Many intellectuals and revolutionaries, Right-wing and Left, find this apparent sameness — omniculture, they’d call it — downright repellent. For conservatives, it signals the erasure of particularity by “globalism.” Leftists, meanwhile, see in the omniculture the triumph of a consumerist economy built on exploitation. What neither camp appreciates is that this sameness is the source of the West’s enduring influence at a time when the United States and its allies are in relative decline thanks mainly to the rise of China.

We should be grateful for omniculture because it appeals to a globalized world more than any of its civilizational rivals do.

Intellectuals and revolutionaries always like to imagine idealized versions of culture. During the Cold War, the best minds looked past the grimness of the “really existing socialism” of Communist states to the idealized socialisms that existed only in the imagination. In the same way, the nostalgic Right today laments the decline of an idealized Greco-Roman-Christian West, and the legacy Left celebrates the defeat of an imperialist, racist West. Neither of these constructs bears any resemblance to the actual culture of the Really Existing West today.

Half a century ago, much of Latin America was ruled by military officers in sunglasses, some of whom looked to Italian fascism or Spanish or Portuguese corporatism for economic models. Meanwhile, the eastern half of Europe was governed by Communist satraps of Moscow. Now democracy, in more and less corrupt versions, has replaced military juntas and rule by politburos. In addition to sharing multiparty democracy, Europe and the Americas increasingly share similar politics — not least the polarization between rural and working-class voters (“the Right”), and urban professionals and ethnic minorities (“the Left”).

The convergence of the nations of the West isn’t limited to political forms and political divisions. Partially, it’s demographic: Western nations are becoming uniformly diverse, in the sense that all are now home to ballooning shares of immigrants from non-Western regions, including Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

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‘AI extinction’ is the new Covid panic

By Michael Lind

In every Western country, fertility rates have collapsed far below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. In the United States, the total fertility rate is 1.6; in the European Union, it’s 1.34; and in Latin America, it’s 1.8 and falling. The shortfall is being filled, everywhere, by immigrants and their descendants. The foreign-born share of the United States population is nearly 15%, the highest rate since the late 19th century. Foreign-born residents make up an even larger share of the population in Britain (around 20%) and Canada (more than 20%).

Growing secularization is another characteristic of the omniculture. Protestantism once defined the United States, while Catholicism shaped life across much of Continental Europe and Latin America. But on both sides of the Atlantic, organized religion and church attendance are in rapid, and perhaps irreversible, decline. More than half of Americans never attend religious services at all. Christian self-identification in the United States has declined to around 60%, not owing to the influence of non-Christian religions, which remain small, but because of the rise of “nones”: those who have left the Christian denominations of their ancestors, mostly for “nothing in particular.”

In Europe between 2010 and 2020, the Christian share of the population dropped to about two-thirds, down from about 3 in 4 — a result caused less by Muslim and other non-Christian migration than by the simple extinction of Christian belief without its replacement by another traditional religion. The same process can be observed in Latin America, where Catholicism is in decline and competing with “nones,” who account for more than 20% of the population in South America and 13% in Mexico and Central America. 

The Catholic Church is also losing ground to Protestants, chiefly evangelicals and Pentecostalists, whose numbers in Latin America swelled to about a quarter, up from only 4% in 1970. Increasingly, in Latin America, evangelical Protestants make up an important constituency of the political Right, as in the United States.

The decline of organized religion has been accompanied by the liberalization of attitudes toward sex and reproduction throughout the Really Existing West. In Europe, abortion is prohibited outright only in Vatican City, Poland, Monaco, Liechtenstein, and Andorra; elsewhere, it is legal and subject to varying restrictions. In the United States, following the Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade, only 13 of 50 states imposed total or near-total bans on abortion.

Homosexuality has been decriminalized in every European country, with most recognizing same-sex marriages or civil unions. In the United States, the Supreme Court has decriminalized homosexuality and legalized gay marriage in all 50 states. Every Latin-American country has decriminalized homosexuality as well.  

In the case of the arts, the folk cultures of various peasantries, the elite cultures of royal courts and the haute bourgeoisie, and the official artistic styles of totalitarian regimes have been swept aside everywhere by commercial mass media and social media. Thanks to comic books and superhero movies, today’s Westerners recognize Spider-Man and Darth Vader more easily than they do figures of Greco-Roman mythology like Hercules or biblical heroes like Joshua. Even many Western conservatives, while lamenting the decline of classical literacy, appear to derive much of their worldview from children’s books by two British authors, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. 

Patriotism exists in the Really Existing West, but it is an unintellectual, sentimental, populist patriotism, based on national sports teams and national music and movies. Contemporary Europeans have long forgotten what they learned in school about the early kings and saints of their countries, but they can tell you the names of their leading national football players and Eurovision contestants. The World Cup plays the role of the original Olympic Games in the era of multiple Greek city-states and kingdoms.

The emerging pan-Western omniculture is deeply pluralistic — but the pluralism is based on functions and sectors, not on races or religions. In premodern multiethnic societies, segregated, parallel communities often existed side by side, as in the millet system of the Ottoman Empire, which allowed minorities a restricted freedom to practice their own religion and establish their own culture and law. In today’s Really Existing West, by contrast, horizontal stratification of different areas of life has replaced vertical communal divisions. There is a pan-Western business and economic culture; a pan-Western academic culture; a pan-Western avant-garde artistic culture; and various pan-Western musical styles with fans everywhere (rock, pop, rap). The same individual can participate in all of these subcultures at different times, with no sense of contradiction.

This functional pluralism is difficult for many intellectuals and activists on both Right and Left to understand. Catholics and Calvinists and Marxists and democrats and romantic nationalists alike have dreamed of aligning every aspect of society — from politics and values to art and architecture and literature — with a single overarching doctrine. Democracies must have “democratic” architecture, socialist regimes must have “socialist” art and literature, and so on. The functional pluralism of the new omniculture seems like incoherence to these would-be social engineers.

But such diversity would have been familiar to ancient Greeks and Romans and premodern East Asians. In the Hellenistic era and the Roman period that followed, formerly segregated and separate cultures of the Mediterranean disintegrated and became parts of a kaleidoscopic whole in which at least some individuals could pick and choose among fragments of different traditions.  People could take part in imperial or civic rites, worship their ancestors and household spirits, practice Stoicism or Epicureanism, and belong to this or that mystery cult at the same time. Similarly, in premodern China and Japan, you could be a Confucian in public life, a Taoist in private life, and perhaps a Buddhist on some occasions for particular purposes. This kind of cafeteria approach to culture — with no comprehensive dogma governing every aspect of life, and with some transnational subcultures appropriate for some functions but not others — is the emerging norm in the Really Existing West.

Subcultural pluralism, however, is not liberal individualism. The local geographic community has given way to multiple transnational communities for many people, but these decentralized communities can be just as conformist and intolerant. Marshall McLuhan believed that modern communications technology would create a “global village.” Yet global villages — plural — would be more accurate. The same neoliberal economic orthodoxy is taught in business schools in the United States, France, and Brazil, while the same intolerant woke identity politics structures the arts and humanities on both sides of the Atlantic. You can choose to enjoy country music or rap, but each has its zealously guarded standards of authentic tradition. 

Post-liberal critics of the modern West get this wrong. Tradition and community have not been replaced by radical individualism and anomie. Rather, complex plural communitarianism has replaced homogeneous tribal and village communitarianism.  

The dominant attitude toward sex in this emerging Western omniculture is not one of celebration of alternative lifestyles, but of lack of concern about what other people do in their bedrooms. If this is liberal, it is the liberalism of indifference. Transgenderism is a bridge too far, because it requires everyone to actively acknowledge minority sexual identities — and radical claims about mind-body dualism — instead of just ignoring them.

Thinkers on both the Right and the Left persist in trying to explain these cultural developments as derivations of this or that overarching ideology. Cultural Marxism! Gnosticism! False consciousness spread by the capitalist media! But there is no common worldview, any more than there was in the Hellenistic era, when you could worship Athena and Serapis at the same time.  The intolerant monotheisms that tried to impose uniform belief on societies by state coercion, and the intolerant secular religion of Marxism-Leninism, were historical aberrations. In the absence of government-imposed orthodoxies, large-scale societies will be heterodox by default.  Led by the Really Existing West, global civilization is returning to its natural incoherent condition.

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We are all Eurasians now

By Anatol Lieven

Attempts by Western conservatives to revive older versions of the West — whether of 1950 or 1350 — are doomed. The West of widespread Christian orthodoxy and overwhelming white majorities and sexual conservatism is gone, never to return. One by one, the countries that the Right sees as refuges from the omniculture of the Really Existing West have succumbed and have been absorbed by the omniculture. Catholic Ireland liberalized abortion law. Anti-gay Hungary jettisoned Orbán and Orbánism. Radical Salafists who want to restore the medieval Caliphate, trad Caths who want to restore medieval Christendom, slavophile Eurasianists who want to de-Westernize Russia — all are fated to fail.

Equally doomed is the progressive Left’s vision of a post-national world society in which every race and gender is represented in every social realm in proportion to its numbers in society as a whole. A shared civilization doesn’t mean a lack of national rivalries and wars. And the incoherent, segmented, functional pluralism of the omniculture, with different subcultures for different private and public purposes, is incompatible with absolute cultural egalitarianism. 

The models for the nostalgic Right are all in the past and the utopias of the progressive Left are in a borderless future that will never come about. Among contemporary societies, there are no alternatives to the new pan-Western omniculture that don’t have to be propped up by autocracy, given their lack of appeal even within their own borders. Communism, at least, once won enthusiastic converts around the world, but radical Islamism appeals to few other than a minority of ethnic Muslims. And the relaxation of religious coercion in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan would almost certainly lead to the assimilation of those societies in short order into the emerging omniculture.  

People in other countries look to China for models of industrial policy and state capitalism, not for neo-Confucian philosophy or authoritarianism. Xi Jinping’s daughter attended Harvard, and China’s Communist princelings have traded Mao suits for Western businesswear and Western fashions.

Jeremiads about Western decline, then, are doubly wrong. While the United States and Europe have allowed too much manufacturing to be lost, the main reason for their declining shares of global GDP and potential military power is external — the industrialization of China, India, and other countries — not internal mismanagement or moral decadence that can be reversed by wise leadership or a revival of correct values.

Paradoxically, the relative decline of the West’s share of global economic and military power is accompanied by the spread of Western values — the values, that is, of today’s new, religiously indifferentist, multiracial Really Existing West. If you don’t like the omniculture of the Really Existing West, you can move to Communist North Korea or anti-gay Uganda or the Taliban’s Islamist Afghanistan — for as long as they hold out against the tide. 

Wilson and lyricist Tony Asher had long discussions about whether to keep the word God in the song, given God’s alleged un-coolness in the 1960s. They needn’t have worried. The song spoke to the universal teenage yearning to fall in love and the universal teenage dread of what would happen “if you should ever leave me.”

Little did Brian Wilson know that a simple phrase, “God only knows,” meant so much more.

The idea that God only knows has a long and storied history in the Abrahamic faiths. The phrases “Lord knows,” “God willing,” and “Inshallah” are part of the modern secular lexicon — even if we don’t fully appreciate their religious origins. These phrases carry significant spiritual meaning and, as we will see, real political consequences.

Each statement tacitly admits a state of human ignorance and imperfection. The speaker is confessing, “I don’t fully know. I’m not in total control.” To say “God willing” is to acknowledge a fundamental difference between the almighty Creator and the not-so-mighty creature. While God is all-knowing, our knowledge is inherently limited. We, after all, are mere mortals, who pale in comparison.

Wilson sings, “God only knows what I’d be without you,” and he is right. He can try to imagine what his life would be like if the girl ever left him, as he fears she might, but he can never know for sure. God alone — here a stand-in for the great beyond, a higher power, or some spiritual force that we can’t grasp — can know. We can’t. Not knowing, it seems, is at the heart of what it means to be human. And it is at the heart of what it means to love and be loved.

The implications of this are that contrary to popular wisdom, “following your truth” is not always the best idea. Not believing in yourself can actually be the right thing to do. In fact, total certainty is bad for us and it can be destructive for democracy.

Think about it: if you have all of life’s questions completely settled, what is there left to discuss? If one political tribe has full and complete access to the truth, why should they include other tribes in the democratic process? Once one group possesses “the truth,” the give-and-take of democracy becomes nothing more than a waste of time. We don’t worry about citizens who have doubts. We worry about the ones who believe in themselves all the way down to their feet. 

A healthy democracy requires citizens who possess intellectual humility, who can shrug their shoulders from time to time and say, “God only knows.” Intellectual humility is a trait and a practice that allows citizens to accept their limitations. Is it “evil” to prefer a marginal tax rate of 42% over one that is 36%? If two citizens are fighting over whether a particular intersection should have a stop sign or a traffic light, there may not be one right answer. It may just be a matter of preference, with each side having a legitimate argument. Even if we suspect that we are right, we must accept that we might be wrong.  

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American democracy isn't dead

By Shadi Hamid

This might all sound obvious, but we are not sure that it is. Quickly rejecting “bad” opinions — and rushing to label certain political beliefs as reflecting deep moral flaws — is not ideal in a democracy, in which bad ideas will always be plentiful. When someone disagrees with you, that doesn’t mean they are necessarily a bad person. It most likely just means that they are different. Citizens must reject the notion that, as philosopher Kevin Vallier puts it, “others disagree with our moral, religious, and political viewpoints solely because of some cognitive or moral vice.”

This is where simple phrases like “Inshallah” and “God only knows” become more than just an offhand phrase or a lyric in a Beach Boys song. They represent an essential starting point for a healthy democracy.

A practice that nicely illustrates our point began more than a millennium ago, instituted by a group of Muslim clerics. Whenever these jurists would write a fatwa, or religious edict, they would always conclude with the phrase Allahu a’lam, which roughly translates to “God only knows.” To be sure, these jurists were not moral relativists. They believed that their particular edicts were correct. They had real confidence in their rulings. However, at the very end, the jurists would reserve the last word for God. It was as if the jurists needed to remind both the reader — and themselves — of their own shortcomings.

Here we can begin to distinguish between human confidence and human certainty. Confidence in one’s beliefs is critically important in a democracy. Absolute certainty in one’s beliefs, on the other hand, is dangerous.  

Christians have their own version of Allahu a’lam. Christians believe that the Bible is divinely inspired — “God-breathed,” as Paul puts it — even though it was written by flawed human beings. But Paul doesn’t pretend that every word he writes carries the same divine weight.

When Paul discusses marriage ethics, he is remarkably transparent about his sources. “For those who are married,” he writes, “I have a command that comes not from me, but from the Lord” — essentially, don’t get divorced. Fair enough. But then Paul encounters a thornier question, one that Jesus never directly addressed: what happens when a new Christian is married to someone who wants nothing to do with the faith? Should they divorce? Paul has an opinion — he thinks they should stay married. But listen to how he frames it: “I do not have a direct command from the Lord.” In other words, “This is my best judgment, but I am flying a bit blind here.”

The lesson is unmistakable: if Paul — writing under divine inspiration — could admit the limits of his certainty, then maybe the rest of us should too. Sometimes wisdom means saying “God only knows,” even when we are pretty sure we know what God would want.

A sincere faith does not depend on absolute certainty and it is unfortunate that our broader religious and political culture tends to equate the two. Feeling comfortable and confident in our convictions can actually engender greater intellectual humility, rather than hubris. After all, if we know where we stand, we may find ourselves less threatened by others’ convictions.

Let’s return for a moment to the Muslim jurists and the fatwa. Trusting God rather than themselves enabled these jurists to approach their legal opponents with generosity. If truth belongs to God alone, that changes the fundamental purpose of debate. As the great 8th- and 9th- century jurist Imam Shafi’i, one of Islam’s most influential scholars, put it, “I never once argued with anyone hoping to win the debate; rather I always wished that the truth would come from his side.” The search for truth, rather than victory, is the goal.

We, your authors, would like to uphold this standard. It is easier said than done, especially when the convictions in question are not about tax rates but about salvation. One of us is Christian, the other Muslim. Regarding the very nature of God, we disagree, and our disagreement is profound. 

Years ago, in one of our Christian-Muslim dialogues at the University of Minnesota, a student asked me (Shadi) how I felt about the fact that many evangelicals — including my co-author Matthew — want me to know Christ, embrace him as my savior, and anchor my life in his grace. I feel no such need to see Matthew convert to Islam, so I can’t entirely relate to the impulse. I was a bit stumped about how to respond, since I was well aware of the imbalance in our perspectives.

Frankly, I am still uncomfortable with the idea that a dear friend might wish for me to replace one set of foundational beliefs with another — to, in effect, become something other than what I am. But I understand better now. My friendship with Matthew is premised on trying our best to understand each other. And if this is what Matthew believes, then I can’t expect him to suppress his own commitments as an evangelical who, by definition, has an interest in evangelizing. He wants me to convert to Christianity, and that’s okay.

Matthew’s confidence in his faith doesn’t threaten our friendship. Certainty would. If either of us believed he possessed God’s final verdict on the other, there would be nothing left to talk about. Matthew and I wrestle with moral and political uncertainty every day. We have found that our respective religious traditions do not forbid this wrestling. In fact, they enable us to wrestle more productively with our questions as well as our doubts.

So how can citizens hold political confidence while at the same time avoiding the destructive temptations of political certainty? It comes down to this: to be a person of political confidence is to place your confidence in something beyond yourself, something you can’t fully comprehend or control. To be a person of political certainty is to place your confidence in yourself and your ability to fully comprehend the truth. The writer Anne Lamott says, “The opposite of faith is not doubt. The opposite of faith is certainty.” This is not just another clever aphorism. It speaks to something deep and true about what it means to be human.

A cautionary tale of the dangers of making premature political judgments comes from the life and death of Ali, one of the most beloved figures in the history of Islam. Ali was the son-in-law and cousin of the Prophet Muhammad and the last of the four “rightly guided” caliphs. He was assassinated in 661 AD, during a civil war that haunts Muslims to this day. 

Ali was embroiled in a bitter dispute with Muawiya, the powerful governor of Syria, who refused to recognize his authority. To settle the matter, Ali submitted himself to a formal process of arbitration, in which an ostensibly neutral party would adjudicate each man’s claims. Many of Ali’s followers were outraged that their beloved leader would humble himself in this way. How could he — the commander of the faithful, blessed by the one true and immortal God — subject himself to the ruling of a mere mortal?

Upon hearing their grumbling, Ali did something both startling and strange. He brought forward a copy of the Quran and touched it. Ali then declared in front of the crowd, “Oh Quran, speak to the people!” His followers were confused. “Oh Ali, why do you mock us?” they asked. The Quran, Ali explained, does not speak by itself.

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It was a brilliant religious demonstration with profound political consequences. For Muslims, the Quran is indeed the word of God, every letter and word divine. As such, the book is ultimate certainty — truth with a capital T. But the Quran’s precise meaning and application are anything but.

The Quran requires a human interpreter. It was “written in straight lines between two covers,” as Ali said, so it can’t speak for itself. Human beings, with all their flaws and foibles, have to read, interpret, and apply it themselves. When they read the holy text, they bring their own biases. Like any book, the Quran requires readers. And readers can always find what they are looking for — if they look hard enough.

There, lying before the crowd, was God’s word, unmediated by human authorship. And yet, even here, Ali’s word of caution was clear: try as you might, you cannot directly access God’s true and perfect intent. The Quran will not speak exactly to this or that situation. Readers need to discuss, debate, and come to their own imperfect decisions. You can judge your fellow humans, but do so with care because your judgments will necessarily be limited. Not only that, but ultimate judgment will never be yours, and it won’t happen in the here and now. Ultimate judgment will be delayed until another world and another life. Only at the very end of time will God clarify who was right and who was wrong.

Ali’s exhortations failed to satisfy his supporters — some of whom became his betrayers. They wanted absolute certainty. They wanted answers. So they killed him.

The story of the Quran that would not speak — and Ali’s refusal to answer on its behalf — might be surprising to those who associate the early days of Islam with fundamentalism, fanaticism, and the often misunderstood term sharia. Ali’s pluralistic ethic was baked into the sharia itself. Sharia is Islam’s sacred law, but its origins come from a word that means “way to the watering-hole.”

According to a saying of the Prophet Muhammad, if a person strives to faithfully interpret God’s path and is successful, they will receive two rewards. If they try but get it wrong, they will still receive one reward for their good-faith attempt. If two interpreters of the Quran disagree with each other, only God knows which one of them is correct. As the Quran says, “No one knows the soldiers of God but God.” 

Muslims and Christians disagree on many things but come together on one critical point: A mortal’s claim to fully comprehend the infinite truth of an immortal God is something close to blasphemy. In claiming intellectual certainty and mastery, blasphemers put themselves in the place of God. In Islam, one of God’s 99 names — the names that make God, God — is the All-Knowing. By definition, humans cannot aspire to anything comparable.

Here we begin to see why claims of absolute certainty, and the political fundamentalism that often follows, are not simply bad manners or undemocratic; they are something worse. Political fundamentalism is, at its heart, a rejection of human finitude and frailty. In this sense, fundamentalism is a rejection of the most important distinction in Islam and Christianity — the distinction between the created and the Creator. 

God only knows. And that, if we are honest, is a relief. Or at least it should be. 

This article is adapted from Matthew Kaemingk and Shadi Hamid’s new book, Can Religion Save Democracy? How More Faith — Not Less — Can Heal Our Public Life, used with permission from Brazos Press. 

If there is a foundational dogma to America’s civic religion, it is that the United States is an exceptional country. The reason we emerged as the world’s first modern democracy, the reason we became the most powerful country in history, the reason we defeated fascism and communism and remade much of the world in our capitalist image, is that we’re somehow special. 

For those inclined to see the world through Christian prophecy, we are ordained by God. For those who prefer to see Enlightenment-style “reason” as the engine of civilization, it was the genius of our Founding Fathers that set us on our path to greatness. For those who are more anthropologically minded, it was the curious Tocquevillian habit of Americans to come together in voluntary associations that set us apart. But all agree that we are a uniquely favored nation.

A wider view of history reveals a more mundane explanation: the reason America became a democratic superpower was its abundance of land. 

The long arc of Western history that led to the birth of the United States did not “begin” at any particular moment, but the collapse of the Roman Empire was certainly a major inflection point. The new kingdoms founded by Germanic tribal warlords on the wreckage of the Empire were less sophisticated than the society they had replaced. They lacked the bureaucracy necessary to tax their subjects as effectively as the Romans had, and without that revenue, they could not raise standing armies. Instead, they relied on volunteer soldiers, and compensated them with the spoils of war and pillage. This included plundered treasure as well as, more importantly, land.

Out of this exchange came the military order of feudalism. The power of a medieval king was measured by the military might of the volunteer soldiers pledged to him — otherwise known as his vassals. These men tended to be experienced warriors who could fight on horseback and who could conscript peasants who lived on their land, by force or by payment, to serve as foot soldiers. Generally, the more land a vassal held, the larger his annual revenue and the greater his army. He agreed to wage war on behalf of a more powerful magnate in exchange for the right to rule over a share of the newly conquered lands that military victory would bring. With that new wealth and power, he could, in turn, attract less powerful vassals into his own service.

But this compensation scheme created an intractable problem for the king, who, in the early Middle Ages, was merely the most powerful warlord in a given region at a given moment. The more land he distributed to his vassals, the stronger and more independent they became. Thus, every vassal was a potential rival, and every fief the king granted to them increased the threat they posed to his hegemony.

The remedy only made the problem worse. The king could secure his throne against the predatory ambitions of his rivals only by waging new wars and conquering new lands to distribute to his vassals as fiefs. It was a vicious cycle: staying ahead of one’s opponents in the short term meant increasing the threat they posed in the long term. On top of that, vassals waged their own wars to amass their own retinues of lesser vassals, and were also constantly trying to build their own military dynasties. Political competition created the conditions for endless war.

The militarized politics of feudal Europe produced an intricate vertical social structure: a long chain of vassals and liege lords connected the lowliest peasant to God. At the same time, however, the competition between warlords created a countervailing ideological force: republicanism.

The core region of feudal Europe was the area that was conquered by Charlemagne in the ninth century, stretching from the south of present-day Italy to the Baltic Sea, and from Bohemia to the Pyrenees. In the early days, aspiring conquerors swarmed to this relatively populated landmass, whose large peasant class could be easily forced into serving in infantries. But eventually, the core became overheated. The power of the incumbent lords became too strong to contest, and competition shifted to the more sparsely populated and up-for-grabs lands of the east and the north.

To effectively exploit these peripheral domains, their new rulers had to encourage settlement — and not just by agricultural laborers. Centuries of military competition in Europe had steadily generated new technologies: plane and chainmail armor, long bows, stone castles and siege weaponry like trebuchets. Artisans were needed to manufacture these products, and they in turn required trading centers. In this way, towns became indispensable to the long-term security of any throne.

Sometimes rulers transferred populations to their territories by sheer force, but more often, they were compelled to offer attractive terms to prospective immigrants. Colonists were granted enhanced property rights and civil autonomy. In the 12th century, the charter of Dublin allowed its residents to administer their own local affairs and judge their own legal cases. They were allowed to form guilds and to build as they wished within the city’s boundaries. Legal innovations spread like mushrooms: a charter in a town in today’s Germany would become a template for the founding of a new one in today’s Poland. A transnational legal network began to emerge, bestowing certain rights and privileges upon urban inhabitants, who became known as “burgesses”, or “the bourgeoisie”.

As the kingdoms of the old Carolingian lands spread to the farthest northern and eastern reaches of the continent, new riverine and overland trade routes emerged, criss-crossing Europe. Trade produced wealth, which kings could tax. These new sources of revenue, along with the development of bureaucracy, began to resolve the problem of the conflicting political interests between lords and vassals. Now, instead of exchanging land for military service, monarchs could pay mercenaries to fight their wars, and even raise standing armies. The Hundred Years’ War of the late Middle Ages was fought largely by mercenaries. But at the end of the war, Charles VII created the first European standing army since the Roman Empire by bringing France’s private military companies, which were typically contracted by feuding lords, into the direct service of the king. The move ignited a brief civil war with much of the aristocracy, as the crown was consolidating at their expense.

Over time, to use Max Weber’s terminology, the crown began to monopolize the use of legitimate violence. Royal domains were internally pacified, and warfare became a matter of conflicts between great kingdoms. Something resembling the modern nation-state became dimly perceptible. 

Pacification was good for trade, and the chartered townships prospered. The republican-minded burgesses flourished with them. But the old feudal class structures didn’t simply evaporate. Warrior knights slowly transformed into domesticated aristocrats orbiting the king’s court. These aristocrats continued to control the land, even while fulfilling no obvious social purpose. Stripped of their military function, they became a parasitical remnant of a social order that no longer existed. Peasants, laborers and lesser aristocrats found themselves socially immobile.

The stage was set for class conflict. The newly consolidated political power of the crown, at its apotheosis in the age of Absolutism, began to chafe against the burgesses with their democratic values.

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California's woes were born in England

By Leighton Woodhouse

But for the discontented burgesses, farmers, and lords without prospects there was the promise of America. In the American colonies, there was arable land for anyone with the gumption to venture into the wilderness and take it. If you could tolerate the backbreaking work of clearing forests and the threat of being massacred by Indians, you could escape the economic stranglehold of early modern Europe’s vampire class. Here, the republican values incubated in medieval European towns and cities were free to spread unencumbered by the dead weight of aristocracy. 

Take, for example, those who would come to be known as the Scots-Irish, though they thought of themselves simply as Irish. Their ancestors, largely Presbyterian, had been transplants from Scotland to Ulster, recruited by Queen Elizabeth I as English-aligned colonists meant to displace the native-born Catholic Irish. Conditions were dismal in Scotland, and the land much better in Ireland, so they came in droves. But once there, they found themselves under the thumbs of absentee English landlords, who leveraged the improvements the new tenants had made to their lands to double and triple the rents they charged them. Feudalism had long since passed, but the laboring classes were still being squeezed by the nobles. 

In the 18th century, the Scots-Irish fled Ulster as readily as their grandparents had once fled Scotland, this time to the east coast of the United States. After landing in Philadelphia, they beat a hasty path into the back country, where they chiseled crude farms out of the mountains and hollows of the Appalachians. Once the nation was unified following the War of Independence, the Scots-Irish pioneers, for better and for worse, became the tip of the spear of American expansionism. 

The conquest of western North America entailed a different kind of warfare than their distant European ancestors had waged in the Middle Ages. The Americans faced fierce resistance from an indigenous population skilled in warfare, but not of the sort that medieval conquerors had encountered in Europe. Indian tribes had not constructed stone castles nor built trebuchets. The Americans could take their land without fielding armies in the tens of thousands, and without reordering their society to produce a warrior class and a servile population that could be conscripted as cannon fodder. The settlers who marched west of the Appalachians to conquer Indian lands largely did the fighting themselves, with the US Army playing only an ancillary role. They furnished their own weapons, and put their own lives at risk. They believed not in oaths of loyalty but in liberty, independence, and natural rights. It was a form of conquest and colonization that was entirely compatible with the old republican values of the European bourgeoisie.

