De Tocqueville thought that there was no real risk of presidential despotism. This was because the federal government was obliged to share power with the component states of the Union; and because even at the federal level the president had to share power with a representative Congress. There was, however, an important reservation. The checks and balances of the Constitution only worked because the federal executive had very few domestic functions. The president’s role was limited to the conduct of foreign affairs and commanding the armed forces. His office therefore provided little scope for would-be despots. In 1832, the writer pointed out, the federal payroll comprised just 12,000 civilian officials, as opposed to 138,000 in France at the same date. In any democracy, De Tocqueville argued, the risk of despotism is directly proportionate to the degree of control exercised by the executive over its internal affairs.

Since De Tocqueville wrote, events have combined to falsify his grounds for optimism. The federal government, and therefore the president who directs it, now has functions encompassing most aspects of public welfare. Its 12,000 civilian employees of 1832 have grown to two million in 2025, in addition to another million employees of the individual states, many of whom are employed in federal programs. In the same period, federal government expenditure has increased from an estimated 0.02% of GDP to 23%, dwarfing the expenditure of the individual states. This is a pattern common to all modern democracies. At the time of the census of 1851, the United Kingdom employed just 1,628 civil servants, as against 560,000 now. At the end of the 19th century, government expenditure in European countries stood at about a tenth of GDP on average, as opposed to just under half today. Even these figures do not capture the whole picture. Until relatively recently, the main limitation on the power of governments was their ignorance. The German sociologist Max Weber defined bureaucracy as “domination through knowledge”. That domination has been greatly increased by modern techniques of information gathering, storage and retrieval.

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The totalitarianism of the open society

By Matthew Crawford

Article II of the US Constitution concentrates all executive power in the president’s hands. He has an electoral mandate independent of Congress. He hires and fires all federal agents and employees. All of them are answerable to him. He is the commander in chief of the armed forces. He nominates all federal judges, subject to Senate confirmation. He is not answerable to Congress for the way that he uses these powers, except by way of impeachment, and only then for treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors. Since a decision by the Supreme Court in 2024, the president has also been constitutionally immune from criminal liability for acts done in his public capacity.

These awesome powers are characteristic of presidential systems, and the only other region where presidential democracies have been the norm is Latin America. Every Latin American country has adopted the US constitutional model, with greater or lesser variants. And every one of them has at some points in its history experienced the subversion of its democracy by its president or the usurpation of presidential powers by a military dictator. The only significant European country to have a presidential system comparable to the US is France. The constitution of the Fifth French Republic was created for a relatively benign strongman, General de Gaulle, but the French presidency may well in 2027 fall into the hands of a markedly less benign strongman of the extreme Left or Right.

The great German-American constitutional scholar Karl Loewenstein observed that the success of the American presidential model was due to factors unique to the United States: its historical prosperity, its relative freedom from external threats, its political culture. These things had, as he put it, “converted an intrinsically absurd constitutional mechanism into a cherished national myth”. When transplanted to a less privileged environment, Loewentein pointed out that the American model has almost always failed. His emphasis on the moral and physical environment of democracies was an important insight. After all, the moral and physical environment may change. All democratic constitutions, whether formal and legal like that of the USA, or informal and political like Britain’s, are vulnerable to the collapse of the basic cultural norms on which democracies depend. When this happens, the formal institutional framework usually survives. There are elections, legislatures, courts and so on in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. But the rule of law and substance of democratic accountability have gone, replaced by a brutal autocratic reality.

Hence the historic significance of Donald Trump. There is a tendency to suggest that Trump is a by-product of American democratic politics, difficult, perhaps, to accommodate within traditional political categories, but nothing like the totalitarian tyrants of the 20th century. This view is fundamentally mistaken. Trump exhibits the three classic symptoms of the totalitarian mind: a personal cult around a charismatic leader; the total identification of the state with himself; and a refusal to accept the legitimacy of any opposition or dissent. He has dismantled the checks and balances of the world’s oldest and most formal constitution in an astonishingly short time. By now, the examples are all too familiar: the bogus claims to emergency powers, part of the classic toolkit of despots the world over; the deployment of ICE’s paramilitaries on the streets of American cities; the attempt to impose taxes (in the shape of tariffs) by executive order; the brazen corruption. He has also conformed to the pattern observable throughout history — that sooner or later the authoritarian rulers of powerful states become international predators.

