On both occasions, the federal city was filled to capacity. “Beds! beds! beds!” was the general cry in 1837. Many visitors had spent the previous night sleeping rough, in barns and markets and even barbers’ chairs. And so it was in 2025, with even mid-market hotels charging upwards of $1,500 per room. Both inaugurations were similarly marked by the irreverence and boozy rowdiness typical of populist movements, Jacksonian democracy in Van Buren’s case, Trumpism yesterday.

Watching the swearing-in remotely, from the Capital One Arena, I chuckled at the partisan fandom. Prominent Democrats drew boos from the crowd, while Republicans got applause. But when Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a Democrat, and House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican, appeared side-by-side, the crowd booed. “Wait, what did poor Mike Johnson do?”, I asked my companion. Then, as if collectively regretting their drive-by booing of the innocent Johnson, most of the arena audience refrained from booing or cheering when members of both parties showed up together on the jumbotrons.

Trump, inevitably, received roars of approval and standing ovations. Not much at first, when he was strangely subdued and his delivery halting. But as he gathered steam, so too did the audience. The greatest clamour of approval came when he pledged to make it the “official policy of the United States government” to recognize only two genders: male and female. Other crowd favorites included “Drill, baby, drill”; his vow to “take back” the Panama Canal; and, of course, his crackdown at the border.

It turns out that doing popular things can make for good politics. Democrats today don’t seem to grasp this banal truism, but their own party’s Jacksonian founders did, whether it was dismantling the Second Bank of the United States, an institution that had come to be hated by much of the public for the imperious role it played in the early republic’s politics (even as it fulfilled important economic functions); or imposing the first legal limitation on the length of the workday; or expanding the democratic franchise to white men without property.

Trump’s instincts hew much closer to those of Jacksonian Democrats than his own party’s intellectual class, and he has no problem proclaiming the popular. Precisely because progressivism has come to be associated with paper straws, congestion fees, and diminished expectations, Trump gains the upper hand simply by promising good things to come, even as some of his brain-storms veer into the preposterous — such as a military invasion to bring Greenland under American control.

Yet the deepest historical echo yesterday had to do with political coalitions. To wit, “Jacksonism” — the worldview associated with Van Buren’s predecessor and ex-boss, Andrew Jackson — raged against “the money power” that oppressed workers and farmers. But his coalition also included grasping entrepreneurs, local bankers, slave-owning planters, along with other interests who were by no means opposed to capitalism, but saw in Jackson a chance to make the system work better for them.

And so it was with Trump. On the one hand, Trump in his Inaugural Address attacked the “corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens while the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair”. On the other, he invited to the dais business leaders such as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, whose firms took once the lead in promoting the corporate “wokeness” reviled by Trump’s base.

Further reading

Europe is clinging to yesterday

By Wolfgang Munchau

More than a mere dais seat, Elon Musk has been presented with his own government department, to which the Tesla and SpaceX boss hopes to recruit a team of “small-government crusaders”. He says he aims to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget —surely impossible without cutting those entitlement programs that Trump and the Republican platform have promised never to touch. So we are left wondering which Trumpism will prevail: the one that explicitly appeals to trade unionists (as the President also did in his address), or the one that (for now) adores Musk as a (Roman) demigod?

But for one day, at least, the American Right’s various factions pressed pause on their bickering to celebrate Trump’s remarkable comeback saga: from January 6 through the barrage of indictments and convictions of the past four years, he has made it back to the summit of earthly power. But the tensions will erupt soon enough. Already, Congress’s TikTok ban and visa program disputes have divided the movement’s populist base and Silicon Valley funders.

Further reading

Donald Trump's second coming

By Christopher Caldwell

Judging by the inauguration, the latter are everywhere in the new Washington. They were at every fringe event, dinner, and party that I attended. Trumpism now contains within itself a downscale base that sings “glory, glory, hallelujah!” and yearns for restoring industrial jobs, and an affluent element that promotes longevity through plasma transfusions and who would automate most jobs out of existence.

Can these two competing impulses be synthesized?