After the West had been settled, the bourgeois ideology continued to prosper. Just as the medieval warlords on the peripheries of Europe needed new settlers to secure their power, the United States had a bottomless appetite not only for laborers but for skilled workers, educated professionals and entrepreneurs to develop the economy of a newly conquered continent. As for the burgesses in the medieval European towns, it was a buyers’ market for labor. And the US government attracted laborers in the same way: by offering economic opportunity as well as political liberties the newcomers were denied at home. With the obvious, colossal exception of blacks in the South, who were still ruled by the vestiges of a European aristocracy that would only be subdued in the Civil War and ultimately defeated in the Civil Rights Movement, American democracy flourished under these material conditions. It continued to do so in the 20th century, as America’s economy boomed, increasing the bargaining power of workers, professionals and entrepreneurs with the state. 

Those conditions, however, have vanished. In an age of urbanization and industrialized farming, land is no longer a productive source of wealth to be exploited at the level of the household. Far from needing to coax migrants into the United States to develop our booming economy, we are stanching the flow to prevent them from competing for scarce jobs. And with Artificial Intelligence rapidly displacing human cognitive labor, the incentives for governments to grant new civil liberties to people in order to secure their commitment to the nation and enlist their participation in the economy is becoming non-existent. Humans are losing their leverage over the institutions that rule them as their labor becomes cheap and superfluous. 

At the age of 250, the United States has long ceased to be exceptional. There is reason to question whether its republican spirit will persist much longer. Far too much emphasis is placed on vague notions of some uniquely American commitment to “freedom” to explain the success of American democracy, and far too little on the material conditions that have historically made democracy here possible: abundant land without a landed gentry. Without these conditions, democracy persists in America merely as a matter of inertia. We should be cautious not to assume it will last. 

Hitler was complying with a public speaking ban issued by Walter Felix Mueller, Weimar’s mayor. Everyone knew the Nazi leader was dangerous. He had tried to overthrow the government in the so-called Munich Putsch just three years earlier. Now, here he was in Weimar, once home to Goethe, and where the German Republic had been founded in 1919, stamping the town’s name on its fragile democratic experiment. Mueller was determined that the cradle of the new democracy would not become its grave. So he silenced Hitler by law — for one weekend in July 1926 anyway. History would soon prove this a futile gesture, one that neither slowed the death of the Weimar Republic nor Hitler’s rise to power.

I’ve spent the last few years studying the German interwar years for my new book, which focuses on the town of Weimar between 1918 and 1939. A century on, we seem to look to this period for guidance more than ever, but one conclusion is rarely drawn: there is little evidence to suggest that the Nazi Party could have been legislated out of history.

This was clear enough that summer day in 1926. Although Mueller’s speaking ban stopped Hitler from addressing his followers in Weimar’s market square, it didn’t stop people from wanting to listen to him. And since the mayor had no power over private gatherings, the Nazis simply held indoor invitation-only meetings instead. Indeed, the very same day that Hitler stood silent on the market square, the Hitler Youth received its name at the nearby Crossbow Society, while in other meetings, central Nazi rituals and symbols were decided. All party publications, for instance, were to be marked with a standardized emblem: an eagle holding an oak wreath with a swastika in the middle. This would later become the official emblem of the Nazi state. Hitler himself also spoke — entirely playing by the rules — behind closed doors at the German National Theater in Weimar: the very birthplace of the republic. In short, Mueller’s ban had done absolutely nothing to stop Hitler, not even for a single weekend.

Despite such evidence to the contrary, many Germans today seem to believe that the lesson from Weimar is that growing public discontent is best tackled by legislating against the parties that channel it. This is particularly noticeable when it comes to the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, whose rapid rise is causing a fair amount of angst in Germany. Haunted by their Nazi past, Germans long believed that there would never again be a significant political party to the Right of conservatism. Now, the AfD is not only occupying that space but is even leading the opinion polls. How should Germany respond? “Learn from history and ban the AfD!” says the far-Left Die Linke party.

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They are not alone. At their party conference last year, pretty much the only thing the deeply divided center-left Social Democrats (SPD) could wholeheartedly agree on was initiating legal proceedings towards an AfD ban because, as one senior party figure put it, “we all have a responsibility to learn from our history.” Even the German President, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, whose role is meant to put him above party politics, asked in a speech last year: “Is it actually possible that we haven’t learnt from history?”, warning that “a party that walks the path of aggressive anti-constitutionalism always had to reckon with the possibility of a ban.”

At the local level, meanwhile, some politicians are trying to tackle the AfD the same way Mueller tried to hem in Hitler. Earlier this year, two Bavarian municipalities issued speaking bans against Björn Höcke, an AfD politician who had planned to appear at campaign rallies. In the end, a court declared this gambit illegal. When Höcke finally spoke, it turned out that his audience now contained people who’d just come to see what the hype was about.

Höcke is a point in case for the argument that legal action does little to diminish the appeal of radical politics. Intense, radical and ambitious, he is infamous in Germany for leading the most extreme faction of the AfD, and has been convicted twice for using Nazi slogans at campaign rallies. Yet Höcke leads one of the most successful AfD branches in the country, with his Thuringian party coming first in regional elections in 2024 and now polling at 38% of the vote share. As a former history teacher, Höcke is conscious of the same history his enemies hope to use to defeat him.

There are indeed many striking parallels between past and present. Thuringia, that central German state where Höcke today has his power base, was pivotal to the rise of the Nazis, as indeed was Weimar, the state’s capital after the First World War. Hitler himself visited Weimar over 40 times, because he found ideal political conditions there despite temporary speaking bans. In many ways, Thuringia became a safe haven for the nascent Nazi movement. Some German states had instituted regional bans of the party from 1922, followed by a nationwide ban after Hitler’s botched 1923 coup. Yet Nazi politicians and fellow-travelers simply stood for election as independents, or in newly formed ersatz parties. In this way, seven far-Right men made it into the Thuringian state parliament in 1924, three of whom were card-carrying National Socialists.

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Due to the parliamentary arithmetic, these Thuringian Nazi MPs were needed to form a  Right-wing majority in the state, and they duly agreed to back the ruling coalition in exchange for a re-legalization of the local Nazi Party. They got what they asked for, forcing a local lifting of the ban as early as March 1924 and granting Hitler’s party a political sanctuary from which to rebuild his movement until the national ban fell in 1925. It’s no coincidence that the first formal Nazi rally, that one with Hitler silent on the stage, happened not in Nuremberg — but in Weimar. The town would, in time, become the seat of the first state government to appoint a Nazi minister, a full three years before Hitler became German chancellor.

Höcke knows all of this — and so do many of his party colleagues. Take the time and location of this year’s national AfD conference. It is being held in Erfurt, which is today the capital of Thuringia. The date for the meet-up is 4 July 2026, exactly 100 years after the crucial Weimar rally of 1926. Make of that what you will, but the AfD certainly doesn’t go out of its way to reject the political legacy of Hitlerism. In fact, it often outright flirts with the phrases, symbols and gestures of the Thirties. The latest example is the federal AfD MP Matthias Moosdorf, who has recently been charged with greeting a party colleague with the Nazi salute in the Berlin parliament.

To be clear, the AfD is not the reincarnation of the Nazi Party. For one thing, it doesn’t have or seek to acquire a private army. By contrast, Hitler’s stormtroopers eventually counted over four million members. Even at the rally in 1926, when he wanted to be seen to stick to the rules, Hitler’s men caused a veritable blood bath in Weimar, provoking brutal street battles. One policeman was shot and wounded on the street, right in front of the train station. So far, there is no sign that the AfD has a comparable appetite for brutal illegality.

That’s another good reason for mainstream politicians to keep their heads — and focus not on the AfD itself but on the causes that have helped it grow. Again, there are parallels to the past. For all its campaigning and consolidating, and for all of Hitler’s personal charisma, the Nazi Party only got 2.6% of the vote in the 1928 elections. Then came the Wall Street Crash, causing such rage and despair that no party ban could have stopped it.

What ordinary Germans wanted most after 1929 wasn’t extremism or ideology: but tangible, drastic and effective reforms to address the misery they found themselves in. That it was possible to absorb such despair — and turn it into optimism by democratic means — is shown by the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt as President of the United States. FDR came to power in 1933, the same year Hitler became chancellor of Germany. Of course, the comparison isn’t perfect: unlike Germany, the US boasted a long tradition of democratic politics. All the same, both Roosevelt and Hitler ultimately dealt with the same economic crisis. We will never know if a charismatic, capable and democratic-minded politician could have pulled Germany from the brink. But there is nothing inevitable about the way German history turned in the interwar period.

That is doubly true today: the causes for the rise of the AfD are far less severe than those that brought the Nazis to power. Between 1929 and 1933, the Great Depression caused mass unemployment at a time when many German families had only just begun to rebuild from the traumas of the First World War and the turmoil that followed in its wake. Today, the AfD is growing not because of external economic collapse, but because people are frustrated with political choices made by recent governments, primarily on immigration, but also on energy policy, economic reforms and cultural issues. All of these are eminently fixable with reforms centrist politicians could themselves enact. Surveys show, for instance, that the stricter stance on controlling immigration that the current German government has taken has led to this issue being seen as less of a concern by voters.

Instead of burying their heads in the sands of time, German politicians should focus on the here and now, tackling the reasons that cause people to turn to radical politics. Suffocating the fires of discontent is never as effective as depriving them of fuel. The Weimar Republic may be the most terrifying example of a fallen democracy in Western history, but fear shouldn’t tempt its successors into trying to legislate against a repeat. The lessons from Weimar are complex and nuanced — yet it’s clear they don’t boil down to party and speaking bans as guarantors for a better future.

Their reasoning was that Turkey, which has the second largest standing army in Nato, was not to be trifled with. More to the point, they saw the attacks as a category error. Turkey was just not the enemy. Ankara’s official self-image is of a natural mediator, a regional heavyweight whose cultural understanding of its neighborhood is deeply rooted in a 600-year Ottoman past. It had loudly denounced the US-Israeli strikes while working its back channels to bring them to a halt. In other words, the missiles targeted Turkish self-esteem. For all its condemnation of US action, and despite saber-rattling at Israel, Turkey was being lumped into the imperial camp it had so loudly refused to join. It was a cruel blow that when talks between the Trump administration and the mullahs in Tehran finally took place, they happened in Islamabad and not Istanbul.

Even before the fog of this conflict lifts, Turkey, like countries elsewhere, is busy calculating who comes out on top. The cui bono matrix is not difficult to run. By most calculations, as Iran goes down, Turkey goes up. Of course, the current high price of oil is a spanner in Turkey’s disinflation policy, and risks undoing three years of sacrifice that dragged inflation down from a high of 75% per annum to (a still staggering) 32%. Yet as with the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, a weakened Iran increases Turkey’s strategic and commercial clout. In the long term, it reinforces Turkey’s effort to be an energy and transport hub, and allows it to compete with Dubai as the regional commercial center. That’s shadowed by opportunities further afield: just last week, Turkey’s foreign minister signed a “strategic partnership” on trade and security with Britain.

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As that last deal implies, all this is also good for the Turkish defense industries — not just drones but warships and even fighter jets. Israel views this with some alarm, and Benjamin Netanyahu has warned against an “emerging radical Sunni axis” in which Turkey is, presumably, the crucial pivot. In truth, the danger of a confrontation between a US ally and a fully paid-up member of Nato is slim. Ankara’s greater fear is that a badly wounded and unstable Iran will be a running sore even greater than the Syrian civil war — prompting a refugee crisis along a common 534-kilometer border, or else fueling Kurdish irredentism.

Thumbing back to before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Turkey may have been suspicious of the Shah’s ambitions to turn Iran into a dominant Middle Eastern power, but relations were largely cooperative. While there was no direct causal link, it is not fanciful to think that the rise of a Shiite theocratic regime in Tehran gave confidence to the Sunni religious Right in Turkey, which was gathering strength in those years. That Turkey was in danger of becoming “another Iran” was the newspaper cliché of the day. It is now ironic to think that a preferred solution for the pious government ruling in Ankara would be a stable but weakened secular regime in Iran. The worst option would be for Iran to emerge from the current conflict as master of the Strait of Hormuz, emboldened and unbowed.

Whatever the outcome, the people of Iran may well conclude that they are classic victims of “the curse of oil”, a rueful malediction preventing nations from converting natural resources into the well-being of their citizens. The Turkish people might conclude that they suffer from a different sort of hex: “strategic significance”. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been at the helm of his country for well over two decades, pioneering the art of transactional international relations while Donald Trump was chasing starlets and Viktor Orbán was still Brussels’ idea of a model democrat. His governments have managed to leverage geography and regional importance to insulate Turkey from external pressures and democratic accountability at home. The question now is whether the war will finally strip away that insulation, exposing Ankara to pressures it has long managed to arbitrage. The answer lies in understanding how profoundly Turkey has changed under Erdoğan’s rule — and whether that change can still work in his favor.

It might be a stretch to say that Turkey underwent a form of regime change in the 2002 elections that brought Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) to power. But it is fair to say that those elections obliterated a whole generation of politicians. No party in the previous parliament managed to gain a single seat. In a result reminiscent of Hungary under Orbán, and under a system that rewards the largest party, the AKP won two-thirds of MPs with barely a third of the popular vote. Erdoğan, a former mayor of Istanbul, was still a banned politician at the time, having served a brief prison sentence for “exploiting religion to political ends” by reciting a nationalist poem at a political rally — a blatant form of judicial casuistry which he was later to apply to his own political rivals.

Erdoğan’s political instincts and impassioned rhetoric peppered with references to Islam spoke to the concerns of first- and second-generation urban migrants. His party portrayed a greater acceptance of religion in public life as part of a wider struggle to make Turkey more democratic. Until recently, an aggressively secular Turkish military was a controlling presence in political life. Still, it is important to remember that what brought the AKP to power was not so much a tide of Islamic feeling as an economic crisis. A decade averaging 70% inflation was followed in 2001 by the collapse of the Turkish lira.

Today, it is again inflation, much more than Iranian Kheibar Shekan missiles, that most threatens the Erdoğan government. The parallel with Orbán is inexact — the GDP of Istanbul alone is roughly 1.5 times larger than all of Hungary. Yet like the jobless Hungarian premier, Erdoğan faces the predicament of a populist leader who now strains to be popular. And, like autocrats everywhere, Turkey’s leader has cultivated a patronage network and a praetorian guard of cronies who will do anything to keep their champion in power. The result is an increasingly disillusioned society that watches its country drop like a stone in international indices of democratic rights and press freedoms. A common reckoning is that 90% of Turkish media is under direct government control. But here’s the rub. The AKP still suffered its worst defeat since coming to power in the 2024 municipal elections, not just failing in the big cities but losing conservative heartland strongholds such as Bursa, Kütahya and Adıyaman.

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A year after Ekrem İmamoğlu — the popular Istanbul mayor widely seen as the most credible presidential challenger for the 2028 elections — won a second term by 10 percentage points in 2024, the government moved to arrest him on corruption charges. The tactic was familiar: Selahattin Demirtaş, the charismatic leader of the pro-Kurdish party, has spent years in prison despite the European Court of Human Rights repeatedly ruling his detention was politically motivated. The court issued a similar ruling for the philanthropist Osman Kavala, imprisoned since 2017. Kavala’s offense was to support civil society activism, his aggravated life sentence now a warning pour décourager les autres, or in this case other businesspeople tempted to support a dissident cause.

As the constitution stands, Erdoğan is not eligible for another presidential term, but few doubt he will overcome that obstacle. And though current polls show him unable to beat a CHP opponent, his current strategy is to use the courts to run that party into the ground. Mayor after CHP mayor is now being arrested, while the party leadership may be legally disbanded. Turkey, once a viable candidate for EU membership, has long ceased to be the poster child for how democracy can flourish in a Muslim-majority society.

The Antalya Diplomacy Forum, Turkey’s annual showcase conference held earlier this month, offered a revealing snapshot of where Erdoğan’s transactional model now stands. Dozens of heads of state attended. American and Iranian officials circled the same rooms without meeting. The mood was less about solving the Hormuz crisis than recalibrating for a world in which Washington is, to put it mildly, unpredictable. In such a world, Erdoğan’s strongman politics finds a ready audience. Tom Barrack, the US ambassador to Ankara, was explicit about the new dispensation at the public forum. “This part of the world,” he said, “respects only one thing: power. And if you don’t reflect power, if you reflect weakness, you are on your heels.” To hammer his point home, Barrack even lauded Erdoğan by name.

But as the price of food rises, as the middle classes try to send their children abroad, and as elected leaders go to jail, Turkish citizens may not be quite so sanguine about the cost to their civil liberties. Turkey pundits used to describe the country’s fault lines as lying between military and democratic politics, between secular and pious — but these binaries may have been more symbiotic than they appeared. Think of the Victorian optical toy, the thaumatrope: a bird painted on one side, a cage on the other. Spin the disc fast enough and the bird appears inside the cage. The question, as Turkey navigates the turbulence of its neighborhood’s most dangerous war in a generation, is whether the disc is finally slowing down — and whether, when it does, the bird will still be there.

A clear example of this took place last month, when Times of Israel reporter Emanuel Fabian published a first-person account headlined: “Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill me if I don’t rewrite an Iran missile story.” In the American press, the article rated only a quick mention, nestled between updates on ships stranded in the Strait of Hormuz and the Pentagon’s comments on US strategy. 

But when this latest chapter of America’s military struggle with Iran is a distant memory, Americans will still be wrestling with the matters raised by Fabian’s article. His account is the proverbial canary in the coalmine, warning us to get a handle on the power of online prediction markets before they hijack our political process.

Here are the basic contours of Fabian’s story. On 11 March, he wrote a Times of Israel blog post, reporting that an Iranian missile had struck Israeli territory. The missile, he wrote, had hit a wooded area and caused no injuries. After publishing this seemingly unremarkable news update, he began receiving emails, and then text messages, from people he did not know. The senders urged him to correct an “error” in his reporting and clarify that the area had been hit by shrapnel rather than by an entire missile. Fabian, believing his reporting to be correct, declined to make the change. But the messages continued, becoming more urgent, and then a bit sinister, and then overtly threatening. One read: “If you do not correct this by 01:00 Israel time today, March 15, you are bringing upon yourself damage you have never imagined you would suffer.” Only after Fabian went to the police with these messages did the threats stop.

By this time, Fabian had figured out that the source of the writers’ obsession with an otherwise insignificant missile attack was that it was the subject of a bet on the blockchain-powered prediction site Polymarket. The bet was on whether Iran would strike Israel on a certain date. The precise terms stipulated that Iran would have “struck” Israel only if Israeli territory were hit by a full missile rather than by fragments of an intercepted one. The pool at stake was $14 million. (Polymarket has since denounced the threats directed at Fabian, stressing its compliance with the law and its commitment to national security.)

When I read Fabian’s article, I was reminded of a scene in George Orwell’s 1984, in which protagonist Winston Smith, a record keeper in the “Ministry of Truth”, is asked by his bosses to change an “error” in the historical record. His specific assignment is to change the official history — which claims that his nation of Oceania has always been at war with the nation of Eastasia — into the claim that Oceania has instead always been at war with the nation of Eurasia. This “error,” of course, is not an error at all. His bosses’ demand simply reflects the government’s wish to maintain continuity in its propaganda, thus justifying its current military engagement with Eurasia. Smith duly complies, consigning the outdated history to the Memory Hole and writing the lie into truth. 

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Over recent decades, we have frequently been warned of the potential for biased journalists, powerful politicians, or moneyed special interests to instill false consciousness in the public to serve their own ends. But we have paid far less attention to the potential for gambling on politics or geopolitics to accomplish the same ends by means more impactful, more pernicious, and less traceable. The type of pressure that Polymarket’s bettors applied to Fabian over a relatively unimportant event — pressure to which a less courageous journalist might easily have succumbed — not only stands to undermine the integrity of journalistic reporting (the shared basis of facts on which democracies make decisions) but the integrity of decision-making itself. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that it isn’t doing so already. 

Gambling is an ancient industry, but real-time prediction markets on topics other than games and sports are far newer. At the scale we observe on leading prediction market sites like Polymarket (founded in 2020) and Kalshi (founded in 2018), where bets on events from election results to military interventions frequently attract pools of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, the industry is practically newborn. 

On Polymarket, trading volumes approach $500 million in a day. The company earns a commission off users’ bets, and payouts can be massive. To bettors, using Polymarket feels like placing bets on sports book sites like FanDuel or DraftKings. But its customers are not betting on horse races or soccer matches; they’re betting on the most impactful events in the world. 

The industry of sports betting has never been able to effectively neutralize the risk that gambling might cause some outcomes to become fixed. Horse racing has always had fixers ready to slip a certain horse a syringeful of drugs to speed it up or slow it down. Just this year, 20 college basketball players were indicted for their involvement in fixing games. Do we really think that when we subject politics and world events (and public information about them) to the same set of incentives, with betting pools running into the hundreds of millions, we’ll get a different result? 

Currently, the only federal regulator of sites like Polymarket and Kalshi is the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), originally formed in 1975 to regulate the trading of futures for commodities like corn and oil. In the absence of other regulators, CFTC has transitioned into regulating prediction markets. Initially, CFTC resisted Polymarket’s entry into the American market on the grounds that it lacked registration with the agency, but in 2025 Polymarket acquired a company that was already registered, making the point moot. The only CFTC enforcement action against Kalshi so far, which challenged the presence of US election prediction markets on the site, ended in a court ruling that the CFTC ban was inappropriate.

CFTC enforcement is hamstrung by the fact that the only major law governing the topics listable by online betting markets is a rather vague provision of the Commodity Exchange Act allowing CFTC to ban contracts that are “contrary to the public interest” if they involve “activity that is unlawful under any Federal or State law, terrorism, assassination, [or] war”. So, when six senators decided to send CFTC Chairman Michael Selig a letter in February asking him to increase enforcement against Polymarket, they were reduced to portentously asking whether he really thought that contracts like “Maduro out by…” or “Will Russia capture Myrnohad by…” were “in the public interest”. Presumably they meant the interests of the public in the US, not that of Ukraine or Venezuela. (Polymarket has updated its rules to clarify that insider trading is banned; Kalshi has said it is working with a compliance firm to identify “bad actors”.)

Government action against political betting sites has thus far taken on a partisan complexion, with Democratic legislators pushing regulations to limit insider trading by (Republican) members of the executive branch. All six senators who signed on to the letter to Selig were Democrats. Most pending legislation in Congress respecting political betting markets deals with insider trading by knowledgeable politicians, and the issue has become lumped in with efforts to regulate stock trading, like Congress’s recent investigation of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over his purchase of defense stocks just before the launch of US military action in Iran.

It is unsurprising that Congressional Democrats have zeroed in on government officials’ betting on politics and geopolitics while a Republican administration occupies the White House and has outsized access to sensitive information. The issue is a valuable political cudgel. They will likely lose that interest as soon as a Democratic administration enters the White House. (The whiplash of Democrats’ sudden deep interest in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal after a decade of indifference suggests just how quickly.) More importantly, this partisan approach all but ensures that no meaningful reforms will ever become law — if Congress ever passes them, the president won’t sign them.

But even if Congress were to pass any of the bills currently under consideration, the risks of insider trading are merely the tip of the iceberg. Far harder to regulate are influence campaigns like those Fabian experienced — whether directed at newsmen or at decision-makers themselves. If we’re already concerned about the influence of the wealthy and powerful on political decision-makers, how much more should we worry when those same individuals are making wagers on the outcomes of policymaking? 

Let’s run a thought experiment. By the standards of Polymarket, the pool that ensnared Fabian was quite small. A larger pool, with $79 million wagered as of Tuesday, asks who will be leading Venezuela at the end of 2026. Current President Delcy Rodríguez is heavily favored with 64% odds, with deposed President Nicolás Maduro at 15%. Clearly, anyone who bets on Maduro stands to make quite a lot of money if he returns to power. 

Let’s suppose a top executive at a semiconductor manufacturer, who is weighing whether to sign on to a proposed new export restriction, bets on Maduro’s return. While meeting with Commerce Department officials, he mentions his deep desire to see Maduro reinstalled. Then, on 1 December, President Trump announces that Maduro has learned his lesson from his year of incarceration. Trump releases him to Venezuelan custody, and he’s back as president. A few months later, new semiconductor export regulations are announced, to little fanfare.

Would that be illegal? Of course, in all kinds of ways. But would criminality be extremely difficult to prove, and the political event itself almost impossible to stop through the legal process? Also, yes. Scanning the leading markets on the Polymarket homepage, it takes but an ounce of creativity to imagine 10, 20, even 100 such scenarios. 

It’s more than enough to convince yourself of two facts: first, that it’s inevitable that prediction markets will very soon exert significant influence on political decision-making, if they aren’t already; the money is simply too good. And second, that cracking down on “insider trading”, no easy task in itself, would be woefully insufficient to solve the problem. 

For one thing, in a democracy where everyone has a vote, everyone is (to some degree) an “insider”. What’s to stop a voter, just as a sports fan bets against his favorite team to win a bet, from voting against his political interests for the same reason? Then there are the many powerful people who can exert political influence in oblique ways, but would not, by any legal definition, be considered “insiders”.

And if betting markets can so profoundly influence the political process, how much more could they influence news, think tanks, and policy institutes — industries where most workers make little money and might stand to get a big payday by tweaking reality just a little bit? For some, the temptation will simply be too great. (Readers may recall one such example from the think tank world last November, when a subsequently fired employee at the Institute for the Study of War altered the think tank’s publicly available map of Russian-held territory in the Ukraine at the eleventh hour to reflect a territorial gain that did not happen. By the time the map was changed, the gain was considered so unlikely that Polymarket bettors stood to earn returns of 33,000% on their investment if it occurred.)

It’s fortunate for Americans that there is a potential solution to the online prediction market problem that is as elegant and complete as the problem itself is multifaceted and complex. That is: limiting online betting to sports and games only. Case law is clear that the Constitution’s Commerce Clause gives Congress the power to regulate online gambling (up to and including banning it). Congress should use this power to ban political prediction markets, and do so quickly.

Some such prediction markets might remain in casinos or local betting parlors. But the experience of the last few years shows conclusively that it is only the engine of the internet that has enabled political and geopolitical prediction markets to become as large and as consequential as they have. If they are not allowed online, there will be little risk of American policymakers or news reporters being bullied, cajoled, or bribed into changing the facts to help someone win a bet. 

One likely reason that the political class has thus far been slow to regulate prediction markets is that in only a few short years, it has come to rely upon them for information. Studies have shown that prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket can be more accurate at predicting election results than traditional polling. Prediction markets also offer predictions on events in areas like war and diplomacy that are not usually polled, and they do so (at least as far as the voyeuristic political class is concerned) for free. But they will need to learn to live without them. Our quality of governance and our national wellbeing are more important than the convenience of pundits, policy analysts, and campaign managers. 

If Congress bans online political betting, it will head off a major destabilizing influence on our republic. Forging a path forward for our fractured country — a path that integrates the genuine diverse interests, desires, and passions of all Americans — is hard enough. With voters, businesspeople, and policymakers betting on those decisions, forging that path will be impossible. 

The head of the movement, President Donald J. Trump, is a billionaire, and a proud graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School. Before achieving notoriety as a media celebrity, he gained access to a lucrative career in real estate on the back of a large donation from his father. The upper echelons of his administration have been staffed by the well-to-do; key members of his cabinet are in receipt of Ivy League degrees. Trump’s own family has benefited from Presidential power, with close intimates occupying influential roles. In addition, prominent cheerleaders of the MAGA chief include leading tech tycoons like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg.

Partisans of MAGA argue that all this misses the point. The movement may be led by affluence and entitlement, but the program (they say) embodies the values of “middle-class America” — a cohort which includes what Europeans call “the working class”. Hillary Clinton once revealingly derided MAGA enthusiasts as little more than a “basket of deplorables”. But the movement’s demographic makeup is altogether more complex than this offhand smear implies. In 2024, around half of the US electorate, both urban and rural, swung behind Trump, with his support among female, Latino, and African-American voters going up.

While MAGA has inspired loyalty among “ordinary Americans”, it has also garnered acceptance among commercial and financial elites. To hold these disparate elements together, Trump has assembled a broad ideological platform: staples of a “neoliberal” economic program, like deregulation and a low-tax agenda, have been married to restrictions on international trade and opposition to foreign migration into the labor market.

