That might sound far-fetched now, but the writing is already on the wall. Emanuel’s tried-and-true mantra — “Never let a good crisis go to waste” — is back in fashion in liberal circles. The crisis, of course, is Trump: a singular, exhausting force whose re-election has caused moderate Democrats to yearn for the days of “Build Back Never” and the blunt instrument of a potential nominee who both sharp-elbowed and sharp-tongued.

Since November, Democrats have started talking like they’ve been binge-watching Veep on HBO rather than their old favorite: The West Wing. Party operatives and candidates are swearing like sailors in interviews, swaggering on social media (The Democratic National Committee itself even promoted Sen. Tammy Duckworth’s labeling of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as “a fucking liar”), and senators are testing out their best “tough-guy” impressions. Likewise, mainstream outlets abound with op-eds insisting that liberals must elect a bully and “learn to punch back.” The stage-managed belligerence is new; the emptiness behind it is not.

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Enter Emanuel, who smells opportunity and is eager to cast himself in that role — grizzled, pragmatic, and so combative that he was once nicknamed “Rahmbo.” As a bonus, no one else has a resume of salty language in politics like Rahm; he’s been wielding F-bombs in Washington longer than congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh has been alive. (The unfunny fictional Twitter thread turned coffee table book The F—ing Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel even made cursing his entire personality.)

But the big fucking problem with Rahm trying to become president isn’t his attack dog style, it’s who and what he’s barking at. The pithy catchphrase he’s market-testing on the talk-show circuit these days is that the current batch of Democrats “is weak and woke,” which is a fine diagnosis, but Rahm himself is bad medicine. He’s the Machiavelli of moderation, a veteran of nearly every Democratic Party capitulation of the last few decades, from NAFTA to the Wall Street bailout to a health-care law designed not to offend the insurance industry. “He gets things done,” was the line from Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, Erskine Bowles, in 1996, but what Rahm was building was the ideological cul-de-sac that Democrats have been stuck in ever since: socially liberal, fiscally neoliberal, and emotionally constipated.

When Rahm admitted recently that he was “a product of Bill Clinton,” it was an unintentional self-own. I’m sympathetic to the view, espoused by author Thomas Frank in Listen, Liberal, that Clinton was secretly the biggest villain of the neoliberal era of US politics because he spearheaded the Democratic Party’s heel turn from Party of the People to the Party of Technocrats, bought and paid for by Wall Street, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley. While Republicans were busy tut-tutting “Slick Willie” for his scandals and affairs, Clinton was busy enacting their agenda. He accomplished things that neither Ronald Reagan nor George Bush (H. or W. — take your pick) could only dream of: welfare reform, the crime bill, NAFTA, and the deregulation of the financial and communication industries — legislation that hurt his coalition but boosted the party coffers.

Rahm didn’t just ride that wave — he helped engineer it. As the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the mid-2000s, he built the model that defined the party’s soul-sickness for decades. The so-called blue wave of the 2006 midterms was mythologized in the book The Thumpin’: How Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats Learned to Be Ruthless and Finally Ended the Republican Revolution. His formula was simple: stoke fear about Republican extremism, then run safe, centrist technocrats (preferably veterans) in swing districts to peel off liberal-leaning GOP voters. Then legislate like you’re trying to please Lindsay Graham and Barney Frank. If you couldn’t beat the neocons, his logic seemed to go, you might as well become them, but with better manners, more bike lanes, and cooler gay bars. As Thomas Frank once put it, “(Rahm) loves one class of citizens and strongly disapproves of another.” Entrepreneurs, good. Labor, bad.

During his tenure as Obama’s chief of staff, Emanuel played the role of enforcer not for bold ideas, but for trimming them down to a size acceptable to Joe Lieberman and the pharmaceutical lobby. He opposed including a public option in the Affordable Care Act from the start, dismissing those demanding comprehensive health care reform as “fucking retarded” and instead backed a deal that locked Americans into private insurance. He urged Obama to abandon ambitious climate legislation, slow-walked financial reform, and urged caution at every major turn — an odd posture for someone known for yelling and sending a dead fish in a box to a pollster. Under Emanuel’s watch, “Hope and Change” got converted into “No Fucking Way.”

When he wasn’t magically shrinking Obama’s agenda, Emanuel was making bank on Wall Street — more than $16 million as an investment banker in a few short years. He also served on the board of directors at Freddie Mac at a time when it misstated its annual revenue, and later, the mortgage giant was blamed for playing a key role in the 2008 financial crisis. Oops.

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Then came Chicago. After he was elected mayor in 2011, Emanuel ran the city like a SimCity expansion pack for the financial elite. He closed public schools by the dozen, declared war on teachers’ unions, outsourced public services, and shoveled tax incentives toward developers and corporations. Then came scandals, like the cover-up of a dashcam video of a black 17-year-old named Laquan McDonald, killed by Chicago police. Chicago journalist Ben Joravsky once described Emanuel as Mayor One Percent, who possessed “as much determination, will, and chutzpah as anyone alive,” but that he wastes it all on “wimpy policies that largely preserve the status quo.”

And yet, everyone’s collective memory seems stuck in a Covid brain fog, as if history started sometime in 2016. To desperate Democrats who have an exceedingly thin bench, Emanuel looks like a grownup. To everyone else, he seems like the reason they stopped voting. His brother Ezekiel (no, not the Hollywood agent, the other one, the doctor) once wrote an essay in The Atlantic headlined Why I Hope to Die at 75, arguing that ambition curdles and creativity fades with age and that it’s better to flame out than fade away. By that logic, Rahm’s political career should’ve been dead and buried long ago.

Instead, it’s threatening to return like a nostalgic aughts-era sequel no one asked for; one about as welcome as wearing low-rise jeans with a visible thong to a Senate confirmation hearing.

It just goes to show that the Biden-era policies dogging the country now were shaped by a sort of temporary insanity, where even moderate Democrats abandoned long-held beliefs to avoid charges of bigotry or associations with Trumpism.

But there’s a serious danger in attributing Joe Biden’s border chaos more to ideology than cowardice. The Biden administration leaned into immigration as a cultural signifier to rack up virtue signal points and stave off charges of bigotry. The result was a precarious new shadow society of migrants, and few good options to address it.

We know that Biden wasn’t a hardened open-borders ideologue. Nor was his vice president, Kamala Harris, at one point charged with addressing the root causes of the migrant surge (a mission that came to naught). Mainstream Democrats wanted higher levels of immigration, to be sure, but Biden and his more lucid colleagues mostly didn’t expect the border to be flooded like it was after Biden rolled back Trump-era policies like “Remain in Mexico,” under which would-be asylum seekers were required to file their cases in Mexico, rather than make the trek to the US frontier. The Bidenites believed the costs of their anti-Trump virtue signaling would be worth the benefits.

To put the numbers in perspective, net migration during Biden’s tenure exceeded 8 million people. It was the largest surge in American history, and the most rapid since 1850. That means Biden added the entire population of New York City to the United States in just four years; or two Delawares to the country every single year of his presidency. There are fewer residents in my home state of Wisconsin — which has a population of 6 million — than migrants who moved to America under Biden.

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For Democrats who counted on winning re-election in 2024, this was not the plan. The party’s genuine ideologues were surely pleased, but the Biden administration drastically reduced migration as it became clear that a continued surge would harm the party in 2024. The truth is that many key decision makers in the Biden administration legitimately didn’t understand that loosening restrictions on migration would be such a powerful magnet for people to come to America.

That, of course, reflects gross incompetence. During a 2021 reporting trip to northern Mexico, I asked a group of Haitian migrants who’d mostly come from stable lives in places like Argentina and Chile why they left those countries to sleep on the cartel-infested streets of Matamoros, waiting for a chance to cross. They said they wanted the American Dream.

I relayed that story to a prominent Left-wing politician at the time, who seemed dumbfounded. “Do they know what it’s like to be poor in the United States?” the person wondered.

Those migrants knew exactly what it would be like. WhatsApp messages from friends and relatives who came first had convinced them to fork over hefty fees to cartel smugglers, risk life and limb crossing through passages like the Darien Gap, and then live in the shadows of US society on a hope and a prayer that dubious asylum cases would turn out alright in several years. If not, they could always melt into the background of a sanctuary city.

So what does any of this have to do with cancel culture?

Peak Woke was a strange time. Presidential hopefuls swapped out “Latino” for “Latinx,” Aziz Ansari’s mild sexual exploits became national news, and feminists organized a boycott of Tampax over a joke. The consequences were, of course, more serious. From malicious government censorship to grave media blunders, a chill ultimately settled over politics and culture.

This is why, in 2019, Kamala Harris pledged to publicly fund gender transitions for prisoners and detained illegal immigrants. It’s why “Scranton Joe” Biden himself supported previously radical trans policies. In Peak Woke, Democrats believed it would be politically worse for them not to back these ideas because interest groups, journalists, and activists were itching to call them bigots.

On immigration, the cynical political calculus of every Democrat running in 2020 was to be positioned as Trump’s antithesis. “Biden Pledges to Dismantle Trump’s Sweeping Immigration Changes,” read an NPR headline. “Biden Will Stop the Border Wall and Loosen Immigration Again,” blared Politico. “Immigrants have always made us stronger as a nation — our diversity has always been our greatest strength. Donald Trump doesn’t get that,” tweeted Biden in October 2019.

As the centrist candidate in the Democratic primary, Biden actively sprinted away from his prior positions on illegal immigration. He had to deal with headlines like this one from CNN: “Joe Biden Once Said a Fence Was Needed to Stop ‘Tons’ of Drugs from Mexico” and this one from Politico: “Biden Under Fire for Mass Deportations Under Obama.”

In December of 2019, Vox noted, “Biden has struggled to answer questions in several recent debates about Obama’s more controversial policies on immigration enforcement, which included record-high levels of deportations and were often criticized by activists.”

At the time, in the fevered days of the #AbolishICE movement, now making a comeback on the Left, virtually no immigration enforcement mechanism was considered humane by activists and outside groups. “There will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration,” Joe Biden pledged in 2020, commenting on perhaps the most basic piece of infrastructure imaginable. This became a massive pull factor for newcomers. As a Red Cross worker in Mexico explained to me in 2020, migrants heard Biden was not as “drastic” as Trump, and they were taking their chances accordingly.

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David Leonhardt explained what happened after Biden took office in a groundbreaking retrospective for The New York Times last year. “Several factors caused the surge, starting with President Biden’s welcoming immigration policy during his first three years in office,” he wrote. “Offended by Donald J. Trump’s harsh policies — including the separation of families at the border — Mr. Biden and other Democrats promised a different approach.”

“After taking office, his administration loosened the rules on asylum and other immigration policies, making it easier for people to enter the United States,” reported Leonhardt. “Some have received temporary legal status while their cases [went] through backlogged immigration courts. Others have remained without legal permission.” According to numbers tracked by Syracuse University, the asylum backlog at the end of the Biden administration was nearly 4 million active cases, with the average wait time stretching well more than a year long.

Love Trump or hate him, a surge of 8 million migrants in four years is no easy situation to address. And as the Biden-Harris campaign ultimately discovered, voters demanded that the next president address it, Democratic or Republican. So here we are, with a massive new population of aspiring Americans, who are living in precarious conditions legally and socially, and an economy of employers and consumers ever-more tied to their cheap labor.

It should be obvious that Biden and “career prosecutor” Harris weren’t on an ideological crusade to replace the native population of the United States. But elite Democrats also wanted to win elections above all else. This is why when the vibes were anti-Trump, they did everything they could to counter him, both to avoid the minefield of Peak Woke cancel culture and to rack up virtue points. It’s also why Biden’s policies and rhetoric changed as soon as election year rolled around and the polling looked bad.

Democrats painted themselves into a corner on immigration. They feared the fringe to the detriment of the American majority—and ultimately, to their own party’s detriment. The immigration chaos Americans endure now is a direct consequence of cancel culture or Peak Woke, and the way “responsible” Democrats caved into these forces, afraid to look like they cared too much about overseeing an orderly immigration system.

Sunstein imagined that Biden might not remember him, as they hadn’t seen each other in years. Yet Biden took Sunstein’s arm and recited his whole biography to the French President, including “details about my life that I only vaguely remember[ed].” But that was only a rare glimpse of a Biden who was no more. A younger Biden would have been able to assert leadership, make the case for his policies, and take arguments about his vision directly to voters. That is not the man we got. Rather, we ended up with a greatly diminished to barely functioning commander in chief.

Yet contrary to the cartoonish narratives of the Right, the debacle revealed not only the weaknesses of the Democratic coalition and mainstream media — but also some of their strengths.

Biden’s deterioration over the course of his presidency is a Shakespearean tragedy. His whole life, he enjoyed being around, and sometimes helping, other people. He finally achieved the position where he could best indulge his sociality and lift up his fellow citizens. Yet by then, Biden simply couldn’t function in the job, as recounted in Jake Tapper’s and Alex Thompson’s new book, Original Sin.

The authors’ portrait of Biden shows a man who is still gregarious and optimistic. But he is unable to reliably go even minutes unscripted without embarrassing himself or causing political headaches. This forced Biden’s top aides to hide the once charming and charismatic politician from the media and the public as much as they could possibly get away with.

Throughout the process, however, there was always dissension within liberal ranks, and much of the media and Democratic establishment were just as fooled as members of the public. There are certainly villains in this story, but also some heroes. These are realities we cannot forget in the Trump era, when previously unthinkable levels of corruption and fealty toward one man have been normalized. 

Original Sin offers necessary background on Biden’s life, followed by a mostly chronological account of his downfall, covering his 2020 campaign through the end of his presidency. It is now clear that the problems that became so glaringly undeniable in the June debate with Donald Trump had been brewing long before Biden won the Democratic nomination. Those close to him trace his mental deterioration to the death of his son Beau from glioblastoma in May 2015, which was followed by Hunter’s downward spiral. 

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The Hur Report, released in February 2024 after a probe into Biden’s mishandling of classified information, cited tapes from 2017 and described them as revealing “significant limitations” in Biden’s memory and speaking ability. During debate prep in 2019, Biden forgot the name of Mike Donilon, whom he had worked with since 1981. Tapper and Thompson speculate that if it hadn’t been for Covid preventing a traditional campaign that year, Biden would have shown himself unqualified and never become president. 

At one point, the campaign decided that the candidate would have a Zoom meeting with a group of Americans and then release the footage. Yet the product was unusable in the end, with one top Democrat sighing that Biden “couldn’t follow the conversation at all.” Another Democratic figure told the authors that, even at that early point, it was clear there was no way Biden could be president. In the end, staffers were only able to release a few minutes of exchanges on the topics of racial justice and health care.

The Zoom debacle was one example of a half-decade-long effort to hide Biden’s shortcomings from the world. The presidency was an endless minefield. Those who led him through it were referred to internally as “The Politburo,” which was composed of Donilon, counselor to the president Steve Ricchetti, and White House deputy chief of staff Bruce Reed, with other aides, such as Anita Dunn, just outside that innermost circle.

It fell on this group to constantly find ways for Biden to shirk his expected duties. Biden couldn’t pronounce the names of world leaders, so by 2021, staff would write out “President / Prime Minister of X country” on texts he was supposed to read. An organization would ask for a five-minute video from the President; but the White House would only produce one or two minutes, and even then, Biden would botch his lines.

There would be fundraisers at which a politician would normally be expected to deliver off-the-cuff remarks. But Biden aides would ask for a teleprompter setup and insist that the demand was nonnegotiable. The White House was in a constant state of crisis management, always ready to mislead journalists or go on the offensive to try to discredit reporters who raised uncomfortable questions about the President’s age.

What lessons are there to draw from this tragicomedy? The Right has a ready and predictable answer. Once again, the Establishment lied to us. There was an important fact about the world that the vast majority of the American people could see with their own eyes, and Democrats and their media allies wouldn’t acknowledge said reality for partisan and self-interested reasons. There is certainly some truth here. Original Sin makes apparent that things were much worse and for much longer than those of us on the outside had reason to suspect.

Yet to turn this into another elite-bashing narrative would be an oversimplification. Yes, there were real malefactors: Donilon, Richetti, Reed, and First Lady Jill Biden — not to mention the former President himself. They misled the public, and there should be reputational consequences for this. But there were also heroes, and ultimately, the party did push Biden out of the 2024 race.

We learn throughout the book that Democratic members of Congress and journalists had their own suspicions, which is why they were kept away from the President throughout his administration. Presumably, had they known how bad things were, the idea of Biden running again would have been untenable within the party much earlier.

Nonetheless, there was pushback even before the debate with Trump that ultimately led to Biden’s downfall. In June 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported that behind the scenes, there was the widespread impression that Biden’s mind was slipping. Journalists added up the number of news conferences and interviews Biden had done, and told the world that he compared unfavorably to recent presidents. Ezra Klein used his position as a New York Times columnist and podcaster to take the remarkable step of calling for the President not to seek re-election — all the way back in February 2024. 

Then, too, Biden’s political, legal, and personal problems in large part stemmed from the fact that Democratic and media elites demanded some adherence to the rule of law and the idea of impartial justice. 

Hunter was put on trial in the summer of 2024, and members of the Biden family sat in the courtroom as they were publicly humiliated. The defendant had lied on his application for a gun by claiming that he wasn’t a drug user. The trial ended up drudging out the skeletons in the Biden family closet. The prosecution recounted how after Beau died, Hunter began an affair with his widow, introducing her to crack.

Hunter’s daughter Naomi took the stand and claimed that her father was progressing in his recovery when he bought the gun. But she was revealed to be lying when prosecutors presented texts showing that he was ignoring her pleas to get together around the same time he had given a drug dealer access to his bank account. Hunter was convicted — and still awaiting sentencing, along with a trial on tax-evasion charges — when his father pardoned him just after the election. 