Here, the Jacksonian example isn’t so helpful. While Jackson, Van Buren and their ilk did indeed smash the Second Bank of the United States, this redounded mostly to the benefit of their business allies; the workers and smallholders in turn were handed a brief depression and a surge in inflation caused by a surfeit of wildcat bankers, followed by decades during which the United States suffered from a much higher rate of banking crises than comparable industrial powers with more centralized financial systems. But for all its flaws, the hated administrative institution did help discipline the flow of credit.

There are, however, more successful reform models in the American political tradition. Particularly germane is what the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr dubbed “Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends”: a willingness to ally with and use big institutions and wealth, whether public or private, in service of the Jeffersonian vision of a competent, modestly propertied citizenry — the American Dream, if you like. Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, FDR, Eisenhower, and JFK all echoed this to varying degrees, with varying degrees of success.

But such an approach would require a willingness to discipline Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk, including by mobilizing public opinion against them. The state must lead business, even if business leaders are allowed great closeness to state power and invited to participate in politics. FDR, for example, warned firms against defying his labor and competition reforms: “There is no group in America that can withstand the force of an aroused public opinion.”

At the Commander-in-Chief Ball on Monday night, where the majority of guests were members of the armed forces and their families, the cheering, whooping, and military-style “Hooahs!” for Trump and his team were deafening. “Welcome back, President Trump, your warriors had missed you,” declared a Medal of Honor recipient from the podium. “He’s just with us,” an Air Force man told me. “I don’t care about this or that policy. He has our backs.”

At least for now, Trump has that dangerous “force” of public opinion on his side to an extent that wasn’t the case the first time he was elected — and that hasn’t been the case for a Republican president in a generation. As one official who had served in the first Trump administration told me, “Every 40 years or so, the Jackson spirit comes back to stir things up in this country. The question is what you do with it.”

Just last month, academic Thomas Schaller, co-author of the erroneous book, White Rural Rage, stoked this prejudice on MSNBC: “[Rural voters] are the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay geo-demographic group in the country… They are the most likely to excuse or justify violence as an acceptable alternative to peaceful public discourse.” He was trending on X in no time. But his ideas aren’t exactly new: after the 2016 election, Frank Rich published an essay titled “No sympathy for the Hillbilly” in New York magazine, while the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman regularly churns out op-eds on rural rage.

As two scholars of rural politics, who have spent the past three years pouring over thousands of survey interviews with rural Americans, this caricature of the rural rabble-rouser is deeply puzzling. Instead of threats to democracy, or rebellious politics, or reflexive anger, we keep finding something different: pride in rural living, a sense of communal belonging, a shared fate that intertwines the economic well-being of rich and poor in rural communities. Yes, there are resentments, especially towards government officials and experts. But resentment is not a stereotype. It’s a motivation, a story.

Suggested reading

The Constitution won't save America

By N.S. Lyons

Still, rageful stereotypes sell better than complex backstories. And they’re easier for our political and media ecosystems to make sense of. Reference some data point about QAnon conspiracies in the heartlands, and you’ll raise more money from nervous liberals in the city (who just so happen to live next to three times as many conspiracy believers). Lash out against the xenophobia in small towns, and you’ll mobilise your city voters to the polls. Rage draws clicks. It makes a splash.

However, unlike rage, which is explosive and directed towards immediate targets, scholars have shown that resentment in rural areas emanates from a sense of enduring injustice and marginalisation. It is not primarily about anger towards specific groups such as black Americans, immigrants, or LGBT individuals. Instead, resentment or grievance is a deeper, more persistent feeling that arises from real and perceived slights against rural communities. These include economic policies that have devastated local industries, a lack of investment in rural infrastructure and education, and a sense of cultural dismissal from urban-centric media and politics.

Such failures help to explain the deep-rooted scepticism in many rural areas towards government policy solutions. Just consider the aftermath of the North American Free Trade Agreement, implemented in 1994. Nafta’s champions, including both Democrats and Republicans, promised that the deal would bring prosperity to small farmers, but between 1998 and 2018, one out of every 10 small US farms disappeared. Not long after the trade barriers were removed, Canadian cattle ranchers flooded the American market with beef and prices plummeted, forcing small farms out of business. Meanwhile, large-scale agribusinesses capitalised on the open borders. If government neglect drove your grandpa off his farm back then, why would you trust it now?