Among the most distinctive components of the MAGA program is its hostility to so-called progressive values, many of these identified as pillars of “woke” politics. A target here is the liberal approach to dealing with discrimination, a persistent theme in US politics since the early Sixties, which now centers on the demand for “equity”. Perhaps ironically, equity is similarly intended to dismantle the prestige enjoyed by presumptive elites. As a tool of reparation, it is supposed to deliver fairness by rectifying historic wrongs. Yet, according to its critics, this mission is blind to the real divisions afflicting contemporary society, not least the experience of economic decline across the American rust belt.

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This disagreement points to conflict over the meaning of elitism. Rival constituencies face one another in a state of mutual incomprehension. Their opposition has shaken standard perceptions of “Left” and “Right”, with MAGA occupying ground once held by sections of the old Left. This includes antagonism towards global capitalism, backing for some kind of industrial strategy, and a raft of protectionist policies. On the other side, self-appointed radicals among anti-MAGA activists organize around the remnants of new left aspirations — backing “diversity” and “inclusion” as antidotes to social hierarchy.

In this way, two factions have emerged in US politics exhibiting contempt for one another while sharing the goal of dismantling select structures of inequality. To advance their cause, both blocs place their trust in a political class, expecting to advance their sectional interests while punishing the undeserving few. In other words, both sides engage the services of political elites to bear down on the supposedly corrupt beneficiaries of the “system”. These elites employ favored rhetoric to fire their respective bases. Democrats opt for sermonizing appeals to hope and cosmopolitan justice while Trump promises to assuage resentments in blunt demotic tones.

With adversaries ranged across the aisles in this manner, it is generally recognized that the level of acrimony in US politics has steadily risen since the 2008 financial crisis, ratcheted up under the impact of social media. But wariness of elites in America has roots going back to the presidency of Andrew Jackson in the third decade of the 19th century. In Jacksonian parlance the “common man” was championed over northeastern “aristocrats”. The crusade against unmerited privilege took a new turn after the Second World War when governing minorities were branded the “elite”. This characterization was popularized by C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite, which appeared in 1956.

Mills’ thesis appealed to the popular imagination agitated by concentrations of power in areas that mattered most: in the military, the federal government, and large corporations. This depiction gave an impression of US society as directed by a concerted combination of bosses. Thereafter, “elites” were associated with excessive clout exercised by a narrow oligarchy. But from the start the book was seen as radically simplifying reality. With its stark portrayal of an all-powerful few, Mills rode roughshod over the layered complexity of social life by focusing on the barons at the top. Modern conditions can’t be crudely split into haves and have-nots. In capitalist societies, inequality is not binary but gradually stratified, organized around a continuous division of labor and an elaborately differentiated distribution of property. Between the super-privileged and the disenfranchised, the bulk of society is divided into a vast array of separate tasks, remunerated along an incrementally ascending scale.

Although Mills altered the terms of debate among the American public at large, his argument harks back to older diatribes against elites. As Hugo Drochon shows in his essential new book, Elites and Democracy, such harangues gained momentum at the turn of the 20th century when European thinkers examined the composition of society and its representation by elected elites.

The starting point for Drochon’s story is a troika of thinkers later dubbed “elite theorists of democracy”. Between 1890 and 1911, two Italians — Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto — as well as the German-born Italian sociologist Robert Michels, set out to analyze relations between rulers and ruled under conditions of mass democracy. Responding to the extension of the franchise in European states — in France, Italy, Germany, and Britain — these figures sought to take the measure of modern politics. Even so, neither Mosca, Pareto, nor Michels shared ideological common ground. Originally, Mosca was an exponent of gentrified liberalism, Pareto a qualified defender of market freedoms, and Michels a supporter of the German Social Democratic Party, at one point attracted to its anarcho-syndicalist wing.

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From these different angles of vision, all three figures worried about the monopolization of decision-making. It seemed that the rise of popular rule was matched by opportunities for charismatic authority. In launching their objections to the prospect of Caesarism, they rightly presupposed the need for a political division of labor. There must, they accepted, be some species of governing structure, staffed by rulers of a given character, and either rigidly persisting or being dynamically replaced.

Drochon recounts how this tradition of commentary impacted 20th-century political science. The American scene in particular split into partisans of elite practice and critics who favored popular participation. Like so many standoffs in academic culture, this tussle soon evolved into a dialogue of the deaf — with “elite theorists” fearing the irrationality of the crowd and “radical democrats” seeking to bypass the state in search of the voice of the people.

As Drochon observes, there is a doggedness about these divergent renditions which belies the changeability of the social arrangements they hope to represent. Instead of “control by elites”, modern capitalist democracy is defined by competition for office and fluctuating classes locked in dynamic struggle. This is not a recipe for egalitarian rule, but neither can it be dismissed as a static oligarchy. Society is divided into a multitude of interests periodically converging to advance a common cause, only to fragment again as the conditions for alignment recede. This leaves us living with the constant rise and fall of elites, partly driven by the shifting divisions churning within their electoral base. The constant remaking of electoral attitudes over the past two decades across the UK and Europe illustrates this fluidity. So too do the erratic fortunes of parties throughout the same period.

The contemporary cast of US politics vividly captures this process. Over a year into the second Trump administration, and cracks are already starting to appear among his loyal adherents. Held together by the forces of an aggrieved nationalism, MAGA shows signs of gradually splintering into camps, with potential clashes in the offing over the Epstein files, the future of AI, and foreign entanglements. Confused messaging around the war in Iran — from J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, and Donald Trump — reflects dissensions over strategies and goals. An inward-looking “America First” posture finds itself hitched to a military machine focused on the wider world with supporters of both tendencies pulled in two directions. In due course, the leading enemy of liberal elites may be remembered as an oligarch-in-chief, with new victims and new culprits serving to mobilize fresh political collisions.

To stay on the correct end of this axis requires a person to organize his moral energies around a boutique picture of reality. It is a picture that doesn’t even try to comprehend common experience — most pointedly, the experience of receiving millions of migrants from different societies (some of them quite alien to our own), with the attendant dislocations. These include the thinning of the social fabric and a retreat into further isolation — what the sociologist Robert Putnam called “hunkering down” in his study of the effects of diversity.

The ideal of the open society doesn’t simply ignore the downsides of immigration — including rising rates of sexual violence — it gains force precisely as a principled negation of experience. It serves to coordinate elites in the epistemic equivalent of a potlatch: an Olympian disregard for social realities expresses a certain magnificence in those who are able to maintain it. Yet while a traditional potlatch is made possible only by an underlying asceticism (a nobleman must be ready to do without the fine things he destroys), the renunciation demanded by our leaders falls most heavily on those they rule. Embracing the open society is the ultimate luxury belief.

As conveyed by the latter half of  Popper’s title, the idea of the “open society” is inherently polemical. It requires a foil of closedness. “In what follows,” he writes, “the magical or tribal or collectivist society will also be called the closed society, and the society in which individuals are confronted with personal decisions, the open society.” The alternative to the open society, then, is tribalism and magic, or some version of collectivist effacement of the individual. The paradigmatic activity of the open society is “personal decision”.

Popper’s original advocacy of the open society carries over to those who speak today in the idiom of universal “human rights”, as opposed to the civil or political rights that attach to citizens of a particular, bounded nation. Anything bounded is “closed”. If the mindset of human rights is given to moral militancy, Popper’s treatment helps us to see that the agenda of human rights carries with it a literal military corollary.

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Given the date of publication, this military frame of mind is understandable. As Popper writes in the preface to the 1950 edition, his ideas for the book had been germinating for some time but “the final decision to write it was made in March 1938, on the day I received the news of the invasion of Austria”. Clearly, the proximate enemy of the open society that he had in mind was Naziism. That would be the “magical or tribal” enemy. But he also takes on communism, the collectivist enemy. Popper speaks for the third combatant in the conflict, which goes by the conventional title “liberal democracy”. Whatever we call it, it is the regime-type that ultimately prevailed over both adversaries in the longer conflict that began with the Anschluss in 1938 and stretched through the Cold War. Arguably it is neither democratic, in the literal sense of rule by the demos, nor liberal in the 18th-century sense of limited government. Rather, it is “open”.

What interests me is the disposition that animates the ideal of the open society. Those who share it invoke the Nazi threat ritualistically, so 1938 remains important as an emblematic moment. But the open society ideal slipped the bounds of any particular circumstance to become a permanent imperative, never satisfied so long as any concrete, circumscribed political community remains. The end of the war in no way relieved enthusiasts of the open society of their need for enemies.

Both points of polemical orientation for Popper — Nazi racialist tribalism and Marxist collectivism — are forms of human association. The remedy for both, then, is individualism. Popper seems historically obtuse, willfully so, in his failure to register the fact that there are non-malignant forms of association that can provide the basis for social order. He skips straight from the Nazi and communist threats to an equally radical counter-ideal of individualism that is meant to inoculate us against both hazards. In this, he comes across as reactive and simple-minded, unable to conceive of a social order mediating between individuals which would satisfy his ideal of openness.

I believe the problem for Popper is that any kind of order that is already established is external to individual will. (Recall that the open society is marked by “personal decision”.) The freedom of the will is compromised when it is impinged upon by binding associations, such as family or nation, that are not chosen. To be innocuous, any association must be provisional; it must be continually re-chosen on a case-by-case basis as circumstances shift. Accordingly, the open society will be one of disengaged monads who come together episodically for various forms of exchange but have no deep or abiding connection to one another.

Popper recognizes that an open society therefore tends to become one of “abstract relations”. In this he is prescient. “We can conceive of a society in which… all business is conducted by individuals in isolation who communicate by typed letters or by telegrams, and who go about in closed motor-cars. Artificial insemination would allow even propagation without a personal element.” He offers this sketch “by way of an exaggeration” in 1943, but in 2026 it seems less so.

Given this thinned-out anthropology, Popper commends economics as the proper mode of doing social theory, because it treats human actors in their abstract relations of exchange. He condemns sociology — for example, that of Durkheim — for its “dogmatic belief that society must be analyzed in terms of real social groups”. It almost sounds like the fact that they are real counts against them. We are not to dwell on the concrete differences of habit and character among different social groups. Ideally we would not even notice them, as such noticing could compromise our allegiance to the ideal of the open society and its corollary: permissive immigration policy. The open society will be a society of individuals denuded of those qualities they acquire in association, as encultured beings. Openness seems to require positing sameness, so the variety of persons and of peoples can be treated as a mass of interchangeable human resources.

Somehow, Popper and his political descendants have succeeded in attaching the word “democracy”, used as a term of approbation, to this imperative of abstraction and replaceability. A better name for it would probably be “bureaucracy”. Bureaucracy takes as its object of rule what Popper’s contemporary Robert Musil called the “Man Without Qualities”.

Popper recognizes that achieving the open society will require a vigorous imperial project. What he had in mind, writing during the war, is not fully spelled out. But arguably, today’s interventions in the internal affairs of putatively sovereign nations by the trans-national organs of openness would seem to capture the spirit of what Popper had in mind. Such organs include the European Commission, USAID and indeed George Soros’ Open Society Foundation. Whatever Popper envisioned, he was discreet enough to make his case for imperialism by historical proxy, treating the Peloponnesian War as a conflict between the open society of Athens and the closed society of Sparta.

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For Popper, any criticism of Athenian imperialism can only be a cover for reaction. “Thucydides himself was an anti-democrat. This becomes clear when we consider his description of the Athenian empire, and the way it was hated by the various Greek states. Athens’ rule over its empire, he tells us, was felt to be no better than a tyranny, and all the Greek tribes were afraid of her.” But Popper, writing over two millennia after events, knows better. All people of goodwill loved being ruled by Athens. Note his pointed misapplication of the term “tribe” to any city that resisted Athens’ enlightened exactions of tribute, or its beneficent control of commerce throughout the Aegean, made possible by its naval superiority.

“[I]t is necessary, I believe, to see that tribalist exclusiveness and self-sufficiency could be superseded only by some form of imperialism. And it must be said that certain of the imperialist measures introduced by Athens were rather liberal.” One expression of Athens’ liberality that Popper points to, which anti-imperialists fail to appreciate, is Athens’ offer to the island of Samos. As reported by Thucydides, the offer was that “the Samians should be Athenians from now on; and that both cities should be one state; and that the Samians should order their internal affairs as they choose and retain their laws.” There is no contradiction here, if the Samians choose wisely — for openness.

What Thucydides says sardonically, bringing out the confluence of Athens’ high moral self-regard with her insatiable need for conquest, sounds very much like how Samantha Power or Ursula von der Leyen might scold the Hungarians today for their recalcitrant independence. But without Thucydides’ irony, of course.

Popper reads backward into the fifth century his own determination to defeat “tribalist exclusiveness”, which requires total hegemony of the enlightened. The word “tribalism” is frequently used by bien pensants to dismiss any insistence on political boundaries as provincialism; as a hangover from a less enlightened stage of human development. The political philosopher Pierre Manent pointed out that “in a deliberately provocative way, the most archaic political form, and traditionally the most despised, becomes the generic name for all political forms and human groupings”. That is, all groupings that fall short of the Universal and Homogeneous State that is to be administered by a post-political clerisy of the open-minded. The most efficient way to combat closed-mindedness is with open borders, global labor markets, and plenty of foreign interventions to keep up a steady flow of migrants and refugees. Invade the world, invite the world.

Popper argues against utopianism, because it leads to totalitarianism. Yet it does not seem to bother him that his hope for a post-political condition is itself utopian and requires a total program; an empire of openness from which no exit is to be countenanced.

And yet 2025 was an annus horribilis for Number 10. Entering 2026, Reform now boasts the largest membership of any party in Britain, taking that mantle from Labour last December. All available polling indicates a drubbing for the Government at the next election, with some forecasts even placing them in fifth. One poll by Ipsos declared Starmer the most unpopular PM on record since 1977 — and that includes Liz Truss. In October, another poll, this time by YouGov, suggested Prince Andrew was more popular than the Government.

Why are things so bad for the PM, particularly given the avoidance of a fiscal crisis, and successive interest rate cuts? The first is Zack Polanski, with the Green’s attention-grabbing leader disrupting Labour’s political calculus. The idea of an anti-Reform coalition, pledging to “stop Farage”, only works for the Government if they are the ones to lead it. The second is that first impressions count. Unfortunately for the Prime Minister, he quickly came to be associated with cuts to the winter fuel allowance, gratis Taylor Swift tickets and a party benefactor buying dresses for his wife.

Whatever the explanation for Starmer’s poor performance, it must be tempting for his retinue to surmise they’ve hit rock bottom. That’s the bet of Morgan McSweeney, the PM’s chief of staff, who claims that 2026 will be the “year of proof”. Yet if there’s an iron law of politics, it is that a sequence of bad events creates its own inexorable pull. Just ask Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May. Some other fiasco will likely befall the PM in the months ahead: and it could well involve local government reorganization in England. It has, so far, remained beneath the national radar. That will soon change, as the implications of the shift becomes clear — and more elections are likely postponed.

It is hard to believe that a single report, compiled five years ago by a consultancy, provides the blueprint for the largest reorganization of local government in decades. And yet that is precisely what is happening with the English Devolution White Paper. Published little more than a year ago, it draws extensively from a PWC report of 2020, whose conclusions can be summed up by the phrase “bigger is better”. This is specifically true regarding savings. If all 21 of England’s “two-tier” authorities were successfully merged into larger “strategic authorities”, PWC claims, the taxpayer would save more than £700 million a year.

Insisting on economies of scale is hardly unusual — and the number of two-tier authorities, where some services are administered by a district or borough council, and others by the county council — needs fixing. It’s also clear that larger authorities are better placed to plan ahead and recruit the right people, and if England is to have more metro mayors — which have generally worked — the combined authorities they oversee would need more streamlined, uniform parts.

Even so, the logic’s seemingly brutal application to one of Europe’s oldest nations, and some of its most venerable towns and cities, is striking. Places like Southampton and Portsmouth are set to have a single mayor for instance, despite being two rival cities both dating back almost a millennium. At one point, even distant Bournemouth, whose needs are entirely different, was touted as being in the same mayoral authority. Among the political class, though, the past is often seen as trivial, with place and experience a distant second to the spreadsheet. For them, England’s great towns and cities are as fungible as an NFL franchise.

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Alongside that heavy-handedness, a political crisis is also brewing. “Strategic authorities” and “accountability frameworks” may be abstruse terms, part of a purposefully inscrutable lexicon. Suspending elections, however, is an extraordinary step — underscoring that something strange, and perhaps even sinister, is afoot.

Last year, ministers delayed four mayoral elections set for this May. As a result, Greater Essex; Hampshire and the Solent; Sussex and Brighton; and Norfolk and Suffolk must all wait until 2028 to elect their inaugural metro mayors. Reform was competitive in each of those races, and its supporters allege a fix. But despite their protests, the postponement is the result of ineptitude rather than conspiracy. The relevant local authorities had not been given the time, resources or bandwidth to prepare.

Yet if suspending these four elections is bad, the Government has a defense of sorts: these metro mayors are entirely new. The same can’t be said for what is set to happen next. In all, 204 councils, across 21 so-called  “areas”, are subject to re-organization. Sixty-three of those councils are set for elections in May: and which Labour now hopes to postpone.

Rather than simply postponing these contests, however, as the Government did for the four mayoralties, it has “invited” local authorities to request delays, which ministers will review from January. In other words, after widespread criticism the first time round, Number 10 is eager to spread the blame in the months ahead.

Unfortunately for Labour, council leaders have so far rejected the prospect of suspending democracy. One example is Hertfordshire, where a cluster of six district and borough councils have stressed they harbor no appetite for postponement. Or there’s Hampshire. Last week, Steve Pitt, Portsmouth City Council’s leader, told The News that there would be no request to delay, saying that “…democracy cannot be interrupted because of the Labour government’s chaotic handling of both devolution and local government reorganization”.

Pitt reflects a consensus among Hampshire’s senior local politicians. That includes Labour-controlled Southampton whose leader, Alex Winning, was eager to highlight how any decision to postpone rested “entirely with the Government”. Labour councils have been left high and dry by the national leadership, with Number 10 trying to deflect some of the blame on them. But on the doorstep, those same councillors will be telling voters the truth: this is Westminster’s mess.

And here, again, it’s hard not to return to history. To the north of Hampshire lies the ancient Saxon capital of Winchester. “Winchester City Council has only ever suspended elections in the event of war or pandemic,” declared its leader, the Liberal Democrat Martin Tod. The city’s modern electoral history began in the 1830s, but it has had a mayor since the 1190s, meaning a continuous process of political representation stretching back almost a millennium. That could be halted this year.

Precisely why Labour would do all this depends on your perspective. While it’s true the party is set to fare terribly this May, most authorities facing the prospect of no elections are not administered by them. At the same time, though, these are generally places where Reform was looking to build on last year’s successes. Then there’s the fact that many of the councillors returned would have to step down before their term ended — because their authorities would no longer have existed. Either way, it’s increasingly clear that merging authorities, and introducing a plethora of new metro mayors, was always going to be hard over a two-year turnaround.

Besides, it’s also uncertain whether the much-vaunted re-organization will even reduce costs in the end. Last year, then-Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner declared that “a significant amount of money” could be saved, citing that 2020 PWC report which projected £2.9 billion of savings over five years. And yet the same organization that commissioned the 2020 report, the County Councillor Network, wrote in March how newly enlarged authorities below 500,000 residents would see no financial benefit.

This is important because some authorities — like Brighton — will likely be permitted to remain at around 300,000 residents. By PWC’s own accounting, that will mean no benefits. In which case: what’s the point? And if Brighton were an exceptional case that would be one thing, but it turns out around half the new authorities will be below the 500,000 mark.

Just as remarkable is that the Government hasn’t conducted a cost review of its own, so even the forecast savings remain uncertain. This merits repeating. The financial forecasts behind local government re-organization, something so important that hundreds of millions will be spent up front with elections likely postponed — they simply weren’t made, or indeed scrutinized, by the very Government proposing them.

So who did commission that 2020 PWC report? The County Council Network, which is itself a part of the Local Government Association (LGA), the national body representing councils in England. The CCN’s partner organizations include, you guessed it, PWC.

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Indeed, that the Government hasn’t conducted its own review is especially concerning given PWC arguably stands to benefit from the radical streamlining of local authorities. Merging areas like payroll, human resources and IT departments are any consultancy’s bread and butter. The same applies to the inevitable redesign of management structures, rationalization of assets and integrating council services.

At the same time, one might even argue that consultancies such as PWC stand to gain from making any new bodies as complex, and the process as disruptive, as possible. After all, maximal opacity means a greater dependence on outside help — and more billable hours. The consultancy-industrial complex, alongside outsourcing, has, to borrow a phrase, enshittified local government. But the political class has so far failed to catch up.

“Trust in politics is falling,” declares the 2024 White Paper. That is certainly true. But surely not even Keir Starmer thinks the design of English local government should be based on a paper commissioned by a consultancy which stands to benefit from as much disruption as possible?

Beyond the possibility of suspending democratic elections, and there being scant evidence for tangible savings, there is a final, terrifying point to consider. Authorities which run surpluses are expected to merge with authorities running deficits — with little to no financial assistance available from Westminster. Surpluses and reserves will be pooled, as will liabilities.

In other words, some authorities, which have been managed comparatively well, will have a form of austerity imposed on them to provide a soft bail out for those which have not. When ministers talk about “financial scale” and “resilience” what they essentially mean is merging stable, solvent councils with struggling neighbors. Things could go very badly wrong: imagine the political equivalent of RBS swallowing up ABN Amro before the last financial crisis, or Lloyds acquiring HBOS straight after. In some places, anyway, residents and local leaders are concerned that the net result will be higher council tax and poorer services.

Local government reorganization could come to define English politics this year — and ease Starmer’s exit from the top job. But beyond its short-term consequences, not least suspended elections, it also distills so much about our political class: identify a genuine, existing problem; adopt a technocratic blueprint devised by consultants; implement the whole thing with maximum incompetence. We’ve seen it before with the “NHS Programme for IT” and HS2, and will likely do so again with ID cards.

In his masterful Ruling the Void, political scientist Peter Mair claims political elites have retreated into institutional “safe havens”, focusing on governance procedures rather than representation, with this only disconnecting them further from the electorate. But even Mair would struggle to believe that a PWC report could lead to the suspension of elections — all in the name of saving money, even if nobody really knows how much.

The head of the self-help group, a quietly authoritative woman called Manasa, explained that the village gives out interest-free loans with the aim of breaking the stranglehold of the money-lenders. One woman had borrowed 15,000 rupees — around £130 — to open a canteen that caters to pilgrims visiting the local temple; all that circumambulation is hungry work. I asked the woman with the headscarf how many Muslims live in the village. “Eighteen,” she replied, before assuring me that the Shia mourning month of Muharram is observed here with the same punctiliousness as the Hindu festivals of Diwali and Dussehra.

When I asked the women to rate the local government, all eyes turned to the sarpanch, or council president, a handsome, well-groomed man. It turned out that the panchayat scored well for improving the water supply — a rare feat in this increasingly arid part of the country — and for the village primary school, which offers a good education in Telugu and English. But the roads! “There aren’t any,” sighed one woman, by which she meant that the narrow tracks which wind between the houses get washed away by the monsoon. With a flourish, the sarpanch announced that the village would have a new road “within three months”. On this happy note, the meeting broke up and we adjourned for selfies.

As a student of Hindi in the Nineties and then as a reporter at India Today, the country’s biggest news magazine, I was in awe of India’s federal constitution and its ability to keep the country whole despite the proliferation of ethnic groups, religions and languages. The states were organized along linguistic lines; over the course of the second half of the 20th century, through the addition of new states, autonomous councils in tribal areas, and the panchayats themselves, democracy set down roots so strong that no Hindu-Muslim riot or separatist movement seemed capable of tearing them up. For all the prevalence of poverty and injustice, the crust of corruption and nepotism that grew around the “natural” party of government, the Congress, and a tradition of political assassinations that took the lives of the country’s founding father, Mahatma Gandhi, and two Congress prime ministers, Indira Gandhi (no relation) and her son Rajiv, surely Bill Clinton was justified in 1994 in describing India as “one of the world’s greatest experiments in multi-cultural democracy”.

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The face of this democracy belonged to T.N. Seshan. A gloomy south Indian with a taste for Hindu philosophy, Seshan was appointed chief election commissioner in 1990, a time of spiraling “booth-capturing” — the practice by armed groups of seizing polling booths in order to stuff ballot boxes — and intimidation of lower castes to stop them exercising their franchise. On Seshan’s watch, booth-capturing plummeted, while in the run-up to the 1996 general election, he had some 300,000 known villains preventively detained. Seshan’s probity made him as famous as the national cricket captain, Mohammad Azharuddin, and the Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, both Muslims, of course — along with the chief justice, Aziz Mushabber Ahmadi, and the future president, Abdul Kalam. Here, it was argued, was the advantage that secular India enjoyed over its estranged sibling, sectarian Pakistan, where elections, as Seshan liked to say, lacked integrity.

And yet, even in its golden age, as Prem Shankar Jha, a former prime ministerial adviser, reminded me when I visited him recently in Delhi, democracy was failing to give its citizens “economic security, the rule of law, and speedy, affordable justice”. These failings prompted the emergence of “an alternative model of nationhood that despised… religious pluralism”, advocating instead “a hard Hindu nation-state”.

Advance warning came on 6 December 1992, when a mob of Hindu zealots tore down a mosque that had been built on the site — according to Hindu tradition — of the birthplace of the god Ram in the city of Ayodhya. As the lodger of a Brahmin numismatist and her daughter 140 miles away in Varanasi, I was kept indoors by my nervous hosts who taught me how to make chappatis while gangs roamed the city looking for people to lynch. Further south, Bombay, India’s most diverse and cosmopolitan city, descended into religious bloodletting that claimed the lives of 1,200 people, most of them Muslim.

Ayodhya brought violent Hindu chauvinism into the mainstream. It gave an emerging nationalist politician called Narendra Modi, who in 2002 became chief minister of the western state of Gujarat, license to sit on his hands while more than 1,000 Gujaratis — two thirds of them Muslim — were killed in a communal firestorm in the same year.

In 2014, Modi became prime minister. Since then, he has striven to turn secular, multi-lingual India into a Hindu supremacist state whose lingua franca is no longer English, but Hindi — a north Indian tongue rejected by many in the south — and defined by its enmity for Pakistan, against which it fought a short, inconclusive war this spring. In 2019, Modi fulfilled a long-cherished nationalist dream by ending the autonomy that Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state, had enjoyed since independence. And last year, he inaugurated a huge temple complex on the site of the demolished mosque at Ayodhya before a crowd of billionaires, cricketers, politicians and actors. Shah Rukh Khan was nowhere to be seen.

My research in India this autumn took me to Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Mumbai (as Bombay was renamed in 1995), Madhya Pradesh and the southern city of Chennai. During the Diwali holidays I was in Orchha, a once-sleepy town in Madhya Pradesh that has over the past decade or so become a popular destination for visitors to the town’s Ram temple; on the day I was there, the streets were full of double-decker buses debouching jovial pilgrims and stalls selling temple oil and marigold garlands. According to KPMG India, religious tourism accounts for more than 60% of travel in the country and by 2028 will be worth $59 billion. At Khajuraho, also in Madhya Pradesh, I visited 10th-century Hindu temples famed for their carved depictions of lovemaking inaccessible to the umbrella-legged. That India’s medieval Muslim invaders included spirited iconoclasts was evidenced by the fact that perhaps a fifth of the temples’ sandstone figures had been beheaded.

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All the while, as my Hindi came back, chatting to people in fields, markets, temples, trains and rickshaws, I was reminded insistently of two things. The first is that the failure of the old India to provide “economic security, the rule of law and speedy, affordable justice” is being perpetuated by the new India under Modi. The second is that, while their efforts may have yet to bear fruit in the panchayats of Andhra Pradesh, Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are diligently undermining democracy while turning the country’s 200 million Muslims from partners in a collective endeavor to a polluting enemy within.

For all Modi’s claims to be moving swiftly towards a “Developed India”, and the high-profile investments that have been made by tech firms such as Foxconn, the world’s biggest iPhone producer, the average growth rate in recent years of less than 6% is far short of the 10% that China achieved when its economy took flight between 1980 and 2015. So precarious is life for urban laborers, and so filthy the air they breathe — eight of the world’s 10 most polluted cities are in India — that many of the farm workers I met in Madhya Pradesh had returned to their villages after abortive moves to the city. Rather than take the government’s claims to have all but eradicated poverty at face value, Subhash Chandra Garg, the former top official at the finance ministry, presented me with a comparison of average per capita incomes. “In 2024, it was $13,660 in China and $83,660 in the US. In India it was $2,650.” He winced. “We’re 140th in the world.”