The core principle of the rule of law is that the state has no power to coerce anyone other than in accordance with public and settled rules of law applicable generally, and not just at the discretion of the ruler. That principle has been directly violated by presidential directions not to enforce mandatory legislation of which the president disapproves, such as the laws against international bribery, or mandatory congressional appropriation of funds to things like education or foreign aid. Trump’s identification of the state with himself and his war on dissent have led him to vindictive attacks on any prominent voice which opposes him, attacks which directly violate the basic principles of the rule of law. We have seen the use of public authority to pursue private vendettas against those have crossed him, including two Democrat governors, a mayor of Chicago, various retired generals, a former director of the FBI, a former director of the CIA, law firms who acted for his enemies, various universities whose teaching staff do not see the world as he does, and just about anyone who worked on Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election or Jack Smith’s investigation of the Capitol riots of 6 January, 2021. Some of these acts have been stopped by the courts, provoking from the President a stream of vulgar abuse against the judges responsible. These things follow a pattern that exposes Donald Trump’s systematic unwillingness to be constrained by the rules that mark the difference between a democratic chief executive and a tyrant.

It is easy to say, as we observe these things, that the current constitutional problems of the United States are all down to the megalomania of one individual. But that is to underestimate the gravity of the situation. The real problem is that this unlikely figure represents something very attractive for many Americans. They were not deceived when they elected him in 2016, let alone 2024. Trump made no secret of his plans and his impatience with democratic constraints during the campaign. Yet half of American voters voted for him. On current polling, at least a third of the electorate would vote for him again if it was not for the two-term limit. There is, however, no two-term limit for voters. The people who want to confer supreme executive power on someone like Trump will still be around in future presidential elections. The critical question, therefore, is not why Trump behaves as he does, but why so many Americans applaud him.

All mature societies are divided by differences of interest and opinion, some of which are fundamental. A liberal democracy can only survive if these differences are transcended by our common acceptance of the legitimacy of the decision-making process, even when we disagree with the outcome. This calls for cultural values which do not come naturally to human beings. You have to care more about ensuring that the decision-making process works, than about “winning” on any particular issue. It requires a large measure of political sensitivity, tolerance and cooperative empathy among both politicians and citizens. It requires conventions about how even lawful powers will be exercised so as to avoid capricious, vindictive or oppressive decisions. Above all, it requires people to treat political opponents as fellow-citizens with whom they disagree, and not as enemies to be trashed or prosecuted. In the United States, the polarization of opinion has meant that people have lost their common respect for the decision-making process if it yields results that they do not like, as it inevitably will from time to time. Without that, people who are disappointed with democratic governments spontaneously turn to more authoritarian regimes.

The origin of the current polarization of opinion in the United States lies not with the Right but with the Left. The liberal consensus of the Sixties and Seventies approached the political process with a high degree of entitlement, and achieved a considerable measure of control over the courts, executive agencies, universities and other cultural institutions. Liberals used this cultural control to move into intolerant identity politics and critical theory, and to promote social and cultural policies for which there was no consensus in the population at large. They treated alternative opinions as lacking legitimacy and therefore unworthy of notice. The word “deplorables”, which may have cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election, sums up this attitude perfectly.

The Right-wing backlash, however, has been a great deal worse than the liberal arrogance which provoked it. Today it is the Republican Party which has an invincible sense of entitlement. Hence its irrational rage against Presidents Clinton and Obama, its persistent constitutional obstructiveness under both of them, and its ruthless use of voter suppression and gerrymandering to disenfranchise Democrats. Hence also the refusal to accept adverse election results on the basis of invented allegations of fraud. These things have happened because the MAGA movement, which today dominates the Republican Party, is not prepared to accept the legitimacy of any political views but its own. The result has been to junk the political culture that made the Constitution workable.

We can see this process unfolding in Congress’s abandonment of its traditional role as a bipartisan guardian of the Constitution. A good example is the willingness of the relevant Senate committees to confirm the parade of stooges and crackpots that Trump nominated to major federal offices in his second term, people who would swiftly have been shown the door in an earlier era. Perhaps the low point of Congressional partisanship came with the refusal of the Republican majority on the Judiciary Committee to schedule confirmation hearings for Merrick Garland, Obama’s last Supreme Court nomination until his term ended so that his Republican successor could fill the vacancy instead. The same people then accelerated the hearing for Amy Coney Barrett, the last appointment of Trump’s first term, so as to get it confirmed before he left office. There was nothing unlawful about any of this, but it illustrates the ease with which even the most carefully designed democracy can be subverted once the underlying spirit has gone. The result has been the most partisan Supreme Court since the Thirties, and arguably since the 1850s.