Biden had the power to stop this at any point, but he chose not to. He could have pardoned Hunter earlier. Going back further, the President himself made the decision to keep Trump-appointed US Attorney David Weiss in his role as he was investigating his son. Biden could have stacked federal law enforcement with complete toadies like Trump later did through appointing figures like Pam Bondi and Kash Patel as top law enforcers.

The Hur investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents similarly required the President to take a hands-off approach throughout the process and refrain from exercising powers he technically had. It was even Biden’s personal attorney, Patrick Moore, who originally found classified documents stored in the President’s former office at the Penn Biden Center. Moore contacted Biden aide Bob Bauer — Anita Dunn’s husband, another one of the staffers responsible for hiding his condition from the world — who informed White House Counsel Richard Sauber.

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This eventually led to an FBI investigation, and ultimately, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to look into the matter. From this came the Hur Report, which concluded that Biden likely violated the law but would be difficult to prosecute because a jury would have too much sympathy for him as an old man with memory problems, which provided fuel to those who questioned his mental capacity.

Needless to say, it is impossible to imagine any of this happening with Donald Trump. 

I have yet to meet a single Trumpian who disagrees with the proposition that Trump would have ever let one of his sons be prosecuted. This isn’t simply because Biden is more personally ethical than Trump, although that is likely true. Democratic elites and the media care about the rule of law, about maintaining fundamental norms, as can be seen in the ways in which law enforcement caused headaches for Biden and his family even as he was in control of the executive branch.

Republican and conservative elites don’t care nearly as much about legal procedure. At least, not under the current populist dispensation. They complain about the politicization of the justice system and corruption among Democrats, and then look the other way as Trump doesn’t even pretend that the DOJ and FBI should operate independent of his personal will; encourages people to send him bribes through purchasing his meme coin; and sits back as his sons strike real-estate deals with foreign governments that he directly benefits from.

Don Jr. and Eric Trump openly attend conferences centered around crypto ventures and the opening of new Trump properties abroad. Trump’s eldest son has even joined forces with members of the administration and donors to start a social club in DC with a $500,000 membership fee. Trump accepting a “palace in the sky” jetliner for his own use from Qatar is only the latest outrage that would have been unthinkable in any other administration. Activities involving far worse corruption than even the worst-case scenario of Biden and his son — if the accusations were proven true — are daily occurrences in Trump World, carried out without the least bit of shame.

There is no political pushback from Republicans to any of this. Trump will, of course, never be in a position to decide whether he will have to pardon his son, because he has made personal loyalty to himself the main criterion for appointing law-enforcement officials and government attorneys, showing few scruples about firing those who refuse to do his bidding. 

In our current moment, it is important to keep two contradictory ideas in mind. Yes, elites make a lot of mistakes, and those responsible for them should suffer consequences. At the same time, things could have been much worse. Indeed, they are much worse with gruff populists.

Democratic elites and the media for the most part didn’t cover themselves in glory when discussing Biden’s mental state. But there was internal dissension throughout the entire unfortunate course of events, as liberals who loved Biden and wanted Democrats to win at least sometimes did their jobs as journalists, attorneys, law enforcement officials, and political leaders. This is not something we can take for granted, and presents a striking contrast to the administration in power now. 

History will remember the personal failures of Biden, and those who worked to cover up his limitations. Yet we cannot blind ourselves to the nature of the developing counter-elites who seek to replace the old liberal establishment. If they have their way, they will bring about a new order with many of the same flaws as the old one, and none of its virtues.

Correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the first name of Merrick Garland.

Yet here I am — still a loyal Democrat. Why is that?

I don’t love modern progressivism. I reject its yearning to reform not just institutions, but people’s souls. Indeed, Marc Dunkelman’s recent book Why Nothing Works has all but convinced me that modern progressivism has turned into a cannibalistic movement chewing to death any attempts at meaningful reform. And with every breath that brings me closer to age 40, I become more and more skeptical of the notion that public policy can right the crooked timber of humankind or alter the fundamentals of human nature.

Given all that, could it be that my loyalty to Democrats has to do with mere tribal identity? I hail from deep-blue New York, which codes entirely Democratic on cultural issues. To a great extent, my Democratic sensibilities can’t help but be shaped by the fact that everybody I knew growing up was Democrat. But tribal identity and teenage gut feelings aren’t solid guides to thoughtful, grownup political participation.

Luckily, there is a better answer, and it has to do with the historical role of the Democrats in America’s modern party system: the fact that in the 20th century, the party has stood for mature governance, warts and all, while the other, the GOP, has been and remains a party too often averse to government as such. When we support political parties, we choose people to govern us. It’s one thing to reject the progressive dream. It’s another to insist upon good governance. 

The Democratic Party was founded in the 1820s by Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren as a vehicle for disaffected farmers and workers. If these groups’ interests didn’t always align, they shared a hostility to the Northeastern establishment, embodied in the Second Bank of the United States, against which Jackson waged war as fiercely as he carried out Indian Removal. As the young republic developed, and sectional tensions over slavery intensified, Democrats found themselves divided in a way that simply wasn’t true of the Republicans, a party explicitly founded in favor of “free labor” and in opposition to the South’s Peculiar Institution. 

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It wasn’t until the 1890s, then, that the modern party system in America really took shape. At that point, the US basically was a single-party state. Having supported secession, pro-slavery Democrats had discredited themselves, and the party as a whole, gifting Republicans with a 30-year run of near-total electoral dominance. The reconstituted Democrats emerged first out of a kind of a yearning for a splinter movement. Attempting to be cutting, a Republican surrogate in 1884 accused the Dems of being the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion,” but there were enough Catholics and rum drinkers around that the label stuck and became a rallying cry. The Democrats became once more, as in their Jacksonian roots, the party of the underdog and particularly of the urban disenfranchised. 

But that left the Democrats as merely a party of sentiment, not of ideas. The tossing-and-turning of the Grover Cleveland administration — a rare Democratic break in the GOP dominance of the Gilded Age — showed the need for a coherent political philosophy. Cleveland, a man of impeccable integrity, conceived of himself as a mountain of obstruction in the executive branch, scrupulously following the Constitution and vetoing everything that seemed out of bounds. And yet Cleveland was compelled, over the course of his presidency (especially in his second term), to abandon his entire political philosophy.

He sent the feds into Chicago to break a strike — with a number of strikers killed in the chaos. He laid groundwork for the annexation of Hawaii as much as he disliked territorial expansion. And he found himself turning the government into a kind of cash-for-gold program, stocking up gold reserves as much as possible and eventually turning to JP Morgan to bail out the Treasury. As Cleveland said of his reliance on the plutocrats, in a stinging rebuke of the populist wing of his party: “It never occurred to any of us to consult in this emergency farmers, doctors, lawyers, shoemakers, or even statesmen.… The prospect of what we needed might be somewhat improved by making application to those whose business and surroundings qualified them to intelligently respond.”

Every one of Cleveland’s decisions was almost certainly correct under the circumstances, but he left office as a pariah to his own party, at that time undergoing its Populist renovation. His GOP successor, William McKinley, planned to govern with traditional Republican values — above all, a protective tariff — but he, like Cleveland, found himself playing cards from a completely different part of the deck. He committed himself to massive territorial expansion, annexing Hawaii and eventually Puerto Rico, turning Cuba into a protectorate, and extending the US imperium as far as the Philippines. A president who had arrived in office anticipating enclosed continental borders was, by 1898, telling his staff, “it is evident that I must learn a great deal of geography in this [Spanish-American] war.” And protective tariffs — the cornerstone of McKinley’s governing vision — were all but forgotten as expansionism spurred free trade.

If the 1890s showed the incoherence of the governing philosophies of both parties, the 1900s helped to smooth them out. The United States came to terms with its expansionary role in the world — abandoning George Washington’s counsel against “entangling alliances” in his Farewell Address — recognizing it as a necessary adaptation to the era of high-seas navies, in which overseas territory not picked up by America would tend to fall to a rival. The new power of the executive branch was accepted in an era of heightened international exposure — and charismatically embodied in the almost universally popular Theodore Roosevelt. And the government could conceive of a new domestic role for itself: enforcing nascent antitrust legislation and curbing the monopolistic control of the trusts.

Having entertained William Jennings Bryan’s idiotic silver-standard movement, the Democrats straightened themselves through the Progressive Era, so that, as Dunkelman writes, the 1912 election would come down to “which version of Progressivism … would define the movement going forward.” Government was understood as what John Kenneth Galbraith would call a “countervailing power” checking big business, and an income tax was instituted to overcome the deeply unreliable revenue system of relying on tariffs (which, as often as not, had meant turning to Wall Street whenever there was a crisis).

This, then, is the heart of what the Democratic Party means to me: a robust conception of government, in which government, without ever sacrificing popular legitimacy, carries out executive functions, above all in exercising countervailing power to curb monopolistic practices and in running a coherent, far-sighted foreign policy.

Neither one of these is exactly enshrined in the Constitution, but what everybody in power in the early 20th century discovered was that the Constitution couldn’t solve all problems — that it was necessary to develop a more robust government to deal with new crises: global power politics, predatory business practices, and then the Jim Crow regime that protected itself in appeals to local government and separation of powers.

Republicans would gradually forget all this. In the Twenties, the Republican Party rebranded itself —  very far away from the party of Theodore Roosevelt — as isolationist, strictly laissez-faire in business, but with stultifyingly high tariffs and immigration barriers. That turned out to be exactly the wrong approach to an era of interconnected global crises, whether economic or political, and the result was not only a well-deserved 20-year loss of power for the Republicans starting in 1932, but the dominance of New Deal Democrats through the Sixties. 

The making of the midcentury Democrats involved a transformation arguably more dramatic than Trump’s remaking of the Reagan GOP. Going back to its Jacksonian roots, the Democrats were beholden to a Jeffersonian vision of independent yeomen which saw the Hamiltonian state as, at best, an evil to be minimized and tolerated — barely. There was virtue to this vision, but it failed to answer the problems of the industrial age, when American craftsmen and yeomen became wage-earning employees, who owned neither their own tools nor land, and who were lorded over by enormous oligopolies controlling their respective markets. Prices were no longer a pristine index of supply and demand or marginal productivity, as in the pre-industrial world — but an expression of sheer market power.

Against this backdrop, the Democratic Party managed to refound itself. It adopted a Hamiltonian vision that accepted the rational need for larger institutions. As Dunkelman writes, “these [Hamiltonian progressives] came to believe that the [Jeffersonian] vilification of ‘bigness’ was fundamentally off base. In their view, the salve wouldn’t be in eroding concentrations of power, but in establishing new nodes of public power to hold vast concentrations in check.” In other words, to protect the ideal of republican independence and dignity, it was necessary to wield the apparatus of the federal government: “Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends,” in the famous formula of the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

And it was that basic conception that drove the recovery from the Depression, the successful execution of World War II, and the phenomenal achievements of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt years. 

The tragedy of the 20th century is that at some point, the Democrats gave up on that political conception. In the Sixties, a progressivism emerged that was essentially nihilist, that believed in tearing-down all concentrated power, that mistrusted the very soul of America. I’m speaking, of course, of the decline of New Deal Democrats and the rise of the McGovernites and their ilk: the cohort that LBJ, the last New Deal Democrat, derided as “Harvard kids.” 

In a way, the acme of this shift was the progressive historian Robert Caro’s ferocious attacks against the legacy of New York’s legendary urban planner, Robert Moses. In his 1974 book, The Power Broker, Caro painted Moses as a liberal autocrat who tore through Gotham’s organic fabric in pursuit of large, rationalized infrastructure. The urbanist Jane Jacobs, representing a similar tendency as Caro, mounted a parallel attack. The enduring result was to delegitimize the Hamiltonian impulse in Democratic government. As Dunkelman puts it, the party’s “previous inclination to build power up had been replaced by an almost insatiable impulse to tear things down.”

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The result was paralysis and red tape everywhere. The Republican Party, having made its own peace with good government under Eisenhower and Nixon, had turned cannibalistic and libertarian by the end of the Seventies, demolishing everything in the American state that wasn’t the military. For their part, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party produced nothing but snarl. Anybody critical of Robert Moses’s excesses might pause to consider the 40 years it took, after Moses’s death, to build a meager extension to the Second Avenue Subway or the city’s utter inability to reconstruct Penn Station. Moses, by contrast, built up several enormous projects in far less time.

Which brings us to today’s Democratic Party. The party today still suffers from the damage wrought by its turn in the Sixties and Seventies. For example, the party’s 2020 assault on policing, now blessedly abandoned, was an echo of the same destructive tendencies that saw Democrats abandon New Deal models and New Deal patriotism in favor of McGovernite suspicion and Leftist excess.

Still, the Democratic Party retains enough muscle memory to be able — maybe, just maybe — to become once more the party of sound government. The movement for so-called abundance, spearheaded by the likes of Ezra Klein, promises to coordinate government and business in order to clear supply bottlenecks, lower prices, and promote the mass, middle-class prosperity that used to be the Democrats’ calling card. Some of this work is deregulatory and involves cutting the kinds of boutique environmental red tape that hinders development in the United States. Some of it, however, would involve — yes — proactive government where the market has failed: industrial policy, workforce training, and the like. 

Compare this to the chaos wrought by DOGE Republicans, as they slash through not just things that need to be slashed — but also funding for the sorts of basic research in the health sciences that form the foundations of US prosperity. This policy can’t but have long-lasting, and destructive, ramifications: researchers and academics leaving the United States in the kind of “brain drain” associated with Third World countries; economic uncertainty prompting other nations to look for new trading partners. 

Allies are caught in the lurch, not sure if they can rely on the United States to maintain its security commitments or even conduct a cogent foreign policy. The United States, whether it likes it or not, is an empire and a hegemon, and the nation owes it to the world to fulfill the imperial obligations it has accrued. That’s what both parties, actually, discovered in the crucial period when the modern party system developed, but the Republicans managed to forget all that and the Democrats almost have. But not quite as badly as the GOP.

So, yes, as much as Democrats drive me to distraction, I remain a Democrat. The party is flawed — deeply flawed — but the job of government, fundamentally, is to govern, and the Democrats are the only party of the two that still takes that task seriously.  

In fact, the long view is looking good.

First, the bad news. On Monday, President Trump proclaimed that the police deserved an entire week in May. America should figuratively pat the boys in blue on the back, he suggested, while the administration attempts to reverse the awkwardly titled “Advancing Effective, Accountable Policing, and Criminal Justice Practices to Enhance Public Trust and Public Safety.” That’s Joe Biden’s 2022 executive order directed at mild and fair-minded police reform. Trump also called on Congress to pass a new crime bill intended to swing the pendulum in the opposite direction — to restore immunity to police officers and a mandatory death penalty for those convicted of killing a cop. In doing so, he’s trying to create more George Floyds, rather than help solve the problem.

This federal Police Week comes on the heels of a late April ribbon-cutting ceremony in Atlanta celebrating the opening of the so-called Cop City. For four years, a motley crew made up mainly of the “A’s”— anarchists, activists, and academics — bitterly fought the construction of the police-and-fire training center under the banner “Stop Cop City.” Atlanta Democrats were asking for it: they tried to quietly fast-track a $115 million facility in early 2021, a time when progressives were still making noise about abolishing and/or defunding cops in the wake of the George Floyd protests.

To make matters worse, the ruling Democrats would raze a patchy forest in the ruins of Atlanta’s defunct Prison Farm to make room for the project. It was, as the kids say, not a good look, and soon the anti-police and prison activists teamed up with NGOs and environmentalists to rabble-rouse against the project, which ranged from petitions to the city government to acts of arson against police motorcycles and construction equipment. The movement tried to expand its jurisdiction and make the fight over a police training complex on the outskirts of Atlanta a national flashpoint, the sequel to the Standing Rock protests, which in 2016 won the sympathy of environmentalists, celebrities, and eventually Barack Obama.

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The problem: as it turns out, almost no one wants to actually abolish the police, which is why the Democrats are now pretending that their flirtation with the movement never actually happened. Plus, since Oct. 7, the Cop City protests have been absorbed into a much broader — and spurious — ideological campaign against white supremacy, settler colonialism, and Western empire. That’s why slogans like “From Atlanta to Palestine” circulate on social media, and in their No Cop City, No Cop World book out this month, Stop Cop City activists suggest that Houthi missile strikes on oil tankers in the Red Sea are inexplicably connected to their effort to — say — shower the Atlanta City Council with ping pong balls. What Stop Cop City looks like now is the Left’s Waterloo, a final death of the movement to abolish police and prisons that became a boutique cause de jour in 2020.

So far, so good for those who think we need cops, right? Not exactly.

Even as #Defund fails, it’s not as if the police are an ascendant institution, at least, not on the local level. Two things can be true at once: Trump is granting federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement expansive and unconstitutional new powers, even as he has little control over the hundreds of thousands of uniformed officers funded and controlled at the county and municipal levels. The latter is slowly going the way of the dodo.

Consider the numbers. The United States employs more police officers today than half a century ago, but population growth has outpaced that increase. Density matters. In 1973, the country had roughly 4 officers per 1,000 people — a ratio that placed it slightly above Canada and Australia, but below Spain, France, and Austria, and nearly identical to England’s per-capita figure of 3.9. That ratio peaked in the early Nineties at 4.3 officers per 1,000, coinciding with the crest of the late-20th-century crime wave during the first Bush administration. (Even then, the American police force was only about a quarter the size of Russia’s in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union.)