In the old days of socialist central planning, government statistics could be trusted. No longer. According to Reuters, 37 out of 50 independent economists disbelieve the official unemployment rate of 5.6%; alternative estimates range as high as 35%. More than half the population — which currently stands at 1.47 billion and is expected to peak at 1.7 billion in the early 2060s — is under 25, and each year between seven and eight million people enter a jobs market that cannot accommodate them. Stagnant wages and private sector lay-offs only heighten the allure of a job for life in public service — no matter how lowly the role. In 2024, 46,000 graduates and postgraduates applied for jobs as road sweepers and rubbish collectors in the state of Haryana. In the same year, Indian Railways received 19 million applications for 64,000 vacancies. As Palanivel Thiaga Rajan, the IT minister of the southern state of Tamil Nadu, told me, “the demographic situation is beginning to swamp us”.

Economic worries need a scapegoat. Addressing a large rally before this month’s assembly elections in the poor, populous state of Bihar, Modi inveighed against Muslim “infiltrators” from Bangladesh. The previous month, Medha Kulkarni, a senior BJP politician in the state of Maharashtra, led a delegation to sprinkle cow urine on a patch of ground where Muslim women had been spotted praying, thereby purifying it. Also in October, Pragya Thakur, a former BJP member of parliament, who was once arrested on suspicion of involvement in a wave of bombings against Muslims — she was freed for lack of evidence — proffered stern advice to any Hindu whose daughter has the temerity to fall in love with a Muslim. “If our daughter does not obey us,” she said, “if she goes to the house of a non-believer, spare no effort in breaking her legs.”

Long gone is the ecumenical India of the late president Abdul Kalam, whose father made a living by ferrying Hindu pilgrims to a popular shrine on his boat. As is the Bombay of the late musician Zakir Hussain, whose morning routine as a child in that once-tolerant city consisted of Muslim ghazals at home followed by ragas at a Hindu temple and mass at his Catholic school. It is hard to imagine another Muslim president, chief justice or national cricket captain in the world’s third-biggest Muslim country. When India’s Muslims are not being abominated, hectored or lynched, it is as if they do not exist at all: not in the speeches of Modi and his ministers, nor in the 12,000 schools catering to 32 million children that are administered by the BJP’s militant feeder organization, the RSS, nor in the numerous Hindu holidays whose observance, once a matter of personal preference, have been inked into the fabric of the state.

Most ominous of all, the Election Commission, citadel of T.N. Seshan, may have been captured by the government. In August Rahul Gandhi, the Congress’s most prominent leader, gave a detailed press conference in which he substantiated longstanding suspicions that the BJP’s narrow victory in the 2024 general election was achieved fraudulently and in collusion with the commission. In the southern electoral ward of Mahadevapura, he said, some 40 party workers had spent six months sorting through mountains of voting records and turned up more than 100,000 “fake” votes that were cast by means of invalid addresses, invalid photos, bulk voters at one location, voters who had cast ballots at several different booths, and “first-time” voters in their sixties and seventies. “This is happening across the country,” Gandhi said. “There is a huge criminal fraud being perpetrated.”

On 5 November, the day before the Bihar polls opened, he presented evidence for an even bigger “vote theft” in state elections held in Haryana last year, claiming that no fewer than 2.5 million votes — one in eight — were cast there illegally. Gandhi showed a photo of a hairdresser from Brazil that had been downloaded from the internet and appeared 22 times on the Haryana electoral rolls.

The Election Commission rejects Gandhi’s allegations, and has refused to hand over the electronic voting records that would enable the Congress — or anyone else — to conduct a nationwide audit of past elections. The Supreme Court has rejected petitions that it launch an investigation of its own. And in Bihar, the decisive defeat in November’s state assembly elections that Congress and its allies suffered at the hands of the ruling coalition, of which the BJP is a part, suggested that for voters the issue of vote theft isn’t as important as the state government’s promise to create 10 million jobs.

This is how democracies die. And while Modi’s contribution has of course been outstanding, Gandhi’s must also be acknowledged. The leader of the opposition is the son of Rajiv Gandhi, grandson of Indira Gandhi, great-grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, and the great-great grandson of Motilal Nehru, a Congress president before independence. Far from nobly shouldering an inherited responsibility to save Indian democracy, the princeling is part of the problem. And yet neither he nor other members of the Gandhi clan will step away from the family firm, while no other party exists that can challenge the BJP nationally.

India’s last big spasm of communal violence came in the winter of 2019-2020 when Muslims in Delhi who were protesting against a discriminatory asylum law and measures to weed out “infiltrators” were attacked by Hindu zealots abetted by the police, leaving at least 54 dead. India has known periods of bigotry before, as the decapitated carvings at Khajuraho demonstrate, and recovered. For the moment, however, for India’s Muslims, it’s a question of keeping one’s head down and one’s sangfroid intact. Lunching at Bagdadi, a legendary Muslim-owned canteen in Mumbai, my eye was caught by the item “Beef Fry” on the antique menu board. When I remarked to the owner that eating beef is enough to get you killed in today’s India, he replied with a smile, “we keep the original menu board because our customers like it. But we haven’t served beef in years. It’s buffalo meat and we have the laboratory analysis to prove it.”

In recent years, the Court has increasingly come into conflict with elected governments — most notably over questions of migration and deportation. Its critics, particularly in Britain, argue that the Convention has expanded far beyond its original remit, interfering in areas that go to the heart of democratic sovereignty: border control, national security and the prerogative of parliaments to set the law. When nine European leaders signed a joint letter in May this year, questioning whether the ECtHR had overstepped its mandate on migration, the Council of Europe’s Secretary General, Alain Berset, dismissed their concerns outright. “No judicial body should be subject to political pressure,” he declared. The implication was clear: the ECtHR sits above democratic scrutiny; its authority, derived from moral principle rather than electoral consent, is to be accepted without debate.

A key turning point came in 2023, when the ECtHR intervened, via Rule 39, to block the UK’s so-called “Rwanda plan”, which would send certain asylum seekers and illegal migrants to Africa for processing. Just hours before the first flight was due to depart, a single judge in Strasbourg issued an emergency injunction that grounded it. Whatever one’s opinion of the policy, the episode raised a profound constitutional question: should an unelected foreign judge have the power to overturn a decision approved by a sovereign parliament?

The debate has only intensified since. Both the Conservatives and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK have pledged to withdraw from the Convention. Even Keir Starmer, while rejecting outright withdrawal, has suggested the Government will review how international human rights law, including the ECHR, is interpreted by British courts — particularly to stop unsuccessful asylum seekers from blocking deportation.

Leaving the Convention would not, by itself, solve the complex problem of illegal migration. But across Europe, elected governments — in Poland, Italy, Hungary, the Netherlands and elsewhere — have often found themselves constrained when trying to respond to growing public concern over the phenomenon which has become one of the defining political issues of our time. What we are witnessing is not simply a technical legal dispute, but a clash between democracy and a transnational judiciary that increasingly sees itself as a moral authority above politics.

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The European Court of Human Rights has, over the past two decades, engineered what can be described as a “quiet power grab”. Through a series of legal innovations and doctrinal reinterpretations, the Court has progressively widened its jurisdiction, often beyond what member states ever agreed to.

One of the Court’s controversial doctrines is that of extraterritorial jurisdiction — the idea that the ECHR applies even outside a state’s borders. This instrument has allowed the Court to extend its reach into foreign territory and even international waters. In the case of Hirsi Jamaa and Others v. Italy, for instance, the Court ruled in 2012 that Italy could not intercept migrants in the Mediterranean and return them to Libya, despite the operation taking place outside Italian territory. The result was a de facto outlawing of “pushbacks”, which is a core component of border enforcement. In practice, the judgment meant that states could no longer prevent illegal entrants from reaching their shores to lodge asylum claims, no matter the operational or humanitarian cost.

Another key development concerns the doctrine of non-refoulement — the prohibition on returning individuals to countries where they may face serious harm. Though not explicitly mentioned in the Convention, the ECtHR has expanded this principle far beyond its original postwar intent. In several cases, the Court has ruled that even transfers to other EU countries may be unlawful if conditions there are deemed inadequate. It has also insisted that each deportation must be subject to an “individualized assessment” of risk — an administrative nightmare that renders mass removals practically impossible. National security considerations are given almost no weight: even individuals deemed dangerous cannot be expelled if they might face mistreatment abroad.

Finally, there is Article 8 of the Convention — the “right to respect for private and family life”. Once a narrowly defined protection of home and correspondence, it has become a catch-all provision invoked to prevent deportations of convicted criminals and illegal immigrants. The Court has repeatedly ruled that deportations must be halted if an offender has established a family life in the host country, however tenuous. This has led to an avalanche of cases in which serious offenders — from violent criminals to drug traffickers — have successfully appealed against removal on Article 8 grounds. British tabloids have gleefully reported cases where criminals were able to avoid deportation because their child liked chicken nuggets or questioned their gender. But behind the tabloid absurdity lies a serious constitutional reality: an international court has assumed the authority to decide who may remain within a nation’s borders.

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The Court’s defenders insist that it merely applies the principles that states themselves agreed to uphold. Yet this is no longer credible. The ECtHR has, by its own admission, embraced the doctrine of the Convention as a “living instrument” — meaning that its provisions must be interpreted in light of “present-day conditions”. In practice, this gives judges carte blanche to reinterpret and expand the meaning of rights according to contemporary political sensibilities. What began as a limited postwar charter has become an evolving moral code enforced by an unelected elite with a de facto veto power over national law.

The ECHR, however, is only the tip of the iceberg. The Court operates within a wider ecosystem of judicial and technocratic power that extends far beyond Strasbourg. Its rulings are cited by the European Court of Justice, domestic supreme courts and international bodies, and often transcribed into national law. National judges, NGOs and human-rights lobbies use its jurisprudence to influence policymaking. An entire regime of judicialized governance has emerged — what legal scholar Ran Hirschl has called juristocracy: rule by judges.

Over the past half-century, vast areas of public life once decided through political debate — from migration and security to macroeconomic policy — have been transferred from parliaments to courts, tribunals and independent authorities. This process of depoliticization was a deliberate response by political elites to the growing assertiveness of mass democracy. As voting rights expanded in the late 19th and 20th centuries, Europe’s ruling classes feared that popular majorities might use their new power to challenge the economic and social order. The solution was to create institutional checks — constitutional courts, independent central banks, and supranational treaties and institutions — that insulated key areas of governance from democratic contestation.

In the postwar decades, this model spread rapidly. Germany, Italy, France and Austria all established constitutional courts with the power to strike down legislation. Internationally, new bodies such as the ECtHR and the European Court of Justice emerged as guardians of a liberal order that placed “rights” and markets above popular sovereignty. Even Westminster-style systems like Britain eventually succumbed. In the Seventies and Eighties, political elites across the Anglosphere embraced judicialization as a means of enforcing policies that might otherwise have faced public resistance.

Examples include the creation of independent monetary and pricing bodies, and the extensive use of quasi-autonomous non-governmental organizations (quangos) to implement policy at arm’s length from parliamentary control. The 1998 Human Rights Act, which incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law, epitomizes the judicialization trend. As Hirschl observed, “deference to the judiciary” served elite interests well: for example, it allowed governments to pursue controversial neoliberal economic and labor reforms while blaming unelected judges or independent bodies for their consequences.

The result is the system we inhabit today: a “constrained democracy” in which the forms of representation remain, but the substance of political choice has been hollowed out. Immigration policy, once the preserve of parliaments, has become the domain of judges interpreting “rights”. Economic and social policies are now dictated by international treaties and constitutional doctrines.

To criticize the ECtHR is not to oppose human rights, but to ask who defines them and by what authority. When “rights” are expanded indefinitely without democratic consent, they cease to be instruments of liberty and become tools of control. Governments, meanwhile, though nominally constrained by such courts, often welcome their interference, which allows them to outsource politically costly decisions to unelected judges — to pursue or preserve policies they privately support but dare not defend — or simply to evade responsibility for problems they are incapable of solving. This is why politicians’ condemnations of the ECHR, especially coming from the Conservative camp that so spectacularly betrayed the Brexit mandate while in power, ring so hollow.

The British public appears to sense this contradiction. While many citizens would probably agree that the ECHR’s authority has gone too far, polls suggest that a majority do not favor outright withdrawal from the Convention. Perhaps they intuitively understand that leaving the ECHR would make sense only as part of a broader project of political renewal — a re-democratization of governance that restores the primacy of parliament and popular sovereignty. But such a project would require a political class that actually believes in democracy — something in short supply, in Britain and across Europe.

Today, as the established order appears to be crumbling all around us, The Magic Mountain speaks directly to our sense of living through a rupture in time.   

Mann wrote the first words of The Magic Mountain in 1913, intending it to be a short companion piece to his novella Death in Venice, published a year earlier. But then, swept up by the nationalistic fervor of Germany’s mobilization at the outbreak of World War I,  he set aside the manuscript to dedicate himself instead to his reactionary essay Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man. It was published on the eve of Germany’s capitulation in 1918. An ill-timed defense of the deep well of German Kultur against the soulless materialism of Western civilization, Reflections was partly provoked by Mann’s older brother, the novelist Heinrich Mann, a liberal democrat and Francophile. When Heinrich published his antiwar essay “Zola” in 1915, Thomas perceived it as a personal attack. The two brothers did not speak for seven years.

Believing democracy to be “poisonous” to the German spirit, Mann appeared at war’s end to be in sympathy with the new German Right. When he returned to the manuscript of The Magic Mountain in April 1919, Munich was in the grip of a violent clash between communist revolutionaries and Right-wing Freikorps troops, including the future Nazi officers Ernst Röhm and Manfred von Killinger. As he began revising the chapters he’d written earlier, Mann could hear machine-gun fire and grenade explosions from his home in Munich’s Herzog Park neighborhood. It was during this time that he wrote the novel’s famous foreword, in which The Magic Mountain is described as a “time-novel” that takes place “long ago, in the old days of the world before the Great War, with whose beginning so many things began whose beginnings, it seems, have not yet ceased.”

Hans Castorp, the novel’s young hero, arrives at the International Berghof Sanatorium in Davos in the summer of 1907. A young engineer about to embark on a career in ship-building, he intends to spend three weeks in the Swiss Alps visiting his tubercular soldier cousin Joachim Ziemssen, a patient at the Berghof, who early on warns his visitor that “a man changes a lot of his ideas up here.” By the end of the novel, when Hans Castorp leaves the sanatorium to fight, and most likely die, in the trenches of World War I, he has spent seven years at the Berghof.

One of the great achievements of the novel is its compositional subtlety, its use of the leitmotif, so that one learns to identify what Hans Castorp is thinking even when he is not himself aware of it. On his arrival, for instance, he is not quite aware of his existential and intellectual aimlessness, his nihilism. (As Nietzsche knew, one can well be a nihilist without actually knowing it). Only many hundreds of pages and several years later does Hans Castorp arrive at a possible answer. By then, he has received a kind of crash course in modern European civilization, listening to and “experimenting with” (the novel’s term for it) the ideas of a number of unforgettable characters. There is the Italian humanist Ludovico Settembrini, a liberal rationalist and firm believer in civilizational progress; the Russian temptress Clavdia Chauchat, who is a kind of Nietzschean apostate of the bourgeois order; and Dr. Edhin Krokowski, a psychoanalyst employed at the Berghof. 

But the most remarkable character of all is Leo Naphta, a Jewish convert to Catholicism, who affirms the supremacy of the Roman church over the bourgeois state and bluntly justifies the use of violence and terror to goad humankind back under divine rule. At the same time, Naphta also espouses a communist dictatorship that, in his view, will help achieve “the ultimate goal of redemption: the children of God living in a world without classes or laws.” As Hans Castorp rightly intuits, Naphta is a reactionary who sounds, at times, proto-fascist in his terroristic contempt for the liberal bourgeois world. Even so, he is drawn to him for the same reason the reader is: because a life lived in the daylight of reason is somehow only half-lived. Naphta speaks from what Nietzsche called “the unexplored realm of dangerous knowledge,” which is what makes him so intriguing.

As a fictional creation, Naphta is Mann at his most prophetic. He is a product of the author’s having paid close attention to what was stirring in Germany in the years immediately after the war. Mann conceived of Naphta in 1922, around the same time that the industrialist and statesman Walter Rathenau was assassinated by two Right-wing terrorists in Berlin in broad daylight. Horrified by this, and other instances of Right-wing terror, Mann had begun a political reorientation that can be felt in The Magic Mountain. In October 1922, he gave a famous address to a group of German students in which he warned them against the emerging threat from the Right, with its “sentimental obscurantism” and “disgusting and crackbrained assassinations.” 

“Perhaps a bildungsroman will strive to show that the experience of death is ultimately an experience of life, that it leads toward the human,” Mann said, before surprising everyone by affirming the democracy of the Weimar Republic.

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The Magic Mountain, of course, is the very bildungsroman Mann was referring to. It was as if he needed to send Hans Castorp — and, by extension, himself — up into the mountain to work through the many ideological and spiritual conflicts the war left in its wake. And just as Hans Castorp, in a pivotal chapter, loses his way in a blizzard and is tempted to lie down in the snow and die, Mann, too, was tempted by what he called Germany’s “sympathy with death”: that cult of unreason that was its spiritual tradition. By the time the novel was published in 1924, he had recognized what that sympathy leads to and chose, instead, like Hans Castorp in the snow, to be on the side of life, to affirm the future, and to “grant death no dominion over his thoughts.”

In these reactionary times, with a nihilist occupying the White House, Mann’s embrace of humanism and democracy against the nihilistic death cult around him remains principled and courageous. The reader ascending the novel’s Olympian heights today should not expect an escape but an immersion in the world around us. The story of the novel’s genesis is also a story of Mann’s political courage. As Walter Benjamin wrote to Gershom Scholem after reading The Magic Mountain: “I can only imagine that an internal change must have taken place in the author while he was writing. Indeed, I am certain this was the case.” Though a conservative by temperament, Thomas Mann became a defender of democracy because he was so alarmed by what German conservatism was becoming. 

Of how many people today can we say the same?   

This essay was adapted from the author’s book, The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of The Magic Mountain, which has just been published by Yale University Press.

The upshot? A bonanza for investors, with firms like Blackstone betting literally billions of dollars on buying up American homes, before renting them out to desperate tenants. And if 28% of US single family homes were sold to investors in Q1 2022, an 8% jump on the previous year, the trend is increasingly popular on the far side of the Atlantic too. Not content with dolling out mortgages, Lloyds Bank apparently has plans to become Britain’s biggest landlord.

Yet as large corporations gobble up a diminishing supply of houses, they pose an enormous threat to would-be homeowners, particularly those Millennials too young to have cashed in the boom of earlier decades. Combined with frequent complaints that these mega-landlords don’t maintain their new purchases — and signs that they’re keen to scoop up even more real estate — much of the Western world edges closer to genuine disaster territory, even if the antagonists are more feudal vampires than undead shamblers.

Housing now dominates political discourse right across the developed world. Among Americans, it now ranks second only to inflation as a leading economic worry. In my native California, almost 70% of residents are concerned about housing costs; in Britain, housing has risen to become one of the top issues for voters — well ahead of defense, security, poverty and crime. That’s hardly surprising: especially under the country’s inflexible NIMBY regime, projections suggest that nearly five million UK households will live in unaffordable accommodation by 2030.

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And if the Anglosphere is especially bad in this respect, it’s hardly unique. Studies have found similar problems stalk the European and East Asian markets too, as prices rise far faster than household incomes or inflation. And if the OECD warns that living standards are bound to “stagnate or decline” in consequence, this is far more than a series of individual catastrophes for the families involved. Rather, the West’s housing crisis, so exacerbated by outfits like Blackstone, has terrifying implications for the maintenance of middle-class democracy.

Small landowners have been the bulwark of democracy for millennia. This was true in the early origins of Athens and Rome, and in the rise of the Dutch Republic during the 17th century, perhaps the first genuinely middle-class society in history. If, however, the rise of property ownership undermined the aristocracy and hastened the end of feudalism, the most dramatic changes came after the Second World War.

Servicemen returning home wanted something better than the dank Victorian apartments they’d inhabited before. Their dreams were embraced, and indeed realized, by a series of progressive governments, often on the Left but sometimes Christian Democratic. There are plenty of examples here: Harry Truman’s GI Bill and Clement Attlee’s welfare state are probably the two most famous, but Australia and Canada pursued similar policies too.

And if President Roosevelt was surely right when he proclaimed that a “nation of homeowners” is unconquerable, the postwar embrace of quality, affordable houses for all provided “the secret sauce” that made liberal capitalism palatable to working people. Throughout the Fifties and Sixties, that was self-evident for those thousands of working-class families that fled the slums of Brooklyn or Wapping, embracing instead a front lawn and back garden in Long Island or its Essex equivalent. “Was there ever such a stealthy social revolution as the rise of this semi-detached suburbia?” wondered the filmmaker John Boorman, recalling his childhood in a South London suburb.

Now, though, many Western countries are transforming into “rentership” societies — where citizens have plenty of income to enjoy video games or tend to houseplants, but can never accumulate their own brick-and-mortar assets. The broader effect may ultimately resemble a modern form of feudalism, where institutional ownership concentrates control over housing.

If these problems transcend demographics, young people are particularly threatened here. When I ask my students if they feel confident about buying a home here in Southern California, they rarely answer affirmatively. In a recent Harvard poll of 18- to 29-year-olds, housing ranked as the third most important issue overall, just behind inflation and health care. No wonder: nationally, homeownership for people under 35 has fallen steadily since the Great Recession, and is now half that of over 45s. And, to be clear, this is not due to changing priorities, as two-thirds of millennials still yearn to escape to the suburbs.

All this has a predictable number of knock-on effects: starting with wealth accumulation. With property now so expensive, a situation hardly helped by Blackstone and the rest, American home owners have a median net worth over 40 times that of renters. It’s not hard, here, to see the political implications of this economic divide, with renters tending to favor Leftist policies such as rent control and housing subsidies. To put it differently, a class of permanent renters seems tailor-made for fomenting class warfare against an ever-shrinking number of owners.

Indeed, this is precisely the factor that’s pushed an obscure socialist named Zohran Mamdani to the verge of becoming the mayor of America’s largest and most important city. Mamdani’s “cost of living” campaign — based on rent control, free buses, childcare and city-owned supermarkets — seems to some Leftist pundits as a potential path back to power. And why not? As one recent poll found, a majority of people under 40 embrace socialist principles, even as 70% of adults no longer believe the American Dream is even attainable.

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This politics of bitterness is arguably exacerbated elsewhere too. The only way many can now buy homes is by relying on the classic feudal formula — “the funnel of privilege”. In the US, after all, Millennials are three times as likely as boomers to count on inheritance for their retirement. In high-price markets like Los Angeles, close to 40% of loans rely on family money for qualification, up from 25% in 2011. For the losers of this economic lottery, resentment is bound to follow.

Of course, it’d be wrong to blame all this on Wall Street or the City. Many forces contribute to higher home prices. That includes immigration — especially the kind of open-door policy faced by Britain in recent years — as well as land-use policies that restrict development. Yet adding big capital to the mix deepens the assault on middle-income aspirations, especially when investors are especially eager to snatch up single-family homes. That, it goes without saying, does much to harden even moderate hearts to free-market ideas, especially when balancing housing with other priorities means that even something as basic as childbearing is now thrown by the wayside.

Nor does the situation look likely to improve in the medium term. As the industry journal Private Equity Real Estate estimates, investors could control as much as 40% of US housing stock by 2030, with similar trends visible in Australia and elsewhere. So pervasive is the trend, in fact, that some lawmakers, including in California, Washington and Georgia, have sought to limit purchases by large real estate outfits. Yet as the radical social theorist Barrington Moore wisely noted half a century ago, “no bourgeois, no democracy”. And if such tweaks are enough to save either remains decidedly unclear, as the stumbling masses look to take revenge.

The Fifth Republic is far from alone here. For Western democracy is under threat — not from “foreign adversaries”, or “far-Right populists”, but from its own elites. Whether in Britain, Germany or Ireland, censorship has become routine across Europe and beyond, even as dissent is increasingly criminalized and legal systems are weaponized to suppress opposition. In recent months, these trends have escalated into direct assaults on the basic institutions of democratic governance. In Romania, to give one example, an entire election was annulled because it delivered the wrong outcome, while other countries contemplate similar measures too.

In theory, all this is being carried out in the name of defending democracy. In truth, the purpose is clear: to help ruling elites maintain their grip on power in the face of a historic collapse of legitimacy. Whether they will succeed in doing so remains to be seen. What is clear, though, is that the stakes are enormous. If elites manage to entrench their control through increasingly authoritarian means, the West will enter a new era of managed democracy — or democracy in name only. If they fail, and in the absence of a coherent alternative, the resulting vacuum may give way to deepening instability, social unrest and systemic crisis. Either way, the outlook for the future of Western democracy is grim.

Critics have been raising alarms about this elite-driven democratic backsliding for years. As far back as 2000, political scientist Colin Crouch coined the term “post-democracy” to describe the fact that, even though Western societies boasted the trappings of freedom, they had increasingly become a meaningless facade. Elections, Crouch argued, had become tightly managed spectacles, orchestrated by professional persuaders who operated within a shared neoliberal consensus — pro-market, pro-business, pro-globalization — and offered voters little choice on fundamental political or economic questions. Citizens, for their part, played a passive role, helpless in the face of political and corporate power. Politics, Crouch said, was “slipping back into the control of privileged elites in the manner characteristic of pre-democratic times”.

Crouch was writing at the peak of what Francis Fukuyama famously called the end of history. In the political scientist’s telling, the Cold War’s end, and the global triumph of Western liberal democracy, marked the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution”. Subsequent upheavals — especially following the 2007-8 financial crisis — shattered any illusion of history’s halt. Yet Fukuyama’s core argument wasn’t so much that the clock of history had stopped spinning, but that, from then on, there would be no essential challenge to liberal democracy and market capitalism, deemed the pinnacle of social evolution.

For a while, Fukuyama’s prediction proved correct. The historical defeat of socialism shrank the ideological space in the West, foreclosing any fundamental challenge to capitalism and enabling the emergence of a technocratic, depoliticized governance model underpinned by the “TINA” (There Is No Alternative) consensus around neoliberalism — centered on individual responsibility, market hegemony and globalization. Left-wing protests, whether against globalization or the Iraq War, failed to transition into formal politics. On the contrary, much of the post-Cold War Left, having abandoned class conflict for liberal-cosmopolitan identity politics, became a legitimizing force for an aggressive “progressive neoliberalism” — a fusion of pseudo-progressivism and neoliberal economic policies.

Geopolitically, meanwhile, US “hyperpower” status allowed it to aggressively assert global hegemony, creating a unipolar “new world order”. This was underpinned by structural economic shifts within the West: the decline of traditional manufacturing, and the Fordist-Keynesian social contract, replaced by services, labor dispersion, precarity and fragmentation. Most Western countries saw manufacturing employment decline by a third-to-half in absolute numbers. This pulverized the working class as a unified political subject — along the way wrecking trade unions and other material symbols of postwar mass politics.

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This historical trend was exacerbated by policies deliberately aimed at reducing labor’s bargaining power (anti-union laws, labor market flexibilization), and promoting privatized consumerism and apathy. Meanwhile, decision-making processes were increasingly insulated from democratic pressures, chiefly through the surrendering of national prerogatives to supranational institutions and super-state bureaucracies such as the European Union. This strategy of depoliticizing democracy birthed what some have called “post-politics”: a regime where political spectacle thrives, but where systemic alternatives to the neoliberal status quo are not just repressed but foreclosed. The American journalist Thomas Friedman aptly described the post-political neoliberal regime as one where “policy choices get reduced to Pepsi or Coke” — minor variations within an unchallenged framework.

The concept of post-politics inevitably intersects with that of democracy. A minimalist view of democracy, focused only on rules and elections, suggests it survived the “end of history”, as formal institutions persisted and in some cases expanded (such as in former communist states). Yet substantive democracy — meaning citizens’ ability to actively shape government policy and the political agenda — has eroded dramatically. With no systemic alternative, politics and substantive democracy withered, resulting in declining voter turnout. One might say that the defining characteristic of post-democracy is that, despite the existence of elections, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. Instead, power and influence are concentrated in the hands of a small subset of society.

Of course, since authors like Crouch first diagnosed this hollowing out of democracy from within, things have become exponentially worse, especially in the wake of the financial crisis. The post-democratic politics of the neoliberal era were actually intensified during the 2010s, becoming increasingly repressive and authoritarian. In the EU, under the pretext of responding to the financial and euro crises, the bloc’s supranational institutions (notably the ECB and European Commission) dramatically expanded their powers, imposing budgetary rules and structural reforms on member states without democratic oversight.