The delegitimization of political opponents can be seen at its crudest in the current issues about redistricting and voter suppression. Redistricting, otherwise known as gerrymandering, is a device used to dilute the votes of one’s political opponents. It has been described as a way of enabling incumbent lawmakers to pick their electors instead of the other way round. In Rucho v Common Cause (2019), the Republican-appointed majority the Supreme Court held that there was nothing unlawful about overtly partisan redistricting. I believe that the only other country in the world which expressly allows the practice is the Pacific republic of Micronesia (population: 100,000). In June 2025, Trump persuaded the Republican majority in the Texas state legislature to redraw their congressional districts so as to artificially eliminate five serving Democrat representatives and replace them with Republicans. Other States with incumbent Democrat majorities responded by redistricting to create extra Democrat seats at the expense of Republicans. In some states, such as California and Virginia, these changes were approved in state-wide referenda. Recently, Republican lawmakers in Indiana, who had resisted the partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts, were deselected in the Republican primaries in favor of Trump-backed candidates committed to allowing the gerrymandering to go ahead.

What are the lessons of all this for the United Kingdom? There are important institutional differences between the United States and Britain. Britain, like most European democracies, has a parliamentary system, and parliamentary systems are better at dispersing power than presidential systems. The British prime minister and his government are daily answerable to the House of Commons for everything that they do. Their hold on power lasts only as long as they retain the confidence of the House. A would-be despot in our system would have to carry many more people with him to succeed. Boris Johnson was the leader of a party with a large overall majority in the House of Commons, but was nevertheless unable to find enough supporters among them to remain in power. In Britain, judges are appointed by a non-political Judicial Appointment Commission. The executive therefore cannot stuff the judiciary with its ideological supporters. In Britain, meanwhile, the boundaries of parliamentary constituencies are fixed at prescribed intervals by a non-political Boundary Commission. Election expenses are limited by law. The courts are vigilant in challenging ministers who exceed their legal powers or use them for illegitimate purposes, and they act a great deal faster than the federal courts in the US. Boris Johnson’s decision to prorogue Parliament and escape parliamentary scrutiny of his negotiations with the European Union was quashed in judicial proceedings which lasted less than two months from their commencement to the Supreme Court’s judgment.

All of this means that, under the current law, our institutions are better equipped to resist the despotic tendencies of democratic politics than those of the United States. Even so, Britain’s institutional defenses against despotism have some serious weaknesses. The first is that under our constitutional settlement it is impossible to entrench any of the legal protections against the establishment of a British despotism. The statutory provisions about electoral boundaries, electoral expenses or judicial appointment could be swept away by legislation by a majority of one in each house of Parliament, or after a year in the House of Commons alone. There are substantial advantages in our unwritten political constitution, which has enabled us to adapt to radical social and political changes in our society that would have broken most written constitutions. But we have to recognize that a greater exposure to the threat of totalitarian takeover is the price for these advantages.

The second institutional weakness is that like the American Congress the House of Commons is elected from single-member constituencies on the first-past-the-post system. No political party has achieved a majority of the national vote in the UK since 1935. The effect of FPTP is artificially to increase the impact of electoral swings. This will normally give the largest party an overall majority in the Commons, even if it lacks one in the electorate at large. In a two-party system such as we had until recently, it has been a valuable source of stability. In a multiparty system, as ours is now becoming, the effect is intensely destabilizing. The largest of seven parties may have a quite small proportion of the popular vote. The present government has one of the largest overall parliamentary majorities since the war, with only a third of the popular vote. No government has ever before enjoyed an absolute majority in Parliament on such a small proportion of the national vote. In local authority elections, insurgent parties have sometimes achieved large majorities of council seats on small proportions of the vote. Such parties can capture the House of Commons, too, without the need to negotiate coalitions that might restrain their exercise of power. It is worth remembering that, albeit under a very different political system, Hitler became Chancellor of a minority government on just 37% of the popular vote in the general election of 1932, the last free election to be held in Germany before the war. In Britain, less than that percentage can capture not just the highest office in government but an overall majority in the House of Commons.

Thirdly, the leaders of the three traditional UK-wide parties are no longer chosen by their MPs: unless someone can contrive to be the only candidate. Normally, they are chosen by their grassroots members. This has been a very significant change. MPs are there to represent the public interest. It is in their personal interest to appeal to a much broader spectrum of opinion than just their own base, if they want to be re-elected anyway. Most grassroots members look at the world differently. Their parties are no longer the mass movements they once were. Their membership rolls are small, and consist mainly of enthusiasts who congregate at the outer edges of the political spectrum. They are interested in no one’s opinion but their own. The result is that party leaders — and therefore potential prime ministers — are chosen by very small groups of activists who are unrepresentative of those who vote for their party, let alone the electorate at large. Jeremy Corbyn and Liz Truss were the natural products of that process. In a system where the endorsement of a political party is a precondition for election, this is a promising scenario for a would-be despot.

