If these are Mamdani’s biggest fans — he performed best among what New Yorkers grimly call “transplants” — then I have no doubt that his appeal to well-meaning, well-heeled Zoomers is bolstered by the presence of his very chic, very right-on wife. Rama Duwaji is a bobbed artist born in Houston (though her Instagram bio protests “from Damascus”) who ranges, according to the resident babe-raters of X, from a sulky, pouting narcissist to a Princess Diana-level national treasure. At 28, she is at the top end of Gen Z; she met her husband on Hinge and wore knee-high black boots on her wedding day. One Facebook post from a “digital creator” in the run-up to the election rhapsodized over her “high boots, bare shoulders … showing off her gorgeous legs with confidence”. This, it read, was the liberated modern Muslim couple “about to lead the most Zionist city on Earth” (ever heard of Tel Aviv?). It seemed Mamdani’s untested political talent was secondary to his wife’s decision to get her shoulders out.

This may seem like the logic of a deranged naïf, but aesthetics increasingly matter in politics. This is particularly true when the target voter is a social media native whose engagement with policy is restricted to what friends put on their Instagram stories. For young liberals, Duwaji’s look signals the promise of progressive politics: her haircut alone is shorthand for being on the right side of history. In the age of Maga mavens with long barrel curls, tangerine foundation and stiff faces, here is someone who looks like she belongs at a Ridgewood party, where she’d drink High Noons and discourse on prison abolition with other illustrator-activists and their software-engineer boyfriends.

To a certain kind of bright-eyed young professional, Duwaji is the model proletarian (aka just like me!): a veteran of dating apps with a cool but humble art job, where you churn out doodles of cats and hijabis, and a commitment to social justice sternly meted out on social media. A direct message on Instagram from weeks after the October 7 attacks shows that she was ticking people off for not advocating for Palestine online: “shift ur energy for speaking out about genocide!!!” Then, last month, she posted broken hearts on Instagram about the death of the Palestinian influencer Saleh al-Jafarawi (“beloved Jafawari”, she wrote), who had celebrated the October 7 attacks in a gleeful viral video. Duwaji embodies the ineffectual radicalism of young activist voters, sharing their frustration over “complicity” and “silence” which they presume is also held by the working masses. But Mamdani and his wife represent “the people” — those inconveniently conservative lumpens more interested in utility bills than the global intifada — about as much as King Donald Croesus represents the red states. That is, not at all.

Duwaji’s physical appearance has drawn ample attention since Mamdani’s victory. Luckily, she also seems to spend a lot of time obsessing over it — to the extent that her own face appears to be the principal subject of her art. X users have been uncharitable about her tendency to “self-insert” in her drawings, but the evidence is pretty damning: to my philistine eye, Duwaji’s style looks like the poorly drawn Wojak memes born on imageboards in the 2010s — except in the place of soyjacks, chuds and tradwives is… the artist herself. In one particularly egregious example, she draws a policeman kneeling on a brown woman’s neck; his handcuffs dangle over her keffiyeh. It’s difficult to escape the interpretation that, here, Duwaji was reimagining the murder of George Floyd except this time, she — or a woman who looked remarkably like her — was the star of the show.

Being a rubbish artist isn’t a problem in itself, but the spectacularly shallow social commentary this first lady’s illustrations provide is depressing indeed. What strikes me is how very 2020 the whole thing is: Instagram activism, fantasies of victimization, nebulous “advocacy” which relentlessly centers the advocate. And, crucially, it’s all so oppressively cringe.

But this may be key to Duwaji’s fascination for a certain kind of voter: the politics of New York do skew embarrassingly earnest. When they enter Gracie Mansion in January, Mamdani and Duwaji will be at the helm of a city where quirky indie rebellion has long amounted to self-aware posturing. Here, the streets are awash with “wholesome chungus”, as one recent tweet put it: memelords tape onto lampposts flyers which invite passers-by to scan QR codes if they’re “looking for a hot performative male” or to “smoke a cigarette with me” in the West Village — all for the incomprehensible cause of being offbeat and, ominously, “creating”. Businesses, too, plaster NYC with vigilante graphic design: one poster on my road, in a corner where the fentanyl addicts huddle overnight, advertises a local dispensary with the tagline “weed made me gay”, along with emetic phrases like “toasted twink” and “puffing pansexual”. Duwaji is a hit here because her gauche art resonates with the city’s softcore radicalism, something which would be laughed out of the room in most of London.

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The real problem, of course, is that what Mamdani and his coterie stand for makes no practical sense to the people they profess to be representing — the killer catch in many radical projects of recent years, including Corbynism and its grim sequel Your Party. Squiggly art about protests and soup kitchens may make Zoomer women feel good, but they might feel less aglow with solidarity when they can’t take the bus because their dreamboat mayor has made them free, turning them into mobile homeless encampments populated with dangerous and drug-addled men. Nor will fourth-wave feminists thank him when he makes social workers, rather than police, the first port of call for victims of domestic abuse — shunting battered women into a sluggish, bureaucratic nightmare instead of putting their partners in handcuffs. Nor will liberated “digital sex workers” selling nudes to supplement their income feel extra-empowered if Mamdani ultimately decriminalizes prostitution, putting trafficked women entirely at the mercy of their pimps. Actually, scrap that last one — privileged feet-pic sellers never gave a toss about actual prostitutes.