Beyond these institutional shifts, meanwhile, unelected elites increasingly interfered in the democratic processes of member states. The ECB’s “monetary coup” against Berlusconi in 2011, where the central bank effectively forced the prime minister to leave office by making his ouster the precondition for further support for Italian bonds and banks, is one good example here. The financial blackmail of Greece’s Tsipras government is another. Taken together, anyway, these events led some observers to suggest that the EU was becoming a “post-democratic prototype” — one fiercely opposed to national sovereignty and democracy both.

The scorched earth left behind by the financial crisis, and the elite-imposed austerity that followed, fueled in the mid-2010s our century’s first major anti-establishment uprisings: Brexit, Trump, the Yellow Vests and growing anti-EU sentiment across Europe. This mass awakening seemingly marked the “end of the end of history”, a widespread rejection of the post-Cold War neoliberal order. Even so, these challenges ultimately failed — absorbed or neutralized by the establishment through repression and ideological counter-offensives.

In this sense, the pandemic, beyond its epidemiological nature, can be interpreted as a “deep structural event” that accelerated this authoritarian centralization of power. Governments inflated the danger of the virus to sweep aside democratic procedures, militarize societies, crack down on liberties and implement unprecedented measures of social control — in the process “freezing” democratic politics and sapping whatever energy was left from the populist movements of the late 2010s.

Similar authoritarian dynamics resurged with the Russia-Ukraine conflict, with the media-political establishment smearing, censoring and even punishing voices critical to Western hawkishness. Just over a month ago, the EU, in a shocking and utterly unprecedented decision, sanctioned three EU citizens — banning them from traveling through the EU and freezing their bank accounts — for allegedly engaging in “pro-Russian propaganda”.

At the same time, new populist threats to the established order have emerged, predominantly from the Right. But so far, these too have failed to disrupt the status quo, partly because the West’s increasingly unpopular and delegitimized elites have turned to ever more brazen forms of repression to influence electoral outcomes and suppress these challenges. The Romanian case marked a fateful escalation: elites, backed by NATO and the EU, overturned a presidential election result, barring the populist candidate via unsubstantiated claims of Russian interference.

These events signal a disturbing trend: elites no longer limit themselves to “managing” electoral outcomes through “soft” or covert means — media manipulation, censorship, lawfare, economic pressure and intelligence operations. Rather, they are increasingly willing to discard the formal structures of democracy altogether. In retrospect, the “post-democratic” era of technocratic managerialism described by Crouch appears positively benign by comparison. All this repression is carried out in the name of defending democracy from so-called internal threats (populists) and external ones (foreign adversaries). Yet it is becoming increasingly clear that its true aim is shoring up elite power.

Most anti-establishment analyses of the current “crisis of democracy”, however, rest on flawed assumptions: that the current phase deviates from a historical norm; that postwar social-democratic capitalism was truly democratic; and that a return to it is possible. These assumptions crumble under scrutiny.

Western liberal democracy, even minimally defined as representative government based on universal suffrage, is a very recent phenomenon. Full male suffrage emerged in a limited number of countries only between the middle of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Women’s suffrage generally came after the Second World War. Effective voting rights for racial minorities, such as African Americans, arrived decades later. In short, democracy as universal adult suffrage, regardless of wealth, property, race or class, has existed for mere decades. Previously, it was the exclusive domain of propertied elites, or else based on sex or skin color.

Besides, as noted above, democracy is about something far more substantial than the mere act of voting. If it means anything, it must surely allow citizens to influence the state’s direction and shape the political agenda on fundamental issues — whether immigration, foreign policy, or the overall trajectory of social and economic policy. It’s hard to claim Western democracy is thriving on those terms. Yet that still leaves one more question: if “real democracy” is now dead, was it ever alive at all?

For a relatively short period — roughly between the Forties and the Seventies — we did witness a form of democracy that was decidedly more substantive than what exists today. Over these decades, often described as the “golden age” of capitalism, the working classes were integrated into the West’s political systems for the first time in history. This allowed them to gain a significant influence over the political agenda, leading to a substantial expansion of social, economic and political rights, in a context of growing politicization of the masses. The contrast to the post-political period is very stark indeed.

All the same, it’d be wrong to idealize the mid-century West. Even then, democracy in its substantive sense remained heavily constrained. Though the ruling classes were forced — under pressure from popular movements, the Cold War, and the threat of social unrest — to extend voting rights and acknowledge a range of political and social rights, they did not do so willingly. On the contrary, they were often driven by the fear that the masses could pose a real threat to the established social order — that workers might use democracy to overturn existing power relations.

As a result, alongside economic concessions, Western elites also constrained democratic participation in various ways. Modern constitutional systems — including nascent supranational ones like the European Court of Justice, established in 1952 — explicitly limited popular sovereignty. Elected governments were prevented from enacting certain economic or social policies, or even challenging existing international alliances. All the while, power shifted. Parliaments got weaker, and technocrats and judges grew more powerful, each in their way proving capable of overriding national laws. This was often justified as a way of protecting democracy from what elites feared could be the irrational or destabilizing demands of the masses — a longstanding argument in liberal political thought that equates too much popular participation with the risk of populism, mob rule or economic irresponsibility.

In some countries, the concept of “militant democracy” became a further means to limit the popular will. In Germany, for example, it legitimized the banning of political parties, most notably the country’s Communist Party. State authorities, supported by media and institutional elites, systematically repressed demands for deeper democratization, whether via police force, media delegitimization or institutional restructuring. Meanwhile, Western “permanent states” — the military, intelligence and security apparatuses — exercised considerable influence behind the scenes, generally under the direction of the US. That infamously included terrorist acts aimed at curbing the power of Left parties and movements, for example through Gladio. In short, from the very beginning of modern liberal democracy, the ruling classes actively worked to contain democracy within the boundaries of what they deemed acceptable politics.

All the same, for a while, the organized power of the masses was indeed able to constrain, to a greater degree than ever before, the power of capital. As noted, however, this brief period of relative substantive democracy depended on a unique confluence of factors. As these conditions crumbled from the mid-Seventies, the marriage between capitalism and democracy dissolved.

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The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the symbolic end of this era. In the decades since, we have witnessed a steady erosion of democratic norms — a process that has accelerated dramatically in recent years. Relevant, here, is Carl Schmitt’s “state of exception”, whereby constitutional safeguards are suspended to impose decisions unachievable via normal democratic channels. Yet as the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben emphasized over 20 years ago, the state of exception has now become a permanent condition in Western states.

This, of course, is a paradox: if it is permanent, then, by definition, it is no longer a state of exception. It becomes the rule. But is this permanent state of exception unique to the “post-democratic” era? An analysis of the postwar era suggests not. Rather, it is a fundamental characteristic of the state itself, even in its liberal-democratic guise. This challenges common conceptions of the state: across the Western world, we are accustomed to identifying the state with the executive and with parliament, assuming that these institutions act in accordance with constitutions and the rule of law.

But this is a misunderstanding: the state doesn’t coincide with the institutions of representative democracy. Rather, the two belong to entirely distinct spheres of politics. On the one hand, there is the politics of the state. On the other, there is what we might call popular politics, embodying popular sovereignty and typified by political parties, trade unions, social movements and civil society. The state operates with a significant degree of autonomy from the latter, meaning it is not only largely independent of civil society, but also of parliaments and even governments themselves.

In theory, after all, state bureaucracies act as neutral executors of government policy. In reality, they often act independently of, or even in opposition to, elected parliaments and governments, particularly when it comes to protecting institutional continuity, legal norms or elite interests. Supreme and constitutional courts, for example, frequently rule against government policies — especially when it comes to controversial issues like immigration. The way in which the Bank of England derailed Liz Truss’s infamous mini-budget is another example here. This phenomenon is obviously much more pronounced when national governments are subordinated to supranational institutions, as in the European Union. And then, of course, you have the military and intelligence bureaucracies, which today arguably exercise more influence than ever before (see, for instance, the Russiagate hoax).

The state thus emerges as a social organism endowed with its own internal logic and continuity, capable of pursuing goals and directions often independent of those declared or pursued by the political leadership of the day. This has always been true — even if, depending on the relative balance of class forces within society, the state may at times be forced to make concessions to the forces of popular politics. In other words, then, today’s crisis doesn’t represent democracy’s sudden collapse, but instead the unveiling of how power truly works. The contemporary crisis of Western democracy exposes the limits of formal democratic institutions, bringing the logic of state power into blindingly sharp relief.

The future, unfortunately, seems bleak. The conditions enabling the brief period of substantive democracy are gone, and unlikely to return soon. In a real sense, substantive democracy is dead. Even so, the unraveling geopolitical order underpinning Western dominance — challenged by the emergence of a multipolar order underpinned by the rise of powers like China — marks a profound political and economic shift. The erosion of Western hegemony is weakening its elites, whose dominance has long relied on both internal suppression and power projection abroad. Declining influence overseas exacerbates domestic discontent, especially when fueled by rising and systemic inequality.

This unraveling exposes the structural weaknesses of the Western system. Without the geopolitical stability and economic dominance that once masked its internal contradictions, elites are growing more vulnerable. Crucially, this decline also paves the way for a potential new order — not just a geopolitical reconfiguration, but a potential reimagining of political and economic systems. As Western elites grapple with their waning power, there are vast opportunities for alternative visions of governance and democracy.

What lies ahead is not merely a question of whether democracy can be “restored”, but whether a new political project can emerge to replace the exhausted model of elite-managed liberalism. The old order is collapsing, but the new has yet to be born. In this vacuum, anything can happen.

There isn’t a lot of room for interpretative ambiguity there. For well over a century and a half, the “birth” part of this was universally understood to mean exactly what it sounded like. Almost everyone born in the United States is a citizen, regardless of the citizenship status of their parents. The only exception pertains to rare cases, such as the children of foreign diplomats, who are immune from US laws.

Nevertheless, on the first day of his second term, Donald Trump signed an executive order absurdly attempting to reinterpret the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship out of existence. The aim was to deny citizenship to certain Americans purely because of immigration violations committed by their parents. At the time, pretty much everyone expected that the courts would immediately overturn this daylight raid against the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. But in the end, it didn’t quite work out that way.

Twenty-two states challenged the order, and judges in several of those states issued nationwide injunctions to block it. But last week, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Trump administration. They declined — for now — to rule on the core constitutional issue. Instead, they ruled on narrow technical grounds, invalidating the longstanding practice of federal judges issuing injunctions that apply to the whole country rather than only ones limited to their districts.

The Court allowed 30 days for further challenges to proceed, but after that, if nothing changes, Trump’s executive order could go into effect in the 28 states that haven’t challenged the order. That means that some babies born in the US will become entirely stateless. While some countries will grant citizenship to children of citizens born abroad, plenty will not.

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Those who seek to minimize the enormity of the Trump administration’s assault on liberal democratic principles often point out that birthright citizenship is rare globally. That’s true enough. It’s far from unique to the United States — about 30 nations have it, including the rest of North America and nearly all of South America. But it’s not the global norm. Then again, neither is the unusually robust protection of free speech and political dissent under the First Amendment.

Just as there are countries without birthright citizenship which nonetheless wouldn’t be classed as extreme ethnostates, there are plenty of nations that have laws against hate speech and blasphemy that haven’t devolved into 1984-style totalitarianism. Still, it would be a serious mistake in either case to assume that nothing important is at stake here. Whether the US continues to honor these protections matters profoundly.

The birthright citizenship clause was born in the aftermath of the Civil War. Just nine years before Congress passed the amendment, the Supreme Court had ruled in the Dred Scott decision that slaves weren’t US citizens, and didn’t become citizens when they escaped to free states. And as morally repulsive as that ruling was, it’s hard to argue that it didn’t conform to the intentions of the Constitution’s authors, who infamously counted each slave as three-fifths of a person when apportioning Congressional districts.

By the war’s end, every freed slave had been born to parents who weren’t citizens. Nevertheless, they themselves all were when the Fourteenth Amendment went into effect in 1868. The principle was very simple and clear: everyone born on American soil and subject to its laws would be an American citizen, full stop.

This was a crucial factor in shaping a unique sense of national identity in America, distinct from the kinds found elsewhere. Most nationalisms fall somewhere between two extremes: pure ethnonationalism, where the nation is an ancestral unit understood in blood-and-soil terms, and pure civic nationalism, where the nation is just all the people in the territory, regardless of race, religion, or ethnicity. Nearly every case is going to contain some elements of both types. But one of the best things about the United States is that American nationalism comes about as close to a pure form of civic nationalism as exists anywhere on the planet.

No one talks about being “a quarter American”, for example. It would sound like a category mistake. That’s why when my family fled from antisemitism in what’s now Ukraine, or when the other side of my family escaped what’s now Croatia as it was plunged into the First World War, these relatives, within a short time, raised children who felt American and who were regarded as such.

I’m a man of the Left, and in the great majority of contexts I’d consider Ronald Reagan to be one of my very least favorite presidents, but he put this point very well in his last speech in office. He said that you can “go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman” and that this is true of many other nations, but that “anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American”. France may have moved closer to pure civic nationalism over the decades, but the underlying point remains. This is one of the most precious aspects of American democracy.

To point this out isn’t to minimize the long and awful history of slavery, Jim Crow, and the mistreatment of the native population. The after-effects survive today in the economic disparities between different demographic groups. But we should be able to recognize this painful history while also celebrating that, as of 2025, we’ve separated American identity from any sort of racial or ethnic or religious or ancestral identity to a far greater extent than most other nations.

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This achievement partly reflects the unique contingencies of American history. Consider France, where national identity has persisted through a number of changes of political and constitutional systems. The French are currently on their fifth republic, and that succession of republics was interrupted at various points by two empires, a monarchist restoration, and the fascism of the Vichy regime. By contrast, America is still in its first republic, meaning that it’s been far easier for us to form a sense of national identity around our allegiance to our founding liberal and democratic principles.

Besides many white Americans have long been able to trace their ancestral roots to many different parts of the world — so many that it would be impossible for there to be a strong association between American identity and, say, ancestral roots in the British motherland (or any other particular county). America exists on its own. And the world-historic victories of the Civil Rights Movement in the Fifties and Sixties undermined any lingering connection between Americanness and even a generic white identity.

In the early 20th century, everyone from Woodrow Wilson to Vladimir Lenin proclaimed a belief in the right of “nations” to self-determination. But what sort of beast is a nation? If the entity seeking self-determination is a particular ethnic, religious or cultural group, such that having achieved it, the resulting state is “for” that group, then a serious problem lingers about the status of demographic minority populations. No matter how well-treated members of those populations may be, there’s always a sense in which they are going to feel (and be treated) more like guests than full, organic members of the nation.

The extent to which the United States isn’t like that is a civilizational achievement. And if the courts really do let the Trump administration get away with redefining Americanness so that you can only be born an American if you have a genetic connection to other citizens, that would be a long step back into the dark.

The chances are that Trump will win this latest legal battle, just as he won the previous ones. The Supreme Court, where this legal battle may ultimately end up, has a majority of conservative justices. Six have been appointed by Republican presidents, three of them by Trump himself. The court’s most recent rulings have tilted heavily in favor of Trump. It ruled before last year’s election that Trump enjoyed immunity for actions he committed as president. It ruled in favor of the Trump administration in a case involving his decision to remove two members of an independent federal agency; on a case involving the protected status of Venezuelan migrants; and on a case that limited the scope of environmental reviews. The Supreme Court went against him in a decision to deport a Venezuelan accused of gang affiliations. This history of the court’s ruling would suggest the odds are 80:20 in favor of Trump.

But the deeper reason why I think Trump will win is that the New York court’s legal argument would set a very dangerous precedent if confirmed. It would be dangerous for Democrats too. Trump invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act from 1977 to justify his “Liberation Day” tariffs. That act was signed into law by Jimmy Carter. It was meant to enable a president to take emergency measures after the oil shocks of that decade.

Trump’s lawyers argued that the persistent US trade deficits constituted a national emergency that would justify the triggering of the Act. The New York court rejected this line of argument because the US has been running trade deficits since 1976. How can something be an emergency if it has been going on for that long?

The argument is sheer sophistry. In finance and economics, most crises occur due to things that have been going on for a long time. Remember subprime mortgages? They started in 1988. It took another 20 years until they triggered the global financial crisis. Or think about diseases in medicine. Life is full of emergencies whose causes started to build over long periods.

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But let’s suppose I am wrong. Trump loses the court case. Then what?

He still wins. This is because he has so many other ways of imposing tariffs. And on top of that, many more ways of achieving similar outcomes.

It already started on the weekend, when he said he would double the steel and aluminum tariffs to 50%. These tariffs come under a different heading: Section 232 of the 1962 Trade Expansion Act. I have counted five Acts that allow a president to impose tariffs — and there are probably more. Section 232 deals with national security. Joe Biden used it to impose a 100% tariff on electric cars from China. Trump’s car tariff also falls into this category.

Could the courts challenge him over Section 232? I doubt it. Historically, courts have not gone against the President over national security. Trump invoked Section 232 with the argument that the US has become dependent on imports for certain critical goods and materials, like vehicles, steel and also drugs. This is factually correct. You cannot use Section 232 to put an import on champagne and argue that you need to block its flow for national security reasons. But Trump can still do what the Europeans do: establish some food and wine standards that only domestic suppliers can fulfill.

The jargon of US trade and finance politics includes a lot of numbers, which all happen to be in the hundreds. There is also Section 301 of the 1974 US Trade Act. This is about unfair trading practices. Section 301 is triggered by an official investigation by the US Trade Representative. It is a powerful act, but slow. It follows strict procedural rules. They have to launch an investigation, hold hearings, and allow people to raise objections. But when all this is over, the President decides.

And then there is the nuclear device: Section 338 of the Smoot-Hawley Act from 1930. That is the Act that triggered the Great Depression. Smoot-Hawley allows the President to impose tariffs of up to 50% for the most quotidian of reasons: to shield American industry from foreign competition. Smoot-Hawley is surprisingly still on the statute books.

You want more numbers? There is also Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, which gives Trump the power to impose tariffs of 15% for up to 150 days, no questions asked. If you deep-dive into the current bill, which passed the House of Representatives by a single vote last week, you might come across Section 899. This introduces a tax on foreign investors whose countries are deemed to run tax regimes the US considers detrimental to the interests of US business.

I am going to stop here with the numbers. But the bottom line is that Trump will find a way. Only a fool would bet on Trump being stopped by the courts. It did not happen in the past. It won’t happen now.

Behind these serial misjudgments lies a deeper problem. One of the reasons why centrist, liberal democracy is in retreat is its tendency towards lawfare. The German military historian Carl von Clausewitz described war as the continuation of policy with other means. Lawfare is the continuation of policies through the courts. If you don’t win elections, you still have the courts. This is an abuse of the legal system. Democracy is not meant to work that way.

Lawfare also has a tendency to backfire. There are many examples other than Trump’s criminal trials. The UK Supreme Court’s decision to stop Boris Johnson’s prorogation of parliament in 2019 represented another campaign whose efforts did not have the intended effect. The ruling was celebrated by the Remain campaign, but it also triggered new elections that Johnson won with an unexpectedly large majority. The European Commission also commits lawfare through a procedure they call “rule of law”. It is where politicians vote to withhold payments to recalcitrant EU members. Courts in France and Romania have banned the lead candidates in presidential elections. In Germany, centrist politicians are actively discussing whether to seek a ban of the Alternative for Germany. If you can’t beat them, ban them. That’s lawfare.

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Lawfare fails for two reasons. It rallies the broader support base of those who are subjected to it — which is what happened with Trump, and with the Leave campaign during the Brexit years. But, perhaps more importantly, it has a terrible effect on those who pursue it. The lawfarers relied on the courts to do the dirty work for them. They were not sufficiently focused on defeating Trump in the elections, because the courts lurked in the background.

I see centrist-liberal complacency everywhere. Here in Europe liberals wrap themselves in the Ukrainian flag and promise that they will support Ukraine for however long it takes to defeat Russia. But for that promise to mean anything, it would have required some real sacrifice, like higher taxes, a gas and oil embargo, or comprehensively cutting off Russian banks from the Western financial system. I feel sorry for Ukraine that it has such spineless allies. The problem with liberal centrists is that they fight battles that are legal rather than political. They like something done. But they don’t like to do it themselves. They don’t fight wars themselves but prefer somebody else to fight it for them. The European centrists hate Trump in part because he ended that toxic game.

The reality is that Trump has won two elections, and he has got almost four years left to govern. The intelligent question for his opponents to ask is not how to defeat him in the courts, but how to move forward when they take over from him, and what parts of the agenda they should focus on if they were to win the mid-term elections next year. What should the US-China relationship be? Or US trade policy after 2029? Do you really want manufacturing to come back? What kind of manufacturing?

The reason why electorates are disaffected with incumbents is that many voters are not partaking in the fast lane of the 21st-century economy. It would be a massive job trying to fix this. It would mean reconnecting the average voter with the 21st-century economy. Trump managed to connect with the average voter better than his Democratic opponent, but in the end I don’t think he will deliver for them. The Trump presidency is more likely than not to end in disappointment. The sole purpose of the tariffs is to pay for the tax cuts that will benefit mostly the rich. If you want to defeat Trump, forget the courts. Start solving the actual problem.

The trouble with this view is that it sees democracy in purely instrumental terms. It judges political systems primarily in terms of whether they secure the best results, however “best” happens to be defined. This surely can’t be right, since even fascist regimes have come up with some impressive achievements from time to time. You can’t look only at the consequences of a form of politics, rather than at its internal operations. What my Tutor seemed not to grasp was that democracy isn’t just a way of getting things done, a way which for Winston Churchill was the least worst and for my Tutor the very worst, but what Aristotle would call a virtuous activity. This means among other things that it’s valuable in itself, not just for where it might get you. Aristotle isn’t altogether opposed to my Tutor’s viewpoint: he thinks that if there’s an individual who is clearly superior to everyone else, then it’s right that he should rule over them all; but he also believes that this is rare or non-existent.

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There’s also a sense in which Aristotle thinks, like my Tutor, that political arrangements should be judged instrumentally. But this means judged in terms of how far they help to secure the good life; and for Aristotle the good life is a virtuous one, which like ballet or laughter or gift-giving is an end in itself. You might say that the goal of the political state is human friendship, but friendship itself doesn’t have a goal. Human beings naturally have affection for each other and therefore desire to have a life together, Aristotle writes in the Politics, even when they have no need to seek each other’s help. This is strikingly at odds with the social contract theory of Hobbes and Locke, for which government is basically a matter of individual self-interest. The state exists to prevent us from strangling each other or stealing each other’s property. Its function is thus largely negative. There’s an element of this in Aristotle’s view, but to his mind the state has a more positive role in creating the conditions in which individuals may flourish; and one form of that flourishing is their participating in the running of the state, which is to say democracy.

This view can lead Aristotle to some pretty authoritarian conclusions, but in anachronistic terms it also puts him on the political Left. (There are those, needless to say, for whom the political Left and authoritarianism are synonymous.) By and large, the Left has looked favorably on political society as the matrix of all individual flourishing, whereas the Right tends to interpret this as meaning that a totalitarian state should take you over. The key distinction between state and society is elided. It sounds authoritarian to some liberal ears to claim that society takes priority over the individual, but for the Left this is a statement of fact rather than a political imperative. Only by belonging to a language and form of life, does one become a person. The self is relational to its roots. There couldn’t be just one individual, any more than there could be just one letter or number. Society is constitutive of individuals, not simply a neutral space in which they move or a potential obstacle to their freedom. The liberal or conservative might retort that it’s the same the other way round — that society itself is simply a collection of individuals. But this isn’t quite true. Society is a set of relations between individuals, some of them formal and some informal, not an assemblage of isolated units.

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So democracy, or self-government, is an exercise of our powers and capabilities which is inherently valuable, as well as conducive to ends beyond itself. As far as its results go, Aristotle isn’t worried that under democracy the people will make all the wrong decisions, since though each of them will be a worse judge than the experts, they will collectively speaking be better, or at least no worse. One might also point out that human beings can abuse their freedom, but they aren’t fully human without it. Collective self-determination, i.e. democracy, may result in thwarting some people’s freedom, but to be self-determining is to be free, at least in one sense of the term. To be free is not just not to be governed by someone else, but to have learnt how to govern oneself alongside others.

Still, there are problems with this vision. For one thing, it seems to suggest that politics and morality are fundamentally incompatible. Politics may be based on the will of the people, but it’s hard to view ethics in the same way. Is murder wrong just because most of us think it is? An alarming number of medieval citizens believed in burning witches, but that doesn’t make it acceptable. What if the moral consensus of the future contradicts the orthodoxy of today? Most people in Britain once held that homosexuality was sinful, but most of them don’t hold that now. It’s disturbing, however, to suppose that we just make up our fundamental principles as we go along. It seems to suggest that humanity rests on nothing but itself. Democracy means that we are the ultimate authority, rather than that there exists a sovereignty beyond us to which we should conform. Human beings determine their own history, but according to no ground plan independent of themselves. Democracy, in a word, is secretly atheistic. God has been replaced by the Plebs, and humanity assigned an importance which may lead to hubris.

There’s also a strained relationship between democracy and the market. If men and women are self-determining in the political sphere, they wouldn’t seem to have much of this capacity in the economic one. On the contrary, their own free actions merge together in the marketplace to constitute alien forces capable of commanding the course of their lives. To be truly sovereign over oneself, you need an environment which is relatively stable and predictable. You can’t play a decent game of croquet if, as in Alice in Wonderland, the equipment keeps shifting capriciously around. A degree of predictability is a condition of freedom, whereas sheer randomness amounts to the death of it. The economic life of capitalism is like a surreal game of croquet in which things stroll off the pitch or morph into something else just when you want them to keep still. As far as keeping still yourself goes, you have to run very fast simply to do that, as the Queen remarks to Alice in Lewis Carroll’s tale. Socialism is among other things a response to the fact that a capitalist economy is inherently out of control, not out of control only at times of crisis. And in the world of Trump, politics has become almost as volatile and erratic as the stock exchange.

There used to be a time when the proletariat was seen as the potential downfall of this system. That it was destined to be the gravedigger of capitalism was a kind of irony, since it was itself a product of it. Today, the potential undoing of the system is still the system itself. Advanced capitalist economies have reached a degree of opaqueness, complexity and global reach which undermine some of their own moral foundations. Classical liberalism, with its faith in individual freedom, has evolved into an anonymous corporate world in which the individual is largely dispensable, and the nation-state along with it. A traditional respect for God, family, community and country gives way to rootlessness, faithlessness, the disruption of communities, the provisional nature of all values and a planet on which any place is more or less interchangeable with any other. Nor can you have proper self-determination when the self seems little more than a fiction, a fleeting nexus of impulse and desire without continuity or foundation. Neoliberalism rounds savagely on its more classical forebear, ripping up civil rights and redefining freedom of expression as the freedom to profit from hate speech. In reaction to all this, parts of the global capitalist system enter a kind of time-warp, turning back to the days when men were men, the nation stood tall, home and kinship were precious, God was in his heaven and the manufacture of automobiles was in Detroit.

Neoliberalism unmasks the embarrassing truth that capitalism and democracy aren’t at root compatible, even if we still have the privilege to choose which particular bunch of old Etonians should represent us at Westminster. This incompatibility wasn’t so evident in the age of classical liberalism, when the individual’s freedom to acquire property seemed to go naturally with his or her freedom to dissent, divorce, launch a campaign or rise in the social hierarchy. We don’t, however, speak of Walmart or the oil companies in terms of the individual’s right to private property. In practice, that whole discourse is almost obsolete; but neoliberalism has nothing but the language of wealth and acquisition with which to fill the ideological gap left behind. John Stuart Mill knew that liberal democracy was constantly under threat from “sinister interests”. Today, it has been effectively taken over by them.

This is the second attempt to hold the election. The regularly scheduled one was annulled last December amid accusations of candidate and government corruption. Cǎlin Georgescu, a Romanian nationalist, populist admirer of Donald Trump, mystical Christian and opponent of the Ukraine war, came seemingly out of nowhere to win the first round. He took 23% of the vote on the strength of a charismatic TikTok campaign, advancing to the second round against the centrist Elena Lasconi. For the first time since Communism, the country’s invincible-looking political establishment seemed to have been shut out of the presidency.

That’s not so odd: Romania today is (by European standards) poor, unequal, corrupt and war-weary. Its population peaked in the last years of communism at almost 25 million. Today, through a combination of emigration and lost mojo, it is just 19. Sharing a longer border with Ukraine than either Poland or Hungary, it has become a hub for the NATO war effort. And for Ukrainian refugees, 180,000 of whom can claim temporary protections. These, of course, include housing, employment and social programs for which natives aren’t eligible.