Again, the United States is a warning. Candidates for the presidency and Congress are selected in primaries, which are usually closed: in other words. limited to a party’s registered supporters. And like their British equivalents, these people are generally activists at the outer edge of the political spectrum. This has enabled Donald Trump to arrange the deselection of sitting Republican Congressmen who cross him or who show any tendency to independent judgment, replacing them with candidates endorsed by himself. This has happened recently in Texas, Kentucky and Louisiana, and the effect has been to reduce the Congressional majority to a servile loyalty to one man, at a time when he is becoming unpopular in the nation at large. This not only could happen here but it does. In November 2019, Boris Johnson personally purged 21 members of his own party who did not share his vision of Britain’s relations with the European Union, refusing to allow them to stand as Conservatives at the general election and thus ensuring that they lost their seats.

It is, however, a mistake to concentrate exclusively on institutional barriers to despotic government. The United States has succumbed to despotic politics in spite of having a carefully written constitution expressed to be “the supreme law of the land”, and despite boasting a strong tradition of judicial and legislative independence. The recent history not just of the United States but of other democracies, such as Poland and Hungary, shows that even with a written constitution institutional barriers to despotism are permeable. The executive branch of the state is so powerful in the modern world that it can swamp any system of checks and balances if its directors are prepared to be sufficiently ruthless. Ultimately no democracy, however robust its institutional framework, can resist the collapse of the cultural values on which democracy depends.

The main problem faced by modern democracies is common to the United States and Britain and indeed to most of Europe. Public expectations of the state are so high that no state can possibly satisfy them. Either the state is incapable of satisfying them full stop  — or else it can satisfy them only at the expense of other equally important expectations. No policy area arouses higher expectations than the economy. People expect their lot to improve, generation by generation. We have got used to the idea of ever-increasing prosperity, because that has been our experience since the Second World War. But historically there have been very few societies and very few periods of history in which economic growth has been sustained for more than a short period, say two or three generations. Governments can create the conditions for economic expansion. They can refrain from wealth-destroying policies. But they cannot actually generate prosperity. Yet people’s voting choices tend to be based on the assumption that they can, and that economic misfortune is necessarily the responsibility of government.

This matters because, historically, democracies have always been heavily dependent on economic good fortune. Western democracy was born in the 19th century, in an age of creative optimism, economic expansion and Western domination of the world. This is particularly relevant to the current state of the US. The country has enjoyed a great deal of economic good fortune. The indications are that this may be coming to an end. Looking at the US economy as a whole, it is in good shape by international standards. Its growth rate is impressive too. The problem is that most earners have not experienced the benefits. Middle class and blue-collar incomes were traditionally based on extraction, agriculture and manufacturing. These sectors were labor-intensive activities calling for many different skill levels, and were therefore relatively efficient distributors of the benefits of American prosperity. But they have experienced little real growth since the Eighties. Technological innovation is essential to growth, but it is disruptive, altering the distribution of wealth in favor of the innovators. American productivity has for some decades been generated mainly by a few dynamic sectors of the economy, such as the tech industries and financial services, which employ relatively small numbers of intellectually gifted people. The benefits are increasingly concentrated in the hands of these elites. This is reflected in high levels of graduate unemployment among young people who have tried to make their careers in other fields. Older skills have become redundant or displaced by competition from low-wage economies. In the longer term, then, the outlook is bleak, as the American technological lead over countries like China and India shortens and in some areas disappears altogether. We are already seeing this in areas like AI and electric vehicles.

I illustrate these points by reference to the United States, which is probably the extreme example. But this is not just an American issue. In Britain, the most dynamic sectors of the economy are financial services, which account for about a tenth of GDP; digital services including AI which account for another 7%; and the technically advanced areas of manufacturing. These are also sectors whose prosperity disproportionately benefits an educational and technocratic elite.

Economic frustration has a lot to do with declining belief in democracy and rising support for authoritarian alternatives. The Pew Research Institute has been tracking confidence in democracy internationally for some 30 years. Its surveys suggest that in most Western countries, a majority of people are dissatisfied with democracy. The figure is 62% in the United States. In France, Italy, Spain and Greece, the proportion is significantly higher. In Britain, it is 51%. The same surveys establish an exact relationship between dissatisfaction with democracy and economic pessimism.

One of the more striking electoral trends in Western democracies has been the high levels of support for authoritarian parties among the young, who for obvious reasons are those mainly affected by the closing out of economic opportunities. Studies of the US presidential election of 2024 suggest that 56% of American men under 30, and 40% of American women in the same age group, voted for Trump. This was a substantial increase on the 2016 election, even though Trump’s autocratic tendencies had become more obvious in the meantime. In Britain, surveys of opinion, such as those published in 2020 by the Bennett Institute in Cambridge, or in 2023 by the Open Society Foundation, all suggest that disillusionment with democracy is strongest among younger citizens. They are much more dissatisfied than their elders were at the same stage in life, and the situation is getting worse. Nor again, are Britain and the United States alone. In France, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National is the most popular party among voters under the age of 35.