New York’s next first lady will preside over the center of the capitalist world, overseen by a husband whose objective is to diminish it. These are young globalists: Mamdani may have won on a campaign of local affordability (memorably including bringing down the cost of halal meals), but his politics revolve around other places, other battles, far from the five boroughs. Nobody better represents this unrootedness — from New York as a place and from the priorities of its residents — than Duwaji and her fan club. These are people stuck in perpetual protest, obsessively documenting their urge to “rage at the state of the world”, as she puts it. Because that protest is so tightly bound in their self-image as a little radical in an evil system, nuance doesn’t come easy; older or more moderate voters find this offputting. When you’re an angry young creative whose job is to draw pictures of other angry people for The New Yorker, you never face ideological compromise or challenges; when the messy reality of political office unfurls next year, we can expect to see this couple grow up fast. It will be fascinating to watch the Zoomer’s champion being, I suspect for the first time, around people with vast experience and complex views.

I stared at it, then I was in tears.

Humans are resilient. Bad things happen, and eventually we move on. But we remember, too. We just wrap those memories up and store them in unexpected places, such as a box of Christmas tree ornaments. 2020 still feels like a blur to me: one long horrible Groundhog Day. But that little snowman abruptly took me right there. Lovingly painted, its little face-mask trying to make something fun of something nightmarish, it captures the heroic efforts of everyone with children in their care. So many parents and carers, making the best of something utterly beyond the capacity of an infant to understand: an official ban on almost all spontaneous touch and social connection.

What does Zoom mean to a toddler? So much of a child’s social world is wordless, conducted in the language of touch, face, and gesture. A loved and trusted other is not a face on a screen but a living, breathing, warm, huggable entity. And for this group, a virus which posed relatively little risk to them meant almost all of this was abruptly taken away. More under-18s died of influenza than Covid-19 in 2020, but we don’t shut the world down for the flu.

We did for Covid. Was it worth it?

How do you calculate something like that? We know that maternal post-natal depression can have lasting negative effects on a developing child. What, then, about the fact that rates of perinatal depression doubled during lockdown, affecting nearly half of all mothers of newborns? What of the children, now toddlers, who didn’t interact with anyone other than their parents for months or even years of their earliest life, and are now developmentally delayed on a raft of measures compared to previous cohorts?

Was it worth it for the millions of children left to scroll unspeakable corners of the internet, unsupervised, for months on end, while their parents tried to keep up with Zoom work? Those all the way up to university age who lost years of education? What about the depression and PTSD that rocketed in kids between seven and 12 between March and June that year? Was it worth that? What about those trapped at home with abusive or neglectful parents?

But just as the downsides of lockdown weren’t evenly distributed, nor were the risks of Covid. Someone elderly or immune-compromised might say: yes, kids were not at great danger from the virus. But why should the demographics most at risk of severe illness and death be recklessly endangered, for the sake of children with their whole lives ahead of them? And this is the nub of the problem. Every human culture prior to our own understood the tragic dimension of human life: that is, the truth that some situations have no good outcome, only messy choices and their painful aftermath. In the Christian tradition, we see something like this in the doctrine of original sin, which holds that we can never make life on earth perfect — because each of us carries a taint of wickedness, and can only hope and pray for salvation.

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Nor is this downbeat assessment only a feature in the Christian worldview. We see it, for example, in the ancient Greek myth of Oedipus, a man whose parents sought to avoid the monstrous actions the gods foretold he would take, by abandoning him on a hillside, only to bring about precisely that fate through their actions. In Hindu myth, times of high civilisation and towering achievement are inescapably followed by ages of decline and destruction, before the cycle begins again.

No doubt, for non-Christian and Christian premodern cultures alike, this downbeat view of what’s achievable on earth was informed by being on everyday speaking terms with hunger, illness and death. But a core belief of the modern world is that weighing two competing dangers is a thing of the past. Instead, thanks to the wonders of innovation and rising prosperity, we can defy gravity and have all the good things at once — even things that previously seemed in conflict. Powered by cheap fossil fuels, we convinced ourselves we were on our way to eliminating hunger and illness, and could set our sights on death itself. And among all the other things fuelled by cheap energy, perhaps the most pervasive has been the conviction that we could escape life’s tragic dimension.

We could have freedom from family obligations, while ensuring the old and young were cared for. Rising prosperity replaced the duty to welcome the stranger, and the injunction to love your neighbour. We could be intensely relaxed (as Peter Mandelson famously put it) about some people getting filthy stinking rich, because some of that money can be collected in taxes and redistributed. And we could do this while leaving everyone free to pursue their own vision of the good. As long as we adopt the same overall rules, and accept the same bits-and-atoms understanding of what’s real and important, we can be as values-pluralistic as we like.