Yet the stereotype of the raging rural American misrepresents these complexities of the rural experience. It is why Hollywood fell for J.D. Vance’s story of Appalachian poverty, while failing to recognise that he was running a political campaign that spoke to the resilience, values and pride of rural residents. And it is why most progressives don’t have much empathy left for rural voters — despite feeling deeply for nearly every other marginalised group in American society.

In some circles, this lack of empathy stems from the fact that these so-called “deplorables” are blamed for having brought Trump to power. As Paul Waldman, the second co-author of White Rural Rage, said on his book tour: “If Donald Trump gets back to the Oval Office, it will be because — once again — rural Whites put him there.” But rural America is not responsible for Trump. If simply voting for Trump makes you “enraged”, then the residents of cities and suburbs, from which Trump derived 80% of his total votes in 2020, are downright furious. Pinning Trump’s gains on decades of rural America’s losses is just another form of confirmation bias — reinforcing existing beliefs without critical examination. Rarely do you hear mentions of figures such as Bill Clinton, who championed Nafta, or Hillary, who seemed to openly celebrate the fact that she lost the places that were economically suffering the most.

With stereotypes of rage come stereotypes of irrationality. But rural folk have good reason to partly blame Democrats, experts and college professors for their misfortunes. They know full well that federal agriculture and trade policies pushed by both Democrats and Republicans did destroy rural economies. And that liberal elites stood by as rural students became one of the least likely groups to attend college, and one of the most likely to drop out. Surely, the drive for diversity and inclusion should include rural kids, too?

We’ve also noticed that city dwellers have a tendency to use stereotypes as a crutch to disguise the fact that they know very little about how different people live their lives. Both rural and urban people see the “other” as having different values. Many of these differences are overblown, but some of them are, undoubtedly, true. We see it in our own lives: as college professors who choose to live in the countryside, our colleagues playfully say we’ve “gone native”, and our neighbours think we’re squirrelly. We love both worlds and the people within them, even when they value different things. But stereotypes, generalisations, tropes and unchecked hyperbole foreclose the possibility of closing this divide.

In order to genuinely heal societal rifts and to find common ground, we have to dispel the myths of blind rage, and see instead a common desire for recognition. And yet, it appears that progressive commitments to multiculturalism and pluralism only extend to groups that vote the “right” way. It’s almost as if they haven’t learnt their lesson: as long as rural America is treated with disdain, should we really be surprised when, once again, it reluctantly turns to Trump?

And yet. Biden’s approval ratings keep falling. Polls show the Republicans leading on a generic congressional ballot and suggest an even split in a potential Biden-Trump rematch in 2024. Voters have more faith in the Republicans on the top issue, the economy, as well as on inflation, immigration, crime, and foreign policy. They think the President is well-meaning but clueless. A March poll from the Wall Street Journal found that 50 per cent of voters agreed that “Joe Biden tries to do the right thing”, but only 39 per cent agreed that he is “focused on the issues that are most important to me”; a February Washington Post poll found that 54 per cent believed Biden lacked the “mental sharpness it takes to serve effectively as president”. Thanks to Biden, the GOP, far from being “dead”, could be gearing up for its strongest election cycle in a decade.

What to make of the paradox that the Republicans appear politically strong but remain completely toxic among those who by and large govern the country? A new book by Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism, does not address itself directly to this question, but it does suggest an answer: this is the consequence of Trump’s destruction and discrediting of the conservative intellectual and policy elite.

Continetti could be fairly described as conservative royalty. A senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, the most respectable of the right-of-centre DC think tanks, he was a long-time employee of The Weekly Standard during its run as the house journal of the Bush administration. He is also the son-in-law of Bill Kristol, neoconservative founder of the Standard and The Bulwark and perhaps the most prominent Trump-era defector to the Democratic Party. Continetti’s perspective is that of a consummate insider, one tied by professional and familial bonds to the Beltway intellectual establishment that was all but obliterated by the 2016 election. He is, as a result, better attuned than most to the role of elites in the conservative ecosystem, as well as to the limits of their power.