Like all members of the EU, Romania is prone to bitter clashes between Europhiles and so-called “sovereigntists”. The EU confers the prestigious status of being “Western”, along with membership in profitable trading networks. Big majorities of Romanians still back it. But the 1992 Maastricht treaty, which commits all member-states to an “ever closer union”, turned the EU into a machine for grinding up systems of national self-rule, whether newly regained (as in the case of the former satellite states of the Soviet Union) or ancient and hallowed (as in the case of the pre-Brexit United Kingdom). Sovereigntists tend to thrive where the responsibility for solving desperately important problems — like mass immigration — is taken out of national hands, and those problems go unsolved.

Romania has followed a different path. The decades-long dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu was particularly brutal, and the violent exit of Romania from communism unique. Ceaușescu was executed alongside his wife on Christmas Day 1989. Romanian sovereigntists have found it hard to rally citizens to the cause of winning back powers for their own democracy, the way the Kaczyński brothers’ Law and Justice party (PiS) managed to do in Poland until 2023, or Viktor Orbán’s Hungarian Fidesz and Robert Fico’s Slovakian Smer continue to do today.

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That has now changed. Georgescu is in some ways a thrilling political novelty: an accomplished civil servant and diplomat, a scientist of distinction, and a would-be policymaker of some sophistication. (He has called for Romania to be more “Hamiltonian”, referring to the first American treasury secretary’s aggressive, nation-based industrial policy. US supporters of Donald Trump’s trade policies often sound similar notes.) Georgescu is also religious in a way that swept many of his Orthodox co-religionists off their feet, promising to “trust in God with His power of love”. Romania is a society of relatively high church attendance (about a quarter) and trust in religious hierarchies. It is also a place where fascist movements of the Twenties and Thirties were tightly linked to Orthodoxy, and to mysticism too. Georgescu can come off as weird, conspiratorial and over-indulgent of his country’s fascist past. Covid, in his view, was a “plan-demic”.

How could such a candidate score as high as Georgescu did? The Constitutional Court was eager to find out. It called for a recount, which found no irregularities. On 6 December, though, with second-round voting already underway, the court cited material declassified by the country’s Supreme Council for National Defense (CSAT) to annul the elections on the grounds of national security, not of election irregularity.

The “declassified” material actually consisted of assertions, not previously classified proofs. But the relevant authorities all winked at this deficiency. Weeks later, Romanian president Klaus Iohannis, who had summoned CSAT in the first place, explained that election meddling was actually “nearly impossible” to prove. The actions “are so broad and complex that only state actors can do that… And here it was Russia.” We know it’s Russia, he assured us, because “they hide perfectly in cyber space”. The lack of evidence of meddling became the main evidence of meddling.

The EU didn’t fuss much, either. Romania and Bulgaria were due to be admitted to the EU’s Schengen open-borders regime this New Year’s Day, barely a month later. No one alluded to Romanians’ cancellation of elections — even if it was a step more serious than those for which the commission had sought to bring the less-Europhilic Hungarians and Poles to their knees. “Fully in Schengen,” European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen tweeted to Romanians, “where you belong.”

The Biden administration — barely three weeks after its own electoral ouster by Trump’s forces — issued a statement casting the election result in a dubious light. The ambassador in Bucharest signalled that remedial intervention might be welcomed: “Our hope,” she wrote, “is that whatever decisions might or might not be taken… Romania’s strong track record as a reliable democratic partner in Europe and in the Euro-Atlantic community will not be tarnished.”

In this context, one can understand why J.D. Vance alluded to the incident in his speech at the Munich Security Conference. Were Romania’s authorities acting to prevent Russia from gaining influence within the European Union? Or to prevent the Trump-era United States from gaining influence within the European Union? Such suspicions would not be out of line. If Vance shares them, then his intervention in Munich would seem not overboard but restrained.

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And that makes the present situation potentially grave. Since last December, there have been two loudly asserted contrary accounts of what happened in Romania’s halted presidential election: either Georgescu won the first round with the votes of actual Romanians or someone faked up such a result through the clever deployment of TikTok. Everything we have learned since December favors the first, more straightforward explanation. Early in the year, Georgescu announced he would run in the do-over election, and his polling numbers shot up even higher than they had been last year. He was beginning to flirt with an absolute majority.

In February, Georgescu was arrested on charges involving “incitement to actions against the constitutional order”. The Social Democrat Marcel Ciolacu, still serving as prime minister after his third-place finish in the presidential election, had said authorities would show “extremely strong evidence” for a prosecution.

It has not been forthcoming. BBC 4’s Crossing Continents sympathetically interviewed a Romanian media researcher credited as an “important source of information for the authorities” on the Georgescu matter, and asked whether his “massive uptick” in social media traffic had come from Romania or abroad. “I think my subjective opinion is both”, she said. “It’s externally with internal help, but this is how the Kremlin playbook of propaganda works.” Her complaint about Georgescu’s campaign offers no proof of corruption or criminality beyond the “subjective”. She only finds Georgescu’s view of Romania’s history repugnant and inadmissible: “That’s a very, if I am allowed to say, MAGA narrative about the history of Romania, glorifying the past of Romania that was never in a state of glory, glorifying the sovereignty of Romania in a historical period, but we actually didn’t have it, glorifying history that for us just means torture, pain.” This is not necessarily wrong as a historical assessment. But it is wrong as a democratic modus operandi. Under present circumstances, it is unlikely to strike Georgescu’s followers as reasonable grounds for nullifying a presidential election.

The assertion that Georgescu’s rise somehow defies reality does not account for TikTok reality. In January, a month before Germany’s federal elections, the Left Party there was in low single digits and given little chance by most pundits of getting any seats at all in the Bundestag. But when Friedrich Merz, the Christian Democratic candidate for chancellor, cooperated on an anti-immigration bill with the hardline Alternative for Germany, the Left’s leader Heidi Reichinnek gave a barn-burning, reel-ready parliamentary speech. Watch it on TikTok. She warned that another Nazi wave was on its way, that Merz was its henchman and only the Left could stop it. It was a scenario implausible enough that, in Romania these days, it might count as “disinformation”. But in a mostly free country, Reichinnek had every right to say it. She obviously believed it. Her talk doubled the party’s membership in a matter of days and on election day the Left had 64 Bundestag members.

Whether Romania’s secret police has evidence against Georgescu is something unknowable except to them. That’s the problem.

But we do know enough about the state of Romanian voters’ minds to pass judgment on what happened with its democracy last autumn. Obviously there was a genuine wave of rebellion behind Georgescu. We can tell from the behavior of voters and candidates in the months since. In Georgescu’s absence, George Simion, a member of the Right-wing Alliance for the Union of Romanians, is well ahead of the pack in the latest polls, at around 30%. (Georgescu once belonged to the AUR but was ousted for speaking sympathetically of the Legionaries, an interwar fascist group.)

Simion has risen primarily by consolidating his party’s base. More conventionally conservative than Georgescu, more sympathetic to the war in Ukraine, less a charismatic outsider, he has nonetheless tried to drape himself in Georgescu’s cause, showing up to Easter services with him. Simion even suggested he might make Georgescu his prime minister if elected. And he attended the inauguration of Donald Trump in Washington. Victor Ponta, a savvy former Social Democratic prime minister, considered an ideological chameleon — he, too, made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago. The centrist candidate Crin Antonescu, former leader of the Liberal party, is probably the last, best chance for the decades-old Romanian establishment to hang on. Yet one Romanian political scientist told the French newspaper Libération that nowadays, in some of his rhetorical flights, Antonescu “could pass for a member of [Marine Le Pen’s] National Rally”. Bucharest mayor Nicușor Dan, another tough-talking member of the establishment, has been trying to squeeze out Lasconi. Antonescu is thought to have the better chance of beating Simion in the second round. Shaken by the persistence of a disruptive war and the return of Donald Trump to the White House, the Romanian political landscape is changing.

Again, there is much that is unknowable for those who are far from the backrooms of Bucharest. But among the candidates who are actually running and are betting their careers on an accurate diagnosis of the Romanian mind, there is a working assumption that the votes Georgescu won last autumn reflected a genuine uprising, not a bot-generated simulacrum. If they are right, then it is possible that we really did see an election brazenly stolen in a vital European Union country. The consequences will extend beyond these coming elections.

Since then İmamoğlu’s party, the Republican People’s Party, or CHP, has held huge protest rallies across the country and staged a primary in which more than 15 million people anointed him as their candidate for the presidency. The opposition has also led a boycott of industrial conglomerates, media companies, and retail groups associated with the government, which has been patchily observed. On 2 April, many shops in Istanbul and elsewhere were shuttered in support of some 3,000 detained protesters. Such measures are clearly intended to spook investors and prompt a currency crisis of the kind that the Central Bank has already spent $25 billion in reserves to prevent. The interior minister deplored the opposition’s “assassination attempt on our national economy”.

The small number of independent Turkish journalists still able to work inside the country concur that the CHP, a fissiparous outfit with a talent for walking into political traps, has handled the crisis surprisingly well. Noting that İmamoğlu’s detention even brought protesters into the streets of Erdoğan’s hometown of Rize, on the Black Sea, one such commentator, Murat Yetkin, declared, “the wind is changing”.

Since Erdoğan embraced authoritarianism in the early 2010s, he and his AK Party, or AKP, have captured the judges, cowed the universities, and lobotomized the mainstream media. Rather than report on the biggest of the recent protests, by hundreds of thousands of Istanbullus (2.2 million according to the CHP), on 29 March, Turkey’s main news channel debated filo pastry recipes for the forthcoming Bayram holiday.

Erdoğan has a habit of revealing the outcome of judicial investigations before they conclude. Referring to a probe into what he called the “bribery, corruption and terrorism” of CHP municipalities, he predicted that “as it advances and deepens [it] will reveal how far the arms of the criminal organization have embraced the municipalities like an octopus”. Depicting the protests as a Jacobin frenzy, and neglecting to mention the police’s use of tear gas, water cannons, and rubber bullets, he warned that such “street terror is nothing but an attempt to veil thefts” of which his opponents stand accused.

That the current agitation is both deep and wide testifies to Erdoğan’s declining credibility even among his constituency of Islamists, nationalists, and small businesses, which is corroborated by ever-slimmer electoral pickings. It also points to the emergence, finally, of a credible alternative to his suffocating misrule.

For years the CHP had struggled with the legacy of Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Republic, who conceived of the party as an engine of Turkish nationalism, economic dirigisme, and prescriptive secularism. Erdoğan’s recent CHP opponents were either too nationalist to attract the Kurds, who make up around 18% of the population, or — as in the case of Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, loser of the 2023 election — were disadvantaged by their membership of the Alevis, a big minority sect to which some Sunnis are axiomatically (and indefensibly) averse.

İmamoğlu, by contrast, is an observant Sunni with a background in the private sector — which Erdoğan supporters find reassuring. He possesses personal magnetism, a reputation for competence, and an instinct for the popular cause (milk for poor children; cleaning up the Golden Horn, for years a foul and dangerous suspension, now a place where dolphins cavort). To the Alevi and socially liberal base he inherited from Kılıçdaroğlu, he has added many Kurdish supporters. In a speech he delivered in the Kurdish region a few days before his incarceration (a 50-minute barnstormer with barely a glance at his notes), he referred to the Kurds as “the foundation stone, the central pillar of this country”. The emergence of the Kurds as a political force marks a big departure from the old nationalist insistence on a wholly Turkish nation. When I lived in Turkey as a journalist in the Nineties, CHP officials would deny the existence of the Kurds altogether, calling them “our brothers in the southeast” or, yet more egregiously, “mountain Turks”.

Of all the qualities that İmamoğlu needs as he begins a confinement that will either destroy him or make him invincible, the most salient is that he, alone among Erdoğan’s adversaries of the past quarter of a century, is a proven winner. In 2019 İmamoğlu was elected mayor of Istanbul, which had been a fiefdom of the AKP and its predecessor party ever since Erdoğan himself became mayor in 1994. The Supreme Election Council promptly annulled İmamoğlu’s victory and ordered a re-run only for indignant Istanbullus to return him with a bigger majority. In last year’s mayoral elections, he trounced his AKP opponent. As the saying goes — and as Erdoğan can confirm, having himself made the leap from mayor of Turkey’s biggest city to prime minister — “whoever wins Istanbul wins Turkey”.

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When I interviewed a smiling Erdoğan in the spring of 1997 on the terrace of an Ottoman pleasure house, the then Istanbul mayor had a reputation for personal magnetism, competence, and an instinct for the popular cause (planting trees on Istanbul verges, piping water to the poor). In this sense, he and İmamoğlu have much in common — they even both hail from the Black Sea region. We were brought early strawberries which we ate while admiring the view over the Bosphorus. The word “democracy” came up often as we talked, even though the previous year Erdoğan had caused outrage by describing democracy as a tram: “it goes as far as we want it to go, and then we step off.”

Last month Turkish democracy ran out of track. Erdoğan’s decision to arrest his rival is a bet against his own experience. It was a jail sentence handed down by Turkey’s (then militantly secular) judiciary that propelled Erdoğan to national power in the first place. His crime in December 1997 was to recite a martial poem which the courts interpreted as an incitement to religious insurrection. The vindictiveness of the judgement turned him into a martyr while his mastery of the democratic discourse established him as a symbol of what Turkey’s Nato allies, searching frantically for unobjectionable Muslim regimes, referred to as “moderate” Islam. The US consul in Istanbul visited the mayoralty to commiserate; the case, she said, would “weaken confidence in Turkish democracy”. Erdoğan served four months in prison and in 2002 became prime minister, a post he subsequently abolished, creating the executive presidency he currently occupies.

The president does not intend to step down when his second term ends, in 2028, as the constitution decrees. Which brings us to another character integral to determining the outcome of the current crisis: Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which has waged an on-off war against the Turkish state since 1984. Erdoğan needs the help of Öcalan’s followers in parliament to enact constitutional changes that would allow him to run for a third term. The PKK is keen: its units have been hammered from the skies by Bayraktar drones manufactured by Erdoğan’s eponymous son-in-law, and its alliance with Syria’s Kurds has been imperilled by Turkey’s influence over the new government in Damascus, which it helped install. So it was a big moment when, on 27 February, after months of secret negotiations, Öcalan ordered the PKK to disarm and disband. Two days later the group’s commanders in northern Iraq announced a ceasefire.

A good deal for the Kurds would involve parole for Öcalan and a new Turkish constitution enshrining Kurdish cultural and political autonomy. But Amberin Zaman, perhaps the best-informed analyst of Kurdish affairs (and herself a courageous reporter who was driven out of Turkey by Erdoğan’s threats), believes that the president’s promises to Öcalan (made through intermediaries) amount to little more than an amelioration of his prison conditions and freedom for a prominent Kurdish politician. Nor have the Kurdish nationalists stayed silent during the current protests, with one of their parliamentary leaders denouncing İmamoğlu’s arrest as “a black stain” and “a blow against democracy and justice”.

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Further blows will be landed. It is possible that Erdoğan will appoint an apparatchik to assume the government of Istanbul as he has done for municipalities whose Kurdish nationalist mayors have been removed or jailed. The loyal media will release details of alleged misdemeanours by the CHP, whose leaders are warning that the authorities will fabricate evidence using AI.

In a reign lasting almost a quarter of a century, Erdoğan has many precedents to draw on as he assaults the CHP. Back in 2016, a coup attempt by parts of the armed forces that had been infiltrated by devotees of Fethullah Gülen, an exiled cleric, was met with a huge purge not only of the army but also the bureaucracy, the universities and the media. Hundreds of thousands of people — not all of them Gülenists, by any means — were jailed, sacked, or forced into exile. To go by the accusations that the government has been leveling against the CHP, the party would be wise to brace for a similar total war.

Forget moderate Islam. Forget Turkish democracy. Erdoğan long ago flattened the secular judges and generals in his path and what he represents now is transactional geopolitics and power in perpetuity. Like the Ottoman sultans he admires — a favorite is Sultan Selim I, who almost tripled the empire’s size and committed what would nowadays be called a genocide against the Alevis — his vision is panoptic. He keeps his army, Nato’s second largest, busy fighting Kurds on both sides of the Syrian border. He opens the sluices and migrants flow into the EU; when the EU pays him enough he shuts them again. He pipes Russian natural gas into Europe for Vladimir Putin, while to Volodymyr Zelensky he sells Bayraktar drones that are used to kill Putin’s soldiers. Donald Trump likes him so much he let Turkey off with a 10% tariff and congratulated Erdoğan on doing “what no one’s been able to do in 2,000 years; you’ve taken over Syria”. The Russians call him “the plug for every barrel”.

This time around, don’t expect the US consul to come to the mayoralty to deplore the spectacle of a Democrat behind bars. Don’t expect Sir Keir Starmer to leap to the defense of a fellow Leftist who on the eve of his arrest was stripped of his university degree, rendering him ineligible to become president. Instead, think of Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, who crowed, “There’s just a lot of good, positive news coming out of Turkey right now.” For this isn’t the late Nineties. In its cells, its streets, this pro-democracy movement stands alone.

The short answer is abusing his royal position to fraudulently accrue a personal fortune and receive sexual favors. If rumors that he is writing his memoirs to tell his side of the story, and set the record straight of his contested legacy are true, the principal obstacle will be that he remains clueless about what he has done wrong. In reality, Juan Carlos’s conduct has not changed much over the last half a century, but what Spanish citizens expect of their leaders is now completely different. The Emeritus King isn’t accustomed to giving explanations, the Spanish media having historically treated him with kid gloves and the general population indulging rumors around his infidelities as part of his Don Juan charm.

But you’d be wrong to think it’s all sexual deviance and financial corruption. Juan Carlos is the chief architect of modern Spanish democracy, whose leadership was central to the country leaving behind its dictatorial past and becoming an active member of the European Union. While detractors claim that he had a blithe disregard for the rules and regulation of democratic law, apologists point to the fact that Spanish democracy might not even exist were it not for Juan Carlos. It remains to be seen which of the two opposing interpretations will overshadow the other in history books of the future.

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On the day Juan Carlos was born, in Rome in 1938, the exiled Spanish royal family were optimistic about returning home. The Spanish Civil War, which began in 1936 with a military coup against the democratically elected government of the Second Republic (1931-1936), was turning in favor of the Right. General Francisco Franco proved remarkably successful at convincing a broad church of conservative factions that their interests would be best protected under his command. He always gave the impression that his success would secure the return of the royal family who left Spain with the proclamation of the Second Republic.

Following his victory, however, Franco had no desire to share power. Don Juan de Borbón, Juan Carlos’s father and heir to the Spanish throne, was extremely bitter about being hoodwinked by the upstart dictator. Presenting himself as a democratic alternative, he became increasingly vocal about his criticisms of the regime following Allied victory in the Second World War. The Spanish royal family had not bothered much about democracy during the Civil War, but Don Juan played on the fact that, with Hitler and Mussolini gone, Franco was a fascist relic.

As for El Caudillo himself, he was preoccupied by the question of succession. He was not averse to a hypothetical return to the royal lineage after his own death: as long as the core values of the regime remained intact. Don Juan’s vocal criticisms of the regime therefore ruled him out as a potential successor. Used — to borrow a phrase from Spanish historian Paul Preston — as a “shuttlecock” in power games between Don Juan and Franco, Juan Carlos was removed from his family as a child and sent to Spain where he was groomed as a prospective head of state. Educated in military academies, he realized the armed forces would never forgive his father for speaking ill of Spain abroad. Juan Carlos was not particularly academic or intellectual, but he developed arguably more important skills: quick-thinking, bonhomie and a chameleon-like ability to adapt to different scenarios.

Juan Carlos’s profile both in Spain and abroad were raised when he married Princess Sofia of Greece in 1962. Their honeymoon gave them the opportunity to meet foreign diplomats, and to present themselves as representing the best candidates to steer Spain towards a peaceful transition to democracy. Franco kept his own counsel, maintaining Juan Carlos close without making his succession plans explicit. Ironically, given his love of hunting and bullfighting, Juan Carlos’s first state appointment was as the president of the Spanish branch of the World Wildlife Fund in 1968. During the dictatorship, Spain never recognized Israel and maintained close socio-political ties with Arab countries. In his capacity as the Iraqi ambassador, Saddam Hussein received the Grand Cross of Isabel the Catholic Queen in recognition of his services to Spain from an ailing Franco, and a young Juan Carlos, in 1974. Juan Carlos was at least as interested in the economic and strategic importance of states as potential allies to Spain as he was in their democratic credentials, or lack thereof.

Keen not to burn any bridges, and aware of the need for dialogue if Spain wasn’t to be plunged into chaos, Juan Carlos was assiduous in meeting with Spanish politicians and opinion-makers from across the ideological spectrum in the years leading up to Franco’s death. On becoming head of state, he never tired of saying that he sought to be “King of all Spaniards” in televised and parliamentary addresses. This formulation, crucial in avoiding a return to the bitter bloodshed of the Civil War, conveniently ignored the fact that, for all his royal credentials, his institutional legitimacy derived from being a dictator’s chosen heir (and, to this day, Juan Carlos and Sofia will not allow anyone to badmouth Franco in their presence). Sofia, who speaks fondly of Franco in interviews, credits his daughter with not sabotaging the succession.

On the one hand, more influence was concentrated in the King’s hands than in any of his royal counterparts in Europe. To all intents and purposes, the remit of his role had been designed by a dictator. Conversely, he was the monarch with a most precarious position. The Spanish royal family were not as integrated into society as, say, the House of Windsor in the US. Juan Carlos walked a tightrope to mediate between Francoists with scant democratic or international credibility, who nevertheless held institutional power, and an opposition whose principal negotiating card was to imbue the transition with legitimacy. The King’s political survival being tied to non-radical democratization ensured his role is better assessed in tactical, not ethical terms. Nothing short of an expert tactician would have delivered, given the constant threat of potential saboteurs to Spain’s nascent democracy.

The Basque terrorist organization ETA had assassinated Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, Franco’s Prime Minister and right-hand man, in 1973. His successor, Carlos Arias Navarro, shed tears on live television when announcing Franco’s death. Committed to keeping Francoism alive, Arias Navarro was an obstacle to democratization. In July 1976, Juan Carlos requested Arias Navarro’s resignation. He was replaced by Adolfo Suárez, an ideal ally to secure democratic evolution not revolution. Aged 43, his relative youth signalled a changing of the guard. But the fact he had been a politician and director of the state broadcaster under Franco reassured the more conservative sections of Spanish society.

When it came to the first general elections since before the Civil War in 1977, the King showed a complete lack of impartiality. Leaving nothing to chance, he wrote to the Shah of Iran and Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia to request funds to support Suárez’s election campaign, playing up the then anti-monarchist Socialist Party’s Marxist credentials at a time when communism was a very clear and present danger to the status quo in the Middle East.

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Suárez won comfortably in 1977, but his popularity soon waned. With a challenging economic situation, and violence in the Basque Country, many Spaniards arrived at the conclusion that democracy wasn’t working. The 1979 general elections had the lowest turnout in recent Spanish history. Suárez narrowly defeated the Socialists who, under party leader Felipe González, then became less threatening by ditching references to Marxism from their party constitution. González and Juan Carlos had a shared interest in moving the Socialists towards the center, as well as sidelining the Communist Party as a major force on the Spanish Left. Opinion polls consistently stressed that the general public’s principal priority was stability, and avoiding another Civil War, as opposed to the installation of democracy. Juan Carlos was seen first as a guarantor of stability and, only later, of democracy. Paradoxically, his reputedly indispensable role in both respects meant that he was free of checks and balances, a hallmark of any genuinely democratic state.

Juan Carlos was, in more ways than one, a hands-on monarch. Amadeo Martínez Inglés, a retired member of the military turned amateur historical sleuth, calculates that the Emeritus King has had 4,786 lovers, peaking with 2,154 between 1976 and 1984. Amid political turmoil, Juan Carlos’s playboy lifestyle rivalled that of Julio Iglesias (who would, some years later, gift him a lion cub, named “Hey” in honour of a signature song written about the romantic crooner’s ex-wife). The Spanish public was last year captivated by newly unearthed audios and photographs that seemingly confirmed long-standing rumours of Juan Carlos’s affair with Bárbara Rey, a vedette.

A mixture of gratitude and fear protected Juan Carlos from public scrutiny for many years. The transition, both at home and abroad, has traditionally been construed as Spain’s success story, the suture of the wounds of a bitterly fratricidal conflict, which cleared the way for the country’s belated modernization and European integration. In many respects, 1981 is a more important date than 1975 as regards the democratization process. For the six years following Franco’s death, a return to dictatorship was a genuine possibility, as the armed forces threatened to derail the new form of government which had left many Spaniards skeptical of the ability of democrats to run the country.

An attempted coup took place on 23 February 1981. It involved members of the Guardia Civil entering parliament, effectively holding democracy hostage, while tanks rolled onto the streets of Madrid and Valencia. The chief agitators claimed to be acting under the orders of Juan Carlos — we will possibly never know if there is any truth to their claims. A televised address from the King to his subjects, pledging his commitment to democracy, was instrumental to the coup failing. Skeptics of Juan Carlos’s democratic credentials have always asked why it took the King so long to address the nation; the televised address only took place after the coup had descended into farce. This remained a minority view until fairly recently, with footage of the King’s address shown on Spanish state television ad nauseam over the coming years. Young Spaniards were indoctrinated with the belief that potentially lethal threat to Europeanization had been averted through the fortitude and quick thinking of Juan Carlos, who steered the country towards a stable monarchical democracy, built on the bedrock of the free market and barring memories of the past from dictating the future. His private peccadillos were viewed as trifling in comparison with such exemplary public service.

The newly monarchical Socialist government, which won a landslide victory in the 1982 general elections under the party leadership of Felipe González, was the youngest in Europe, the first time the Generation of 1968 had been in charge of a major European government. When, in 2018, I interviewed González, the longest serving President of the democratic period, he emphasized the debt he and the general public had to the King for facilitating a transfer of powers to parliament. Many would beg to differ. A less picaresque figure than Juan Carlos would perhaps have been unable to midwife the transition, variously reassuring and playing off different factions of Spanish society. The issue is that he continued to act as a rogue and a rake when circumstances no longer demanded such qualities.

Juan Carlos’s instinct for measuring and manipulating the public mood deserted him with the crash of 2008. As millions of Spaniards lost their jobs, and struggled with mortgage repayments, the King considered divorcing Sofia to marry his long-term mistress, Corinna Larsen, with whom he was photographed on a hunting expedition in Botswana in 2012: all while citizens were still feeling the financial pain. Accounts differ as to what then ensued, but what we do know is that the Spanish secret services sought to persuade the German-Danish businesswoman to end the relationship, fearing that a scandal could rock the foundations of the state. She construed this as a threat.

When Larsen ended the relationship, Juan Carlos sought to recoup the millions he had lent and laundered through his mistress. She saw things differently and did not believe that her retaining funds were dependent on an ongoing romantic attachment. The Spanish press and the population were in no mood to mollycoddle the wayward Don Juan, who was now considered to be at the center of a corrupt establishment that let the country and its citizens down. An increasing number of Spaniards began to question the “great men” accounts of the transition.

In 2014, Juan Carlos was pressured into abdicating in favor of his son, Felipe VI. Fearing a potential overturning of the legal immunity granted to living monarchs, the Emeritus King sought refuge with his old political chums in the Arab world. On his occasional returns to Spain, he has been kept at a distance by his family.

Juan Carlos’s downfall is the consequence of not only his personal and political failings, but also a social structure that exalted a man with all too human foibles as almost God-like. The result is closer to farcical soap opera than classical tragedy — anagnorisis has been in short supply. It is difficult to see Juan Carlos as anything other than a foolish old man. What remains to be seen is whether he will be written into posterity as the hero or villain of modern Spanish democracy.

I had always rushed past them, since they seemed anodyne. But Tocqueville mastered the art of making the boldest of claims in an off-handed way. These paragraphs are far more radical than they first appear. They’ve encouraged me to argue that the first and most necessary condition of democracy is the feeling of inclusion.

“Of all the novel things which attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, none struck me more forcibly than the equality of conditions. I had no difficulty in discovering the extraordinary influence this fundamental fact exerts upon the progress of society; it sets up a particular direction to public attitudes, a certain style to the laws, fresh guidelines to governing authorities, and distinctive habits to those governed.

“Soon I came to recognise that this very fact extends its influence well beyond political customs and laws; it exercises no less power over civil society than it does over the government. It forms opinion, creates feelings, proposes ways of acting, and transforms anything it does not directly instigate itself.”

To fully understand what Tocqueville means by “equality of conditions”, we need to appreciate how different the new democratic societies were. Tocqueville describes the old aristocratic societies as archipelagos of mini-societies inhabited by different classes of people with very different material conditions, and therefore different sets of emotions. But on each island there was a sense of inclusion and mutual recognition of others who faced those conditions.

The situation in the United States was destined to be something else. There were no pre-existing islands of privilege, thinking, and feeling. Instead the earliest Americans faced the same set of opportunities and challenges posed by their new environment — sparsely populated and vast, the land was also wild and untamed. Securing basic necessities was difficult for everyone, not just one class. And as settlement moved West, they had to learn the art of self-government for themselves. They were, in an almost unimaginable way today, starting over.

