing it will be — and the harder it will, therefore, be to disbelieve, dissent, and defect from.

Now, when one talks to members of the Washington establishment, the collective story they hold to tends to quickly become apparent.

None are, in their own minds, either corrupt cynics or ideological zealots. Instead they are moderate, prudent, wise “public servants”; the trained and chosen elite guardians of American interests and values. Sensible centrists, they do what must be done to ensure America’s security and prosperity, steering the ship of state along a pragmatic course, eschewing both the goodhearted but naïve idealism of the too-far-Left and the crude jingoistic nationalism of the populist-Right.

This pragmatism does not, of course, preclude their simultaneously being moral exemplars. They embody America’s highest ideals, given that they are the ones extending the light of whatever truly makes America great, whether that be liberal democracy, equality and human rights, pluralism and diversity, scientific progress, or economic liberty. In protecting the global world order of Pax Americana, they make the world safe for American ideals. In fact, these guardians are basically the bulwark of Enlightened Civilisation writ large, taming barbarian savagery wherever it rears its ugly head, whether in Afghanistan or Alabama. Even a moment’s slackness and “the jungle grows back”.

American power is righteous, because it is on the right side of History; as clearly demonstrated by the fact that America is so powerful. And if that power is righteous and good, it deserves to be exercised. To use righteous power to remake the world in our own image would by definition be to make the world better. Thus extending American power is both the most pragmatic and the most idealistic possible course.

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By Mark Lilla

This story, which has dominated Washington since at least the end of the Cold War, is what we might label The Consensus. Maybe all or some elements of The Consensus are true. Or maybe it’s all nonsense. It doesn’t really matter; that’s not the point. Those who submit themselves to The Consensus can by doing so automatically consider themselves better people, engaged in more meaningful lives. And their peers will consider them to be as well.

A term that one is liable to hear used in Washington is “Serious Person”. On being asked to meet with someone he doesn’t know (maybe a journalist, or a potential new hire), for example, a Very Important Washingtonian may first inquire of his staff: “Well, is he a Serious Person?” But what makes a person Serious? A Serious Person is, naturally, an orthodox follower of The Consensus. Asking if someone is a Serious Person is a bit like a secular version of how one might have asked, back in the day, whether some new fellow was in fact a “God-fearing Christian?” “Yes,” would come the reply, “and he went to Yale.” “Good enough, let’s put him in charge of the OSS,” you could then say with confidence.

Rumour that some new acquaintance is in fact a Serious Person is greatly reassuring, as it means he is not a “Wingnut”. A Wingnut is an unsociable crank, living outside of The Consensus. Wingnuts demonstrate this by suggesting unserious ideas, such as cutting the defence budget, curtailing the surveillance state, or questioning the demands of the public health bureaucracy. Glenn Greenwald is a Wingnut par excellence. Nobody wants to be associated with a Wingnut, as that can taint your reputation as a Serious Person. And then you’ll never be invited to a swanky conference in Aspen again. Which is probably why for every mile closer to Capitol Hill a foreign policy think tank is, the more measurably it advocates in favour of militant internationalism. These are the Serious Institutions, able to court the serious money necessary to afford prime real estate.

Here then is the point: why is it so likely that any given person in the Washington “Blob” will automatically support raising the defence budget, or intervening militarily in some country abroad, or otherwise expanding the security state? In the vast majority of cases, it’s not because they’re taking bribes from some defence contractor. It’s because they simply want more than anything to be counted among the Serious People. And to do that they first have to accept the word and practice of The Consensus.

Sometimes they may not fully buy it, but conform merely because it’s the path of least resistance. Often, they do buy it completely. I once had a former General and Director of the CIA tell me, with complete earnestness, that the United States had to occupy every single “ungoverned space” on earth — every conflict zone, every “rogue state”, every barren patch of sand large enough for an Isis terrorist to do doughnuts in a Toyota pickup. No one was paying him to say this (yet); it was pure idealistic conviction. And there are a lot of people in Washington far less distinguished than he who labour daily to help shore up The Consensus: legions of non-profit workers, lowly staffers, and ambitious interns who happily pump out endless Consensus-reiterating briefing papers, reports, op-eds, and legislative bills (all of which are written by people under 35 who have no idea what they’re doing, by the way). The military-industrial complex doesn’t have to bribe any of them. They are working to cultivate the illustrious aura of a Serious Person.