The book is a work of history rather than a commentary on current events, and Continetti refrains from splashy arguments. But his framing of the American Right over the past century has obvious implications for the present day. Broadly speaking, his narrative is one of the “endless competition and occasional collaboration between populism and elitism”. Conservatism, in his telling, “has toggled between an elite-driven strategy in both content and constituencies and a populist strategy that meets normal people where they are and is driven by their ambitions, anxieties, and animosities”. Only a synthesis of the two is capable of anything other than fleeting victories — elite-driven politics fails at the ballot-box, populism fails at governing — yet such a synthesis has been difficult to come by, which explains the “tenuous” and “fragile” nature of Republican successes.

Suggested reading

Is the New Right a grift?

By Park MacDougald

Since FDR’s expansion and reorganisation of the American state in the Thirties, conservatism has always been a minority faction in the American elite, which tends toward welfare-state, social-reforming liberalism with occasional forays into radicalism. The broad middle of the social spectrum is more conservative, or at the very least more suspicious of elite liberalism and its various improving crusades. As a political project, post-war conservatism, embodied by figures such as National Review founder William F. Buckley, was an attempt to harness this popular, anti-liberal political energy for electoral purposes, with the implicit understanding that the elites would do the actual governing, softening the edges of populist anxieties (which often shade into bigotry and conspiracism), while translating them into a viable political programme.

For liberals, of course, this relationship looks like the cynical manipulation of the electorate’s base instincts, and at times it can be exactly that. But, as conservatives like Continetti would point out, it serves an important political function. A liberal governing class ruling over a conservative populace is not an inherently stable political arrangement. When persuasion fails — and people can only be persuaded of so much — there will always be a temptation to coerce, cajole, or mislead. Sometimes, as in the case of desegregating the South in the Sixties, coercion may be justified in the name of a higher moral purpose. But the language of “moral clarity” (not to mention technocratic expertise) can also be used to disqualify legitimate criticism of unpopular or wrong-headed fads.

Plus, in a democracy, the people get a vote. You can only ignore their preferences for so long without incurring a backlash. As Eric Kaufmann argues, the rise of populism in the West is in large part the result of conservative elites colluding with liberals to remove immigration restriction from the policy debate at a time when a large portion of the population felt very strongly about it. This did not make the issue go away, however, and the glaring mismatch between popular demand for the policy and its conspicuous lack of supply in the political system provided the opening for political entrepreneurs such as Trump. But the point can be stated more generally: Conservative elites mediate between their voters and a wider American elite, ideally acting as a check on the excesses of both. When they fail in this role, as they did in the years prior to 2016, the entire system becomes vulnerable to outside disruption.

Suggested reading

Twilight of the American Left

By Park McDougald

Where does that leave conservatism today? Continetti is pessimistic about Trump’s effect on the Right — he has shattered elite conservatism as an independent force and made the party’s brand toxic to the professional class, whose buy-in was critical to Reagan’s victories and relative effectiveness once in office. He notes, despairingly, that the rise of cable news and social media may have simply eliminated the ability of any conservative elite to perform their gatekeeping and mediating function — constantly at risk of being outflanked by Fox News and Twitter influencers, their options may be to join the populists, join the Democrats, or fade into irrelevance.

Not mentioned, though relevant, is the fact that the radicalisation of the liberal establishment over the past decade has made the old role of conservative elites less tenable. If they represent the interests of their base, they risk forfeiting their status and respectability among their fellow elites. But if they capitulate to each new progressive taboo as it is erected, they forfeit their credibility with the people they are supposed to represent, making themselves superfluous. Few on the Left or the populist Right are likely to shed a tear over this outcome, but absent any group able to effectively translate popular demands into the language of professional-class respectability, the two sides will lose their ability to talk to one another, and American politics will descend further down the road of all-out, zero-sum warfare.

The turning point, at least in the medium-term, will be the 2024 presidential primary. Whoever wins the party’s nomination will be in a strong position to win the presidency, and perhaps to enjoy at least a few years of unified control of the government. A Trump victory would not herald the “end of democracy in America”, but it would be a disaster for the country — four more years of chaos, mutual enmity, and partisan radicalisation in which political disputes are subordinated to the private whims and grievances of one man.