In the life of any political community, the shattering of optimism is a dangerous moment. Disillusionment with the promise of progress was a major factor in the 30-year crisis of Europe which began in 1914 and ended in 1945. That crisis was characterized by a resort to autocracy across much of the continent. Britain, the United States and France escaped that fate, but in all three countries, there were powerful authoritarian movements of Left and Right that drew their strength mainly from economic misfortune. When people are disappointed, they blame “the system”, the “deep state” or the whole class of democratic politicians. They lash out, spontaneously turning to strongmen, and kidding themselves that strongmen get things done. All this is consistent with the historically high levels of electoral support for authoritarian figures such as Marine Le Pen, the leading lights of Alternativ für Deutschland, and (until recently) Viktor Orban, all of them, incidentally, politicians for whom Trump has expressed admiration.

Political polarization, which has done so much to undermine constitutional values in the United States, has not gone as far in Britain. But it is a phenomenon of growing importance. In recent years the issue which has done most to undermine constitutional values in Britain in recent years is Brexit. The referendum created a sense of entitlement in the majority which inhibited compromise and invited absolute outcomes. This was the mentality summed up in the oft-repeated statement that “the British people” had voted to leave the EU. In fact, just over half of the British people voted to leave the EU. The statement implied what many people said out loud, that the 48% who voted to stay were not for this purpose to be regarded as part of the British people and did not count. The effect was to delegitimize the views of nearly half the population who had voted to remain and wanted to retain a closer relationship with the EU even while leaving its institutions. There are obvious parallels with the attempt of the MAGA movement in the United States to delegitimize the views about immigration, tariffs or foreign relations of the 49% of the electorate who voted Democrat in the 2024 election. In Britain, this attitude reached the outer limits of hyperbole in September 2019 when the Attorney General (of all people) told the House of Commons that having voted to frustrate the government’s plans for the hardest possible form of Brexit, the Commons had “no moral right to sit”. This approach encouraged a more authoritarian style of government, characterized by the Conservative purges of November 2019; the manipulation of the procedures of the House of Commons to silence opposition; and ultimately the attempt to prorogue Parliament at a critical point in negotiations with the European Union.

I have dwelt a little on Brexit not to rake over the embers of old quarrels, but because it is the extreme example of polarization in modern British politics, and the most significant single cause of the decline of a shared political culture. It fragmented our political world, cutting across party lines, sundering the four nations of the United Kingdom and dividing us by class, by region, by economic status and by generation. It split families and alienated friends, something reflected at a trivial level in polls which suggest that a surprisingly large proportion of the population would object if their children dated someone on the other side of the political divide. This has had a continuing impact on our politics, because Brexit was not just a policy. It was the badge of a certain outlook on the political world, reflected in many other areas of political controversy, not least immigration and climate change. In the recent local elections, we witnessed the steep decline of the center as voters migrated to the outer edge of the political spectrum. Like American voters, they lashed out at the inability of governments to deliver a better life.

Many of them are protesting, like the MAGA faithful, against the whole political process and the whole class of politicians. Donald Trump essentially stands for a rejection of deliberative politics because it gets in the way of the kind of decisive outcomes that he and his supporters favor. Those who think like this rarely reflect on how dangerous it is. Politics is the essential mechanism of the democratic state. You cannot have democracy without politics, or politics without politicians. Those who reject politics are really rejecting democracy itself. Their position almost inevitably involves a resort to authoritarian forms of government.

Unfortunately, those who lash out against the political process are not entirely mistaken. There are major issues in our world that democracy has historically proved unable to address: because the electoral cost is too high. Climate change is probably the most obvious example. Across the world, democratic electors reject measures designed to deal with climate change because they almost always involve reducing consumption or raising its cost. The effect is to pass on the problem in aggravated form to the next generation. There are other examples. We cannot resolve the high cost of housing in Britain without loosening planning and environmental controls to which existing home-owners are understandably attached. Almost any attempt to reform the funding of old-age pensions and care at a time of increasing longevity risks an electoral backlash from the beneficiaries of the current system, who are numerous and who vote more diligently than any other group. It is no coincidence that many of these dilemmas of the democratic state involve conflicts between the interests of different generations. It is the young who will suffer most if we fail to deal with climate change. It is the young who cannot get onto the housing ladder until they are middle-aged and often not even then. It is the young whose taxes support the cost of old-age provision. It is the young who are unable to find jobs in a stagnant economy. It should be no surprise that it is the young who are most disenchanted with democracy.