But from 1990 to 2020, a paradoxical trend emerged. The national crime rate fell precipitously — by some measures, mysteriously — even as the police presence, relative to population, remained flat. By 2013, the Department of Justice counted approximately 600,000 full-time personnel in local police departments, bringing the officer-to-resident ratio down to about 3 per 1,000 — roughly 25 percent lower than four decades earlier. By the time Joe Biden took office in 2020, the size of the overall police force had contracted even further, placing America’s police density below average for countries in Europe and the Americas.

America’s depolicing trend has only worsened since the pandemic. According to a recent survey by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, departments across the country are operating with, on average, a 10 percent shortfall in personnel. To compensate, 65% of responding agencies reported cutting back on services or eliminating specialized units, like detective bureaus or community outreach teams, to preserve basic patrol coverage. In Washington, DC, the police force has fallen to its lowest level in half a century, prompting the city’s police union to describe the situation as “dangerous.” Likewise, Philadelphia has a 19% vacancy rate, and in Gotham, the NYPD has seen its headcount decline by 11 percent since 2019.

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As a result, fewer than 50 million people reported contact with police in 2022, according to the Bureau of Justice’s statistics — the fewest number of police encounters since 2008. That’s mainly because traffic enforcement is disappearing. By the end of 2023, officers in Baltimore, New Orleans, and San Francisco were making fewer than half the traffic stops they had made before the pandemic. Not coincidentally, road fatalities have jumped to startling highs, including a 74% increase in Memphis from 2019 to 2022, which has lost 22% of its force since 2011. All over America, you can spot “Slow Down!” signs in lawns, but little in the way of enforcing those requests.

The problems are structural. Young people, generally, are more cynical and don’t trust institutions, including the police, and are increasingly not willing to accept relatively low pay, long hours, and a lack of remote work possibilities. It’s the same reason military recruitment is down overall (notwithstanding a recent uptick) and civil service jobs everywhere aren’t being filled — even why pools are closed. Why be a cop or a lifeguard when you can get an email job, work from home, and sell photos on OnlyFans? That explains why one of the biggest growth industries is the private security industry, which, according to one report, is expected to more than double in value in the decade from 2022 to 2032.

That America is actually under policed is not an issue that the Left wants to talk about, because progressives only seem to care about state-inflicted violence, not the vastly more common interpersonal kind. However, the truth is that the decline of policing — both in terms of quality and quantity — is a social-justice issue. Eventually, the police departments, the ones publicly accountable to citizens, will abolish themselves and, like nearly everything else in America, public safety justice will become a privatized luxury good.

In the end, the officials graced me with clemency, thanks in part to advocacy by the boat’s captain. “Not long ago, they would have ignored you, but things have changed”, the captain later explained, referring to Venezuela’s ongoing crisis.

The experience showed me first-hand how Latin-American countries enforce their borders when confronted with mass migration — and taught me a valuable lesson about cross-border travel. Had I been deported, however, the penalty would only have been a speedy return to the United States — as opposed to life inside a “Terrorism Confinement Center” in El Salvador: the fate of hairdressers and landscapers — in addition to hardened criminals — under President Trump.

Many in MAGA World seem to believe that no corrective is too severe, no countermeasure too cruel, in response to the border chaos inherited from Joe Biden. Yet more than 100 days into his second term, Trump’s deportation effort is a failure on its own terms — notwithstanding the shock-and-awe impression.

Make no mistake: the border was in a catastrophic state under the previous administration. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the number of illegal immigrants swelled by approximately 10 million during Biden’s term. The parameters under which irregular visitors could claim asylum were stretched to such a point that the term “refugee” lost all meaning, leading to a backlog of 3.2 million claimants. Industrial-scale smuggling boomed, and vital public services across the United States groaned under the weight of mass migration.

Ordinary Americans, including many Latinos, warned that economic migrants were abusing an overly generous asylum regime — a reality I observed firsthand in 2022 and 2023 as an immigration case worker. Finally, in June 2024, Biden stanched the flow somewhat with an executive, prompting a decline in the numbers. Yet under Team Biden, removals from within the homeland dropped to about half of what they had been in Trump’s first term, about 50,000 a year.

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Confronted with this reality, an overwhelming majority of voters expressed support for cutting illegal immigration and ramping up deportations. On the former (cutting the flow), Trump has unquestionably delivered. By March, border crossings fell to just 7,000, a quarter-century low. This has been, by far, the most unambiguous success of an otherwise confused presidency.

Mass deportations, however, are a different story.

Thus far, the pace of total deportations is lower than it was under Biden in 2024. True, this is in part a function of fewer crossings. But there is no question that many of those who entered in recent years are still here. While credible data on interior removals under Trump II have yet to be released, it’s plausible that the deportation figure hovers around 50,000. It’s far more than under Biden, to be sure, but still a far cry from the 120,000 deported at the same point in 2009 by Barack Obama (earning Obama the moniker “Deporter in Chief” from progressives).

Having failed at delivering big numbers, Trump officials have apparently resorted to spectacular stunts and sadism as substitutes.

In March, the administration deported 238 Venezuelans and 23 Salvadorans to Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele’s so-called Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, a latter-day gulag. Like many others, I gave the White House the benefit of the doubt, assuming that a Department of Justice renowned for prosecuting gang members couldn’t possibly send civilians with no criminal sentences to a prison built for MS13 and Barrio 18’s most hardened members.

Except, the White House continues to withhold the names and purportedly heinous crimes of those deported to Bukele’s CECOT, treating them as state secrets. Most of the inmates were designated as “alien terrorists” and stripped of the ability to contest that designation under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act — the White House’s ridiculous theory of the case being that the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang is conducting an “invasion” of the US homeland at the behest of the Caracas regime. Under the terms of the agreement with El Salvador, outsourced detainees are imprisoned indefinitely in the CECOT. No trial, not even proper sentencing.

On 20 March, CBS published the names of the imprisoned Venezuelans from a leaked government document. A subsequent investigation by The New York Times ran all 238 names through public databases in the United States, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Chile, finding serious accusations or convictions for just 32 of the deportees. Another two dozen were accused or found guilty of lower-level offenses, such as trespassing and speeding. The remainder had no criminal records in either the United States or abroad; an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official also admitted in a sworn declaration that “many” of those deported had no criminal records. Deported, to be clear, to a gang confinement center. For life.

In deciding if someone is a member of Tren de Aragua, Trump officials placed inordinate emphasis on tattoos. A separate government document obtained by the Times, titled “Alien Enemy Validation Guide”, uses an eight-point system to identify gang members, with tattoos yielding four points. One such case with no criminal record was that of Arturo Suarez Trejo, a landscaper and urban musician with numerous tattoos who was detained while filming a music video.

Two others with no criminal records — Francisco García Casique, a barber, and Neri Alvarado, a bakery-shop worker — had tattoos of family members’ names, one of which included a ribbon for autism awareness. As Ronna Rísquez, the author of a 2003 book on Tren de Aragua, has noted, the group doesn’t use tattoos as markers of affiliation — in marked contrast to the likes of MS13 and Barrio 18.

Given that ICE arrested 976 gang members in February, it’s fair to describe the vetting process behind the Salvadoran deportations as incompetent, and that’s being generous. A charter flight even arrived with eight women — a surprise that proved too extreme for even Bukele, who harangued his American counterparts for violating the terms of their agreement. The women were ultimately returned to the United States, with many claiming that officials asked passengers to sign affidavits confessing membership in Tren de Aragua.

Beyond Trumpian chaos, the GOP’s characteristic incoherence appears to have contributed to the Salvadoran debacle. Days into Trump’s presidency, Venezuela’s Maduro regime acquiesced to deportation flights in exchange for the renewal of Chevron’s oil license in the country. Furious, Miami hawks in Congress threatened to withhold their votes from the slim GOP majority. The White House immediately caved, leading to an abrupt end to Venezuelan repatriations and the subsequent invocation of the Alien Enemies Act. The plight of CECOT deportees has since been a propaganda boon for Maduro, as thousands have poured onto Venezuelan streets to protest against Washington’s forced disappearances to El Salvador.

The Trump administration also wrongfully deported the Salvadoran national Kilmar Abrego García, though his case is a complicated one. Kilmar’s family business was allegedly extorted by Barrio 18 in his home country. Had he solicited asylum when he first traveled to the United States, he could have claimed a credible fear of persecution. Instead, ICE nearly deported him in 2019. By that point, Kilmar wasn’t eligible for asylum, but a judge granted him “withholding of removal” on the grounds that his life was still at risk in El Salvador.

Kilmar’s alleged ties to MS13 remain unproved, and he complied with yearly check-ins at ICE. Yet the reality is that the case is uncomfortable for both sides of the debate. It’s reasonable to question Abrego García’s current immigration status; by 2019, his family business was defunct and the threat of Barrio 18 diminished. At the same time, he should have been eligible for residency through his marriage to a US citizen. Ironically, recipients of withheld removal like him are ineligible for permanent residence but can receive work permits.

None of this excuses the Trump administration’s denial of due process to Kilmar Abrego, let alone hundreds of apparently nonviolent offenders condemned to life in a foreign gulag. Surprising as it may be to MAGA, the Fifth Amendment entitles noncitizens to due process. Considering that the president is floating sending US citizens to the CECOT, and is attempting to deport legal residents over anti-Israel op-eds — it’s fair to wonder if Trump is bent on importing Maduro’s and Bukele’s governance model, even as he deports their citizens.

Instead of governing by decree like Maduro or Bukele, the White House could pursue long-term, durable reform in the legislature. A reasonable compromise with Democrats could be to close the loophole in the Immigration and Nationality Act which allowed virtually any border-crosser to apply for asylum under Biden. In exchange, Republicans could acquiesce to the regularization of spouses of US citizens, a move which would help accelerate deportations by annulling the ongoing issue of custody for the children of illegal spouses.

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Unfortunately, much of the GOP is currently committed to ending asylum outright. It’s similarly telling that Christian conservatives justify imprisoning the fathers of US citizens in CECOT. The fact that immigration enforcement was more or less abrogated during most of Biden’s term doesn’t justify violating constitutional amendments. Unsurprisingly, Trump’s once-vaunted approval on immigration is in free fall, particularly among Latinos, a key segment of the Republicans’ new base.

Contrary to much of the party’s narrative about serving a “multiracial working class”, the GOP appears bent on alienating previously die-hard supporters, such as Venezuelan-Americans. Unlike MAGA partisans, the broader working class has little interest in terrorizing migrants for the sake of likes on the X app.

For their part, Democrats would do well to acknowledge that popular support for restrictionism is an inevitable consequence of mass illegal immigration. The fact that migrants’ own countries of origin have experienced the same trend — as I learned on my trip to Peru — suggests that more is at play than Left-of-center parties “accepting conservative frames on immigration”, as progressives worry. Even in Left-wing Mexico, 55 percent oppose allowing entry to foreign migrants.

For Left and Right, the Obama administration’s common-sense mix of pathways to citizenship and overwhelming enforcement was a key source of its appeal with Latino and working-class voters. It should, moreover, give Democrats pause that Biden’s — and Hillary Clinton’s — abandoning of Obama’s winning formula subsequently enabled both of Trump’s ballot-box victories. In their Fox News-distorted reality, Republicans also fail to recognize that the “Kenyan-born” Obama respected due process, even as he deported almost 3 million in his first term.

The mistake of MAGA Republicans and progressive Democrats alike is that they each fail to understand that their priorities are comparably unpalatable to most Americans. So long as both factions remain beholden to the preferences of nativist incels and cosmopolitan elitists, respectively, they will continue to sow maximal cruelty, exploitation, and sectarian hatred among the very people they claim to represent.

Uncritically reported by Politico at the time, their claims helped legitimate the Big Tech censorship of the New York Post — America’s oldest continuous daily newspaper, where I serve as a columnist — which broke the laptop story. The emails put the lie to Joe Biden’s claims that he knew “nothing” about his son Hunter’s overseas business dealings and apparent influence peddling, not least Hunter’s 2015 role in connecting his father, then Barack Obama’s vice president, with executives from Burisma, a Ukrainian energy firm on whose board Hunter served.

Thanks to the combined efforts of Twitter (now X), Facebook, the mainstream media, and the Deep State, all this was buried, and Biden eked out a win.

Four years later, a resurrected Trump piled on the punishments for the “spies who lied”, as the Post dubbed the 51 officials. “The signatories willfully weaponized the gravitas of the Intelligence Community to manipulate the political process and undermine our democratic institutions”, he wrote in his Day One executive order, followed by last week’s memorandum banning them from secure buildings.

Trump believes that the actions of the ex-spooks was a major reason why he lost the blisteringly close election of 2020, in which fewer than 45,000 votes in five states made the difference. Yet with Biden out of office, it’s all too easy to lose sight of the magnitude of the crisis that goes beyond a single election: the corruption of both America’s security apparatus and its establishment political class as embodied by the Biden family.

In hindsight, the letter signed by the 51 spies should be seen as a domestic CIA election-interference operation in cahoots with the Biden campaign. It was part of a coordinated Deep State effort to ensure that Donald Trump wouldn’t win a second term and that the sins of Joe Biden remained hidden from the American people.

Five former CIA directors or acting directors signed the letter: Mike Hayden, Leon Panetta, John Brennan, John McLaughlin, and Mike Morell. That last was the principal author, who hoped he would lead the CIA if Biden won the election. In all, 41 of the 51 signatures came from the CIA.

Morell told congressional investigators from the House Judiciary Committee in 2023 that the letter had been solicited by the Biden campaign adviser and future secretary of State, Antony Blinken, in a call to Morell, who quarterbacked it through the CIA classification review process in record time.

We now know, thanks to Andrew Makridis, then the CIA’s chief operating officer, testifying before the Judiciary committee last year, that the letter was cleared for publication by then-CIA director Gina Haspel, a protégé of Brennan’s, who also had her fingerprints on Operation Crossfire Hurricane. The operation was the foundation of Russiagate, which framed the 2016 Trump campaign for “collusion” with the Kremlin, when she was CIA station chief in London in 2016.

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Morell told colleagues in an email that the letter was timed to appear on the eve of the final presidential debate to give Biden a “talking point to push back on Trump on this issue”. It worked like a charm, allowing Biden to deflect the bombshell revelations about his family’s international influence peddling.

“Look, there are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant”, Biden coolly told the debate moderators. “Four, five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage”.

Trump kept harping on the laptop, with all its evidence of diamonds and millions of dollars that Hunter was paid by Chinese energy company CEFC, whose executives Biden had met in Washington. But Joe Biden denied it all: “My son has not made money in terms of this thing about — what are you talking about? — China”. He concluded his performance by looking down the barrel of the camera and addressing American voters at home: “You know his character. You know my character. You know my reputation is for honor and telling the truth. The character of the country is on the ballot.”

Yes, it was.

Getting Biden to his false vindication during the debate took a months-long team effort. In one of the regular meetings the FBI conducted with social-media companies to sound the alarm about supposed disinformation in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election, somebody warned of a “hack-and-leak operations” by “state actors” involving Hunter Biden and “likely” to take place in October, according to a sworn declaration by Yoel Roth, who headed Twitter’s trust and safety department at the relevant time. The warnings were so specific that when the Post’s scoop first appeared, Facebook and Twitter recognized it and immediately throttled its reach.

Twitter claimed the story violated its “hacked-materials” policy. Officials with the company claimed that they couldn’t permit the release of journalistic material not authorized by the subject — a stance that would have rendered impossible the Pentagon Papers, the Abu Ghraib disclosures, and every other legendary scoop celebrated in journalism seminars across the land.

In the event, the laptop hadn’t been hacked. Rather, Hunter Biden had abandoned the waterlogged device in April 2019 at a Delaware repair shop without paying for services, granting the owner what lawyers call “constructive ownership.” Moreover, Twitter executives knew even at the time that their hacked-materials excuse was so much bosh, as we now know thanks to Elon Musk’s disclosure of the #TwitterFiles. But that didn’t stop them from locking the Post’s account for two weeks, silencing the newspaper founded by Alexander Hamilton.

Something similar unfolded at Facebook. “Right on schedule,” a Facebook employee said of the timing of the laptop story in an internal chat obtained by the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on the weaponization of government. “FBI tipped us all off last week that this Burisma story was likely to emerge,” an unidentified Microsoft employee wrote in another internal message.

The FBI, too, knew the Post story was not Russian disinformation. The agency had had possession of the laptop for 10 months, as prosecutors would tell a Delaware court during Hunter’s 2024 gun trial. The FBI’s forensic analysis, moreover, had concluded that the device belonged to Hunter, had not been tampered with, and was fit for use as evidence in court. CBS News reached the same conclusion after commissioning its own independent analysis of the laptop in 2022.

How did the FBI have possession of the laptop so much earlier? The Delaware store owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, became alarmed by content he found on the computer that he feared was a national-security risk. He handed the laptop to the FBI in December 2019. Nine months later, Mac Isaac handed Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, a copy of the hard drive, believing a batch of Ukrainian invoices would exonerate Trump during his first impeachment.

At the time, the Internal Revenue Service was investigating Hunter for tax violations related to his international dealings. But every time investigators Gary Shapley and Joe Ziegler tried to follow a trail of evidence that led to Joe, they were obstructed by prosecutors in the office of the US attorney for Delaware, David Weiss, as Shapley and Ziegler would later tell Congress.

After they blew the whistle, Shapley and Ziegler were dismissed from their jobs. Still, their testimony derailed the suspicious sweetheart plea deal that the Biden Department of Justice had stitched up with Hunter’s lawyers, which would have amounted to probation on a couple of tax misdemeanors and immunity from future prosecution over other crimes.

The FBI knew something else, too. It had been spying on Giuliani in 2020 using a covert surveillance warrant on his iCloud. Agents thus had access to an email from Mac Isaac to Giuliani, from August 2020, disclosing information from the laptop that would damage Biden’s campaign. The FBI also would have had access to messages between me and Giuliani two months later, indicating that the New York Post was interested in the story.