“Progress” means, in a nutshell, the ability to trade in-person social bonds for freedom, while our basic needs are met via paid-for services and labour-saving machinery. In other words, technology replaced moral frameworks, or rather became the moral framework: a machine theology. In this worldview there are no moral choices, only rational ones. Its corresponding mode of governance is technocracy, where the legitimacy of political choices rests in their adherence to “evidence” and “data”. And humans, too, are unconnected atoms: you’re a person to the extent that you can be free, with no obligation to share values or social codes.

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The tyranny of a Covid amnesty

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Except it turns out that there are still situations where we can’t just “do our own thing”. When each of us is a potential disease vector, everyone else absolutely has a stake in what we do. And at the collective level, sometimes there’s no “neutral” option. Faced with a rapidly-spreading virus of still-unknown severity, doing nothing is as much a decision with consequences as making active interventions.

So Covid presented a new universe of tragic choices. But we had little mental furniture for grappling with them. No wonder so many ended up hiding behind “science”, and sought to justify their preferred policies in those terms. But the truth is that no one is very rational when lives are in danger — and so the pandemic exposed the underlying, enduring truth that data-driven decision-making can only ever be a fig-leaf for the real business of governance, which is tragic moral choices.

How do you weigh incommensurable alternatives, where every side has horrible trade-offs? How do you weigh granny’s life against a generation of developmentally-delayed babies and toddlers? Short answer: you can’t. At least, there’s no way of doing so rationally, using data, without some kind of moral framework.

And from this perspective it’s easier to see why we accepted the choices we did — or at least found ourselves at a loss to protest, even if it felt wrong. For what we needed to navigate Covid were the very moral frameworks we’ve spent so long carefully dismantling, in favour of moral pluralism underwritten by the lonely unity of machines and the market. No wonder, then, that when in-person contact suddenly seemed a danger to life, we told ourselves all of it could be replaced with money and machines — for money and machines are the moral framework now. And no wonder we looked away from those groups for whom in-person contact is life.

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We accepted the sacrifice of almost all in-person social contact, on our children’s behalf, for months on end. In some parts of the world, it was years. Perhaps, accustomed to a machine theology that dismisses relationships as an optional extra, we didn’t think it much of a sacrifice. It was a moral choice, founded in a culture that insists everything inconvenient about love can be replaced by money and machines. But we didn’t defy gravity. Instead, the heaviest burden fell on the slightest shoulders. Now, we’re living with the aftermath. Two Christmases on, I’m still feeling the disintegrative aftershocks of Covid in my own family, and a sudden reminder of 2020 in the Christmas box can leave me choked. As inflation soars and everyone hunkers down, we’re feeling it at a national level too.

That little snowman will go back into its box on Twelfth Night. But we can’t just pack away the memory of that fearful, isolated time — especially as China faces its long-postponed reckoning with Covid, driving fears of new variants spreading overseas. We can’t just forget again what it was like to see a generation of children stripped of social worlds they couldn’t do without. A generation of the young, two years older now, living with the cost of our refusal to defend love in the face of death. As families gather for another Christmas, we must say: never again. That experiment can never be repeated.

It’s a deeply religious project, firmly rooted in the Christian story, conceived and executed by a community of profound faith. So what is it that warms the cockles of my deeply atheist heart? I think it’s the strength of the promise: the coming of hope after a brutal, bitter year. For me, that hope is primarily in the shape of a vaccine being dispensed in hospitals and clinics in every corner of the country.

Is it sacrilegious of me to think of the coming of a vaccine — bringing with it a temporal salvation — as analogous to the coming of Christ? Or is it simply that religious stories work so well precisely because they are the archetypes of so many individual human experiences? I don’t know. But one thing I appreciate about Advent is the way Christianity gives us 24 full days to prepare ourselves for the arrival of hope. After all, if you step out of the dark into the light you will be blinded; you need time to adjust.

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By Polly Mackenzie

The Covid-19 crisis is not over. But the vaccine does herald the end of the worst; even if this latest surge were to push us beyond the peak hospitalisations of the spring, at least the fear that this is forever has gone. So, as we navigate the next few difficult months, we need to prepare ourselves to step into the light again. Am I the only one who thinks that will be hard?

Launching the vaccine, Matt Hancock said this was “a day to remember in a year to forget.” A beautiful line, of course — but balderdash. We should not forget; we can’t, even if we wanted to. This year has scarred us and bereaved us. We need to grieve what we have lost. The book that’s been helping me do so is Good Grief: Embracing Life At A Time of Death. It is a memoir of the first half of the year by Catherine Mayer and her mother Anne Mayer Bird, who lost their husbands within five weeks of each other around the beginning of this wretched year.