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The American experiment has just begun

By Anton Jäger

Any financial rewards are secondary to the power, prestige, and psychological assurance of being counted among the ruling class and holding the right opinions. This does not of course mean there aren’t significant financial rewards that flow to senior figures, but to the “public servant” they genuinely bear no conceivable trace of wrongful quid pro quo. As far as they are concerned, they are merely doing the right thing in service to the public and the nation, and being fairly compensated for it. Being paid to sit on Raytheon’s board and lobby for a strong national defence is public service, as is being paid by CNN to go on TV and call dissenters a dangerous threat to our democracy. Advancing The Consensus is, after all, the essence of public service. This complex is utterly impervious to any charges of corruption or hypocrisy, because from the inside such charges literally sound like the mad rantings of an immoral and maliciously anti-American Wingnut.

It would be tempting to call this ideological capture, but I don’t think that quite describes it. The Consensus is not an ideology with clear or coherent doctrines. And it is extremely adaptable and flexible, seamlessly incorporating new threats and opportunities (which is why “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is now regularly cited as a top foreign policy priority). Instead, it works more loosely, subconsciously, to shape what individuals and institutions value and what they believe is right and normal and just. It really is more like a deep story about the world and how it works; or a spirit that moves subjects without their understanding how or why, or even that it exists.

Which is why I think I need to introduce one more element in order to fully explain what really runs Washington.

Everyone and everything needs a hierarchy of values to operate, otherwise they risk having no telos — no purpose, motivation, or orientation for action. And at the top of this pyramid of values or principles must necessarily be some highest value or principle, from which all others descend.

Bureaucracies, which are themselves pyramidal, subsume an individual’s values and objectives into themselves; the individual’s value hierarchy and telos is then effectively restructured or replaced by the telos superimposed from above by the bureaucracy. Which is why the bureaucracy so often seems to co-opt its individuals and take on a life of its own. But many singular bureaucracies, such as the Defence and State Departments, exist side-by-side in Washington and operate simultaneously. And, at least theoretically, they are all part of the same government and on the same side. What unites them in direction and orientation, if anything? Some pyramid of higher values, naturally. This is the role of The Consensus.

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By Paul Kingsnorth

Does The Consensus itself also exist as part of an even higher story? Maybe. The author Paul Kingsnorth has I think wisely described there being, at the pinnacle of our collective Western civilisational subconscious, an “empty throne,” where once sat God:

“[E]very culture, whether it knows it or not, is built around a sacred order. It does not, of course, need to be a Christian order. It could be Islamic, Hindu or Daoist. It could be based around the veneration of ancestors or the worship of Odin. But there is a throne at the heart of every culture, and whoever sits on it will be the force you take your instruction from.”

“The modern experiment,” however, “has been the act of dethroning both literal human sovereigns and the representative of the sacred order, and replacing them with purely human, and purely abstract, notions — ‘the people’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘democracy’ or ‘progress.’” But one sacred value must necessarily rule above all others, and “when a culture kills its sovereign, the throne will not remain empty for long”.

What now occupies this empty throne today, if anything? Kingsnorth has suggested it is “money”. As I’ve written before, I don’t think that’s it. I think it is something more fundamental: I think it’s what could be called the spirit in Man that hungers for infinite “control” — meaning power itself. The power to have all good things, from material comfort to equality, without any limits or contradictions; power over all evils and all suffering and all dangers; power over human nature. It’s the desire for the power to eliminate all friction between the will and the world; to have the power to overcome all resistance and achieve heaven on earth, as fast as possible, by any means necessary.

The efforts of those few poor souls who spend their days trying to reason with Washington and convince it to follow some policy of “realism and restraint” are doomed. The place is busily fighting a holy war against the terms of existence.