To sum up all this in other words: The American security apparatus knew that the laptop was authentic; and that buried in the laptop’s treasury of bank statements, corporate documents, and homemade porn were emails that made the Democratic nominee for president look pretty bad. Nevertheless, intelligence officials at the highest levels pretended that the laptop was “disinformation” and prevailed upon Big Tech to censor the Post, with the mainstream media dutifully justifying the censorship in the name of protecting democracy.

Which brings us to Joe Biden’s grift. Depicted through the adventures of Hunter and his fast-talking uncle, Joe’s brother Jim Biden, the scale of the family’s corruption has slowly dripped into the public consciousness over the last four years. This is mainly thanks to congressional committees with subpoena power that sprang into action once Republicans retook control of the House in 2022.

But back in October 2020, the Post was on its own. In its first story, the paper revealed a 2015 email from an executive of Burisma, the Ukrainian energy firm, which was then paying Biden’s son $83,333 a month to serve on its board (his pay was cut in half after his father left the vice presidency). Vadym Pozharskyi, the executive, thanked Hunter for “the opportunity to meet your father” the previous evening in Washington.

That meeting, we later discovered, was a dinner organized by Hunter in a private room at Café Milano in Washington on 16 April, 2015, at which his powerful father met some of his colleagues from Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan. Upon the story’s publication, Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates told the media: “They never had a meeting”. Months after the election, the White House admitted that Joe Biden did attend the Café Milano dinner.

It was just one of the dozens of meetings he had during his vice presidency with his son’s foreign partners, after which millions of dollars would flow into the family coffers. Hunter would also call his father and put him on speaker phone when he wanted to impress a prospective client or partner, according to Devon Archer, Hunter’s former business partner. Another email published by the Post described a plan to allocate 10 percent of a lucrative Chinese venture to “The Big Guy” — the code name Hunter’s partners used to refer to Joe Biden.

It would take another three years for James Comer, chairman of the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee, to identify 20 shell companies created by Hunter and his partners, into which more than $30 million flowed from Chinese and other foreign entities after Joe Biden became Obama’s vice president. Incremental payments were made from those companies to at least 10 Biden family members, including Joe Biden himself.

Comer released bank records revealing that “Joe Biden received $40,000 in laundered China money from the account of his brother, James [Jim] Biden, and his sister-in-law, Sara Biden, in the form of a personal check”. He uncovered another $200,000 check to Joe from Jim. Both checks were labeled “loan repayment,” and the White House maintained that Joe had kindly helped his brother when he was in need; Comer could find no proof to suggest otherwise.

Even so, evidence from the laptop suggests that Hunter had paid for upkeep and maintenance of Joe Biden’s Delaware estate, as well as the monthly bill for his father’s private cellphone. Hunter footed the bill for a lot of family expenses through the years and often griped in family discussions that he never got sufficient credit. In one message on the laptop, he complains that he has had to “pay for everything for this entire family for 30 years”.

For months after Joe was sworn in as president, Democrats and their media allies ignored the laptop. Some were still in denial right up until the moment last December, when Joe Biden broke his promise not to pardon Hunter.

Days before Hunter was to be sentenced over a felony gun conviction in Delaware and felony tax fraud in California, Joe Biden gave his son an unprecedented “full and unconditional pardon” for any crime he might have committed stretching back 11 years to January 2014, the year of Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution, which brought the country under the influence of the vice president from Delaware and opened the door to Biden-family self-dealing.

The pardon timeline covered all the Ukraine grift, and most of the China grift, everything that would implicate Joe Biden in Hunter’s influence-peddling. That’s another way of saying that Joe Biden effectively pardoned Joe Biden.

Then, on 27 December, new photographs emerged from an activist lawsuit against the National Archives showing then-Vice President Biden introducing Hunter to Chinese President Xi Jinping and other Chinese Communist Party dignitaries in Beijing a decade earlier. To Chinese eyes, it was clear when Hunter followed his father off Air Force Two that this was American power come to do private business. A few days later, Hunter would receive a 10 percent stake in the Chinese equity firm BHR. Hunter’s business partner in the venture, Jonathan Li, is pictured in several Beijing photographs gladhanding Joe Biden.

But the scope of Biden’s pardons went far beyond Hunter. Preemptive unconditional pardons were also granted to his brothers Jim and Frank and their wives, and his sister Val and her husband. Jim, who was deeply involved Hunter’s China dealings and had been under investigation by the Department of Justice over various deals invoking Joe’s name. Frank, the youngest, spent years avoiding paying a court-ordered $1 million to the children of a Florida man killed in a high-speed hit-and-run. A few years later, at age 49, he was arrested for shoplifting in a Florida Blockbuster when he allegedly stuffed two DVDs down his pants.

As with Hunter, Joe pardoned his siblings for all nonviolent crimes they may have committed going back to January 2014, in what seems to many like an implicit admission of guilt for the period when Joe’s power and influence in the world garnered a fortune for his family.

For many Democrats on the day of the pardon, disappointment with Joe turned to bitter rancor. Big Tech, the Deep State, and the corporate media conspired to suppress evidence of Joe Biden’s corruption, and then he made fools of them all. He refused to give up power when he should have, and when they discarded him too late, he snookered them with an unelectable nominee, Kamala Harris, whom he had selected as his veep to fulfill a pledge to hire a woman of color.

“No one fucks with a Biden,” he is reportedly fond of saying. You could see in the old man’s sly, lopsided grin as he turned away from the camera one last time after his party’s election drubbing, that the muscle memory of a machine politician was in full working order. In his one last act of political bastardy, Joe Biden blew up the Democratic Party. Now, as Donald Trump lays waste to all their works in Washington, they only have themselves to blame.

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

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

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

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Your awokening isn't special

By Geoff Shullenberger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Will Bidenism outlive Biden?

By Gary Gerstle

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

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

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

Over the past three decades, the Republican Party has done relatively poorly in its bids for the White House. This is partly because, apart from when his son won 50.7% of the popular vote in 2004, no Republican has won an outright majority since George H.W. Bush in 1988. Even worse, George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016 won the White House despite losing the overall popular vote. Fortunately for Trump, in the latter instance, independent candidates won 5% of the national share, biting into the Democratic vote. But four years later, that figure fell to 1.5% — allowing Biden to win even though Trump’s popular vote also increased.

What about 2024? For months, it has seemed that the defection of the anti-war Left from the Democrats to RFK Jr, Jill Stein, Cornel West and other protest candidates would help Trump in November. But a Harris candidacy could, in fact, minimise defection.

This is partly due to circumstances that came to light even before Biden stepped aside. By choosing Vance as his running mate, Trump has crafted a populist ticket which, on issues such as trade and immigration, might benefit third-party candidates such as the Libertarian nominee, Chase Oliver. As well as being a former Democrat, Oliver’s support for an unlimited number of non-criminal immigrants joining the workforce could win the vote of some traditional free-market Republicans.

But there are other, more important factors that could simultaneously stop Democratic defections — and chief among them is the centrality of identity politics to American progressive ideology. Put simply, it is unlikely that those who voted in protest against Biden — an old white man — would also vote against a female black and half-Asian Democratic nominee.

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Trump's conviction is an assault on democracy

By Michael Lind

What of Harris’s policies? One of the great sports of American politics is pretending that the detailed policy positions or voting records of presidential candidates matter. But the truth is the vast majority of Americans will vote for a party regardless of its nominee. And many of the swing voters who are undecided at this late stage are what political scientists and pollsters rather kindly call “low-information voters” who pay little attention to politics. Such “disengaged voters” — predominantly less educated, lower-income, and young — have little knowledge of party positions and do not follow political news. One study suggests that voters who are poorly informed about the positions of the parties are more likely than better-informed voters to be influenced by a candidate’s looks.

If policy positions are not necessarily the basis of political success, neither is favourable media coverage. The editors and reporters of the American mainstream media organs, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and National Public Radio (NPR), are overwhelmingly Democratic in partisanship. Having helped to cover up Biden’s debility since the 2020 campaign, the Left-leaning American press no doubt will pivot now and portray Harris in the most flattering light possible, while demonising Trump and Vance as sinister neo-fascists who would replace democracy with dictatorship if they were elected.

Of course, the credibility of the mainstream media has been damaged by their promotion of bogus claims in recent years: about Russia’s influence on the 2016 election, the origins of Covid, and falsehoods about Biden’s health and mental acuity. Biden’s disastrous debate performance exposed their mendacity. In any event, most of the Democratic press’s audience consists of partisan Democrats — not the low-information swing voters which both presidential campaigns will try to reach. The exception to the generally limited influence of the media on public political opinion may, however, be live, televised debates. With no intermediaries engaging in spin, Americans can view candidates directly for a prolonged time. It was, after all, Biden’s shockingly poor debate performance that ultimately drove him from the race.

Harris can hardly do worse. She has often been ridiculed for her meandering syntax as well as her laugh. But Harris wouldn’t be debating a slick, conventional politician. Instead, her debate rival would be a man who often veers off into preposterous boasts or rambling anecdotes. Harris may, in fact, benefit from how Trump is often as inarticulate as she is.

This is crucial. By historical standards, all of this year’s presidential candidates — Trump, Biden, and possibly now Harris — have been extremely unpopular, marking a sharp rupture with the previous performances of Obama and even Biden at the beginning of his term. Indeed, political scientists and pollsters have identified a new breed of American swing voter, the “double hater”, who despises both parties and their candidates and makes up 14% of the electorate this year. In this environment, presidential races are unpopularity contests. According to one study, one in three voters this year is motivated by opposition to the other candidate. The winner can be widely loathed as long as the loser is loathed even more.

When Biden was the presumptive nominee, Democrats ran a negative campaign based on vilifying Trump and his Republican supporters rather than emphasising the policies of the Biden administration. We can expect that if the unpopular Harris replaces the unpopular Biden, the Democrats will double down on demonising not only Trump and Vance but also RFK Jr and other independent candidates who threaten to prevent an anti-Trump coalition from uniting behind the new Democratic nominee. The American presidential race following Biden’s withdrawal is going to be very nasty indeed. Welcome to the most important unpopularity contest on the planet.

To say that this is an unprecedented situation risks underselling the uniqueness of the current moment. Not only are we in very strange territory electorally (given the announcement’s proximity to the party convention), but there is also a sense that something has gone seriously wrong with the political system itself.

As I write, there is growing concern — bordering on paranoia — that Joe Biden might not actually have signed his resignation letter. Comparisons between the letter’s signature and those on previous executive orders are being circulated, and other curious details, including the absence of an official White House letterhead, are also being poured over. And whatever the merit of these conspiratorial claims, the basic fact remains that this is a resignation communicated by social media, through an account that Biden himself does not control, while the man himself is still nowhere to be seen. Last night, the White House still hadn’t published official plans for Biden to address the nation. Is he sulking? Is he physically incapacitated? The fact that these questions are even being asked — that there exists any degree of uncertainty about any of this — is momentous in and of itself.

Has America just experienced its own version of the 1991 coup in the Soviet Union, where Mikhail Gorbachev was confined to his dacha, with all lines of communication cut, and pressured to sign a letter declaring a state of emergency? Did the staffer who published the news of Biden’s resignation act on orders from Biden himself? Or did someone else make that call? Every hour that Biden doesn’t publicly dispel these rumours adds to the feeling of unreality. Needless to say, this is not exactly a healthy state for the “world’s greatest democracy”.

But whatever the details, one conclusion has been reached: Joe Biden is out and Kamala Harris is in. This is currently being met with a fair degree of celebration among many on the American Right: Harris is a notoriously weak candidate, one who is prone to gaffes and was completely unable to make headway in the 2020 Democratic primary. But counting your electoral chickens before they hatch is never wise, and certainly not in these extraordinary times. Biden himself was also a notoriously weak candidate (having tried to run for president several times and failed spectacularly every time), even more gaffe-prone than Harris, and only became the 2020 Democratic nominee as part of a concerted insider plot to stop Bernie Sanders. Neither Harris nor Biden could ever hope to win even a remotely competitive Democratic primary if their lives depended on it. But as we learned in 2020, a basic inability to win a primary race does not mean a candidate can’t then go on to win the presidential race.

And yet, 2024 is not a year that lends itself to easy predictions. In the space of just over a week, the US has seen one presidential candidate shot, and the other step down under murky circumstances. The idea that Trump now has an automatic path to victory reeks of the same complacency that saw him lose in 2020, and that spurred so many hopes for a massive “red wave” in the 2022 midterms.

But while it might be impossible to confidently call the outcome of the election in November, the very near future is quite easy to predict: more political chaos, paranoia and uncertainty. Biden’s decision to remain as president even as he now concedes he is unfit for the job of campaigning for re-election is not at all tenable. Already, more and more Republicans are stating the obvious: if you aren’t healthy enough to run for president, you clearly aren’t healthy enough to be president. Chances are that a real battle to remove Biden from his perch inside the Oval Office is about to commence — either through convincing or coercing him to “voluntarily” step down, or by invoking the 25th Amendment. The latter would be an entirely unprecedented watershed moment, but unprecedented watershed moments seem to have become a dime a dozen in America of late.

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How Joe Biden should abdicate

By Malcom Kyeyune

There exists an old African proverb: when the elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled. It is tempting to analyse these large, chaotic movements inside the American political system simply in terms of the political rat race: what, one might ask, would it mean for large donors if Biden had continued to run? But while that might still be interesting, the wider context to all this chaos is more important. Who is even in charge at this point? Is it Barack Obama, or Nancy Pelosi? Is it Joe Biden himself, despite all the signs to the contrary? Or is nobody in charge?

Few seem to be able to answer these questions in an authoritative manner, and it seems increasingly unlikely that the election will solve this fundamental brokenness. A Trump win is unlikely to calm the paranoia that has seeped into the walls of the American political consciousness; a Harris win, especially at this point, might not be accepted as legitimate by a very large number of Republicans.

So, while America isn’t quite yet at the same level of crisis as the Soviet Union in 1991, even acknowledging that is to damn the US with some very faint praise indeed. It’s true that renditions of Swan Lake aren’t yet playing on an endless loop on CNN and MSNBC, urging the Soviet citizens of America to remain calm as the tanks roll up Pennsylvania Avenue. But faith is surely starting to wane. Some may say that Biden’s departure is proof that America’s political system is working. But just as the past few months have proved the opposite, don’t be surprised if the next few do the same.

If there were fissures, they had been smoothed over: deviant Hungary, long a blemish on the pact’s public-facing unanimity, had agreed not to block military aid to Ukraine provided it would not have to partake in any Nato operations there. All members of the alliance were in total agreement on the basic facts of the war, Stoltenberg insisted. Under Biden’s steadfast leadership, he asserted, the world had united behind Ukraine.

The self-mythologising PR was fitting for a summit that was also the 75^th anniversary of the alliance’s founding. And 75 years after the 12 original signatories of the North Atlantic Treaty gathered in Washington to pledge collective defence, the alliance and the world look very different. NATO has always cast itself as a moral arbiter, disseminating “values” and ideology, while simultaneously fostering member states’ dependency on the United States and securing American hegemony over Europe. But this vassalisation has reached a new stage since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The invasion brought a Cold War alliance of questionable 21st-century utility roaring back to life; the long-time neutral holdouts of Sweden and Finland have even opted to join. During the Cold War, NATO counted many of its most ardent critics among left-wing opponents of US militarism; today, its most prominent skeptics are on the Right, and include Donald Trump.

Small wonder, then that American domestic politics loomed large. Held just days ahead of the Republican National Convention, the gathering was timed perfectly to allow Nato leadership to ensure one of their key points for this year — that many hitherto freeloading allies had stepped up their defence spending — would be fresh in the minds of its Republican critics. Back during the now infamous 2018 summit, Trump lambasted flunkies for not paying their fair share and even threatened to withdraw the US from the alliance. This year, though, Nato leaders could boast that at least 20 out of 32 member states would be spending 2% of their GDP on defence. Both anxious Atlanticists and Nato sceptics would be reassured that the alliance was, as Stoltenberg said, adaptive and agile; it would endure, regardless of dramatic changes in political leadership in its member states. And it was responsive both to events on the ground and internal criticism.

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But efforts to make the event about the steadiness and durability of Nato — a rare fulcrum of stability in an unpredictable world — were challenged by mounting concerns about the cognitive fitness of 81-year-old President Biden. Despite the usual pomp and pathos, along with attempts to pander to Trump Republicans, inevitably, it became a referendum on Biden’s age. Then, during the brief interlude between the summit and the start of the Republican National Convention, an assassination attempt on Trump’s life made it clear that there would be no assurances forthcoming about Nato’s future, that nothing would be predictable.

Things had begun on a triumphant note, in the Mellon Auditorium in Washington, where the North Atlantic Treaty was signed in 1949. There was no shortage of grandiosity on display. “The most successful military alliance in history”, claimed Stoltenberg, had now become the longest-lasting — outliving even the Delian League of ancient Greek city-states. The auditorium looked like Nato’s holy temple, with Biden describing the US commitment to the Alliance as a “sacred obligation”. His performance was better than at last month’s debate, but it wasn’t reassuring. His eyes were glued to the teleprompter as he seesawed back and forth between jingoistic shouting and barely audible, indecipherable mumbling. He managed to muddle through.

The President’s lapses of memory and coherence weren’t such  a surprise. Earlier this year, Biden twice referred to dead European leaders — former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and former French President François Mitterrand — when referring to recent discussions with foreign counterparts. At the summit, Biden did not mistake contemporary leaders for those long dead, but he did confuse allies with enemies, calling Ukrainian President Zelensky “Putin” and Kamala Harris “Vice President Trump”.