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How Britain lost control

By Jonathan Sumption

Democracy has a natural tendency to create interest groups for whom the preservation of their current advantages — or the acquisition of new ones — are the dominant factors in their political choices. Political philosophers from Aristotle to Montesquieu have observed that a harmonious society requires what they have called “virtue”. What they meant by virtue was an ability to put common interests above personal ones. In a democracy, though, this kind of virtue is almost impossible to achieve. It is asking a lot to expect people to look beyond their own interest at the broader interests of society, and to future problems that may not materialize until after their deaths. Historically, it has never happened. But the political cost of voting exclusively according to our current material interests has never been as high as it is now. The inability of democracies to adopt unwelcome measures in response to critical issues is likely, in the long run, to lead to a much more autocratic model of government.

Democracy is fragile. Its history in the West has been relatively brief — barely a century and a half. The default condition of mankind has always been some form of autocracy. The Economist Intelligence Unit, which has published a “Democracy Index” since 2006, reckons that only 25 of the 167 countries covered, encompassing 6.6% of the world’s population, ranked as full democracies. Even before Trump’s second term, the United States was not one of them. It ranked only as a “flawed democracy”, thus putting it in the same category as fragmented countries like South Africa and unstable ones like most of South America. Today, most of the world’s population lives under authoritarian regimes of one kind or another. Britain and the countries of Western Europe still rank as full democracies. Unfortunately, though, we cannot take it for granted that they still will be there in the next generation.

This essay was adapted from the St George’s House Annual Lecture, delivered at St George’s Chapel Windsor on Tuesday 14 July 2026.

Nearly two centuries later, do we Americans retain the talent for association? The signs aren’t promising. We belong to fewer congregations, clubs, unions, and lodges than our grandparents did. We report fewer close friends, and a rising share of us claim none at all. Time spent alone has reached record highs, and the Surgeon General has declared loneliness a public-health emergency. The genius for association that Tocqueville admired has not been abolished, so much as left to atrophy.

The breakdown in association results in what I call the problem of “the one and the 99” — the direct and unnatural relationship between a human person and a large group. It is a perennial problem, but current conditions have accentuated it dramatically because our technologies are built to connect the one directly to the millions, dissolving everything in between. The platforms that promised to bring us together did so by hollowing out the associations that once stood between the person and the mass. A man scrolling alone is plugged into a crowd of strangers — exposed to their moods, their fears, their judgments — with no friend group or congregation to mediate the encounter. We have never been connected to so many while accompanied by so few. 

Its political manifestation is the self set against the state, with no intermediary institutions or forms of association between them — except a few good group chats, if you’re lucky.

That is not only a lonely and somewhat pathetic way to live. It is also dangerous. The human quest for community does not disappear in these atomized environments; it simply gravitates toward more totalitarian forms of government and belonging.

History has tried to warn us about this danger — and it also shows us the way out.

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The scapegoating of Peter Thiel

By Luke Burgis

In the gray hush of 1970s Czechoslovakia, where even silence seemed state-issued, there was a band called The Plastic People of the Universe. Its music was raw, dissonant, and defiantly Western. The band didn’t shout slogans or call for revolution, but played loudly and boldly. For that, its members were arrested by the Communist government in 1976.

Among those watching was a playwright and dissident named Václav Havel, who would eventually become president of post-Communist Czechoslovakia. Galvanized by what he saw, Havel wrote a 1978 manifesto in samizdat (self-published) form that passed from hand to trembling hand across the country, under the title The Power of the Powerless.

“Everyone understood that an attack on the Czech musical underground was an attack on a most elementary and important thing,” he wrote, “something that in fact bound everyone together: it was an attack on the very notion of ‘living within the truth,’ on the real aims of life.”

Havel’s essay centers around a memorable image — a hypothetical greengrocer who places a sign in his shop window that reads “WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!” The greengrocer doesn’t really have a strong belief that the workers of the world should unite. He places the sign in the window because it is the easiest thing to do. “The poster was delivered to our greengrocer from the enterprise headquarters along with the onions and carrots,” Havel wrote. It gets put up because it is the default thing to do, like unpacking the onions and carrots and putting them on the shelf.

Acts like that, Havel suggested, are the lifeblood of what he called post-totalitarianism, in which people aren’t coerced by force into doing things; they voluntarily do what they think is expected of them. They don’t want to cause any trouble, so they quietly and perhaps even unconsciously engage in performative acts that signal belief in the status quo.

Havel’s poster has not disappeared; it has migrated. Today, it is the reflexive repost, the slogan in the bio, the conviction adopted because the people nearest us already hold it. Few of us examine these gestures any more than the greengrocer examined his sign. We perform them because performing them is the path of least resistance — and because everyone around us is performing them, too.