When a Wingnut reveals himself as a Wingnut, it is because he has resisted the unrestrained exercise of power in some way. Such an act is grounds not for admiration of virtue, but for shock and suspicion: by doing so he has challenged the whole story of the new sacred order. In a real sense the Wingnut is not just unsociable but impious.

It may be that at some point in the past, when the empty throne was occupied by its rightful ruler, America’s governing institutions and the people who make their gears turn participated in a greater shared story, which subsumed their lower interests and appetites and rightly ordered them with a telos oriented toward a genuine highest good. Maybe this was God. Maybe it was the American Idea, or the Republican Ideal. Whatever it was, perhaps its very existence moderated and disciplined them. But if the baser value of power has now been elevated to this highest place, then they no longer have any internalised limits, and their quest has no stopping point. There are no longer any moral brakes on the run-away train of the state.

If so, then even all the money of the military-industrial complex definitely doesn’t run Washington. Indeed, if the military-industrial complex didn’t exist we’d have to invent it immediately just so that we could hand it all of our money.

A version of this essay originally appeared on The Upheaval on Substack.

For three years, the Chinese government has maintained its policy of draconian city-wide lockdowns, endless daily mass testing, and digital Covid-passes. It has set up vast camps to house those dragged into quarantine for weeks at a time, and, more recently, “closed-loop” factories.

But many have finally had enough. Over the past several days, protests have erupted in at least two dozen cities and 79 universities across the country, with spontaneous demonstrations quickly drawing crowds of hundreds, even thousands, of people willing to fearlessly demand an end to the Zero-Covid nightmare. In Wuhan, where it all began, swarming crowds smashed down containment barriers and “liberated” locked-down neighbourhoods. In Lanzhou, they overturned Covid-testing booths; in Chengdu, they chanted “give me freedom or give me death!”

This is without doubt the largest wave of protest seen in the country since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. In some cases, protestors’ frustration with Zero-Covid tyranny has translated into something more: an outpouring of raw anger against the CCP and Xi Jinping.

What has really sparked these protests, however, is the Zero-Covid regime’s lack of basic respect for humanity. On 24 November, a fire at an apartment complex in Urumqi, Xinjiang, killed as many as 44 people, including children. Social media posts alleged they could not escape because the doors and windows of their building were wired shut (you know, for safety), and because responding firetrucks were not allowed past a checkpoint into the “quarantined” zone, preventing them from reaching the building (you know, for safety). While authorities have denied this — instead blaming residents for lacking “the knowledge or capability to rescue themselves” — China’s citizens are convinced otherwise.

They can see the residents were killed by the senseless, inhuman bureaucracy of China’s Zero-Covid machine. They know that they could easily be next. It is their anger and frustration with this system’s mindless stupidity that has prompted them to finally come out en masse.

Like every Kafkaesque technocratic nightmare, the Zero-Covid machine is seemingly constructed entirely out of arbitrary rules. This is a regime that deploys armies of flying robots to pointlessly spray vast quantities of (probably toxic) disinfectant into the air over entire cities; that installs machines in libraries to painstakingly sterilise every book, despite overwhelming scientific evidence that Covid doesn’t transmit through surface infection.

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Most visibly, this regime is embodied by the Dabai (the “Big Whites”), the omnipresent “public health” thugs who have flawlessly succeeded in dehumanising themselves into zombie-like agents of the machine by donning their iconic (and totally pointless) full-body white hazmat suits 100% of the time, no matter what their job is or what miseries they’re inflicting on the people while just following orders.

The most surreal and tragic part of all of this, is that there is absolutely no practical or scientific reason for it. As the protests rage, China’s state media asserted again and again that they will continue with Zero-Covid because it is “scientific and effective”. But of course it is neither. Lockdowns don’t work: a fact that was clear from very early in the pandemic. Even masks don’t appear to demonstrate any really any significant effect on transmission. By contrast, the “Swedish Model” for “living with Covid” has by now been fully vindicated.

The rest of the world has pretty much come — kicking and screaming — to accept this reality and allow people to move on with their lives. Which is why when Chinese citizens were exposed to insufficiently censored footage of the packed, maskless crowds of the World Cup, they were in for a shock that may have helped push the country over the edge.