It would be a stretch to call Catherine a friend, but I know her a little and admire her a lot. I’ve been to the flat where many of the events in this remarkable book played out, above the recording studio where her rockstar husband played and recorded his last music. I’ve met, all too briefly, many of the characters whose deaths she recounts, or who help her, sometimes clumsily, to grieve. But it’s the universality of the experience of loss, not its closeness to me, that sticks.

The book as a whole is a metaphor for grief. It’s jumbled. It skips forward in time and back again. The chapters are themed, but messily so, taking you with them through surges of emotion just like those which hit you unexpectedly after the loss of a loved one, just as you’ve decided you’re going to be ok. Its greatest strength is a series of letters from Anne to her dead husband, with whom she wanted so desperately to share the experience of this dreadful year. Written at intervals during the worst phase of the lockdown, they punctuate the book, acting as a trigger for the reader’s own detailed memories of how it felt, then, to be scared, or worse — scared and alone.

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I’ve been finding it hard to remember much of this year. It blurs. We did the same walk in the same park so many times it’s hard to be clear about what happened when. Even specific trips, like the one time we visited my mother, or an eat-out-to-help-out lunch in my hometown, seem to have an ethereal, faded quality. But without memory, there is no healing. Catherine and Anne’s book is a catalyst for all our memory, and a playbook for how to deal with its darker corners.

There are dead people everywhere in Good Grief, brought to life by the stories Catherine tells of them. Some you’ve even heard of like Michael Hutchence and Paula Yates. They are not gloomy spectres haunting the text, but the warm spirits of what Catherine calls the “lovely dead”. Catherine and Anne are both advised to leave the homes they shared with their husbands, to escape the memories. But they do not want to escape the memories: they bring them joy. It reminds me of the lines Shakespeare gives Constance in King John:

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty look, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,

Mourners are told this is pathology. This is how you get stuck in grief, and forget to live. But the central message of Good Grief is the opposite: we live well by doing justice to the lovely dead. We live well by making time and space for grief, making it “welcome,” not trying to suppress it. That is how we will do justice to this year, as well: not by pushing our grief away, but by making space for it.

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Unless you are the luckiest person in the country, you have lost something this year. Your freedom. Your peace of mind. Your watercooler moments. Your sense of smell. Your favourite pint. Your club nights. Your income. Your security. Your prospects. Your university place. The list is endless. And our feelings of loss will not go away simply because the experience has ended: they need to be discussed, and processed, and dealt with.

Good Grief helped me to see that leaning into grief is not self-indulgent. Experiencing your loss is the best way to understand what you had; it’s even a way to relive the joy of what was. The dead, of course, can only return in memory. The same is not true of the opportunities to create new memories that we lost in this catastrophe, of course. But it is worth spending time with your grief this winter to help you work out what you want back. Will you keep up the volunteering or the zoom calls with your family? Will you return to the commute? Will you join a campaign for a living wage? For changes to local government funding? Will you eat differently? Will you spend more time in the park? No-one could come through a crucible like 2020 unchanged. How has it changed you?

Since we’ve been told to celebrate Christmas as little as we can, now seems like the moment to ask that question and start to find the answer. Let grief fill up the room, if only for a few hours. Let it walk up and down with you, and see what it says. Matt Hancock got it wrong: this is not a year to forget, but to remember. We will be best prepared for the dawn if we allow ourselves to experience the darkness which precedes it.

The former Vice-President is not exactly the type you would imagine clad in all-black combat-style street apparel, hurling commercial-grade fireworks at police officers. Rather, he drafted the infamous 1994 omnibus crime bill in concert with the National Association of Police Organizations. He is even known to venerate the arcane institutionalist ethos of the US Senate — whereas to insurrectionary anarchists, such institutions could only be tools of oppression.

But the Trump Era has an odd way of bringing about unexpected ideological convergences. In the announcement video that formally kicked off his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden paid homage to what he called the “courageous group of Americans” who descended upon Charlottesville, VA in August 2017 to confront an assembly of Right-wing rally-goers. Among that “courageous group” were Left-wing activist factions broadly classified under the banner of “antifa”.

For Biden, what transpired in Charlottesville was a “defining moment,” and formed the basis for his decision to launch a third campaign for the presidency at age 76. While Biden did herald generic American idealism in that announcement video — which would be anathema to most insurrectionary anarchists — in the gravity he assigned to the Charlottesville episode, he also affirmed a core tenet of the “antifa” worldview: the notion that a uniquely pressing fascistic threat has gripped the country, and crushing this threat is a matter of unparalleled world-historic urgency.

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Certainly, if you picked any “antifa” member at random, there’d be an almost 0% chance that they would express any kind of personal enthusiasm for Joe Biden. But there’d be a virtually 100% chance that they’d express a great deal of enthusiasm for the theory that “fascism” is an accurate characterisation of America’s current state of governance. Biden would be similarly enthused to present a variation of this analysis, albeit from a slightly different ideological angle. He typically intones things like, “This is not who we are”, rather than “All Cops Are Bastards”.