That is social contagion: the unconscious transmission of belief and desire from one person to the next, the reason a slogan or a fear can move through a crowd faster than any argument can. Post-totalitarianism is simply social contagion left unchecked — a society in which the pressure to perform runs strong and widespread because people do not have the kinds of friends, or civic associations, that would immunize them from it. If our society were a human body, it would have high blood pressure which, left untreated, would damage its vital organs. The way to treat this societal disease is not through medication, but through exercise: in our case, the exercise of healthy association that acts as a check on the pressures of power.

Power rarely comes from one source. It often comes from the way people relate — through trust, fear, stories, and rules. “It is in the basic associations of men that the real consequences of political power reveal themselves,” wrote the sociologist Robert Nisbet in the 1950s. Nisbet understood that political health depends on the strength of intermediate bonds that lie between the individual and the state — families, congregations, and local associations that give shape to common life. Once these bonds dissolve, the individual and the state meet face-to-face, naked and unmediated. That is the crisis of modern politics: not too much government, but too little community.

Havel saw a way to reconstitute the civic bonds that helped people live with more integrity, not according to the lies that falsely held his post-totalitarian society together. What if the compliant greengrocer chooses to change his behavior? “Let us now imagine that one day something in our greengrocer snaps and he stops putting up the slogans merely to ingratiate himself,” he wrote. “He stops voting in elections he knows are a farce. He begins to say what he really thinks at political meetings.” The greengrocer, Havel continued, “has not committed a simple, individual offense, isolated in its own uniqueness, but something incomparably more serious. By breaking the rules of the game, he has disrupted the game as such. He has exposed it as a mere game.”

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The myth of Western crisis

By Michael Lind

The “one” who thinks that he is alone is never truly alone — that feeling of alienation, of isolation, is precisely what the state wants him to believe. Small acts of defiance are never done in isolation, in part because they appeal to the conscience of others. They wake some up; they help others form new associations. It was the fearlessness of a singular rock band, after all, that gave Havel himself the courage to form an association of his own.

In 1977, he and a group of public intellectuals, writers, philosophers, workers, clergymen, artists, and former political prisoners published a manifesto known as Charter 77. It wasn’t a formal organization, but a kind of moral fellowship: a living association of people who wanted to “live within the truth.” In a society built on compliance, the mere act of signing their names became an act of differentiation.

Our society will remain enervated and paralyzed if we believe that the only choice is between the one and the 99 — between isolation and totalizing conformity. The way forward begins with realizing that a vast middle ground exists. The one cannot be connected to the 99 directly without being in danger of either dissolving into it — or isolating for self-preservation. The self and the crowd are not in a natural relationship.

Imagine going to a large concert with a group of friends in a vast stadium filled with 100,000 frenzied fans and losing your friends in the crowd. You suddenly lose sight of your reference point, of those familiar faces, and you become a stranger in an anonymous crowd. It is your friend group — the intermediary association between yourself and the crowd — that keeps you anchored.

In a strong sense, that is the situation that many people find themselves in today, with the loss of the intermediary associations that Tocqueville saw were so important to the American character. A healthy civic association does not measure its success in membership count or the number of events hosted. Unlike the crowd, your association will notice if you stop coming, and it is there that the value lies. You will be sought out.

History suggests that the most transformative associations are rarely massive at the start. Charter 77 had 240 initial signatories. The Oxford Inklings rarely had more than six or eight members in the room, yet changed literary history. Jesus chose 12. Associations of a modest size are large enough to test ideas against resistance, yet intimate enough for personal accountability.

If you can’t claim to be part of a community of that character today, you should stop waiting for it or looking for it. It is time to build the associations on which progress depends.

This essay was adapted from the author’s book,  The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion, which has just been published by Macmillan.

The problem is that even with all the Googling, no one has a definitive answer on what the hell mutual aid actually means. In activist circles, it’s often tacked onto the stock list of self-descriptions, recited as part of their Leftist CVs: I do art, activism, political organizing, and mutual aid, which is like renaming the same job four times on a resume to sound busier. These days, mutual aid is usually a synonym for organized do-goodery or small-scale politics, but not always. 

It’s invoked to describe anything from “craftivism” projects like distributing “Melt the ICE” knitted hats, swapping casseroles, and borrowing a power drill, to running abortion access networks and organizing rapid-response teams for immigration raids. It can apparently include running a homeless shelter in Philadelphia, handing out free condoms and fentanyl test strips in San Francisco, or distributing Indigenous Justice fact sheets for the “Land Back” movement in the Twin Cities. Also, don’t forget mutual-aid GoFundMe campaigns for sex workers or the Bruce Springsteen and Bon Iver benefit concert to raise money for the families of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, which, of course, was named the Mutual Aid Benefit Concert.