That task was made much easier, Tocqueville thought, by another kind of equal condition: ethnic and religious homogeneity. The first settlers shared an Anglo-Protestant cultural heritage, prizing religious liberty and a shared stock of concepts for engaging in politics. Paradoxically, it would turn out that a certain kind of homogeneity in early America helped give birth to principles that would one day be employed to defend diversity.

From these observations, Tocqueville drew two very important conclusions. First, since different human feelings are generated by different material conditions, those feelings should be considered brute facts as solid as the conditions themselves. The set of dominant emotions arising from the equality of conditions in democracies are crucial givens, so long as those conditions hold. Second, since the equality of conditions towards which modern societies are tending is historically novel, so too we should expect to see novel democratic feelings.

So what are the implications of these conclusions? If American democracy rests on a bedrock of brute factual similarity — similar challenges in life, aspirations and habits — then the emotional weather of the regime will depend on the degree to which that similarity holds. If it changes, if citizens feel they belong to separate realities, if a part of the population feels excluded, we should not be surprised if it sets off an emotional storm.

American democracy, then, does not rest ultimately on the principles of liberty and equality, as so many patriotic interpreters have assumed. Nor does it rest ultimately on religious beliefs, as his pious interpreters believe. It rests instead on a lucky break. The roughly similar material conditions that the first, roughly similar settlers faced when they landed naturally gave rise to feelings of inclusion and recognition, which spread throughout the entire society, not just on small islands of an archipelago.

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Tocqueville’s observations about inclusion were not wholly original — thinking about the political significance of inclusion and mutual recognition in the Western tradition began with Aristotle, was elaborated in the Christian Middle Ages, and continues to play a role in Catholic theology today. But his application of them to modern democracy was.

In Tocqueville’s view, to sustain a democratic society, feelings must be engaged and then widely shared: what “keeps a majority of citizens under the same government” is the “instinctive and, in a sense, unconscious agreement resulting from like feelings and similar opinions”. What he has in mind here has nothing to do with an aspiration to Christian virtue, or the moral principle of equality, or appeals to a contrived notion of reflective civic patriotism. He is referring to a factual reality, a brute fact of congruence in the feelings of citizens and their general outlook on the world. Either it is there or it is not.

There still are contexts in which a basic congruence of feelings and outlook among Americans becomes apparent. Imagine you have been spending a few years in a foreign country, whose language you have learned and whose customs you have got used to. One day you find yourself in a restaurant seated next to a group of loud and garrulous American tourists. Suddenly you feel yourself beamed into a psychological and moral universe you only dimly remember. In it, everyone is open, even confessional, in their speech. Self-doubt and irony have fled the room, driven out by an almost oppressive bonhomie. The poor waiter has been asked for his first name and is informed that these new friends from downstate Illinois will be staying in touch.

How do you, the American observer, feel once they have left? The sound of familiar voices might come as a welcome respite from the rudeness of the French or the humourlessness of the Germans. You might feel the urge to pull up a chair and join them, knowing that you would be welcomed into the conversation. If you’ve had too much to drink you might even share your email address with them at the end of the evening.

But what if you have been straining to fit into this foreign culture and not appear American? What are you feeling as you stick your head more deeply into your copy of Le Monde and pray that the tourists leave soon? You are experiencing exactly the same set of feelings as the other American observer, just with a negative valence. You both recognise yourselves in your fellow citizens and feel implicated in their behaviour. Some inner string vibrates at the same frequency as those of these intruders, whether you wish it or not.

But, notwithstanding that example, we cannot deny that the feelings of democratic belonging have diminished rapidly in our contemporary democracies. A complex cultural gap has opened up in our democracies that we find much more difficult to bridge.

Tocqueville’s subtle observation about the difference between Southerners and Northerners that he discovered on his travels might help us understand:

“If two men belonging to the same society have the same interests and to some extent the same opinions, but their characters, education, and style of living are different, it is highly likely that they will not see eye to eye.”

Even if he found himself speaking to people of the same class, with the same economic interests, their characters, education, and styles of living were so different — mainly due to slavery — that mutual recognition and political friendship between them was difficult, and soon would become impossible.

Today the cultural gap in America is not a function of geography but of education. A certain level of education — basically a bachelor’s degree — is now required to advance significantly in society. We may forget in our little university and urban cocoons but only a little more than a third of adult Americans have such a degree. When I looked up the percent of Manhattanites with a university degree, which I assumed to be a little less than 50%, I discovered that it has risen to nearly 70%. It is only 23% in the Bronx. I had no idea.

And the consequences of this gap are not just economic. University does not only provide training for entering lucrative professions, it also socialises students into new styles of living, as Tocqueville called it, that are vastly different from those of the less educated. Graduates come out of the university with different ideas about how to comport themselves in public and at work, what to eat, how to entertain themselves, how many children to have and how to raise them, how to manage money, and how to take care of their health. Even the typical bodies of our cultural classes are notably different today.

The term caste is thrown around fairly promiscuously, but frankly I can’t think of a better one to describe the seriousness of the new cultural gap. If Tocqueville was right that extremely different styles of living can set apart even people who have shared economic and political interests, then we are in trouble.

A widely shared sense of exclusion, with all the attendant emotions of shame and resentment, is toxic to democracies. We are living with a new brute, generating fact that is triggering new feelings of distrust, contempt, resentment, antipathy, and withdrawal. A large class of white Americans is experiencing for the first time a range of emotions that American minorities, especially black Americans, have always had to contend with on a far vaster scale.

That is why I have come to take very seriously the expressed need to feel included, “to see people who look and talk like me”, beginning in our educational establishments. In a book I wrote a few years ago I treated such expressions as divisive, on the grounds that emphasising group identities can block people from recognising the wider common good. While that can be true, it is more true of diversity. There is, I think, a tension between the ideals of diversity and inclusion, since the former is centrifugal in effect and the latter is centripetal.

But the feelings of exclusion in Americans today extend beyond minority groups. The white working class feels it, the religious population feels it, the South feels it. Our common sense of mutual recognition is melting away and we have no idea really how to stop it. The crisis of inclusion extends far beyond our elite spats over college admission and corporate hiring.

Is there an institution that still helps Americans from different walks of life feel included? The only example I can come up with is college sports — and for a somewhat personal reason.

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My late father never attended college. But he was a sports fan and had developed a vicarious attachment to the University of Michigan. The day I was admitted to the university was the second happiest day of his life, the happiest being the day he saw the team win the Rose Bowl. After he was widowed, he came to visit me every weekend and we would go to games together — football, basketball, anything. He started buying up paraphernalia and soon everything in his house was covered in maize and blue.

But the significance of the experience for him was not simply in watching university sports. It was that when we crossed campus together, he felt at home. He knew the streets and he knew the buildings. He felt somehow welcomed — even without a degree. And it certainly made him more willing to pay taxes for the university.

This story is not to say life is like football — quite the contrary. I am simply saddened and a little shocked to discover that I couldn’t think of a single other institution in American life that makes people from different education classes all feel included.

And even then, I’m not sure it’s still working. When I attended an Ohio State game last year, I marvelled once again at the class diversity of the crowd and the palpable sense of friendship among those who attended. But as I walked past the cars in the parking lot when the game was over, I saw nothing but bumper stickers expressing hate or contempt for fellow citizens who didn’t share the owner’s political outlook. What happens in the stadium, stays in the stadium apparently.

So, yes, we are in a very bad way.

***

This article is based on a lecture delivered at the conference “Beyond the Impasse: Theological Perspectives on DEI” at the Aquinas Institute in Princeton.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

It is difficult to critique this comment. Not just because he is correct, but because it is unclear precisely what he is correct about. Is it the tedious process of each member having to individually express their loyalty to the Crown? Is it the incongruity of members swearing on this book and that book, to this god and that god, or no god at all? Is it the insistence on continuing to pretend that an MP’s allegiance is most fundamentally to an unelected monarch, to the extent that Clive Lewis had to retake his oath for omitting reference to Charles’s “heirs and successors”?

Perhaps all of the above. How many MPs, especially in this parliament, believe this is where their loyalty lies? How many are genuinely willing to preemptively submit to any future head of state so long as they come from the loins of the former?

I am not anti-monarchy in principle. But I am anti-pretence. A monarch with real power, and commanding real loyalty, is not an automatic embarrassment. But the continued ceremonial propping up of the King as a sort of royal taxidermy of what sovereignty once was is hardly a respectable exercise.

The problem is that the farce is two-tiered. The celebrated paradox of our sovereign parliament affirming its allegiance to the sovereign might be understandable — even enjoyable — if it was approached with a due irony. But our elected officials are supposed to act as if their solemn oath bears genuine resemblance to their political ambitions, complete with a reaffirmation under duress of His Majesty’s, well, majesty.

Who believes this? I doubt the King himself could have such a confused ego. One can only wonder how he felt this week during the state opening of parliament, carrying the 12-foot train attached to his gown through his special entrance into parliament and towards his special golden throne. Perhaps he secretly recognises the clunky absurdity of it all, but then “sacred tradition” has such a chokehold on our government that nobody has likely summoned the confidence to inform him that the emperor is wearing silly clothes.

The loyalty is, I am told, less to the King, and more to the venerable English tradition which expressing loyalty to the King represents. This is no defence. It is in fewer words what I am trying to say. Even those who defend this ludicrous extravagance do so not with allegiance to the truth of the oath, but to its utility. They do not actually believe any of it is real, but think that by forcing our politicians to partake in a humiliating ritual of undisguised make-believe we somehow protect something “ineffable” whose upkeep requires it.

Some dissidents, I should recognise, had the respectable gall to protest: SDLP leader Colum Eastwood, called upon to be sworn in, sandwiched the affirmation between “I’ll read out this empty formula in order to represent my constituents, but it’s under protest,” and, “My true allegiance is to the people of Derry and the people of Ireland”. “Thank you very much,” said His Majesty’s clerk.

Clive Lewis, Labour MP for Norwich South, committed to full-scale treason in saying: “I take this oath under protest, and in the hope that one day my fellow citizens will democratically decide to live in a republic. Until that time, I do solemnly, sincerely, and truly declare and affirm that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King Charles, according to law.”

In sincerely declaring loyalty to the King he wishes to see dethroned, Lewis demonstrates before our very eyes the “emptiness” of the formula described by Eastwood. It is, frankly, a joke. If it were taken seriously at all, even by those who administer the requirement, this oath would have been immediately ruled invalid, and Lewis made to renounce his republican ideals or refused his seat in parliament. This would, of course, be an unthinkable political scandal, but such is the unthinking superficiality of the entire pantomime.

Imagine a groom vowing to take a bride as his lawfully-wedded wife, till death do them part, before saying, “Of course, one day I plan to get divorced.” What could we even make of such a contradictory affirmation? It would make a mockery of the entire ceremony, or at least invalidate the oath. On the small matter of electing our parliamentary representatives, however, anything goes, it seems, as long as one goes through the motions.

Not all traditions are worth maintaining. Until 1998, a member wishing to raise a point of order in the lower chamber was required to wear a hat in order to do so: two opera hats were kept on standby for this reason, until a select committee advised abolishing the regulation, saying: “This particular practice has almost certainly brought the House into greater ridicule than almost any other, particularly since the advent of television.”

Well, the advent of television has also thrust the divine mystery of anointed royalty onto our screens. We can now all see from our living rooms what has for centuries been going on inside the perpendicular Gothic palace, and many of us find it impossible to take seriously.

I may be called an iconoclast. Perhaps an arrogant one, too. But I am not the iconoclast. As C.S. Lewis wrote, it is reality which is the greatest of iconoclasts, constantly rubbing up against and thereby shattering our ideals. The monarch is supposed to serve as an apolitical figurehead, transcending vicious politics and providing a unifying ideal for all Britons to identify with. Yet viewership of these pompous ordeals, not to mention our being privy to the family politics of “Megxit” and the pastimes of a certain Duke of York, among other scandals, now makes it difficult to situate this institution above even the vicious, let alone the controversial.

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The King’s Speech, wrote the BBC on Wednesday, “is written by the Government, and the monarch delivers it in a neutral tone, to avoid any appearance of political support”. This, I suppose, in contrast to his usual enthusiasm and fiery rhetorical flair. The incessant neutrality of our sovereign strikes today less as refreshing and more as limp, and may be both a cause of and response to the fact that now only 62% of the UK population support his continuation as our head of state.

My principal observation on the monarchy has always been this: when I complain about what I see as the illegitimate influence of hereditary authority over what is supposed to be a democratic government — especially when it takes such an expensive and flamboyant form — I am politely informed that the monarchy doesn’t really have any power to speak of anyway, so I shouldn’t be concerned. When I suggest that therefore we should just do away with the whole charade, I am told that the monarchy is somehow integral to the upkeep of British government.

Quite how it is integral, then, eludes me. But perhaps that is the nature of our compromising (patchwork) and ethereal (unwritten) constitution. Maybe it is an archetypal Chesterton’s fence, and those publicly imagining the abolition of the monarchy (which is still illegal, by the way) are making a grave error. If so, then I think a conservative case can be made for “toning down” the extravagance, at least to its politically important elements; retaining them only serves to overdetermine the inevitability of a future United Republic.

Was Corbyn wrong to condemn these bizarre parliamentary procedures? Once asked by BBC Newsnight about those criticising his “scruffy” sartorial standards in the House of Commons, he replied, “It’s not a fashion parade, it’s not a gentlemen’s club, it’s not a bankers institute; it’s a place where the people are represented.” If we wish to believe that this is true, perhaps it’s time to retire at least the golden throne, even if we can’t quite bring ourselves to retire the man who sits on it.

The hippies are mostly gone now, but the old hippie saying now has a new air of relevance about it. For what goes for LSD and magic mushrooms also goes for political polarisation and violence.

Even as many now celebrate Trump’s miraculous luck, and see his survival as a sign from God, such enthusiasm seems badly misplaced. The bullets destined for Trump ended up killing a completely innocent person sitting in the bleachers, and severely wounding at least one more; this was hardly the work of a merciful guardian angel. Still, there’s a surreal quality to the photos of Trump standing defiant, blood streaking across his face. Had they been part of a work of fiction, they’d have been dismissed as too on the nose, too unrealistic. In America’s ill-fated 2024 election cycle, truth has become stranger than fiction.

When one looks at the sombre reactions to this assassination attempt, it’s hard to avoid a certain sense of absurdity to it all. The shock, grief and dismay at what has happened is very real, and it is extremely bipartisan. Yet nobody can really pretend to be surprised. In fact, this shooting is singularly unsurprising: America has spent the last eight years warning about the unique evil of Trump; the Democratic Party’s re-election slogan is literally that “democracy is on the ballot”, and that if Trump were to win, a new era of fascism and darkness is sure to descend on the country. Thousands, tens of thousands, maybe millions of marginalised people’s lives are supposedly at risk; what then is an assassin’s bullet or two, given the enormity of the stakes?

It is no wonder, then, that the mood in America at this point is one of despondency and depression. Having already bought the “ticket”, people are becoming immensely uncomfortable with the way the “ride” is going. The same people who — either jokingly or seriously — talked about how someone needed to put a bullet into Trump now recoil in horror at the reality of political violence, like a kid playing too many violent video games and foolishly thinking this means he knows what real violence is like.

For a short while, most people in America are likely to try to back away from the brink, to dial down the rhetoric, to cool the talk about how the sky is falling and the other side is out to destroy everything you hold dear. And this seems to be exactly what is happening right now, on both sides of the aisle. Joe Biden himself has called for calmer tempers and cooler rhetoric: in America, differences should be settled with ballots, not bullets. Trump himself seems eager to play along: a recent Axios article laid out just how much this brush with death seems to have changed Trump’s thinking. His speech at the Republican national convention has been completely reworked in the aftermath of the failed assassination: apparently it is now aiming at trying to preach a message of political unity rather than further division. For now, both sides of America are talking about peace, love and understanding. It is their first time doing so in many, many years.

But as much as people would like this new era to last, it can’t — and it won’t. Political division isn’t merely a product of bad thoughts; often, they are the surface level symptom of much deeper issues within a society. And the sad truth about America today is that both Joe Biden and Donald Trump — as well as every other actor in the political system — completely depend on this kind of rhetoric. They cannot make do without it for very long, no matter how much they would wish to turn a new leaf. The real problem in America today is that the political system has simply been hollowed out; it is no longer capable of delivering solutions to either side of the partisan divide.

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Biden himself now has historically low approval ratings and a supermajority of Americans think he is mentally unfit to serve another term. The only tool left in his toolbox is to talk about the other guy; without doing so, without stressing just how dangerous the enemy is and how thin the margins are, he has no chance. But the same goes for Trump. None of his voters really believe that he can drain the swamp, or reform the system, or somehow halt America’s very dangerous drift into insolvency and economic chaos. For them, too, all that’s left to talk about is the evil of the other side, and how sweet revenge will be.

In truth, for a well-functioning society, a bit of violent rhetoric here and there really isn’t a big deal. It is only when the political elites lose control of the situation — when they can no longer maintain the military, fix the roads and bridges, keep the economy running and manage the state in such a way that it doesn’t drown itself in an ocean of unpayable debt — that such rhetoric leads to violence and blood in the streets. But America’s elites have lost control of the situation, and now they are waking up to a nightmare they’ve unwittingly created. There is not a single American politician today who even pretends to have a plan — much less a solution — for the massive fiscal time bomb located at the heart of the current system. Social unity is completely incompatible with economic bankruptcy: when things truly fall apart, political elites can either admit that the entire political class has failed and needs replacement, or they can try to blame the other guy. Unity is a luxury; one that the American political class can no longer afford.

One can certainly sympathise with the deep, profound sense of regret and sadness that is now visible among the American political class and punditry. But political violence and psychedelic mushrooms follow the same rules in the end: there are no takebacks, no mulligans and no refunds. Once you buy the ticket, you have to take the ride all the way to the end. All you can do, no matter how bad things become, is to sit back and try to endure.

Steve Bannon is expected at some point today to report to a US prison to start serving his sentence for contempt of congress. His four-month sentence is not in itself the end of the world for Bannon, but there is perhaps a greater symbolism at play. In the early days of the 2016 Trump presidency, Bannon was often seen as the political visionary behind the operation, with many on the Right looking to his heterodox mix of issues and reforms.

For him to go to prison might, therefore, be seen as the end of an era in American politics. We are talking about a period of around half a decade, starting a bit after Trump descended that golden escalator. It was the era of people enthusiastically trying to reform the US political system from the right. Like mushrooms after rain, the success of Trump’s outsider campaign gave birth to a whole ecosystem of organisations and ventures intending whether to capitalise on or assist in the sea change that was surely about to take place. From organs such as American Compass and American Moment, to media ventures such as The Realignment podcast or American Affairs magazine, the early years of the first Trump administration had, at least for the Right, a real sense of “springtime in America”. This was the time where senators such as Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio talked a big game about the Republicans now being a “multi-racial working-class party”; Bannon might have been one of the first people to see a new dawn of opportunity opening up in the wake of Trump’s surprise presidential bid, but many, many others followed in his footsteps.

It is for that reason that Bannon’s trip to prison serves as a convenient bookend for an era that is now well and truly dead. All the hope of reform that existed in 2016 and 2017, the talk of “draining the swamp”, or reindustrialising, or putting an end to new and stupid “forever wars” — all of it ended up amounting to very little in the end. The factories did not come back, the swamp was not drained, and Trump’s administration got bogged down fighting a two-front battle against sabotage from within the state apparatus on one hand, and then its own dysfunction on the other.

To therefore say that 2024 lacks much of the energy and optimism of the 2016 election would be a massive understatement. Eight years ago, Trump publicly humiliated all of his Republican primary competitors by pointing out that, as politicians, they were essentially for sale, ready to decide American policy based merely on who paid them the most. Today, by contrast, Trump has been reduced to the most high-profile beggar in all of the United States; he is reportedly in negotiations with the widow of Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson for a cash injection of around $100 million, in return for supporting future Israeli attempts to annex more of the West Bank.

Many commentators today seem convinced that the various attempts at lawfare against Trump have amounted to nothing but failure, but the truth is probably a bit more complex: while his polling numbers are still robust, the financial strain Trump has been placed under has in many ways turned him into a very conventional politician. Increasingly, the role of many of his supporters — including politicians such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, as well as Bannon himself — has become one of trying to explain that the King himself is a very good man, but one surrounded by evil and feckless ministers; if only the King wasn’t tricked and led astray by those around him, things would be fine. But this narrative can only survive for so long before people truly start losing faith.

Beyond the failures of the Trump administration, there is now a dawning sense that America itself might be fundamentally unreformable. The debt is skyrocketing, and nobody seems to have a plan to address it. The reality, of course, that unpayable debt can only really be dealt with in one of two ways: either defaulting on the debt entirely (which will never happen), or destroying the value of every individual dollar in the system to the point where any debt denominated in dollars becomes worthless. Such a situation would be a true social, political and financial apocalypse, throwing the country into chaos and destroying the savings and buying power of hundreds of millions of Americans. But nobody has an alternative; the problem is now simply too big to solve. Thus, American pundits and elites sit around discussing future plans, like opening new shipyards or colonising space, even as they all know that the system is bankrupt, both literally and figuratively.

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Elsewhere, if Trump’s biggest “sin” in 2016 was denouncing the Iraq war (an act of sacrilege which was rewarded mightily by a grateful electorate), in 2024 he seems unable to really articulate a strong resistance to the next war that many in Washington DC now see as inevitable: a battle with China over Taiwan. With the shrinking of the fiscal horizon, the American political system is reverting to autopilot, hoping that more sanctions, more trade embargos, and more warfare will restore some semblance of control. The era of dreaming of meaningful reform is now mostly over. From Left to Right, there is a sense that the ship is sinking, and that it is simply too late to try to do anything

But another era in American politics is also coming to a close, one that in some sense ties together the future fates of both Joe Biden and Steve Bannon. That is, the era of small-“r” republicanism in the United States.

As far as Bannon is concerned, the partisan lawfare that has led to his prison sentence is merely a small piece of a much bigger resurgence of using the courts and the judicial system as a political weapon. America once had very powerful norms against this sort of thing. Trump may have violated those norms in spirit when he nodded approvingly to chants of “lock her up!” regarding Hillary Clinton, but when he ascended to the presidency, he quickly changed his tune: trying to go after political opponents would simply risk destabilising the entire democratic system, leading to a vicious cycle of tit-for-that prosecutions. Trump respected this basic taboo in deed if not always in word, but this clemency would not be repaid during Biden’s tenure. Lawfare and counter-lawfare, trying to imprison one’s political enemies only to be imprisoned in turn as they return to power, is a lethal kind of poison to any sort of republic or democracy. It is, however, simply the ordinary mode of business in corrupt oligarchies around the world.

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Which brings us to Biden. If one considers his atrocious performance during the debate against Trump, and the near-unanimous consensus that the man simply isn’t lucid enough anymore, there’s only really two ways the Democrats can go from here. Either they let Biden stay in the race, at which point it’s merely natural to ask: who will really pull the strings here? Or they dump Biden and pick another candidate just before the Convention in August, but this too leads to the very basic question: is this really much of a democracy anymore? The Democrats conspired to prevent there being a real primary and railroaded Biden through the process; now they are suddenly discussing railroading Biden out and getting someone else to take his place.

Once upon a time, Benjamin Franklin famously replied to a question of what kind of system he and his companions had created for America with “a republic, if you can keep it”. And, despite some ups and downs, the American republic has had a pretty good run. Now, however, it seems very doubtful that anyone is really interested in the “keeping it” part. Neither Trump, nor Biden, nor anyone else inside the American political system can be bothered to play anymore. The game, it seems, is over.

Asimov was inspired by CBS News’s Remington Rand UNIVAC I computer, which correctly predicted a landslide for Eisenhower on election night 1952 after only 3 million votes had been counted and Adlai Stevenson was ahead. It was the first instance of what has become a familiar feature of US elections, to the degree that most people treat the “calling” of the result early in the evening by the networks as the actual outcome of the election.

Asimov’s fantasy was a prophetic reductio ad absurdum of something which has played a steadily increasing role in modern politics: the idea that citizens can be represented by a carefully designed system in which they play no active role. The vogue for citizen juries is an illustration of this, while a number of theorists have gone even further and proposed that actual legislative assemblies should be chosen through some kind of lottery — what is technically termed “sortition”. The processes of voting and elections, on this account, are messy and corruptible: far better to have a system which is genuinely representative of public opinion. And a citizen jury will represent the population better than a committee of elected legislators scrutinising the same material.

It is also the case that politics since 1955 has come to be wholly dominated by opinion polling, to the extent that a great deal of policy is devised by governments to fit in with what the polls say. This is a practical form of daily representation, going far beyond what would have been conceivable to earlier generations. Imagine, for instance, what would be happening at the moment, were we still in the position we were in the 19th or early-20th centuries. Would our politicians be anything like as sure of victory or defeat as they currently seem to be? Would we even be having a general election at the moment, and might Boris Johnson still be Prime Minister?

In reality, however, today’s emphasis polling masks the fact that the general public has played no active part in these decisions; rather, a bloodless and abstract form of representation has replaced the old practices of mass action by citizens which once were used to bring about political change. People can lobby, demonstrate and be activists in other ways, but they cannot take part in the difficult business of decision-making — that is restricted to a small sample of the population.

So far has the assumption wormed its way into people’s heads that it now seems natural to give the vote to 16-year-olds even if they cannot be members of Parliament (allowing them to be members was proposed in Scotland, but nothing came of). Contrast this with what happened when women and working men were given the vote: they almost immediately became eligible themselves to be legislators, and it would have seemed ridiculous to those generations of politicians to have the one without the other. What’s different now is that our background assumptions about representation have shifted, such that elections now look like superior (or possibly inferior) opinion polls — and why shouldn’t everyone with opinions (which especially includes teenagers) have the vote?

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Schemes for proportional representation have the same character. PR is often presented as a better form of representation in a parliamentary system than first-past-the-post, but it shares with sortition and opinion polling the feature that an essential decision — the question of who shall form a government — is largely taken out of the hands of the voters and given to their representatives. This was precisely the objection to PR in what is still the most thorough examination of the subject, the report of a Royal Commission in 1910, at a time when many alternatives to the existing British constitution were being touted, including the use of referendums. The Report decided against introducing PR on the grounds that:

“A general election is in fact considered by a large portion of the electorate of this country as practically a referendum on the question which of two Governments shall be returned to power. The view may be right or wrong, but it has to be taken account of in any discussion which turns on the composition of the House of Commons.”

This was a profound observation, with many implications. One of them is that there is a responsibility on great parties to avoid becoming narrow factions, and to present themselves as plausible governments. Another is that there is also a responsibility on citizens who want to think of themselves as legislators to treat their vote as genuinely a contribution to the creation of a government, and not merely as the expression of their feelings. This was the distinction Max Weber made between the ethics of responsibility and the ethics of conviction. As he said, real politics requires the former, a willingness to make difficult choices: “the strong and slow boring of hard boards”. But if we have left those choices to other people, we can be politically irresponsible — with consequences which are all too visible today.

A third implication (though it has seldom been recognised) arises from the fact that in the conditions of modern politics — and arguably those of 1910 — the electorate above all votes for a prime minister. It is the prime minister who personally appoints the government, after all, and whose power rests on MPs who are whipped and committed to a party manifesto. In this respect, the referendum-like character of a general election has been wholly disregarded, and, as we have often seen, prime ministers can be replaced without any fresh recourse to the public.

But what is the point of asking people who they want to have as prime minister, and then disregarding the answer without putting the question to them again? It is clear why MPs and party managers like the ability to do so, but it can be seen as another and very important instance of passive representation: the voters stand idly by while a matter on which they had once given a great deal of thought is decided anew by their representatives.

Like the populists in America, the European Left used to demand that their populations should be allowed to take an active role in politics. The British Social Democrat Federation’s programme in 1884, for example, included “LEGISLATION by the PEOPLE, in such wise that no project of Law shall become legally binding till accepted by the Majority of the People”, while the German Social Democrats at Erfurt in 1891 called for “Authorities to be elected by the people; to be responsible and bound”.

Left Parliamentarians, such as the nascent Labour Party in Britain, were able to disregard these calls only because they believed (along with the 1910 Report) that general elections, at least in Britain, were already referendums of a kind, in which the voters were exercising a genuine power to choose a government, though with many reservations in practice. But they were in complete agreement with the more radical Left that citizens should be thought of as active participants in their politics, behaving like legislators themselves and not as the passive subjects of representative systems. The age of mass parties, which lasted more or less down to the Seventies, was testimony to this: the general population was arrayed on two sides, like the members in the House of Commons, and saw itself as taking a real part in the contests there.