Still, where Biden is united with “antifa” is in assigning such outsized importance to the role of small-time “fascist” agitators like the ones who gathered that weekend three years ago in Charlottesville (despite ultimately being outnumbered by Left-wing activists) on account of the validation they are purported to have received from Donald Trump. For both Biden and “antifa,” this dynamic constitutes the chief prism through which contemporary American political affairs must be viewed.

And for both Biden and “antifa,” this mode of analysis has been hugely successful. “Antifa” has succeeded in stoking nationwide insurrectionary fervour on a scale unseen in decades. Given their opposition to Trump as the alleged fascist-in-chief, as well as their appropriation of the “Black Lives Matter” protest mantle, they’ve received an extraordinary amount of mainstream liberal legitimation.

Democratic Party operatives have even gone so far as to exalt “antifa” activists as the modern-day equivalents of US soldiers fighting in World War II — while apparently exhibiting no embarrassment for invoking this comparison.

Another clear beneficiary of the “fascism” panic, somewhat paradoxically, has been Biden. A supreme irony of the outsized role that “anti-fascism” has played in post-2016 US political discourse — as popularised by both liberals and leftists, who often claim to be at odds with each other but nonetheless overwhelmingly agree on the underlying “fascism” prognosis — is that it has ultimately limited the possibility of actual Left-wing policy reform.

Democratic presidential primary voters had been traumatised by the non-stop barrage of Trump-related hysteria churned out each and every day by profit-driven corporate media outlets, and laboured under the sincere belief that Trump’s America bears some bonafide relation to Weimar Germany. As such, a plurality were understandably uninterested in foundational reform to the Democratic Party.

That was bad news for socialist Bernie Sanders, who ended up losing handily in the 2020 primaries to a former Vice President whose entire campaign was predicated on little more than restoring the pre-2016 Democratic Party to power.

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And in a way, you can’t particularly blame those Biden voters. Because if your main sources of information tell you for years on end that the reins of state have been seized by an out-and-out fascist, who is fuelling a siege of “Nazi” street agitators, whatever deficiencies the Democratic Party might have at the moment are of little or no concern. Now even Sanders himself has called for a “united front” against Trump ahead of the election, seeming to suggest that the precedent of Francisco Franco is historically apt. Wasn’t the whole problem with Franco that he couldn’t be voted out?

Never mind that Trump would have to be quite a feckless fascist to allow himself to be constantly maligned in the country’s major media, plotted against by his own administration underlings, and impeached. The decidedly unsexy reality is that Trump has been a fairly weak executive, at least relative to his predecessors in the postwar era.

But his radically unorthodox communications style belies any dispassionate assessment of this record, thus the fascism-mongering persists more-or-less unabated. And for all the warnings of a Reichstag Fire moment always supposedly being around the corner, the past six months of Covid and riots were a missed opportunity for any genuine fascist seeking to consolidate power. Trump appears largely content with issuing inflammatory tweets.

So as riots continue around the country, and corporate news networks describe post-protest scenes with raging infernos as “mostly peaceful”, the temptation can be to write this off as mere partisan side-taking. Certainly there’s an element of that — most journalists desperately don’t want to see Trump win in November.

But thanks to the prevailing “fascism” framework, their opposition to Trump isn’t just a matter of ordinary election-year preference. It’s imbued with existential, civilisation-altering significance. How could anyone in their right mind not do everything within their capacity to ensure the defeat of fascism? Once you accept the premise that fascism does in fact accurately describe the current state of American governance, all bets are off — journalistically and otherwise.

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So even if the “anti-fascists” in the equation are burning down cities, they will still never exist on the same moral plane as the actual “fascists” whose champion occupies the White House. Hence, riots which result in the destruction of huge swaths of Kenosha, WI magically become a “mostly peaceful” affair according to CNN and the New York Times.

Yes, journalists also presumptively ascribe a certain virtue to any protests that occur with the imprimatur of “Black Lives Matter”. But racial disparities have been a fact of American life since the dawn of the republic. The unavoidable explanation for why they’ve taken on such frantic energy in the past several months is the alleged spectre of fascism, namely Trump. With a Democratic President, even one as vanilla as Biden, there will doubtless be future race-based controversies. But they won’t have the cosmic weight as those that occur when a “fascist” president also looms.

Adding to the growing list of ironies, Trump’s primary conception of the presidency has less been Fuhrer, than “Pundit-in-Chief”, whereby he proudly brandishes the role of world’s loudest media critic — with media criticism having been one of his life-long passions. Given that experience, Trump knows how to expertly pry at tensions in how pundit narratives get constructed, and the “peaceful protest” cliché provides all the material that could ever be desired in that respect. Kayleigh McEnany, in tweeting a photo of a recent Trump air hanger rally in Pennsylvania, described the attendees (only half-jokingly) as “peaceful protesters”.