I find it rather odd, then, that Western media outlets have insisted on upholding China’s Zero-Covid narrative. The BBC, the New York Times, Axios, and the Financial Times have all praised China’s “freedom fighters”, but they also echo the Official Line: sombrely asserting that China’s leaders are “in a bind” and can’t actually open up like the people naively want. If they do the hospitals will immediately be overwhelmed, untold millions will die, and the economy will suffer massively. Zero-Covid might be a bit excessive — what with people starving in their apartments and throwing themselves off buildings — and the government should probably loosen up somewhat, especially to get commerce flowing again. But ultimately top-down control will have to be maintained for the people’s own good. It’s an understandably difficult situation for Beijing.

I will go ahead and call total bullshit on this. To do otherwise would require pretending we don’t now have three years’ worth of collective experience from around the world, during which time every “expert” model predicting mass death in the dangerous event of freedom was consistently proved wrong. With only rare exceptions, health care systems in most countries ended up being able to handle the impact of the pandemic without any kind of collapse. Every big Covid wave quickly reversed itself and diminished. Why? Because herd immunity works.

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Will China's anti-lockdown protestors succeed?

By Bill Hayton

Ultimately SARS-CoV-2 is a virus with a greater than 99.9% overall pre-vaccine infection survival rate for those under the age of 69, and above 99.5% even if the most elderly are included. Vaccines have long been available for all those who want them. None of the humanity-crushing germophobic paranoia and tyranny is necessary or ethically justifiable in the slightest, and never has been.

No, there is only one real reason for China’s insistence on the Zero-Covid policy, and it’s one we also have some recent experience with in the West: pure ideological psychosis, rooted in the CCP’s pathologically fearful desperation to maintain total control of everything at all times, no matter how self-destructive the results.

The control-obsessed minds of the CCP’s leadership have been broken by the uncontrollability of the pandemic. The propaganda narrative they quickly built up around Covid — the web of lies intended to inculcate a “healthy” fear of the virus and thereby enhance social cohesion and control — took on a life of its own and became self-perpetuating. Now, in a closed information environment, the Narrative is setting the policies of government instead of the other way around. Much as during other massively self-destructive episodes of CCP history (the Great Leap Forward comes to mind), they are trapped not by a difficult reality but by a collective unreality — one from which at least some Chinese people have now woken up.

The pandemic has helped to shatter the image of modern China as a bastion of effective technocratic governance: a country run by sensible engineering PhDs, and possessing the enviable authoritarian “state capacity” to build marvellous mega-projects. Gone are the days when New York Times columnists and Canadian prime ministers daydreamed about what could be accomplished if their countries were but “China for a day”. The truth is of course that even technocratic central planners can be possessed by horrifyingly blind ideological madness just like everyone else.

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Can China let go of Zero Covid?

By Bill Hayton

It is pretty clear why the mainstream international media won’t talk plainly about China’s Zero-Covid mistake. To do so honestly would be to strike directly at the same animating myth that drove “emergency” Covid measures in their own countries. The lockdowns, vaccine passports, QR codes, mass censorship, and brutal treatment of so-called “far-Right” or “conspiracy theorist” dissenters that we saw gleefully implemented by governments all over the world — and which were based directly on the China model — were always worse than irrational and illiberal. To point out that such measures are a continuing crime against humanity in China would be to point out that they were a crime against humanity everywhere.

That would be pretty awkward for Western governments. Besides, it seems we’re not done yet with technocratic solutions to “public health” threats: new plans for sweeping, “technology-enabled ‘always-on’ global health infrastructure”, including a global digital health pass that will determine whether or not anyone anywhere “can move around,” was just agreed to by the leaders of the G20. The last thing our governments need is for their grand plans to be derailed by the kind of pro-human independent spirit on display in China.

Fortunately for everyone (except the people), police have successfully flooded the streets of China, and the protests seem to have died down. Stability will likely be restored; revolution doesn’t seem to be in the cards. Regimes and their journalists everywhere will breathe a sigh of relief. After all, what would the future be like if everyone was inspired to stop obeying disembodied robot-megaphones demanding that we show our health pass?

***

This essay originally appeared on The Upheaval on Substack.