With Biden faltering so badly, the spectre of a new Nato-sceptic Trump administration drew closer, prompting some of the more hawkish member states to tailor their talking points to address the Republicans. At one panel composed of the three top defence officials from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, participants spoke in a language they knew the Trump camp would understand: golf. “Nato is a club,” Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur said. “When you have club rules, then you respect the rules and you expect that everyone will also respect the rules. When you pay your fee in the golf club, you can play. It doesn’t matter how big is your wallet.” They hammered away at the idea of all those members who were now spending 2% of GDP on defence, hoping to convince Republicans that Europe was now pulling its weight. And yet, as international relations theorist Patrick Porter told me, this “magical 2% figure” was arrived at with full US commitment in mind. Europeans are still avoiding the difficult question: if America scales back its commitments in Europe under a Trump presidency — many in his camp advocate for a “pivot to Taiwan” and a shift of focus to the Indo-Pacific — who will fill in the gap?

In fact, much of the summit did seem to be a carefully calibrated pitch to America — or at least those Nato sceptics at the RNC. Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti, whose country is a Nato aspirant, wrote a front-page op-ed in the New York Times with the title “Don’t Doubt NATO, it Saved My People”, outlining the role the alliance played in ending the Kosovo conflict in 1999. Meanwhile, Latvia’s President Edgars Rinkevics addressed the criticism that the US does much more than Europe to support Ukraine, claiming that in truth, it was the other way around. “It’s also very important to explain to the American public,” Rinkevics said in a speech on Tuesday. European Atlanticists fear an American retreat from the continent under Trump, who has complained that Europe has given too little aid to Ukraine, while the United States has given too much.

The contentious subject of Ukraine’s future membership in Nato was the other big theme of the summit. Germany and the United States are unwilling to extend full Nato membership while Ukraine is still at war with Russia. Instead, they say, Ukraine should be granted a “bridge to Nato”, a nebulous promise that fell far from aspirations of full membership that Ukraine has been waiting for since 2008. However, some felt the language of the communique was made stronger by the insertion of the word “irreversible”: apparently the bridge to Nato can only be crossed in one direction. But the Ukraine section of the Washington Summit Declaration, published last week, was ambiguous about its future. “We reaffirm that we will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met.”

Meanwhile, Ukraine and its supporters in Eastern Europe are adamant that the country be granted membership, or at least a timetable for it. Only full membership, they claim, can deter Russia. Some suggest that Article 5 security guarantees — the provision that states that an attack on one member state is an attack on all — be introduced incrementally, first on territory already under Ukrainian command, and eventually under those parts of the country Zelensky’s forces win back.

But critics counter that admitting Ukraine risks triggering all-out war with Russia. They contend that membership would make it far more difficult to negotiate a ceasefire or engage in peace talks, since Russia has long insisted that Ukraine in Nato is a “red line”. And they point out that, contra the exalted Atlanticist rhetoric surrounding the current war, Nato has no intention of fighting for Ukraine. And if Nato is not committed to entering the war now, as Ukraine is fighting for its life, then it certainly isn’t going to make any promises about some undefined point in the future. They suggest a dialing down of the rhetoric and scaling of expectations. In fact, dozens of foreign policy experts signed a controversial letter ahead of the summit urging caution. “If Ukraine were to join NATO, Russia would have reason to doubt the credibility of NATO’s security guarantee — and would gain an opportunity to test and potentially rupture the alliance. The result could be a direct NATO-Russia war or the unraveling of NATO itself.”

Notwithstanding membership, Ukraine won’t leave the summit empty-handed. Nato has pledged five strategic air defence systems over the coming year, as well as F-16 fighter jets. These will be donated under the proviso that they can’t be used to strike targets inside Russia. Along with the equipment, a new Ukraine command, staffed with 700 employees, will be established in Germany, and Nato will deputise a senior representative to Kyiv. Ukraine will also receive at least €40 billion of assistance within the next year. The Alliance is also looking to “Trump proof” its assistance for Ukraine and will take over coordination of military aid for Ukraine through the Ukraine Defence Contact Group, a role hitherto played by the US Department of Defence. This reorganisation was made to ensure that Ukraine will continue to receive military aid, even if a new Trump administration decides to cut it.

With Biden’s cognitive state drawing all media attention, some significant developments received far less scrutiny. There was, for example, a joint-statement by the US and German governments announcing that the US would, in 2026, begin “episodic deployments” to Germany of long-range missiles, including SM-6, Tomahawk, and developmental hypersonic weapons. Some of these weapons have a range that would have seen them banned under the defunct Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987. Russia’s response to news of the planned deployments was dramatic. “Without nerves, without emotions, we will develop a military response, first of all, to this new game,” deputy minister, Sergei A. Ryabkov, told Interfax. But what was most remarkable about news of the imminent deployment was how closely it echoed events of the Cold War — but with one glaring difference. During the early Eighties, the United States began deploying Pershing II missiles to West Germany. The news was met with deep anger by the European Left. More than one million people took to the streets in West Germany as weeks of demonstrations also swept through Paris, Stockholm, Rome, and London.

Today, in contrast, the announcement was met with comparative silence. This is doubtless down to the fact that the Left is being slowly absorbed into the Nato project. All four of Nato’s newest member states — Sweden, Finland, North Macedonia and Montenegro — opted to join with Social Democratic-led governments in power. Emblematic of this shift are the German Greens. One former party leader, Petra Kelly, was a star of the anti-missile protests in West Germany, yet some 40 years on, the Greens are now among the most hawkishly Atlanticist in Europe. Meanwhile, many peace initiatives and calls for a ceasefire in Ukraine have come from the Right. Hungary’s Viktor Orban has been on a self-styled “peace mission” in recent weeks, visiting Moscow, Kyiv, and Trump in Mar-a-Lago in an effort to bring the warring parties to the negotiating table. Orban and his ilk are not the dedicated anti-war activists of the Cold War. They support conflict; they just don’t like this one, which they view as an unwinnable liberal pet project. But broad swathes of the Left have also proved inconsistent: they may say they dislike the foreign policy of the United States, but they have uncritically embraced a military alliance that ensures its hegemony over Europe.

As Biden stumbled through his final, possibly terminal, press conference, he did manage to make one clear point: that Trump and his ilk were a threat to Nato. Why the average American voter should care as much as the tbose assembled in Washington, he did not say. And while the eyes of the world watched this very public demonstration of his vulnerability, it was clear that the future of Nato and the entire transatlantic order will be determined by who is elected president in November. The summit that was supposed to be a celebration of the alliance’s stability and longevity was instead a testament to its frailty.

According to most accounts, Biden’s campaign is starting to falter, with Trump maintaining a slight edge in the national polls. But anyone tempted to write off Biden should do so with caution. As a new Focaldata-UnHerd poll of six key swing states reveals, the race for the White House is much closer than the headlines suggest.

We find that:

• Trump has only a very small lead across the swing states.
• Biden has a hidden advantage as the incumbent.
• There’s a possibility of a polling error against the Democrats.
• Key battleground issues are yet to be won.

The state of the swing states

We ran separate state polls in each of America’s six key swing states. The first group was Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — the “rust belt” that swung for Trump in 2016, but went blue again for Biden in 2020. We also polled Arizona, Georgia and Nevada, the first two of which were edged by the Democrats in 2020 — for the first time since Bill Clinton. Nevada has been more reliably Democrat but remains an extremely close competition.

On the surface, the results from our polls show that Trump has a lead in all six states. He is just 2 points ahead in Michigan, and as many as 9 in Georgia — but a lot of small-to-medium leads add up to a strong advantage overall.

However, when we focus on people who are likely to vote, things narrow significantly. Trump is still well ahead in Georgia — the closest state in 2020 — but his lead in the other states has shrunk. Biden even edges ahead in Michigan.

Most obviously, this shift reflects Trump’s popularity among politically disengaged groups who are less likely to turn out to vote in November. It leaves the former president with the challenge of motivating these people to show up: can he recapture the enthusiasm of 2016?

Adding further uncertainty is the fact that a large percentage of respondents — 11-15%, depending on the state, which is enough to swing the election — favour another candidate, or say they “don’t know” how they will vote. This far out from November, that’s normal — but how will it change in the coming months?

To find out, we asked these people a follow-up question: “Although you do not intend to vote for Donald Trump or Joe Biden, which of the two do you lean towards, even if only a little?” The results were striking.

When we combine these responses with the Trump/Biden choices of other likely voters, the election looks much closer. Trump’s lead is now 2 points or less in Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada, and just 3 points in Georgia and Pennsylvania. We think that this is closest to the real “state of play” in each of the swing states: Trump is only marginally ahead.

Trump has the better map

Of course, the presidency is not only about voter percentages; it’s about the electoral college, too. Hillary Clinton and Al Gore both won the popular vote, but not the keys to the White House. And this time, the maths is against the Democrats. In other words, Biden could easily have a very good campaign and still lose.

Some of the six states are worth more than others. Pennsylvania, in particular, is worth more electoral college votes than Arizona and Nevada combined. Given how very close Georgia was last time (Biden won by just 0.23%), we might well expect him to lose it this year. That, however, makes Pennsylvania the key swing state. Even if Biden wins Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona, and Michigan, he would still lose overall (by 270 to 268).

This particular map, where Trump flips only Georgia and Pennsylvania, is fascinating. Trump would win by 270-268, but it’s close enough to be decided by the changes in electoral college vote allocation since 2020, when Biden would have won with this configuration. What’s more, Maine’s attempt to bar Trump from the ballot would become relevant: if that were upheld by the courts, Trump would lose one vote to Biden, tying the electoral college.

It’s extremely difficult to put a hard number on things, but taking the only-Biden-or-Trump figures above as a baseline, and accounting for expected polling error, we would say that Trump probably can count on a 90% win rate with the polls where they are. However, things are close enough that if there were to be just a 1.3% swing to the Democrats, Biden would be favourite.

The power of the incumbent

If history is our guide, then a 1.3% swing is hardly inconceivable. Since Reagan was inaugurated in 1981, incumbent presidents have increased in the polls by an average of 1.75% from January to election day. Moreover, once you exclude the mad 1992 election, in which Ross Perot took nearly 19% of the vote, and incumbent George H. W. Bush lost 7% during those months, the average incumbency pickup is 3.75%.

Of course, this all depends on the scenario. Will Biden’s campaign follow Obama’s in 2012, when he broadly didn’t pick up any votes from February onwards? Or will it resemble Trump’s in 2020, when he actually lost votes towards election day? If the latter, Trump 2024 is still the heavy favourite.

Indeed, that 3.75% average is heavily tilted towards the massive incumbency gains made by Reagan in 1984 (7%), and Clinton in 1996 (9%), two of the greatest orators of the 20th century. Is that really replicable? When you step back, this election surely has more in common with George W. Bush’s in 2004, which resulted in a modest 2.5% pickup. And if that does happen, it could result in the closest electoral college map in history, with constitutional chaos bound to follow.

A very personal election

It’s going to be a defensive election for the Democrats. Biden, who represented a “fresh start” in 2020, is now feeling the costs of governing. The problem for Democrats is that the last election was very close — Biden won by less than a single percentage point in Arizona, Wisconsin and Georgia. And he can’t afford to lose them now.

That said, presidential vote choice now tends to be extremely static. Gone are the days when a large percentage of the electorate were genuinely prepared to vote for either of the two main parties. Over 90% of Republican and Democratic voters in 2016 voted for the same party in 2020. It suggests that this year’s election will be decided by turnout rather than switchers: just 3% of those we surveyed are intending to directly switch from Trump to Biden.

The question is: of those who voted Biden in 2020, how many are not planning to vote for him this time? We used a regression model — a way of teasing out what drives voting behaviour using statistical analysis, rather than explicit answers, as people are not very good judges of their own motivations and impulses. The results were pretty striking.

The biggest factor behind defection from voting Democrat is, unsurprisingly, people’s approval of Biden as President. The next three factors are: belief that Republicans can handle cost of living better, high concern about Biden’s age, and low institutional trust.

There are, however, also blockers that stop people from defecting: Biden’s decision to make climate change a top-three issue, and a high level of trust, as measured by Covid vaccination doses (more on this below).

There is a lot of collinearity here: those who rate Biden poorly are also very likely to think that Republicans will better handle the cost of living. But the overall message is that it’s a very personal election: people are not voting for Biden because they don’t think he’s done a good job when it comes to the cost of living. Reversing this is key.

And this is where things get tricky for Biden. For while his flagship policies involve investment in the economy, voters do not associate these policies with the cost of living. Half of respondents (51%) picked the cost of living among their top-three issues in our poll, almost 20% more than the next most important issues, immigration and healthcare. However, when respondents were prompted to pick a policy, they chose direct income — a higher minimum wage, or improving the Affordable Care Act — over industrial or green investment, by a large margin.

But before we get too bearish on Biden, it’s worth looking at the battleground maps. In any given election, looking at these quadrants is a staple activity of the war room. Each graph shows the salience of each issue — and which party is winning it. But as those below indicate, this election is a dog-fight, and it’s probably going to remain so right up to election day.

Could we see a polling error?

For people like us who spend their day poring over political polling, the 2016 election night looms large in polling nightmares. The polling industry as a whole failed to pick up the extent of Trump’s support, and there was a large polling “miss” on a state level, as Trump unexpectedly won in a number of Democratic states — in particular, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Could that happen again?

For all the excitement, we don’t think such a big miss is likely. Since Trump and Biden have run against each other before, the overall pattern of their support is mostly a “known quantity”, unlike in 2016. There are, however, some signs that controlling for education — one of the key factors in the 2016 election surprise — may no longer be enough. This increases the possibility of a slight polling error — but this time against the Democrats.

Since at least 2000, the Democratic-Republican political divide has been moving away from income and “realigning” towards trust in the federal government and mainstream media. Poorer areas with high levels of suspicion towards the state have been shifting from Democratic to Republican, while wealthier and educated areas have become increasingly Democratic.

A key measure of this shift are Covid-19 vaccination rates. Many people in the US chose not to be vaccinated, or did not take at least one of the recommended doses. This choice was strongly linked to their trust in the government, media and scientists. The fact that vaccination data is available for relatively small geographical areas makes it an ideal tool to investigate how important “trust” is to politics.

As the above graph reveals, trust is extremely important in understanding the shift in Republican support since 2000. The correlation between Trump’s vote in 2016 and the percentage who completed the initial course of two doses is strong (at -0.62), as is the correlation to Republican gain between 2000 and 2016 (-0.46). Note: this is the Republican vote share from 2016 — vaccination rates are used to track underlying social attitudes, rather than opinions relating to Trump’s handling of the pandemic.

What vaccination rates give us is a granular variable that isn’t strictly demographic, but is in fact quite predictive of your cultural outlook and values. It helps us understand when a poll may be demographically balanced — i.e. have the right number of white people aged 18-24 — but not representative of other politically sensitive variables — i.e. it has too many unvaccinated people or not enough two-dose Americans. When this happens you get a polling error. In the case of our own, we found that panel data typically overestimated unvaccinated, and underestimated two-dose Americans — thereby potentially underestimating the Democrat vote share.

Added to this factor is the possible existence of “non-response bias”, a result of the skew caused by certain kinds of people being more likely to answer surveys than others. In the US, the hardest to reach respondents tend to be the youngest (18-24) as well as those aged 65 and over. In surveys these groups are often represented by a particular subset who are more likely to answer surveys: namely, the 18-24s who use social media most heavily, and the most educated retirees.

This probably skews the results for those groups, making the youngest groups appear more Republican, and the oldest too Democrat. We think this is behind many polls showing Trump leading Biden among voters aged under 30 — something Sabato’s Crystal Ball has noticed. Although Trump has probably gained among this group since 2020, it would be very surprising if he had gone as far as to overturn Biden’s lead. We think that the age cross breaks of US polling are deeply vulnerable to polling error and data quality. We are sceptical that the age curve of the US has flattened to the degree the polls suggest.

A similar effect, in reverse, may also be leading pollsters to overestimate Democratic support among the over-65s. To make matters thornier, this skew can interact with the vaccination angle. In our raw sample, unvaccinated 18-24s are overrepresented: just half have received two doses, a figure that should be closer to two-thirds. With high-dose young Democrats being less represented in polls, and authoritarian, unvaccinated young adults more represented — it is clear that the young are very likely to be less pro-Trump than polls suggest, and older voters marginally more supportive of Trump than public polls.

Another aspect of our polling we’ve been looking at is “white identity” — or specifically, the belief that there is discrimination against white Americans. In this survey, we measured this by asking: “In the USA today, how likely is it that many whites are unable to find a job because employers are hiring minorities instead?” The most common response was “Not at all likely” — but responding positively to any extent is a strong predictor of voting for Trump, both in 2016 and 2020.

What’s really interesting here, however, is that polls may be overestimating the percentage of people — particularly white people — who are hostile to affirmative action, and who believe their job prospects are hindered by minorities. If that’s the case, then we might expect a very different kind of polling error this cycle. When we look at the incidence in our survey compared to those in the general population (as measured by the ANES 2020 survey), we are over-sampling those who answer “extremely” and “very likely” (and particularly so in Pennsylvania).

As a result, it is possible that we are over-sampling low-trust, anti-establishment and strong white-identity voters — something which, if true, would lead to the Democrats doing a little bit better than polls predict. And come November, that “little bit better” could make all the difference. Biden might be polling behind Trump for now, but when you stack up the reasons why he could win, his re-election is much more likely than many would have you think.

Such progressive posturing may soon run out of steam: faced with a looming humanitarian crisis, the Democratic mayors of both cities, Eric Adams of New York and Muriel Bowser of D.C., are now begging the federal government for assistance.