The reason she did this is because if one follows the recent patterns of media nomenclature, any and all “peaceful protesters” should be painstakingly accommodated, even if their gatherings produce widespread arson attacks or increase the Covid-19 infection rate. There is no impartial explanation for why the “peaceful protests” of this past summer deserved praise, adulation, and rousing defences from the standpoint of pandemic mitigation. Again, only does this make sense when inserted into the blinkered fascism vs. anti-fascism context.

One wonders if these protesters and rioters have ever paused to consider why it is that so many establishment media outlets are so consistently eager to advocate on their behalf, with the phrase “largely peaceful” having been stretched well past the point of absurdity. And one also wonders why so many powerful forces are so willing to join in affirming their “anti-fascism” worldview — up to and including, in his own way, Joe Biden. For all the talk about dismantling systems of oppression, those who actually wield power in 2020 America seem to view the “fascism vs. antifascism” dichotomy as awfully convenient to their own self-preserving interests.

It is symptomatic of how diseased American strategic thinking has become over the past 30 years that so few Americans in a position to influence the direction of US foreign policy would have the guts or insight to issue a similar warning today.

That cannot be said of President Trump’s nominee to become ambassador to Germany, retired US Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor. It’s a selection that sends a clear message in the run-up to the 2020 election.

Macgregor, who has previously been on the shortlists to be either US national security advisor or Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, would be that rarest of creatures in Trumpworld: an appointee actually in line with the policies the President campaigned on in 2016.

In him, Trump would at long last have a high profile advocate for foreign policy positions that arguably won him the election four years ago. Macgregor has been a staunch supporter of the President’s efforts to finally bring a real and lasting peace to the Korean peninsula. He has also long been an outspoken proponent of a worldwide US military drawdown, in particular calling for a serious rethink of the benefits of NATO.

President Trump has consistently called on America’s NATO partners, especially Germany, to increase their defence expenditures up to 2% of GDP. In that regard, he is not dissimilar from his presidential predecessors: both George W. Bush and Barack Obama regularly expressed frustration with NATO member countries for not spending more of their budgets on defence.

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Like the President, Colonel Macgregor recognises that, in aggregate, the EU has a larger population and economy than the U.S. and is perfectly capable of defending itself. Unfortunately, the cold war defence alliance has, in the decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall, transformed itself into a global policeman, and a reckless one at that: the disasters of Iraq, Libya and Syria have not only undermined regional stability, they have also hampered efforts by Trump to make peace with North Korea and come to a modus vivendi with Russia.

But in some respects, Macgregor has gone even further than the president and will doubtless spell out some hard truths to the German government if he becomes the next US Ambassador to Berlin. Just last year, he called NATO a “zombie”. Even more controversial during a period of bogus “Russiagate” fanaticism, Macgregor has inconveniently reminded us that “the promises given to President Mikhail Gorbachev by President George H. W. Bush, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, President Francois Mitterrand, Chancellor Helmut Kohl and their foreign ministers in 1990 — not to expand NATO eastward; not to extend membership in the NATO alliance to former member states of the Warsaw Pact—were ignored.”

This strategic commitment has not just been ignored with impunity over decades, but recently exacerbated, given America’s decision to place more US troops right on Russia’s doorstep in Poland. Indeed, NATO’s ongoing eastward expansion to Russia’s borders — encouraged by successive Democratic and Republican Administrations in Washington alike — has revived tensions with a bellicose Moscow, an irresponsible threat inflation that has revived the perpetual gravy train that flows to the Pentagon.

Macgregor, who holds a PhD from the University of Virginia, will hopefully restore some coherence to Trump’s foreign policy. He has long been a critic of the militarisation of US foreign policy, while also calling for long needed reforms in the US armed services. His credentials on that score are unassailable: Macgregor was awarded a Bronze Star with a V device for Valor in the first Gulf War for his heroic leadership in the Battle of 73 Easting, but he remained a staunch critic of the Iraqi occupation after his retirement from the armed forces in 2004.

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Will America ever be great again?

By Justin Webb

Under normal circumstances, in a normal country, the elevation of someone of Macgregor’s stature would have been hailed by the press and foreign affairs commentariat. Alas, we are a long way from that now, and so, predictably, Macgregor’s nomination has set off a round of ad hominem attacks designed to derail his confirmation.

We’ve seen this movie before. Rather than address a nominee’s core competencies, the establishment engages in character slurs, asserting racism or the standard canard, anti-Semitism. For example, back in 2012 when President Obama nominated another war hero with contrarian views that threatened to upend to the bipartisan consensus, Chuck Hagel found himself on the receiving end of unfounded accusations of anti-Semitism by leading neo-conservatives, such as William Kristol, Eliot Cohen and Jennifer Rubin.

The focus on only a handful of Macgregor’s past statements are just a pretext for the real reasons his nomination is drawing fire. First, he is a target because his views run 180 degrees counter to those who compose the DC foreign policy “blob”, namely those working in government, think tanks, and academia, none of whom have ever been held to account for its many grave failures over the past 20 years.