What all of these disparate acts have in common is Left-of-center framing. Mutual aid is a woke rebrand of two very old human impulses: charity and neighborliness. Those terms sound too much like conformist bourgeois values, and to Left-libs, the act of helping can’t simply be helpful; it must be subversive. Everything has to be seen as a radical act of resistance against, well, what ya got? Federal overreach. MAGA. Capitalism. White supremacy. Check. Check. Check.

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What’s most grating about mutual-aid discourse isn’t the helping itself — which is mostly good — but the historical amnesia around it. The way activists talk, you’d think Americans only discovered the concept of neighbors helping neighbors sometime around 2020, thanks to, say, the Instagram reels of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In reality, America was built on dense webs of voluntary association and community aid long before anyone sewed “Abolish ICE” on a tote bag. Just ask Alexis de Tocqueville, who — nearly 200 years ago in his book Democracy in America — marveled at the way Americans built their own associations and institutions as a bulwark against elite greed. “In democratic peoples, associations must take the place of the powerful particular persons whom equality of conditions has made disappear,” De Tocqueville wrote. He observed a society where, if a road needed fixing or a barn needed raising, men didn’t wait for a grant or a website; they simply came together and took action.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, union halls, fraternal orders, churches, ethnic societies, volunteer fire companies, and informal neighborhood networks once did much of what today’s organizers claim as a radical innovation and often went way further: they pooled money, fed the hungry, cared for the sick, buried the dead, and kept communities afloat when the state was distant or indifferent. Contemporary activists like to cite the Black Panthers’ Free School Lunch program in Chicago in the 1960s as their intellectual lodestar, but a better comparison might be the infrastructure of mutualism built by European immigrant communities in the same place decades earlier.

When the Czechs, for instance, turned Chicago into the third biggest Czech community in the world behind Prague and Vienna, they constructed hulking structures called sokols where you could attend educational classes, listen to lectures, visit libraries, see choral groups, theater, and other entertainment — all in the same building — for free, if you could speak the native tongue. These pre-welfare-state communities also looked after the poor and provided informal banking and insurance, all without state intervention. There was no “Solidarity, not Charity” slogan plastered on the walls because the distinction was self-evident: you weren’t “serving” a client; you were sustaining your own people. Even as these tight-knit immigrant cultures assimilated, a strong sense of neighborliness and charity remained throughout the 20th century. 

This instinct has dulled in the 21st century; what’s been deemed the “anti-social century,” due to hyperindividualism, the death of in-person community, and the NGOing of America that turned charity into Charity. But that doesn’t mean it’s dead — far from it. If we strip away the radical chic and the academic jargon, the biggest mutual aid project of this year didn’t happen at a protest or a community meeting; it happened on just about every street and city block during this winter’s historic snowstorms. People shoveled each other’s driveways, dug out or jump-started cars in sub-zero temperatures, and checked on the elderly. On my street, a 30-something man named Joe was outside all day after 14 inches of snow fell, shoveling his entire block. Another elderly man took turns heave-ho-ing cars stuck in snowbanks. Shoveling ice, not protesting ICE, was “mutual aid” in its truest and most effective form — neighbors, family, and friends looking out for one another without needing to call it resistance (unless that meant resisting the bad weather). You don’t need to “center the voices” of the cold; just grab a shovel, and suddenly three other people grab their shovels too. That’s how social norms work. 

There’s also a class story hiding in the mutual-aid discourse. Much of what now exists under the banner of mutual aid is, in practice, the middle or upper-middle classes assisting the working poor or what Marx once called the lumpenproletariat, often mediated through NGOs, activist collectives, or social media campaigns. This is presented as horizontal solidarity, but the structure remains vertical. The resource-rich help the resource-poor. Again, there’s nothing particularly wrong with that. But what’s odd is the insistence that this arrangement is fundamentally different from charity, as if renaming the relationship dissolves the underlying asymmetry. It doesn’t. It just changes the story we tell ourselves about it.

That story matters because language shapes expectations. When mutual aid is framed as resistance, ordinary acts of care risk being devalued unless they’re politicized. Helping your neighbor move a couch becomes morally thinner than helping a stranger as part of a branded campaign called something like Seat Your Community. Clearing snow becomes less meaningful than staffing a mutual-aid table with a logo. This is a perverse incentive structure. It nudges people away from the kinds of thick, local bonds that actually sustain communities and toward thin, performative gestures that travel well on social media.

And vibes, like snowdrifts, eventually melt. When the political moment passes, as the current ICE #Resistance will inevitably, so does the attention, and with it the care. Neighborliness, by contrast, is boringly durable. It doesn’t spike on Google Trends, but it persists across decades. Unless your local Food Not Bombs chapter is actually stopping bombs rather than just cooking meals for people in need, that’s not radical. That’s called becoming your grandmother. And thank God. The revolution can wait; the driveway cannot.