Yet perhaps the most surprising element of all this chaos is the way the media have blamed the Right for this crisis. “Cold-Blooded Texas Guv Vows to Dump Asylum Seekers in the Middle of D.C.,” was how the Daily Beast covered the story. “GOP Governors Cause Havoc by Busing Migrants to the East Coast,” explained the New York Times. White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre called Abbott’s policy “shameful” and a “political ploy”.

The migrants themselves, however, are under no illusions about who deserves credit for their arrival in the US. “Biden promised us that everything was going to change,” one migrant told reporters back in March. “He promised the Haitian community he will help them,” a Haitian migrant told Fox News. “I just need [the US] to tell me when we can cross,” a Honduran woman told Politico.

Where did millions of migrants get the idea that Biden had invited them in? From Biden himself, naturally. During the 2020 primary debates, then-candidate Biden said that migrants illegally crossing the border should not be detained, and like nearly every other candidate on the debate stage, he said he would decriminalise illegal border crossing. Millions of migrants were listening, along with the human traffickers who extort, torture, rape and kill them.

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And Biden has more or less followed through as President. From Day One, he stopped construction of a border wall with Mexico, ended President Trump’s travel ban restricting travel from 14 countries, and dramatically reduced deportations — from more than 267,000 in 2019 to just 59,000 in 2021. The Biden administration also vowed to end Title 42, a Trump-era restriction that allowed migrants to be turned away due to the pandemic, though a federal judge in Louisiana has for now blocked Biden’s attempts to end the policy. Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security said this week that it plans to end another effective Trump-era program, Remain in Mexico, which allowed border agents to turn migrants away and have them wait in Mexico until their removal hearings.”

What’s most peculiar about all this is how the administration’s de facto open-border policy represents a remarkable U-turn on the Left. Until very recently, free-market Republicans were the ones pushing for things like amnesty and easy access to migrant labour, while the Democrats were on the side of limiting immigration. Back in the Nineties, Barbara Jordan, the first black woman from the South elected to Congress and Democrat Chair of the US Commission on Immigration Reform, wrote that the commission found “no national interest in continuing to import lesser skilled and unskilled workers to compete in the most vulnerable parts of our labour force”.

“Open borders? No, that’s a Koch Brothers proposal,” socialist Senator Bernie Sanders scoffed as recently as 2015. “What Right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that.” Fast forward to that 2020 primary debate and Sanders, just like Biden, said he would support decriminalising illegal border crossing.

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This reversal is especially surprising given that the Democrats’ base — or what used to be their base — agrees more with Bernie 2015 than Bernie 2020. In 2019, a large majority of black and Hispanic Americans said they would vote for a presidential candidate who stood for strengthening border security to reduce illegal immigration. This shouldn’t be surprising: Illegal immigration has been tied to a 20-60% decrease in black working-class wages. Another recent study suggested that immigration accounts for a third of the decline in the black employment rate over the last 40 years. “Black Americans are more supportive of limiting immigration than any other bloc of the Democratic coalition,” the sociologist Musa al Gharbi reported. “And Hispanics actually tend to be more concerned about illegal immigration than are whites or Blacks.”

Why did the Democrats abandon these voters? Many who support mass immigration do so ostensibly because of the overall effect on GDP, which is positive. But they tend not to ask, positive for whom? As the economist George Borjas has argued, immigration primarily boosts the incomes of the immigrants themselves, while redistributing wealth from the native poor to the native rich. In other words, among Americans, it is the elites who benefit from open borders, people whose professional-class jobs would never be threatened by someone who doesn’t speak English. For the American working classes, good jobs are sacrificed on the altar of helping those from other countries.

Point this out and you can count on a member of the Squad to call you racist — a ridiculous accusation given who has paid the highest price for mass immigration. “The history of citizenship in the US is deeply woven with the history of racism,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said back in 2019. “It has been used as the legal enforcer of racism for most of US history.” When Vice President Kamala Harris told would-be migrants to stay home, Ilhan Omar tweeted: “We should not abandon our values and rights to far-Right white nationalists.”

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But these accusations of bigotry hide a class divide that has seen the Democrats choose educated white elites over the working class again and again. Remember that immigrants make up nearly 50% of America’s household servants, 42% of taxi drivers and chauffeurs, and 35% of grounds maintenance workers. It is these migrants’ employers, not the migrants themselves, who are the target audience for Democrats’ “anti-racist” moralising.

Of course, many of these progressives also have compassion for migrants crossing the border in search of a better life. I do, too. It’s impossible not to feel for people seeking a better life for their children. But what about America’s own struggling workers? Why no compassion for them? Like so much of what passes for political debate in America in 2022, the fight between Governor Abbott and Mayors Adams and Bowser is less about values and more about interests. Big-city Democrats want to flatter the moral vanity of their elite base by rhetorically supporting illegal immigration, but only so long as border states such as Texas and Arizona are the ones who foot the bill.

Moreover, the “compassionate” approach is incentivising truly dangerous behaviours, leading to parents drowning in the Rio Grande with their infants and to children riding La Bestia migrant train and watching as others fall off to their deaths. A third of women who make the trip across the border admit to being sexually abused, and nearly everyone is preyed upon in some way by the powerful cartels that now effectively control the border. Trump may have gone too far with his family separation policy, but his relentless approach to the border ended up preventing a lot of suffering, both to would-be migrants and to American workers. Since the start of 2022, authorities have found 609 bodies on the border, a record high that doesn’t even include those discovered further north in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

Some of these deaths made headlines, such as the 50 migrants who perished in the back of an abandoned truck in south Texas earlier this year, or the migrant from Nicaragua who drowned crossing the Rio Grande in May, or the 22-year-old who drowned in April. But most of these tragic and totally preventable deaths go unnoticed.

This is Leftist compassion curdled into cruelty. And it’s not Governor Abbott’s fault — it’s President Biden’s.

After all, this war is nothing less than a godsend for Western elites. Domestically, it is a well-known fact that periods of international crisis or war tend to bolster the popularity of a country’s government or political leaders (the rally-around-the-flag effect) — especially if the country in question doesn’t actually have boots on the ground, and therefore coffins returning home, in which case it’s all gain and no pain.

You might remember the eerily prescient 1997 satire Wag the Dog, in which the US president enlists the help of a Hollywood producer to fabricate a fictional war in Albania to distract voters from a sex scandal in which he’s involved. Every major Western leader could do with a similar booster shot. Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron, and Justin Trudeau have all been performing abysmally in the polls, due in no small part to their disastrous (if not outright authoritarian) handling of the pandemic and its social and economic fallout.

The latest data shows that the rally-around-the-flag effect is already working its magic: approval ratings for all Western leaders have registered a significant bounce since the beginning of the war. Biden has enjoyed the best makeover of all, going overnight from Sleepy Joe — the embarrassing grandad known for farting at parties — to “leader of the free world”, as he self-styled himself in his State of the Union address last week.

But there’s more at play here than a few percentage points in the polls. On a deeper level, we seem to have entered a particularly decadent stage of Western capitalism. Today, ruling elites are increasingly unable to generate societal consensus or hegemony in either material or ideological terms — due to neoliberalism’s innate tendency towards ever-growing levels of capital concentration and its disdain for democratic participation and empowerment — and are therefore forced to rely on repressive and militaristic measures in order to remain in power and stifle any challenges to their authority.

Hence their need for a more or less permanent state of crisis or emergency capable of justifying such measures. Which might help explain why the West seems to have been mired in a perennial state of “crisis” for much of the past 20 years: the post-9/11 global terrorism crisis, the post-2008 financial-economic crisis, the pandemic crisis and now, just as the latter seemed to be waning, the military crisis in Ukraine. All this against the background of a worsening climate and ecological crisis. Indeed, “crisis” no longer represents a deviation from the norm; it is the norm, the default starting point for all politics in the West.

In this sense, the framing of Covid as a “war” — the ultimate state of exception — was no accident. But nothing beats a real war when it comes to rallying people around the status quo. This moment is bound to exacerbate the worrying trends that have emerged during the pandemic: the consolidation of the media, the blatant resort to crude propaganda, the shutting down of any meaningful form of public debate, the “cancelling” of dissenting voices, and the demonisation and criminalisation of whomever happens to be the public enemy of the moment — yesterday the unvaccinated, today the “pro-Russians”.

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At the international level, the weaponisation of the suffering of the Ukrainians might prove even more beneficial to Western elites. Their order isn’t merely in an internal crisis but externally as well. It’s threatened by the rise of new regional powers — first and foremost China but to some extent Russia as well. In the US, they still struggle to accept that the “unipolar moment” is over. Our world is multipolar, whether the State Department in Washington likes it or not. The crisis in Ukraine is in many ways a result of this collective denial, of the West’s inability to conceive a new order, and of its foolish dream of somehow turning the clock back to the Nineties.

By meddling in Eastern Europe, and ignoring Moscow’s security interests, the West invited conflict in Ukraine. It’s worth noting that the US is now adopting against China the same strategy of military encirclement that ended up triggering Putin. When a similar crisis breaks out with China at some point down the road nobody should be surprised.

Events in Ukraine make such a conflict increasingly probable. And that is because they offer the West and its military-industrial apparatuses the perfect excuse to whip up a new Cold War and militarise Western foreign policy, under the guise of defending the “free world” from a new Russo-Chinese Evil Empire. It also helps that billions of dollars are waiting to be made in the process. Indeed, arms manufacturers are licking their lips at the prospect.

The consequences for Europe will be profound. From the perspective of the US, it prevents the strengthening of Russian-European relations and the rise of a Eurasian geopolitical reality. It allows the US to reassert its hegemony over Europe, in particular Germany. Indeed, several commentators have argued that the crisis in Ukraine was partially manufactured by the US in order to torpedo the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.

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That pipeline was vehemently opposed by every element of the US establishment, from Joe Biden to Donald Trump. It’s no secret that thanks to the “shale revolution” the US is now a direct competitor of Russia in the field of natural gas exports. But even more importantly, the US feared that stronger, friendlier relations between Germany — and with it the rest of the EU — and Russia would have chipped away at Europe’s reliance on the United States’ security umbrella.

Well, as a result of recent events, the pipeline has been shelved once and for all. In fact, the talk in Europe is how to “decouple” once and for all from Russian gas (that’s if Putin doesn’t decide to turn off the tap beforehand). This is a double win for the US. Europe is likely to pivot towards the US for its gas imports as relations with Russia grow colder. And tensions with Russia have already boosted European support for Nato, which had become lukewarm in recent years. The result: the US maintains its military stranglehold over Europe.

It’s worth remembering that not too long ago Macron diagnosed Nato as being “braindead” and called for Europe to build its own common defence system. Both France and Germany reacted with the diplomatic equivalent of disgust to the new security pact between Australia, the US and the UK (AUKUS). That’s a thing of the past: now European leaders are once again lining up to pledge their unconditional allegiance to Nato — and to bolster their military spending and thus their contribution to the Alliance.

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Consider Germany’s foreign policy pivot — the announcement that it will be increasing its military spending to over 2% of its GDP in direct response to the situation in Ukraine. Sweden and Finland have reportedly given consideration to joining Nato; Switzerland is ending its neutral status and joining the EU’s sanctions on Russian assets. Even Ireland, neutral for a century, is considering joining Nato. Increased military spending in Europe means more US military hardware entering the continent. Moreover, the crisis along Europe’s eastern flank, should it be prolonged, will inevitably hamper trade relations with China. For America the geopolitical view looks cloudless.

The EU’s political autonomy will be reduced, to the extent that military considerations — determined in Washington — will trump other concerns. It will now be far harder for the EU to punish countries like Poland and Hungary for alleged deficiencies in their “rule of law” given their strategic importance for Nato. As Wolfgang Streeck writes: “In short, as Western Europe is returned to “the West”, the EU is reduced to a geoeconomic utility for Nato, aka the United States. The events around Ukraine are making it clearer than ever that for the US, the EU is essentially a source of economic and political regulation for states needed to help “the West” encircle Russia on its Western flank… The implication for von der Leyen and her crowd is to confirm their subordinate status”.

That’s not to say that the crisis is not an opportunity for EU elites as well. It offers them a chance, at last, to push ahead with plans for a “common defence policy”, something Macron has been advocating for a long time. The issue had been contentious, both in Washington — where it was feared that a militarily independent Europe would be less reliant on the US – and in Berlin, which was sceptical of helping France use the EU as a cover for its global ambitions. Public opinion in Europe never embraced the idea.

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However, the conflict in Ukraine has swept away any doubts. For the first time ever, the EU is supporting member states as they supply military equipment to embattled Kyiv, mobilising €500 million under the European Peace Facility. This is a classic example of the EU’s long standing integration-through-crisis strategy: exploiting moments of public fear and disorientation to surreptitiously deepen an integration process that lacks popular support.

From the US perspective, such plans don’t represent a direct threat at the moment, so long as Europe’s military machine remains under the effective command of Nato. Whether they will create transatlantic tensions down the road remains to be seen. For the peoples of Europe, neither option is particularly appealing. Either a European army under the aegis of the US security establishment or one under the aegis of France and a remilitarised Germany? Whatever happens, arming the EU — an institution as undemocratic and oligarchic as they come — remains a bad idea. But war is a racket, as US Marine Corps Major General Smedley D. Butler famously claimed, and no one wants to be left out.

Two things. As these are not philosophies but tricks, they are less likely to affront; one can always say of a trick (and what are techniques but elaborated tricks?), “I just learned this last week…”

First: when the baby gets you up in the middle of the night, do not look at the clock. Anyone who’s had children will nod in understanding — you’re up anyway, why pay twice?

The second trick is The Designated Criminal.

My notion of hell is the cross-country road trip with the whole damn family. Here everything, of course, is always going wrong. Some kid is complaining, spouses are feuding about directions, and all is misery. Now this traveler and now that offends against reason and good order and everyone ends up blaming Father, who, as the sole voice of reason, will now turn belligerent. Hot, tired, weary, angry, thirsty and lost, the car rolls on.

How to get from Coast to Coast? Appeals for calm (from Mother), obedience (that’s right), fellow-feeling, and so on will not avail. But a technique (trick) may. It is The Designated Criminal.

On setting out the family must establish a rotation. Each car member, then, on his appointed day, will be The Designated Criminal. On his lucky day, everything that goes wrong in the car is his fault. The affronted family are happily then leagued against the diabolical offender in their midst.

It works like a charm.

But The Designated Criminal may also be practised as oppression. For there are families and other organisms which employ the technique not as a means of maintaining esprit-de-corps, but of exercising control. Here the criminal is designated once and for all time, and will live and die in his chains.

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In the co-dependant family one child or parent is always in the wrong. We have all seen it and some have been taxed with participating in the loathsome farce: that Dad is a fool, Mom is a dunderhead, Little Bob is a lazy good-for-nothing, Little Suzy is a pre-pubescent whore and if she doesn’t wear more modest clothes she will end on the street, and so on.

And we know of the continual indictment of The Jews, the Witch Trials of Salem and McCarthy, the chattel slavery of Black Americans, and the continuation of that vile racism as the indictment of Whites.

The mechanism of the Designated Criminal can be used both for social equilibrium, in the car, or, politically, for disruption of the body politic. The first case, The Orderly Rotation of Blame, is the essential engine of democracy. The Game’s Rules (The Constitution) are designed to ensure the periodic exchange of power. The Ins and the Outs, and their adherents and dupes, may not understand the transfer of power as a game; but they are involved in one as much as the folks in the station wagon.

The motorists enjoy a process which elevates family unity over individual discomfort; the voters, the self-importance of saving the world from mindless fools. But it’s the same game.

If played according to the rules the rotation of power promotes the health and longevity of the organism. The Ins are allowed to tax the limits of legitimate incumbency, the Outs to misuse the permitted latitudes of opposition. And then, as in a football game, offense and defence shift.

But what if the game is not played according to Hoyle?

What if a player or contingent takes advantage of the rules themselves to achieve a goal other than balance? What if put-upon Dad, for example, says, “I know which Young Traveller is today’s Designated Criminal, but Samantha has just done something so egregious that I am going to suspend the rules and humiliate her”.

Readers will feel the affront of the interjection. As will not only young Samantha, but the whole family. For they had agreed to suspend their individual feelings in favour of group unity. And Dad has just proclaimed that they were fools to do so — that they had made a bargain which, it seems, the car’s driver reserved the right to abrogate, and, thus, that anyone may be the next-accused.

Now, the once-happy car, all occupants free to enjoy not only the trip but the game, are forced into co-dependence. The game is over, and the Ref (of whose existence the car was previously unaware) has ruled that actual indictment of the other is now the order of the day and those not supporting the new rule will suffer. The enjoyment of Free Speech has been superseded by the necessity of obedience to power. The car has just experienced Terror.

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The occupants, now, do not know what the new rules are, but only that they, having been changed once, may continue to be changed at will, by those possessing or bidding for power. Now, rather than the joy of improvisation (of the communal comedy), the rule of silence, obedience and denunciation is in force.

This is the state of the sick, co-dependant family. Here it is not that some things may be false, but that all things must be false. For if the subordinate members do not know what is and what is not permitted, they must devote themselves, in preference to any productive activity, to protection from power.

Far worse than the frowns of the car which does not know The Designated Criminal we now have the false smiles and the sad head shakings of the sick family, which is to say, of the Left.

When we know that it’s our turn on the electoral ducking stool tomorrow, we, when in power, may moderate our behaviour. In a crumbling Democracy, the power-mad, like Dad taking the reins, have come to the Dictator’s realisation. That is, “Wait a second. All I have to do is rig it so I can hold my seat indefinitely”. This, of course, is the aperçu of most every politician from dogcatcher to President, down through time. (George III said of Washington that if he chose to relinquish the Presidency he would be the greatest man who ever lived.)