Even worse, many of these same Establishment figures are now predictably reaching out to Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden. A report last week quoted unnamed “individuals who work for conservative think tanks in Washington” who have acknowledged “informally speaking with members of the Biden team in recent weeks.” The former Vice-President himself has spent his entire career in the beltway, and reflexively shares the prevailing biases of the Washington foreign policy consensus.

That’s certainly not Douglas Macgregor. He is one of the leading figures of Washington’s small and besieged but growing and determined, counter-establishment. In addition to his role as a contrarian commentator on Tucker Carlson’s popular broadcast, Macgregor is a member of the board of the Committee for the Republic which has long served as the social and intellectual nexus of DC’s counter-establishment.

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The counter-establishment is rightly deemed a growing threat to the militarist status quo and plays a crucial role in pushing back against the bipartisan foreign policy that is instinctively predisposed to militarism and open-ended fiscal commitments to the Pentagon. Equally fundamental is that this group reflects the growing views of the American public which, according to recent polling, revealed a national voter population that is largely sceptical of the practicality or benefits of military intervention overseas.

Indeed, since the election of Donald Trump, DC ruling elites on both sides of the political aisle have made it abundantly clear that in their view the only people who are qualified to run for the presidency are those who refuse to question the status quo. Through incessant leaks against Trump and the dissemination of stories of dubious reporting (coincidentally, always occurring whenever a troop reduction anywhere is publicly mooted), they are seeking to ensure that never again will an outsider with heterodox views challenge the existing militarist status quo in a manner that subverts their foreign policy objectives.

Macgregor, if he had his way, would reduce the number of generals and colonels — and, of course, the huge amount of dollars now allocated to the Pentagon. President Trump, whether we approve of him or not (and the authors most assuredly do not) has not had, until now, a single high ranking member of his administration who understands, much less cares about what American imperial overreach has done to its own citizens. In Doug Macgregor, he finally will have a figure who will make this case very forcefully — and on an influential European stage.

The case for Macgregor’s confirmation is clear: after 20 years of endless wars during which they have been buffeted by three recessions and a global pandemic, the American people want the US to step away from the frontline and seek to solve problems at home. Macgregor’s appointment would move us closer to that goal. Were his nomination to be subverted, however, then we would see who really pulls the strings in Washington. It would also illustrate that, regardless of who wins the 2020 election, the country is likely to continue down the path to perpetual, ruinous warfare.

That is certainly plausible. In which case, it would presumably be important to document how ordinary Americans, especially those most directly affected, perceive the “movement” in question.

Scan almost any of the popular media coverage over the past six weeks and you’ll find that journalists have been steadfast in their depiction of “protesters” as unassailably “peaceful.” While the vast majority of those who attended a state-backed demonstration or some other event spurred by the ‘movement’ are unlikely to have committed any acts of physical destruction, the term “peaceful protest” doesn’t seem to quite capture the impact of a society-wide upheaval that included, as a key component, mass riots — the magnitude of which have not been seen in the U.S. since at least the 1960s.

From large metro areas like Chicago and Minneapolis/St. Paul, to small and mid-sized cities like Fort Wayne, Indiana and Green Bay, Wisconsin, the number of boarded up, damaged or destroyed buildings I have personally observed — commercial, civic, and residential — is staggering. Keeping exact count is impossible. One might think that a major media organisation such as the New York Times would use some of their galactic journalistic resources to tally up the wreckage for posterity. But roughly six weeks later, and such a tally is still nowhere to be found.

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A standard retort one often hears is that “the riots” must not be conflated with “the protests,” which is technically accurate in certain contexts. But the distinction is not as obvious as the media like to make out. In many locations, police and fire services were diverted to accommodate these massive protests, which in turn created a vacuum that enabled the outbreak of riotous activity. As one resident of Minneapolis explained to me, emergency services told him that they would simply be unavailable during the weekend of 29-31 May, while other locals recounted with amazement that police were totally absent as their neighbourhoods burned.

In Milwaukee, a man described being chased down by rioters after getting off the bus on his way home from work. He saw no difference between protesters and rioters; the flippant idea that these groups can be so neatly disentangled is wrong.

This view is just as likely to be espoused by black people and other minorities as anyone else (the Milwaukee man was black), which renders the media’s strident insistence to depict the ‘movement’ as entirely peaceful incongruous with the perceptions of working-class Americans (of all races). So many of them experienced what transpired more as a painful tragedy than any kind of wondrous harmony.

Indeed, the resulting destruction may have set their majority-minority neighbourhoods back economically for months or years, if not longer. Most had already been struggling due to the pandemic, with the riots interrupting fragile reopening plans. To exclude the perspectives of these people from popular media narratives amounts to a kind of purposefully obfuscatory, moralising snobbery. Talk about ‘erasure’.