This world has disappeared, killed by a variety of forces, including supranational institutions such as the EU and the disappearance of an old kind of solidarity among fellow citizens, as the circumstances of people’s lives and work have changed. With communities more atomised and removed from power, it is hard to imagine any familiar Left-wing party calling for an increase in active participation on the part of the population, rather than for increasingly elaborate forms of passive representation.

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The response to the Brexit vote in 2016 was a particularly stark illustration of this. The Heath government had pushed through the constitutionally far-reaching membership of the EEC on a slim majority (eight on the second reading of the Bill), and with a manifesto which had merely said that “our sole commitment is to negotiate; no more no less”. Partly for internal party reasons, but also for old-fashioned Left reasons of principle, Labour committed itself to a referendum on the issue, obliging any future government to extricate itself from the EEC through the same means. But as we saw in between 2016 and 2019, a large swathe of the governing classes could not stand the idea that they should be given specific instructions by the electorate.

In the end, Brexit was saved in 2019 by a very traditional (and democratic) means: a general election, understood as another referendum. But the politician most associated with this triumph was then removed without any appeal to the electorate — and largely because his colleagues quailed in the face of opinion polls. Citizen juries, votes for 16-years-olds and PR are all now high on the agenda of many political parties, and some of them are extremely likely to be implemented in the near future. Systems of passive representation seem, despite Brexit, to have won the struggle against active participation.

It is widely recognised that this general election is marked by an almost unprecedented degree of hostility to both major parties on the part of the electorate. But who can be surprised at this, given that they were offered the chance of real and active democracy only to have it snatched away from them — and this time, perhaps, for good?

It was the first interesting thing to happen so far, in an election that has hitherto felt like the uniparty talking to itself while flinging other people’s spare change at OAPs. The interest doesn’t have much to do with Reform’s policies, which mostly read like a Tory manifesto, if the Tories were still a centre-right party instead of an agglomeration of corporate lobbies plus a granny annexe. Rather, Farage’s return is interesting for what it tells us about a wider trend: the demise of the franchise as our principal mechanism for political representation, and in its place the startlingly medieval return of “interests”.

But isn’t Farage the shadily post-democratic one? That was the thrust of numerous questions following his announcement on Monday, several of which mentioned Donald Trump, or focused on Farage’s power to make leadership decisions and backroom deals at the drop not just of a hat but also, at very short notice, of the existing Reform candidate for Clacton.

It’s true that Reform doesn’t conform to the 20th-century template for mass-membership political parties. It has, according to Farage, more than 30,000 paying members, but these are recruited online, rather than via local associations. It is also a limited company, and doesn’t have any obvious formal mechanism for forming, debating or voting on policies. Its critics make dark accusations about the motivations of its larger donors.

In all these senses, Reform UK is a political entity of some kind, but doesn’t adhere to the older template for party politics. Does this make it anti-democratic? To this, one might respond that it’s a bit rich to accuse Reform UK of ignoring the wishes of the masses, when its whole raison d’être is remedying just this indifference to electoral wishes among the mainstream political parties. We’re on our third Tory Prime Minister since the party was last voted into power, and the last one wasn’t even elected by the party membership. No vote apart from Brexit has changed anything very substantial in my adult lifetime. Even Brexit only happened against years of shrill establishment resistance, and failed to do the one thing voters wanted it to do.

In this context, we might reasonably ask: what would be the point of forming a mass-membership political party along early 20th-century lines? It should be obvious by now that bottom-up political activism aimed at directing the universally enfranchised voting public doesn’t reliably produce results in line with what that public wants. But if this is so, it raises the question of how different groups are to have their voices heard at all, in the wider political conversation. For it’s not as though even autocrats always get their way over the wishes of the masses. As the political scientist Julian Waller has shown, even regimes that don’t embrace formal democracy typically don’t last very long, unless they have some feedback mechanism for responding to different power blocs.

Prior to the universal franchise, indeed well into the early 20th century, it was common to talk about such blocs as aggregate political “interests”: groups such as the working classes, landed gentry, church, and so on. Further back still, the medieval formulation understood these as “estates”, all of which were — in theory if not always in practice — represented according to their needs and obligations.

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Prior to mass democracy, though, no one thought the best way to represent each “estate” or “interest” was “one man, one vote”. Indeed, opponents of the franchise argued that flattening interests in this way would warp the overall political fabric to everyone’s detriment. But they didn’t get their way, and now we have the universal franchise — a franchise, indeed, that is set to become even more universal under Keir Starmer.

Does this mean everyone is now better represented than before? Perhaps not. For at the very moment the universal franchise was granted in the early 20th century, extra-democratic bodies such as NGOs and international regulatory entities began professionalising and proliferating, and in the process draining ever more power into pre-political fields closed to the democratic process. It’s possible that this was a coincidence, of course. But perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps the patrician preference for keeping popular opinion at arm’s length never really went away, meaning that the arrival of the popular voice in the halls of power necessitated new mechanisms for routing around that voice where necessary.

Certainly, it was striking to see this lordly attitude at full volume, in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, as the Remainer great and good united in defence of their beloved, extra-democratic, supranational technocracy. And I’m sure you remember, as I do, every well-connected such individual insisting the referendum should be struck down because people didn’t know what they were voting for, and had been duped by the side of a bus.

Since then, though, I’ve started to wonder whether the technocrats were at least partly right. Given that a great many Tory MPs still don’t seem to understand EU regulatory mechanisms, it’s is at least plausible that no one else did either. Hence, the Remainers may have been, like Cromwell in 1066 and All That, “Right but Repulsive”.

The question nags at me: what if post-industrial society really is too complex for elected generalists to grasp its operations in anything like the detail required to make sensible governing decisions? Well, even if this is true, you may accept in principle that technocrats are a necessary evil, spreadsheets and chinos and all — but in practice, you don’t have to be a technocrat with five PhDs to make reasonable inferences as to whether life is getting better or worse. And on most of the metrics that matter, to most people, life under the Conservatives has been getting worse, with the process accelerating with every change of Prime Minister and attendant slide toward spreadsheets-and-chinos “centrism”.

So even if we do accept in principle that without technocrats things would be even more dire, and hence that the problem isn’t technocrats as such, we may still be dissatisfied with the ones we have. And hence, logically, we still need some mechanism for holding to account whichever technocrats are now tasked with steering this wildly overcomplicated ship of state. But the whole point of technocracy is that it is impervious to such outbreaks of democratic feedback. So how do you course-correct your cadres of unaccountable wonks?

Enter Nigel Farage. My sense is that most of Farage’s supporters don’t want to wield power themselves, and that Farage himself doesn’t really want to be a constituency MP. Rather, Farage’s supporters seek representation, in something more like the medieval sense, as an “interest” or “estate” to be taken seriously. And not without reason: they’re a significant subset of the English polity.

Broadly speaking, Farage represents the English petit bourgeois that lives in villages and small towns, values cultural homogeneity and social trust, and intuits (accurately) that the end of the carbon economy spells disaster for their social class. This group, currently almost entirely voiceless within contemporary politics, would perhaps have been characterised by the now-very-cancelled high imperial writer Rudyard Kipling as the “Saxon” side of the Norman-Saxon hybrid people that has long made up England’s class hierarchy.

As Kipling saw it, the Saxon is generally uninterested in large-scale political power, and content to be governed provided this is done fairly. But the modern-day equivalent of Kipling’s Saxon is ill-served by the modern “Norman”, and is grumbling en masse. Worse still, the Saxon senses the contempt modern Normans have for him, as they sneer at the “bigots” and “gammons”.

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This group’s anger was temporarily assuaged by the political realignment we were, however briefly, promised in 2019. But in the end, the realignment we got accelerated the trends that impelled Brexit in the first place: hollowing out the social fabric, draining away real-world jobs in favour of placeless knowledge-work that mostly benefits Normans, and trading in the nation-state and its people for an economic zone populated by fungible, interchangeable human work units — in which the English people have grown increasingly displaced and alienated.

Now, the Saxon is angrier than ever — but, as a consequence of that realignment, also more voiceless. And Farage is variously loved or loathed for his effortless ability to give them a voice. He has become a figurehead and avatar for an entire class, with a role that’s at least as much about symbolic embodiment as it ever could be about the dry legislation-and-policy aspect of politics.

The last time I wrote about him, it was in the context of his appearance on I’m A Celeb. And his return to Reform UK now is a continuation of his I’m A Celeb trajectory: pragmatic recognition that mass politics is both radically defanged, reduced to a branch of entertainment with little to distinguish it from reality TV — and that it nonetheless, paradoxically, still provides avenues for exerting popular pressure on an otherwise untrammelled technocratic class.

What, then, are these avenues? Farage’s modus operandi isn’t grassroots constituency work, canvassing, local associations, policy development and all the other ponderous architecture of universal-franchise-era mass politics. Our obdurate post-Brexit return to uniparty consensus illustrates how resistant such mechanisms have become to deprecated “interests”. Against this, Farage has waged an insurgency on behalf of the English petit-bourgeois class — one now extended, judging by his recent social-media game, to Right-leaning zoomers — via a cocktail of media spectacle, meme activism, plus hacking formal political systems. The endgame isn’t bums on Commons seats, but forcing reluctant technocrats (whatever their formal political affiliation) towards policies that better reflect those outside the charmed circle. To date, Farage has proved a startlingly effective politician despite being yet to enter Parliament as an MP, purely via such para-Parliamentary methods. And it’s ironic that he should point critically at the “sectarian” political activism now emerging from Muslim groups in Britain, many of which increasingly employ much the same MO as Farage, to get their “interest” on the table.

It remains to be seen whether Farage can pull the Brexit stunt again, or indeed how the Saxon will fare, as an “interest”, against the increasingly politicised British Muslim community. Farage may well succeed on his own terms, with an MP or two and a vote tally that delivers a smack to both cheeks of the uniparty backside. Even if this does happen, though, the “interest” he represents within British post-democracy is unlikely to succeed in tilting policy very far in their preferred direction. But with Farage as their avatar, they at least stand a chance of not being entirely disregarded.

More recently, the silver-haired populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or “Amlo”, chose the Zocalo as the site of dozens of rallies during his 12-year quest for power. When he finally won the top job in 2018 with his Morena party — short for “Movement for National Regeneration”, while also meaning “brown skinned woman” — he moved the seat of the presidency back to the square’s National Palace.

It was also in the Zocalo that the current opposition, centred around presidential contender Xóchitl Gálvez, filled the square with activists dressed in pink on Sunday 19 May, promising a “pink tide” to sweep to power and replace what they claim is an authoritarian government by Morena. (The pink signals Gálvez’s coalition of parties rather an ideological bent.) Come Sunday, however, it will almost certainly be Morena supporters who will be celebrating.

A 61-year-old environmental engineer, Claudia Sheinbaum — Amlo’s anointed successor — was mayor of Mexico City from 2018 to last year. With opinion polls showing her leading the polls by a whopping 20 to 30 points over Gálvez, the campaign has been no nail-biter. Either way, Sheinbaum or Gálvez will give Mexico its first female president, ahead of its super-power neighbour the United States.

Despite misgivings among commentators in the UK and US, this weekend’s election — the biggest in the nation’s history by number of eligible voters and positions being contested — is a testament to the tenacity of Mexico’s democracy. Undeniably, its political system is heavily flawed, besieged by drug cartels who finance and murder candidates as well as journalists. But, for the most part, especially when compared with the rest of Latin America, it still functions. Mexico, remember, is nothing like the nearby authoritarian regimes of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua; nor is it suffering the political meltdown of Peru nor the complete ungovernability of Haiti.

And yet, read the British and American press and you could be forgiven for thinking that Mexico is sliding into a dictatorship. Two years ago, for example, the London-based Index On Censorship named Amlo “Tyrant of the Year”, above Vladimir Putin or Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, while The Economist Intelligence Unit downgraded Mexico from a “flawed democracy” to a “hybrid regime”. Elsewhere, the Financial Times has warned  that “the country’s democracy is now in real danger”, while a headline in The Atlantic referred to Amlo as “The Autocrat Next Door”.

At its heart, this is not necessarily an issue of Right vs Left. Amlo, after all, identifies as Left-wing and promotes a range of different social programmes, some of which have reduced poverty and which Sheinbaum promises to carry on. But, perhaps confusingly for many in the West, he does not talk about “socialism” and is socially conservative on some issues, being strongly nationalist and in favour of the family. “The Mexican family is the principal institution of social security,” he has said.

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Mexico’s cartel corruption on trial

By Ioan Grillo

At the same time, however, Amlo is clearly populist, employing a rhetoric that pits the Mexican people against what he calls “a mafia of power”. This style has garnered comparisons with Donald Trump, with whom Amlo was friendly when he was US President. In a similar vein, since his election in 2018, critics have focused on how Morena has expanded its power across various state institutions, including the judicial system, a process they fear will carry on under Sheinbaum. They also point to Amlo’s combative approach with the media. In February, he published the telephone number of a New York Times reporter who had investigated narco-corruption, and revealed the supposed income of a Mexican journalist who wrote a report on the president’s son.

Both amounted to acts of gross intimidation that deserve to be condemned. They are, however, not necessarily symptoms of how an authoritarian regime might function. Under Amlo, for instance, there have not been any major violent crackdowns on protests or round ups of political prisoners, such as those in Nicaragua and Venezuela, let alone in Syria or China. Indeed, as Amlo goes through his last months of power, he remains genuinely popular with an approval of around 60%, according to newspaper El Financiero.

Moreover, focusing solely on Amlo risks ignoring the fact that Mexico was already a very flawed democracy before he took office. The nation’s democratic transition since was long and twisted, and it was only in 2000, after 72 years in power, that the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) lost the presidency and a real multiparty system took root. Nor did its trials end there. Under the new president Vicente Fox, there was a dubious criminal charge against Amlo in 2004 that would stop him running for president that was only dropped after huge protests (in the Zocalo again). Under Fox’s successor Felipe Calderón, the public security secretary Genaro García Luna was later found to be in the pocket of Mexico’s drug cartels. And under the next president, Enrique Peña Nieto, a scandal blew up over his wife buying a $7-million mansion from a company that received government contracts. In other words, Mexico’s democracy was hardly in fine shape before Amlo came along.

None of this is to say that we shouldn’t single out Amlo for criticism, particularly when it comes to national security. During his five years in office, Mexico has suffered more than 150,000 murders, the worst stretch in recent history. Cartels continue to operate brazenly in swathes of the country, using drones to drop bombs and shaking down businesses, even tortilla sellers.

And unsurprisingly, this violence places a great strain on Mexican democracy. Under Amlo, 37 journalists have been murdered, while over the past year, assassins have killed at least 30 political candidates seeking office, with victims from both Morena and the opposition. Yet while it is no excuse, the uncomfortable truth is that cartel violence has been soaking Mexico in blood for almost two decades. Neither Calderón nor Peña Nieto nor Amlo has found a solution to it. We can only hope that Sheinbaum has more success — although she has offered few concrete policies so far.

An argument made by critics is that Amlo is moving gradually towards an authoritarian system: that his aggressive rhetoric and greater control of institutions will lead to more open authoritarianism down the road. “The democratic retreat does not follow a fixed sequence,” writes Mexican journalist Eduardo Ruiz-Healy. “It is a gradual and prolonged process.” According to these fears, Amlo could still rule from behind the scenes with Sheinbaum as a puppet. However, surely it is dangerous to condemn a government for something that could happen in the future; we need to report the facts of what is actually happening.

It is common for anti-populist commentators to see populists as naturally inclined towards authoritarianism. According to this thinking, as soon as politicians start to talk of the people versus the elite, it is only a matter of time before they try to seize more power. The reality, however, is far more complex. Framing societal conflict in terms of a battle between the demos and their rulers is hardly a new phenomenon: rather, it can be traced back to the golden age of social democracy, including to the British Labour Party’s campaign in 1945.

Besides, in the following decades, a number of populist Latin American Presidents, including in Argentina and Ecuador, left office peacefully to be replaced by rival populists. Critics will rightfully point to the authoritarian takeovers in Nicaragua and Venezuela by self-avowed socialists, but they are the exception. Mexico, by contrast, is about to welcome North America’s first female president into power, off the back of a largely successful exercise in mass democracy.

Yes, it is imperfect — and yes, it can be dangerous. But after two and a half decades, Mexico’s democracy stumbles on.

Nowhere is this more evident than in transatlantic debates over trade and immigration. Here the elite catechism goes something like this: trade and immigration benefit all citizens; as a result, those who claim to have suffered from their effects are delusional; moreover, not only are they delusional, but they are also guilty of scapegoating foreign workers and immigrants.

Note the anti-political implications of this orthodoxy. If policy disputes about trade and immigration have objective answers, like mathematical theorems or scientific equations, then public opinion is irrelevant. And if this is the case, how should a “democracy” treat its voters?

The most obvious remedy would be to introduce general-knowledge tests for voters, and those who give the wrong answer could be disfranchised. But this would be too reminiscent of the “literacy tests” once used by segregationists in the South to prevent black Americans from voting, and only academic libertarians who fantasise about “epistemocracy” truly dream of limiting the suffrage on the basis of education.

A second approach would be to appeal to technocratic authority figures, and hope that the electorate will defer to elite expertise. But this only works for those who share the elite consensus in the first place. And with increasing numbers of voters starting to dissent, elites on both sides of the Atlantic have been forced to try and mollify public opinion by two other methods: censorship and delegation of power.

During the Cold War, “disinformation” was an obscure term that referred to attempts by both the West and the Soviet bloc to trick each other with false information. In the middle of the past decade, however, the term became weaponised as part of a campaign to delegitimise Trump and other populists as subversive agents and fronts created by Vladimir Putin to destabilise Western democracies. A few years later, during the pandemic, the definition of “disinformation” was then expanded to mean any dissent from the ever-changing and contradictory edicts of centre-left national establishments.

Combined with the construction of a public-private surveillance system, which includes the monitoring of social media by government agencies, this constituted a new strain of McCarthyism, but with an obvious difference. This was a “McCarthyism of the Centre”, which is far more dangerous to liberty and democracy than the Right-wing Cold War version, because it is backed by many senior politicians, government agencies, social-media platforms, businesses, banks, media and the academy. Its enforcers are entirely insulated from public opinion: the civil services, appointed judiciaries, corporate and non-profit government contractors, and transnational bureaucracies such as the World Trade Organization and the European Commission.

The logic of technocratic neoliberalism, then, is inherently apolitical and anti-political. It is, in effect, the triumph of de facto rule by unelected bureaucrats — public, private, non-profit. All of this follows from the belief that public opinion about certain issues, such as trade and immigration, is so wrong that it cannot be explained except as the result of a toxic mix of popular ignorance, irrationality and xenophobia.

The alternative is to treat the issues that the McCarthyites of the Centre want to remove from discussion as legitimate issues in public debate. And rather than explaining political differences in terms of education, rationality or virtue, this would require us to teach them as clashes of interests among different groups — clashes which can be ameliorated by compromise.

In the case of trade and immigration, this interest-based approach would produce something like the following counter-catechism: “Trade and immigration policies benefit some citizens, classes, occupations, and other interest groups, and harm others.”

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Ron DeSantis and the failure of pseudo-Trumpism

By Michael Lind

This may only be one sentence, but it dynamites the entire foundation of technocratic neoliberalism. For if disputes over trade and immigration are a matter of conflicting group interests, then there is no single correct answer or solution that can be identified by experts. And if experts cannot dictate the correct public policy, then the conflicting interests of different groups in society must be resolved through the political process. At most, experts can play a useful advisory role, by measuring the benefits and harms of policies not to “the nation as a whole” (a non-existent group, except in political rhetoric) but to the differing groups that make up the nation. But when it comes to deciding how much weight should be assigned to the benefits for one group in comparison to the harms suffered by another, the opinion of the expert is of no more value than anybody else’s.

Like falling dominos, the rest of the technocratic neoliberal regime also comes toppling down, once it is admitted that working-class people may have legitimate interests that clash with those of their political rulers. In this world, the grievances of workers displaced by offshoring national production to low-wage workforces or forced to compete with immigrants for limited welfare services or low-wage jobs can no longer be dismissed as proof of their ignorance; their suffering is real and should be taken seriously. Nor can their complaints be dismissed as irrational scapegoating, motivated by racial prejudice or chauvinism.

None of this is to justify the demagogic anti-politics of populist tribunes such as Trump. On the contrary, the alternative to both technocratic anti-politics and demagogic anti-politics is democratic politics, defined as the balancing of legitimate but conflicting interests by elected officials accountable to ordinary voters. For both voters and the health of the nation, public policy is too important to be left to experts.

Nigel Farage, the most influential British politician never to have served as MP, is the controversial star turn on this year’s I’m A Celebrity – Get Me Out Of Here!: an appearance that will, reportedly, net him £1.5m. Albeit somewhat muffled by Suella-related screeching, the press is already excitedly feasting: fans will reportedly “boycott” the series, friends worry it will “haunt” him, and haters grumble that the opposite might happen. After all, in the wake of his appearance in the last series, there are now people with a celebrity crush on Matt Hancock.

What may be less obvious, though, is that the latest round of Westminster court drama and reality-TV drama are the same story. And what they reveal is that far from being a failure, the much-hailed post-Brexit realignment has been a roaring success. It’s just not the realignment we wanted.

Since its advent with Big Brother in 2000, modern competitive reality TV has (perhaps unintentionally) existed as ironic comment on the official political process. Just like politics junkies (and in far greater numbers), reality TV enthusiasts follow the contestants’ ups and downs with the utmost devotion, argue over their merits, and cast votes with enthusiasm. The results are watched and debated. Reality TV is now even as dynastic as politics: Bobby Brazier, son of Big Brother’s most notorious superstar, the late Jade Goody, is riding as high in this year’s Strictly as Stephen Kinnock briefly was when elected in 2015.

The other comparison, as has grown increasingly apparent since Big Brother, is less cheerful. The net impact on audience lives of voting for or against Nigel Farage on I’m A Celebrity will be nil, beyond a measure of entertainment and something to discuss with colleagues at work. By contrast, what was the net impact of voting for Brexit, seven years later? Two dominant themes in Brexiteers’ arguments for leaving were: first, a desire to reclaim democratic self-governance from the stultifying effect of EU treaties and the unelected Commission; and second, lower immigration. Did it work? The judges’ scores, as they say on Strictly, are in — no, it didn’t.

After a brief post-Brexit dip, immigration is at its highest level ever. And after a landslide Tory majority in 2019, won for an expressed willingness to follow through on a decision made by British voters, today the second unelected Tory Prime Minister since that Johnson victory now enjoys an EU Commission-like appointee status without even his party’s mandate. This man has, in turn, appointed to his Cabinet an even less-elected Foreign Secretary: a man who isn’t even an MP. I can see how some would conclude that the main difference between voting in an election, and voting for your favourite couple on Strictly, is that the latter will cost you 15p from a BT landline.

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Suellaism is here to stay

By Tom McTague

Meanwhile, if voting is now largely unrelated to the terrain in which politics happens, what exactly is the nature of that terrain? It’s not a new observation that — with considerable historic help from the Tory Party — what is considered acceptable material for electoral politics is shaped some way upstream of voting, by an insider network of “statutory bodies”, watchdogs, czars, courts and the like. This blends seamlessly into a professionalised, often murkily-funded archipelago of NGOs that propagates guidelines, lobbies for pet causes, and either provides or withholds the moral imprimatur for official electoral politics. And the political outlook of this cadre, which exists in symbiotic relationship with official state institutions, is hostile to every form of Toryism except (at a pinch) the Cameroon variety.

It’s possible, up to a point, to intervene in this ecosystem by forming and funding your own NGOs. But in underwhelming contrast with the American Republican Party, whose institutional artillery is now laser-focused on preparing for a future programme of attack on the US version of this perceived hostile hegemony, the Tory-led “realignment” left its British analogue almost entirely intact. The clear inference is that a majority prefer it that way.  And even accepting that this is now the key battlefield has a grim corollary: that contra optimists’ hopes, especially after 2019, the real political realignment has not been toward democratic accountability, but decisively in the other direction.

Meanwhile, for those without the social or financial table-stakes required to help shape the field of acceptable Westminster discourse — which is to say, ordinary voters — this leaves few avenues for expressing views discordant with the acceptable range of politics, as defined by this unelected consensus-formation machine. But here, too, the realignment we got isn’t the one we hoped for. Some imagined Brexit might usher in a new politics of belonging, with people brought together by love of locality, the givens of our life in common, and a shared effort to improve our social fabric together. Such hopes were, however briefly, raised by Johnson’s promised “levelling-up” agenda.

What we got instead, especially since Covid has tipped us decisively from a print-first to a digital-first culture, has been a radically unequal, deracinated, dematerialised, transnational public discourse of politics as overlapping fandoms. In digital form, such fandoms manifest as political firestorms, “dogpiling” opponents, or pushing pet causes via clicktivism and online petitions. Offline, it coalesces as “phatic protest”: street demonstrations oriented less toward actual policy, than a form of self-expression and group identity-formation.

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Top Gear's Britain no longer exists

By Mary Harrington

The results are often jarringly transcultural: for example the protesters mimicking American ones by calling “hands up don’t shoot” at Britain’s police officers during the (transnational) BLM riots, despite the fact that only around 5% of British officers carry guns. The recent, global “Palestine” protests also fit this template, bringing together assorted far-Left and Islamist fandoms in a coalition that seems to presage previously unimaginable forms of transnational neo-polity.

How such pressure groups and seemingly decentralised memetic tides interact with real-world power and money is ambiguous. But one thing these phenomena resoundingly are not is a newly resurgent politics of place. Quite the opposite: if the globalisation of meme-driven street protest signals anything, it’s the ascendancy of a new politics of placelessness: the very phenomenon the Tories’ abortive “realignment” promised to end.

None of this is to say that elected politicians have no power, or that we’re all governed in perpetuity by a shadowy conspiracy. The truth is, as ever, more banal than the conspiracies. The actually existing realignment may be post-democratic, but it is far from being a closed shop. The tendency shown by the now-deposed Suella Braverman to speak and tweet as though already in Opposition implied that the position of Home Secretary did not, in fact, command the level of power over home affairs a naïve outsider might imagine it to afford. Even so, were the role completely toothless it would hardly have been worth anyone’s while to sack her for proposing (or so she argues) to enact actual policies in line with the wishes of Conservative voters.

Nonetheless, her expulsion, as with that of Liz Truss before her, illustrates the fate that awaits those who batter too noisily against the boundaries imposed by the symbiotic civil service and NGO-cracy, the combustible online rent-a-mob, or who knows what other extra-political interests. Where such actors align against a policy, however well-supported it nominally is electorally or by polling, that policy will be strangled at birth. In turn, this leaves no avenues for high-profile dissidents save abandoning “reality” altogether, and leaning into “TV”. That is: embracing a new status as influencers within the digital domain of politics fandom.

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David Cameron destroyed the Tories

By Aris Roussinos

We might call this “politainment”, and its stars wield non-trivial levels of power over their political fandoms, much as online influencers in any other type of fandom. Here, too, you can flourish (after a fashion) whether or not you’re an insider. And being obnoxious or notorious is often an advantage. Consider the iconic “Q Shaman”, Jacob Chansley, who made photo headlines across the world after the January 6 Capitol riot. After a stint in jail, he is now, reportedly, running for Congress. This makes sense: the logic of internet celebrity is such that it doesn’t really matter whether the clout you acquire is generated by love or hate — a click is a click.

While Farage has played at the edges of politics since Brexit with his chat show on GB News and Reform party, could he now be garnering the energy needed for a comeback by re-inserting himself into the national consciousness via reality TV? His legions of haters will love watching him eat insects; meanwhile he’ll be on every tabloid front page for weeks on end. Who knows where a re-injection of publicity (not to mention hard cash) will take him. No surprise, then, to find him leaning hard into the collapse of dissident politics into entertainment, by hijacking the Reform Party mailing list to shill for I’m A Celeb votes.

But the flip side of this eruption of influencer politainment is its bleak corollary: the only way to be an insider, with access to real power, is by hewing to an increasingly narrowly defined consensus. The Overton window has been nailed shut.

Instead of rescuing 20th-century style democracy, the realignment buried it. Farage’s move simply attests that what is reported in the press as the political process is more accurately understood as a subset of reality TV, with at best an oblique relation to how decisions are actually taken.

Where Brexiteers dreamed of greater democratic accountability, the tumult their victory set in motion has entrenched financiers and insiders, even as it has made the views of voters ever more obviously irrelevant. And shifts that some hoped would widen the Overton window have produced, instead, a politics in which the only outlet for dissidents is as defanged internet celebrities.

So we got the realignment. It just wasn’t the one we ordered. The urgent project for every disappointed optimist of 2016 and 2019 is now to stop complaining about promises betrayed, drag our eyes from the TV, and lean into post-democratic reality.