***

One cannot credit the Politicians of the Left with even the delusion that they are Doing Good. And, if they do, then what? They did not take an oath to do good, but to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.

Must they come to bend and break the rules in favour of 1) their good ideas, 2) the necessity of staying in office, 3) theft? Of course. That’s why we have elections. To roll the dice. The co-dependant, terrified society comes to think that, having achieved the perfection of leadership, it’s a grand idea to call it quits, abolish the electoral college, mail ballots to everyone on earth, require no voter identification, import new voters, and so on.

Just as the inspired politicians see that perpetual hegemony might be had by mere suspension of their Oath; their dupes, the electorate, learn to suspend their reason, and substitute hatred of the indicted for their new-found fear of power — a fear so powerful it must be relegated to the unconscious.

Just like the children in the car.

When Dad trashes the rules he changes the whole point of the exercise. The building of family happiness and unity (which, we assume, was, after all, the whole purpose of the trip) becomes an indoctrination; and, the child sees, safety must now be his primary concern. He may keep silent, or join in the condemnation of Little Trevor, but should he object, “what about the Game?” he is, most certainly, now the new Criminal.

Our electorate is split into the affronted Right and the supine Left. Those who wish to preserve our Constitutional Republic, its rules, and the culture from which they spring, are indicted by those in momentary power (both political and asserted) ad-lib.

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There is no merit in supporting various contemporary blasphemies (“Birthing Parent”, and so on). Unless they are untrue. The merit comes from the affiant’s vocal sacrifice of his reason, and, so, of his self-respect, in support of The Cause.

This is the contemporary terror. Not that we’re faced with the enormities, the crimes, delusions, and lies of a Politician (when were we not?), but that we are now frightened of whomever was screaming last.

From “New Business Item 39” posted on the National Education Association’s website on July 5, 2021: “The N.E.A. will provide an already-created, in-depth study that criticises empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeniety, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarcy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of oppression at the intersections of society.”

This is the country’s largest Teachers Union. What do these words mean? That the teachers will be put in charge of criticising. Whom? Whomever the N.E.A. designates.

And how might one, however convinced, ensure that he will not transgress the rules? There are no rules, for the categories are infinitely expansible. (Larry Elder, an African American running for Governor of California, and a lifelong champion of America and of his race, was called “the Black Face of White Supremacy,” L.A. Times, August 20, 2021.) And what in the world are “the intersections of society”?

In Woody Allen’s film Sleeper (1973) he is transported to the future. There he learns that the world he knew came to grief in 1989. He asks how and is told: “A man called Albert Shanker got his hands on a nuclear warhead.” Albert Shanker was the head of the United Foundation of Teachers, and then the American Federation of Teachers.

This may be the rock on which the Left comes to grief: the insistence on infecting one’s children with hatred. Young parents four generations away from The New Deal are insisting that they will not abandon their children to the blasphemies of the N.E.A. and its servitors, the Democratic Party. They are finding that there is a mechanism created to protect them from a despotic government, and that it is The Constitution and the organisations derived therefrom.

It is not incumbent on us Jews to prove we do not drink the blood of Christian Children, nor of white American citizens to apologise, nor of citizens to assert their loyalty to various confederations of thugs, and shriek heresies and treason or risk blacklisting as “of insufficient zeal”.

What does it mean to be “cancelled”?

It seems to mean that some group asserting power has mobilised its forces in social media and that their indictments have, in turn, been echoed and endorsed by multitudes. But we all know, or should know, that the controllers of the algorithms are constantly aware of and manipulate our prejudices through their presentation of that called information.

Fear of the heretic is spread through social media, but who knows, and how could one know, that the numbers and the tweets are real? One cannot. They are pixels on a screen which stampede the fearful into actual action against the indicted.

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How Satanism conquered America

By Mary Harrington

Would the controllers of the blogosphere stoop to such subterfuge as cooking the numbers? They limit access to their outlets ad lib, banning any person or idea they do not endorse. Why would they not also warp the number or content of the blogs to suit or, indeed, confect them? (I worked, for a year, as a Contributing Editor (utility man) at a very prominent national publication. One of my duties was Letters to the Editor. This involved not only answering but writing them. I assume the practice was universal and that it continues in the new media.)

I live in a liberal neighbourhood outside of Los Angeles. The residents here are miserable. Traditionally it was Not Done to acknowledge each other’s presence on the streets. A “good morning” uttered to a fellow dogwalker was considered as if one had exposed oneself. (This latter, in fact, now accepted as a permitted practice of the Homeless.)

Since Covid, the masked or the unmasked cross the street to avoid each other, glaring.  Signs on the homes proclaim that Love Is Love, but the residents hate and fear each other. Nancy Mitford wrote of the Liberals, “they are all so unhappy, and all of their plans fail so miserably.”

I was elected a non-person by the Left many years ago. It’s uncomfortable, and it’s costly and sad to see the happy fields in which I played all those decades — Broadway, book publishing, TV and film — fold up and Hail Caesar, but there it is.

The question for the young is: what kind of country do you want for your children? The question for the aged (myself) is: “what did you do in the War, Daddy?”

I’ve been involved for near 50 years in dealing with folks in the mass. It was not a social experiment for me, but a game: The Theatre. I learned very young that the correct study of the dramatist was neither his own feelings, nor those of the actors, but the attention of the audience. I understood that it was not my job to teach them anything, nor to induce a feeling in them, but to perform a sort of magic trick — to understand their behaviour in order to control their concentration. Why? In order to give them a treat. Just like a magician.

I sat with them night by night and year by year, and it was a joy to feel their conjoined attention, and to learn from it and its absence how to improve the play. As Billy Wilder said, “individually, they’re idiots, but together they’re a genius”.

The horror of the last year’s slide into despotism has showed me the reverse of the medal.

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Britain needs a cigarette

By David Hockney

Watching the good play, the audience suspends its reason in order to be entertained — at Hamlet, as much and identically with watching a woman be sawed in half. The audience enjoys the trick while knowing, and because they know she is not going to be harmed. Just as they know Hamlet’s Dad is not coming back from the dead.

But just as the techniques of stage magic are identical with those of the confidence game, the understanding of the dramatist — that the mass can be suggested, and, so controlled —is the same as that of the Dictator. Here fear replaces happy anticipation; and, as we see, outrage at the indicted masks an unavowable fear.

The children in the car must immediately come to support the new regime or risk abandonment. The protection it offers is illusory (as who knows who will be next), but the illusion, to them, is preferable to knowledge of their powerlessness.

In the mass the alternative to submission is blacklisting, poverty, censure, et cetera. Finally, this is the same alternative offered to the children. They may court protection from fear only by remaining submissive. Just like the Electorate.

© David Mamet 2021

This piece was originally published in November.

Dear Bobby,

I wanted to warn you that only one of my three kids will show at the 9/11 memorial in lower Manhattan this year. Roman finally exploded that the reading of all those names every frigging September (though he didn’t say “frigging”) has got “kill-yourself boring”, even if one name is his uncle’s.

For Ettie, who was only two at the time and can’t remember you, 9/11 belongs in the same dusty bag as Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations. Just out of college, she dismisses the memorial as an exercise in archaic patriotism — itself a celebration of “white supremacy”. I know, I know. That expression used to refer to a few kooks in peaked white hats. It now functions as an indictment of the entire country. And that’s just the beginning of what you’ve missed out on.

I’m hoping that bringing you up to date about the past two decades will partially restore the breath-taking sense of perspective that descended on me that monstrous morning. Although the weight on my chest was almost unbearable, I do miss the accompanying clarity.

To my chagrin, I’d suddenly been elevated to American royalty: I’d lost an immediate relative to the attacks. I soon grew weary of the deference. I didn’t want to feel special. After all, part of that clarity was realising the country itself wasn’t as special as we’d thought. People have been attacking other countries since forever, especially rich countries full of people who think they’re special.

More from this author

Why wait to die?

By Lionel Shriver

Not that I believe we deserved it, mind. Just that shit happens, even to the United States, which we might have learned from Pearl Harbor. And sisters have been losing their brothers forever, too.

Everyone was nice and kind and open in the immediate aftermath, as if the shock had shattered the shells we hadn’t even realised we were cocooned in. The force of collective mourning was so overpowering that nothing else seemed to matter, which frankly made the conduct of prosaic daily life rather difficult.

Having still to remember that we couldn’t have tacos again tonight after having had tacos just three days earlier was embarrassing. Funny, I got into a huge fight with Roy, when I pointed out about ten days in that now no one was going to give a flying fig for a documentary about how “attachment parenting” turns your kids into little shits; all that mattered about kids now was that they had parents at all.

Roy exploded. He couldn’t believe his wife could concern herself with anything as petty as her career at a time like this. I said, well, at least it took me a whole ten days to even remember that, oh, crap, a year’s work just swirled down the sewer. In our family mythology, I was the selfish one, and Roy found the typecasting useful. By the way, and you won’t be crushed, because you never cared for his high-horsery: we’re divorced.

Epiphanies are lies. They seem to offer a radical realignment of how you look at things for the rest of your life, but actually they’re just tiny wrapped-up presents that you can peek at but don’t get to keep, and then you snap right back to seeing everything the same way again. It took New Yorkers only a day or two to get competitive about who’d lost someone or knew someone who’d lost someone, who was closer to downtown at the time, whose neighbourhood stank worse, and whose sidewalks were more covered with that awful grey silt. 9/11 brought in a whole new hierarchy, but it was still all about status, so New Yorkers were simply reverting to the same rivalrous assholes they’d always been.

It’s been especially brutal for me that when you died, we still weren’t speaking. And we fell out over what? Bush v Gore! I can’t even dredge up the details we got so exercised about—something about chads and military ballots and “cherry-picking”. Okay, our whole family couldn’t get over my having voted for “that idiot”. You accused me of merely trying to distinguish myself from my liberal family out of desperation for a separate “identity”, but at the expense of throwing the country under a bus. Honestly, in retrospect, I think I just didn’t care for Al, whose dreary sanctimony reminded me of Roy. FYI, our pal Al, always fleshy, is now fat.

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America's failed Machiavelli

By Edward Luttwak

Obviously, that 2000 election ripped the country in half and put us all at each other’s throats. At first, 9/11 seemed to mend that rift. But only with a basting stitch, whose straggled threads broke years ago. No one cares about terrorists anymore. Americans save their animosity for each other. As for contested elections, the last one takes the cake. Two-thirds of Republicans think the 2020 presidential election was stolen, without a shred of evidence. Like, practically half the electorate thinks voting is rigged and fake. That’s way worse than some too-close-to-call in Florida, and even Al had the grace to concede. So that sensation of us all being in this together, that warm feeling of communal suffering while walking down Broadway? Long gone.

The other revelation 20 years ago was, wow, there really is such a thing as an enemy. There really are people out there who hate this country and want to destroy it, and it was pretty disturbing that I’d never noticed before. Well, kiss that insight goodbye, too. These days, no one seems to pay the slightest attention to enemies outside the country. They’re all in the country. Our very President — Joe Biden, believe it or not, and no, he’s not dead, or not quite — claims the biggest threat to the US is “domestic terrorism”. He’s not talking about Islamic nutjobs with visas for going to flying school, either, but about white people — and not even the white people burning down black-owned businesses in the interest of “social justice”.

So never mind China (massively more dangerous than in your day), or Russia, or Iran, or the tons of terrorists in Africa and the Middle East still plotting more mayhem; all that matters is “systemic racism” right here. You’d think this country had never elected a black president (surprise!) — twice (double surprise!). You’d think 9/11 had never happened — that we’d never been shaken up, never looked around wide-eyed at the big scary world out there. We’re back to squabbling with the other children in our grubby private sandbox.

When the South tower collapsed with you in it, I also thought: my God, there is such a thing as evil. Such a thing as truly horrible, despicable people who do horrible, despicable things. And now our compatriots think “evil” means asking someone where they’re from or complimenting a foreigner’s English or using the wrong pronoun. If Ettie and her friends ever came face-to-face with proper evil, smoke would come out their ears and their brains would short out.

After the attacks, we blathered endlessly about defending “freedom”, but no one gives a tinker’s damn about freedom anymore. For 18 months they’ve “locked down” swathes of the country, telling everyone to close their businesses and stay home. That’s what now passes for “liberty and justice for all”, and practically nobody complained.

Maybe that’s because no one feels safe saying anything more controversial than their shoe size. If you announce what might have seemed self-evident 10 years ago, like “women don’t have penises”, you can lose your job, and the only place I’d dare to type such heresy is in an unposted letter to my dead brother.

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This is Britain's 9/11 moment

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

You’ll be glad to hear we attacked Afghanistan in your memory, but less happy to learn that we only left that slagheap, tail between our legs, ten days ago. The Taliban are back in power, and aside from leaving them as one of the best equipped fighting forces in the world — with $86 billion’s worth of our gear — everything is the same. Oh, we finally shot the Jesus-y creep who ploughed a plane into your office, but two trillion dollars is a stiff price for one hit job. Eight years of occupation of Iraq cost nearly the same money and accomplished the same nothing.

I need to get ready for that memorial, so this will be rushed. In 2008, the financial world went blooie. Though we’ve technically recovered, we’re still tippling on the edge of a sheer drop; my finance guy’s advice is: “Don’t look down.” In 2016, we elected an inarticulate, narcissistic blowhard as president, who made us an international laughingstock. Now we’ve elected an elderly puppet with encroaching dementia who draws not contempt but pity; he’s spending money as if medically incapable of remembering that he already spent all of it last week. The government is in hock $23 trillion and counting (your eyes are bulging), and if the dollar is ever replaced as the world’s reserve currency — this is your bailiwick, Wee Willy Wall Street — we’ll all be huddled around campfires with meat on sticks. Or soy protein on sticks. Yum.

Back in 2001, it was medieval fanatics who denigrated our country as decadent, degenerate, corrupt and irredeemably amoral. Now the leadership of all our institutions — universities, arts foundations, corporations, even the Army and CIA — has taken on the smear job for them, happily trashing the country as wicked and unsalvageable. It’s a form of the entrepreneurship we’re so famous for: Americans have learned to terrorise themselves.

By the way — although well into production, my new documentary on “cancel culture” has just been cancelled. Imagine the hilarious late-night debrief you and I might have enjoyed as I drip-fed you the ironic details. One more of our jousting, wine-soaked sibling powwows would have more than compensated for my wasted work.

L.

A significant factor in the Democrats’ defeat, I argued, was a style of politics that prevented them from developing an ambitious vision of America’s future — one that was capable of inspiring people from all walks of life. Indeed, it seemed that ever since the 1980s, American liberals had gotten out of the vision business altogether. They redirected their energies from party politics to movement politics, focusing attention in particular on minority and gender identity movements.

While that shift was morally comprehensible, it made it harder for liberals to speak of the common good across group lines. It also ingrained the habit of forgetting large constituencies that did not fit into the liberal-Left identity narrative, such as working-class whites and evangelicals — the latter group making up about a quarter of the adult population. If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them. Otherwise you give your opponent the opportunity to, as Donald Trump did with great success.

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By Matthew Goodwin

This movement politics mindset proved to be electorally suicidal. From the 1980s on we witnessed a massive transfer of political power, in large sections of the country, from the Democrats to an increasingly radical Republican Party. The most perverse consequence was that as Democrats ceded ever more geographical ground to Republicans, particularly in state and local governments, they lost the ability to protect the very identity groups they professed to care about — in particular, their right to vote. More than half of all African Americans, for instance, live in the deep red South.

Yet Democrats resisted the obvious lessons to be drawn from these developments: that you cannot help anyone if you do not hold institutional power. And you cannot acquire that power without a vision that transcends group attachments, without denying them.

Democrats have had four years to ponder their defeat as America crumbled around them. Now that hopes of a Democratic landslide have been dashed and defeat is within the realm of possibility, the question remains as to whether they have drawn the right lessons from their electoral performance. The signs are decidedly mixed.

The good news is that Democratic politicians, party functionaries, and most importantly donors focused their energies on addressing the common good and capturing the political centre. They had seen that in the 2018 midterm elections the seats the party gained were mainly won by centrist candidates who focused on building a suburban base, particularly among white women.

They also realised that while minority groups make up an important part of the base, many of their members are culturally conservative. African-Americans, particularly older ones, are more likely to have reservations about the LGBT movement. A significant portion of Latinos oppose abortion due to their Catholic faith and have more conventional views about marriage and gender roles.

That seems to have registered, because in the recent election Democratic candidates generally avoided cultural and identity themes (apart from police reform), despite the efforts of Republicans and Fox News to provoke them into it. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris ran a rather old-fashioned campaign based on policy, competence, and basic decency, and pointedly did not portray the Democratic Party as a “rainbow coalition” of distinct groups. This bodes well for the future.

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By Gavin Haynes

The bad news is that the cultural Left is even more focused on identity than it was in 2016. In part, this is due to the Trump experience. What we back then genteelly called “populism” has degenerated on the Right of the Right into a reactionary force of poorly-educated whites with their own identitarian agenda. It is tempting to want to fight fire with fire.

But over the last summer, other events revealed just how large the gap has grown between the ambition and tactics of political Democrats and those of the cultural Left. Here I am thinking of elites whose power base is in universities, the media, Hollywood, the publishing and advertising industries, the art world, and philanthropic institutions. It also includes young activists whose notion of political engagement is identity-based, confrontational, and social-media driven.

This cultural Left has been behind the so-called “Great Awokening” on race of the past five years or so. I speak here not of economic and social policies intended to improve the condition of African-Americans, which is a historical duty. Nor of legal protections for gay, lesbian, and trans people. I refer to the focus on symbols and gestures meant to display one’s conformity with enlightened opinion on such matters.