So why, exactly, has the scope of these riots been so assiduously downplayed, and the opinions of those who experienced them first-hand been largely ignored? A number of potential explanations ring true. For one, media elites desperately do not want to undermine the moral legitimacy of a ‘movement’ that they have cast as presumptively righteous. And highlighting that urban minority populations are generally less enthusiastic about a movement whose mantra is “Black Lives Matter” would be embarrassing for obvious reasons.

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The white liberals and Leftists who claim to be so sensitively attuned to the feelings of minorities clearly spend very little time actually talking to working class non-white people — or at least those who happen to fall outside their activist cohort. If they did, they would be saddened to discover that, unlike them, working class non-whites frequently express “small-c” conservative cultural attitudes.

For instance, black Americans whom I’ve spoken to on the street across America in randomly-selected encounters were almost unanimous in their approval of the National Guard deployments to their neighborhood during the riots. If anything, their main criticism was that these deployments came too late to prevent the destruction.

This certainly makes the emotional meltdown of coddled 20 and 30-something journalists, who seriously claimed that they were “endangered” by a U.S. Senator’s NYT column advocating for a military presence to maintain order in cities, look especially disconnected and bizarre. So one could understand why the media would be reluctant to feature the “voices” of minorities who take an alternate view.

There’s also the barely-hidden fear that properly depicting the after-effects of these riots would somehow “help Trump” during an election year. Even if it could be established as true that reporting on a historically significant event would “help” the incumbent president, refraining from such reportage on that ground would obviously be wildly improper from a journalistic perspective.

But even from a raw political standpoint, it’s almost certainly not even true. Trump’s inability to convert this post-riot political environment into some kind of electoral advantage is an irony unto itself, given the theme of his inaugural address — which ominously (but not entirely unjustifiably) invoked the specter of “American carnage”. For all the non-stop hysteria painting Trump as some kind of maniacal fascist, it truly is a lousy fascist who fails to leverage widespread social unrest and instability to consolidate power.

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Needless to say, Trump is also currently presiding over a disastrous federal pandemic response, and rapidly shedding support among elderly voters. So if one insists on behaving purely as a partisan actor — which many contemporary journalists certainly are — any fatuous “would it help Trump?” calculation ought to be irrelevant.

Trump or no Trump, the lack of adequate coverage is the true affront. It should be more widely known that large swathes of a major American metropolis, Minneapolis/St. Paul, still lies in rubble over a month after the riots. And the main perpetrators of this destruction — namely those who committed the most incendiary arson attacks — were, by many accounts relayed to me directly, white Left-wing activists. Refusing to seek out and accurately present this information reflects the mainstream media’s propensity to operate under predetermined, politicised assumptions that are antithetical to any rightly-understood conception of journalism.

Travelling around Minneapolis, one frequently sees the anarchist “A” symbol scrawled on charred and/or boarded-up buildings, as well as catchphrases like “Viva La Revolucion” — expressions typical of Left-wing activists. Indeed, it’s abundantly clear that there was a strong ideological component to these riots, one that’s also been under-emphasised by the media, again likely because of the belief that it could in some vague sense “help Trump.” I spoke to numerous residents who are convinced that white out-of-towners were the ones who instigated the most severe chaos, after which locals latched on opportunistically. Marianne Robinson, a black woman who has resided in Chicago’s South Side for decades, asked me if I was familiar with “antifa” and blamed them for the riots.

Flora Westbrooks of Minneapolis, whose hair salon was burned down, was likewise convinced that the perpetrators could not have possibly been familiar with the neighbourhood given her longstanding community ties there. The theory might be a tad over-simplistic, but it does seem at least partially accurate. A (white) rioter I interviewed, who was present when the Third Police Precinct building in Minneapolis burned, remarked to me that he found himself in jail alongside people who came from as far as Missouri, Florida, Colorado, California and other distant states. He said they ventured to Minnesota out of a mixture of thrill-seeking and inchoate political grievance.

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A police officer on foot patrol in Chicago’s heavily-black West Side remarked to me how perplexed she was by the lack of coverage of the damage in these neighbourhoods. Indeed, a simple drive around such parts of Chicago reveals a stunning number of boarded-up establishments, many of which appear like they will never return. The officer mused that she enjoyed the social-work aspects of the job — I watched her greeting various street-dwellers by name — and so, far from seeing the “Defund the Police” slogan and other expressions of animosity as an existential threat to the Chicago Police Department, regarded it as so detached from her everyday experience that she wasn’t even bothered. Over the course of my ten days in Minneapolis, I didn’t see a single officer on foot patrol, which is highly unusual for a major American city.

In Chicago, at the peak of the riots during the last weekend in May, there were a record-breaking 18 homicides in a single 24-hour period — the most since such data started being collected in 1961. I mention this not to make a knee-jerk “what about black-on-black crime” point, but simply to ask in general terms: why wasn’t this historic occurrence featured more prominently in the coverage of these protests?

Something extreme just happened in America. I could give dozens of additional examples of reportorial tidbits which don’t align with the prevailing media narrative that has flourished in the wake of this “movement”. And if you hadn’t seen it directly, would you ever know?