Consider the aftermath to the impressive early demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd in May. There were massive, peaceful gatherings in cities and small towns across America (and the world). But very quickly the situation degenerated into conflicts over symbols. Countless cultural institutions felt compelled to make statements about racial justice, and some of their directors resigned after making acts of contrition.

Many businesses followed suit and announced requirements that employees attend “anti-racist” training sessions, run by highly-paid, self-declared “consultants”. Twitter mobs descended on people thought to hold impure views. Editors were fired for running controversial pieces, while a researcher was fired for circulating an academic study on racial attitudes. What began as a summer of civic solidarity ended with squabbles about “cancel culture” that contributed nothing to improving life for non-elite African Americans.

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What's the mood in Trumpland?

By Ian Birrell

A major force behind this wrong turn was the liberal media, which has fallen into bad habits during the Trump presidency. Feeling that they had not been hard enough on Trump in the 2016 election, reporters got used to calling out “lies,” of which there were plenty. But the distinction between demonstrable lies and differences of opinion has gotten lost in the process. The standard of journalistic impartiality is being jettisoned in the name of an undefined “moral clarity.”

Central to these efforts has been editorial pressure on reporters to emphasise the racial dimension to stories and to play an active role in rewriting the national narrative. For example, in 2019 the New York Times launched “The 1619 Project” to mark the date when African slaves first arrived in the United States. What began as a thought-provoking idea soon became a tendentious effort to make the crime of slavery the true founding of the republic. Historians complained about inaccuracies and the Times silently corrected them, while still standing behind the project’s editor, who won a Pulitzer Prize. Young reporters were left with the impression that such efforts will still help them to advance their careers.

While the Biden campaign was not overly distracted by these psychodramas, it would be a mistake for Democratic leaders to pretend any longer that they don’t exist. Right-wing media will keep the culture war over symbols before the public eye, which can only help the Republican Party. That means that the Democratic politicians must explicitly distance themselves from ideological “anti-racist” rhetoric and political theatre, such as efforts to tear down statues of American presidents. And they must resist efforts to distort American history in our schools.

Democratic voters care about racial justice but they are focused on the present and the future, not on litigating the past. They also believe in fair play, open debate, and legitimate differences of opinion. They want to build America, not indict America. Democratic leaders must make it crystal clear that they feel the same way. No matter what the final results of this year’s elections, they desperately need to do some housecleaning if they hope ever to build a durable Democratic majority in our lifetimes.

I was particularly inspired by a recent post on the subject from Robert Wiblin of the effective altruism charity 80,000 Hours, who helped me understand a few things.

First, it’s unlikely that your vote will be the one that, on its own, changes the course of an election. It will probably not turn a win into a tie or a tie into a win. That’s because millions of votes are cast. 

If there were only 10 people voting as well as you, then there would be 1,024 possible different ways the 10 of them could vote, of which about 250 would be a 5-5 tie that you could break. So – assuming all the other voters were equally likely to vote A or B – there would be about a 25% chance that your vote would make the critical difference. If you go up to 100 other voters, it becomes about an 8% chance.

Of course, you can’t be the actual tiebreaking vote in the US election, because it’s not decided on the popular vote. But you could break the tie in a single state which then goes on to break the tie in the electoral college.

But how likely is that? On the face of it, not very. Even the smallest US state, Wyoming, has over 200,000 registered voters; most have millions. The odds of breaking the tie in one state is small: even in Wyoming (and even assuming other voters were equally likely to vote for either party, which they are definitely not; it is one of the safest Republican states, voting 67% Trump in 2016), then it would be less than one in 500. 

And even if you are the one who breaks the tie in that state, that state then has to be the one to break a tie in the electoral college for your vote to affect the overall outcome, and since there are 50 states and the smaller ones have less influence, the odds of your Wyoming vote being the tiebreaker are commensurately tinier.

So that might sound like your vote is essentially meaningless. But it’s a bit more complicated than that, for two reasons. One, not all states are equally likely to be tied, or to be tiebreakers; and two, the value of a vote is determined not just by how likely it is to have an effect, but by how big that effect will be.

The statistician Andrew Gelman’s model suggests that there is about a one in 7.7 million chance that a voter in Pennsylvania could swing the election, because it is a reasonably big state that is likely to be close. A voter in Wisconsin has about the same chance; a voter in Nevada, about one in 12 million. Meanwhile, very safe states – such as the aforementioned Wyoming, or California – are very unlikely: one chance in many billions. So if you live in a swing state, your chances of deciding the election are thousands of times higher than in safe ones. 

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Wiblin raises an interesting aside, by the way. You might be thinking “Hang on, there’s no way that a state is really decided by a single vote. If it’s that close, there’ll be court battles about recounts and so on.” And that’s true.

If vote-counting were absolutely perfect, and we knew down to the exact one how many had voted A or B, then candidate A would have 0% chance of winning if they had one vote less than their opponent, and a 100% chance of winning if they had one vote more. But given that counting isn’t perfect, then it’s not quite as clear as that.

If the count finds that one candidate in a swing state has won by a single vote, it’s almost certainly going to be challenged in the courts, and that challenge might be successful. If that candidate is found to have won by 100 votes, the challenge is that much less likely to work. If it’s 1,000 votes, it’ll be less likely still. If it’s 10,000, there might not be a challenge at all. A vote for a candidate in that situation doesn’t instantly tip a result from win to loss, but it might make some small difference to the chance that the result will be challenged and overturned in the courts.

So instead of having a one in 7.7 million chance of being the tipping vote, a Pennsylvania voter might have a somewhat larger chance of helping to avoid a recount or to make their side more likely to win that recount, which then translates into the same one in 7.7 million chance of affecting the election overall.

Still, though, one in 7.7 million doesn’t sound very much. But that’s where we have to introduce our second point, how much the outcome matters. What matters is not just the likelihood, but the likelihood times the outcome. Here, I need to bring in the idea of expected value. 

Expected value is a concept from probability theory. Imagine we were playing a game of dice. We roll a die: on a score of one to five, you give me a pound; on a score of six, I give you £10. Should you take that bet? You’re probably going to lose, after all. But if we played six times, on average, you would lose £5 and win £10, for a total gain of £5. My expected value for each roll, therefore, is £5 divided by six, or 83p. I can’t actually win 83p on any single roll, but if I did it a million times, that’s what I’d expect on average. So the bet is a good one.

Let’s say, then, you’re in Pennsylvania, and you’ve got your one in 7.7 million chance of being the magic vote. How can we work out the expected value of your vote?

The obvious thing to look at would be the overall spend of the United States government. In the 2019 financial year, the US government spent $4.45 trillion. Over four years, that’s nearly $18 trillion, or about $130,000 for each American who voted in 2016. If it was as simple as “If the candidate you want gets in, he will spend that $18 trillion on good things; if the other one does, he will spend it on bad things,” then the expected value of a one in 7.7 million chance of directing $18 trillion is pretty huge. It would be the equivalent of being in charge of a nearly $2,400,000 budget. Even if you lived in California and had only a one in 9.4 billion chance of being the deciding vote, that is an expected value of nearly $2,000.

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Of course Trump can win

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Of course, that’s not what actually happens. The bulk of the spending is already locked in, on social security, Medicare and Medicaid, road maintenance, interest on the public debt, things like that. 

And under the US system, presidents have surprisingly little power. Wiblin points out that last year, in the UK, the hung parliament meant that Theresa May’s government struggled to pass its agenda, and that this was really weird and unusual and the situation was rectified with an election. But in the US, it’s often true that the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the Presidency are split between parties, they stymie each other, and nothing very much gets done.

Still, the Trump administration, although in general (as I understand it) a legislative and policy failure, did manage to get a tax cut passed in 2017 which the Congressional Budget Office estimates lowered federal revenues by about $300 billion in 2018. That’s about 8% of the total revenue that year. More generally, presidents have huge power over foreign policy – they can decide whether to go to war, for a start, and the war in Iraq cost trillions of dollars. I think it’s pretty reasonable to think that a choice of president could affect a single-digits percentage of total US government spending. If we say 5%, and that you’re a Pennsylvania voter, then your vote probably has an expected value of about $120,000. (If you’re a California voter, on the other hand, it’s probably only about $100.)

There are harder-to-quantify non-budgetary values as well, of course. Donald Trump, I think it’s fair to say, says a lot of untrue things. If you think that his constant lies and misinformation are corrosive to public debate, you might feel that has some value that is difficult to assess in dollar terms. Similarly, he is a destabilising influence on the world order, threatening to remove the USA from international bodies like the WHO and Nato and undermining international cooperation; whether you think that’s a good or a bad thing depends on how you value the world order, but either way, again, it’s a difficult thing to price. 

Also, while – I’m surprised to learn – fewer immigrants have been deported per year under his presidency than under Obama’s, the administration has upped the rhetoric on immigration, and introduced a blanket policy of the separation of migrant children from their parents (separation did happen under Obama/Biden, but in rare cases, not as a general policy). Whether you approve or disapprove – the latter seems bafflingly cruel to me – you’ll want to assign some value to voting for it.

It’s not that you can’t put a dollar value on these things – you absolutely can, just as people can put a value on a year of human life (between $50,000 and $150,000 in the US, apparently). But it’s much harder, and would involve a much longer piece than this. I’d be happy saying they add significantly to the value of a vote; whatever value you give them, the same calculations about the likelihood of that vote having an impact apply.

But these hard-to-quantify values bring us to the third point: how confident are you – or should you be – in your decision? For instance, I would have probably bet that there were more deportations under the Trump administration than under the Obama one, but (as I have just illustrated) I would have been wrong. If I were a single-issue voter who cared solely about the number of deportations, I would have voted exactly the wrong way, if I assumed that a Biden administration would be more like Obama’s than Trump’s. If you are completely uninformed about some policy or other, then your voting will be no more likely than chance to improve the situation.

In general, whichever way you vote, about half of the population will vote the other way. In most situations, if you believe something and half of the world believes the exact opposite, that’s a good reason to pause and wonder how confident you should be in your belief.

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That said, as Wiblin points out, there are reasons to assume – given that you are reading this – that you are better informed than the median US voter. He quotes Ilya Somin’s 2013 book Democracy and Political Ignorance as saying that less than 40% of US voters knew who controlled the Senate or the House ahead of the 2014 elections, or that the government spends more on social security than on foreign aid. (Which it does, by about 20 times.) Keeping informed about politics is time-consuming and difficult and most people don’t enjoy it. So if you are doing some relatively basic things, like reading about the US election, and know basic things like who your congressional representative is, you are probably better informed than most. Still – if you are, say, 75% confident that you know the best way to vote on some issue, then you should downgrade the value of your vote by 25%.

(I will note that I don’t trust people who claim to be 100% confident in anything.)

There are also ways of improving your confidence that your vote will do what you want it to do. Wiblin points out a very simple one – find a clever friend whose judgment you trust and whose political opinions you largely agree with, and ask them who they would vote for. You can also look up surveys of expert opinion on various matters, such as Chicago Booth’s US Economic Experts Panel.

So: is voting worth it? First – of course, there are other reasons to vote than for cold-eyed estimates of your impact on spending. It communicates your preferences; some people see it as a civic duty; some people just enjoy it. And there are other things to vote for than simply the president: votes for local congressional races, or even votes for local district attorneys or dog-catchers or whatever, have much smaller electorates and so it is more likely that your vote will be the deciding one (although on the flip side, the impact of those outcomes will be smaller).

There are a couple of other considerations, as well. Wiblin points out politicians can ignore demographics that don’t usually vote – young people, for instance. If you are in such a demographic, then simply by raising the percentage of that group which voted, then you will make a small contribution to forcing politicians to pay attention to what that group wants. Something similar applies if your voting in a safe state makes it less safe.

Another, more complex, point is that other people think like you, and your behaviour affects other people’s behaviour. So there’s effectively game of the prisoner’s dilemma going on. If there are five of us voting, and I know that two people will vote A, and I want to vote B, then I won’t bother if I know that the other two are going to stay home. But if they know I’m going to stay home, they won’t bother either. By reliably voting, you make it more valuable for other people to vote. 

But to come back to our original question, if you are thinking in pure numbers terms, then, in short, whether voting is worth it depends on where you live. If you live in Pennsylvania, then your vote probably has about a one in 7.7 million chance of affecting perhaps 5% of US government spending over four years – so it has an expected value of about $120,000. Depending on how confident you are in your ability to pick the right candidate, then your vote could be worth as much as that. Even if it takes, say, two hours to vote (which is apparently a thing), then you are doing $60,000’s worth of good per hour. 

Of course, if you have to spend many hours researching your vote beforehand, that reduces the value accordingly, but unless you value your time extraordinarily highly, then it is probably a good use of your time per hour.

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If you live in Kentucky or Wyoming or Oklahoma, though, where the odds of your vote being decisive is more like one in 50 billion, then the calculations are very different. Your vote is probably worth something in the region of $20. I could entirely understand not wanting to spend two hours in the rain, or many hours looking up the impacts of different policy measures, for that. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth it if you see it as a civic duty, but I don’t think you could be reasonably judged for deciding it is not worth your time.

If you’re in one of the in-between states – Colorado, or Alaska, or Ohio, places in the one-in-150-million-ish zone – then you have to decide. The sum I’ve been using is $18 trillion (the total US government budget over four years), multiplied by 0.05 (the percentage I estimate that would be affected by a change in president), divided by the chance that you will cast the deciding vote, as given in Gelman’s model here. The expected value of your vote in those in-between states ends up in the mid-four-figures, usually. Then you need to work out how many hours it will take you to do the research if you need to, and to vote. And if you’re not confident that your vote will help – if you think you’ll just be adding noise to the already noisy system – then you may well decide it’s not worth it. 

If, though, like me, you live in north London, haven’t been to the USA for years, and are in no way a US citizen, then you can’t vote at all. Your opinion, as opposed to your ballot, is worthless and you are paying too much attention to the Americans again. But since you will have elections of your own in your own backwoods country, you might dust this piece off in four year’s time.

Everything changed for him that day and for us as a family. He was diagnosed with type one diabetes; incurable, dangerous, and in those days, deeply unpleasant for children who had to prick their fingers and inject themselves with insulin every few hours.

How did the US system perform?

Magnificently. No waiting. No fuss. No rationing of anything. A hospital stay. Kit and caboodle to help cope at home. Appointments with sales people during which they would compete to try to get us to choose their insulin pump over the other guys’. Everything paid for by our insurers.

We worried about plenty of things, but never the availability of anything that any human being had ever invented to cope with this condition.

This is why Covid-19 presents such a foundational threat to the US healthcare system. That’s why it could change the politics of healthcare in a way that will leave both Donald Trump and Joe Biden (let us assume it is him) scrambling for new thinking by the time of the presidential election.

Bluntly: the unfairness does not matter. The fact that plenty of Americans with type one diabetes struggle to get even basic care and the insulin to keep them alive has motivated the Bernie Sanders Left to call for a UK–style guarantee of government funded care — but frankly they have made little political headway. The tipping point, the moment of truth, is not the public health emergency caused by a weak primary care system, or the inability of millions of uninsured people to get access to a doctor at all.

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Americans are used to both.

The reason why this moment feels so deeply transformational is that the crisis about to hit the USA is going to touch a segment of the population that has benefited from an unlimited health-care candy store. And is about to find the candy gone.

According to Array Advisors, a healthcare monitoring consultancy, most states will run out of available intensive care unit hospital beds by mid-April. Hugely populous and hugely demanding New York state is expected to hit its capacity by April 5. Let us hope it does not happen. But it seems likely.

In those circumstances you can have insurance. The best. You can be willing to pay from your own pocket. Whatever it takes. But suddenly, for the first time in living memory, the US healthcare system will not deliver.

That age old American question, why should I pay for someone else’s healthcare? will be answered: you should pay because you too are affected. You should pay to protect yourself.

And you should understand that a system that promises to deliver everything all the time might be due for a fundamental review.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth is one of those books that sits in the category of ‘much more interesting than they sound’. Robert Gordon’s doorstop-sized tome, published in 2016, is humming with stories of American enterprise, including in the field of health.

But the story since around 1970 is little short of dismal. The USA has saddled itself with easily the most expensive medical system in the developed world, alongside some of the worst levels of life expectancy. And it has done so quite recently. As Gordon writes: “By 2013 the share of medical spending in GDP, which was only 4 percent between 1930 and 1960, had reached 18 percent”. It is expected to get to 20 percent in a few years time.

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To look at it another way: Robert Gordon says America spends 55% more per person on health than Canada. Its life expectancy is 2.5% shorter.

My son’s diabetes kit was provided without any thought about the cost. The insurer passed it on in premiums to my employer, the BBC, and they in turn will have had a tax break for providing the cover. Somewhere in this great gloopy mess of hidden subsidy and administrative costs, Sam’s insulin pump was lost. Nobody knows who actually paid and nobody cares. The incentive is to over-serve the wealthy and spend hugely on unproductive services and over-paid practitioners.

Until now. If well-insured people in New York state call for help in the next month and do not get it, the fever will break. Most elderly Americans have been ditched by their private insurers but they get to join a government-backed system called Medicare: the better-off will pay extra into this scheme and get more out of it: including the best care for Covid-19. Everyone with decent insurance will expect the treatment that they have been used to all their lives.

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Again: let us hope that the system copes. It still might. But if it buckles, a failure of this scale for the well-insured demographic is a unique event in modern American healthcare.

And it comes, of course, just months before an election in which a populist president is looking for ideas. And a moderate challenger is looking for traction. To many Americans, neither one of these men fit the bill as serious thinkers about health or much else. But around them, among those advising them, there is a big prize to be won. If America’s system breaks in the coming months, along what lines should it be rebuilt?

Robert Gordon calls American hospitals “gleaming palaces of science and waste”. I take no joy in wondering if the palace walls are about to fall in.