Suggested reading

Joe Biden's gender agenda

By Park McDougald

But there is a reason, beyond the Electoral College, why Republicans are in good political position, despite these obvious problems: many Americans, including some of the professional elites now solidly in the Democratic camp, are deeply uncomfortable with the direction that liberalism has taken since 2016, as seen in the rising numbers of “anti-woke” liberal intellectuals and in the emergence of at least rhetorically law-and-order Democratic politicians such as New York mayor Eric Adams. As Continetti notes, an earlier wave of elite defectors from a radicalised Left — the neoconservatives — infused conservatism in the Seventies and Eighties with a previously lacking cultural cachet and intellectual sophistication. They were able to appeal to the mainstream with plausible accounts of what had gone wrong with the Great Society and how to fix it.

There is no guarantee that a non-Trump candidate in 2024 could pull off such a trick, but they could, perhaps, establish facts on the ground to start clawing the party back from the Trumpian abyss, and start rebuilding an elite and professional class constituency. There would still be culture war, and much of the stupidity that makes contemporary American politics so unbearable. But it might be the best chance to finally leave the grim disputes of the present behind.

“So much of the experience of watching returns,” remarked frustrated MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes to two leading pollsters, “was anchored by the polling going into it. And it was a bad night for polling—an enormous polling miss.”

Far from learning from the mistakes of 2016, the polling industry seemed to have got things worse. Whether conducted by private or public firms, at the national or local, presidential or senatorial, levels, polls were off by wide margins. The Five Thirty-Eight final poll of polls put Biden ahead by 8.4 points, but the actual difference in popular vote is likely to be closer to 3-4 points. In some close state races, the error was even greater.

Why did they get it so wrong? Pollsters typically receive low response rates to calls, which leads them to undercount key demographics. To get around this, they typically weight for key categories like race, education or gender. If they get too few Latinos or whites without degrees, they adjust their numbers to match the actual electorate.

But most attitudes vary far more within a group like university graduates, than between graduates and non-graduates. So even if you have the correct share of graduates and non-graduates, you might be selecting the more liberal-minded among them. For example, in the 2019 American National Election Study pilot survey, education level predicts less than 1% of the variation in whether a white person voted for Trump in 2016. By contrast, their feelings towards illegal immigrants on a 0-100 thermometer predicts over 30% of the variation. Moreover, immigration views pick out Trump from Clinton voters better within the university-educated white population than among high school-educated whites. Unless pollsters weight for attitudes and psychology – which is tricky because these positions can be caused by candidate support – they miss much of the action.

Looking at this election’s errors — which seems to have been concentrated among white college graduates — I wonder if political correctness lies at the heart of the problem.

Political correctness refers to the policing of speech so that it conforms to cultural taboos, especially the ones concerning race, gender and sexuality. Those who wield taboos gain rhetorical power, encouraging them to stretch the meaning of concepts such as racism to encompass non-racist actions such as voting for Donald Trump.

Across all racial groups, 80% of Americans say “political correctness is a problem in our country”. Only the small “Progressive Activist” 8% of the US population largely thinks it’s not. In practice, the burden of political correctness arguably falls most heavily on university-educated Republican supporters. Data from a recent Cato Institute survey shows that 88% of Trump-voting graduates compared to just 44% of Clinton-supporting graduates agreed that “The political climate these days prevents me from saying things I believe because others might find them offensive.”

Republican supporters with degrees tend to work in graduate-dominated environments, where organisations and peers are more likely to enforce norms of political correctness. As a result, it is highly-educated Republican supporters who are most shy about revealing their beliefs at work.

As figure 1 illustrates, 45% of Republicans with degrees, compared to 23% of Democrats with degrees, said they feared that their careers could be at risk if their views became known.

How does this affect polling? Republican pollster Frank Luntz told Emily Maitlis that Trump voters were over twice as likely as Biden voters — by a 19 to 9 margin — to conceal their intended vote from others. I would expect this ratio to be considerably higher among university graduates, which would, accordingly, skew predictions the most among graduates.

Pollsters claim to have overcome this problem by comparing telephone and online surveys and finding no difference. Since online surveys are anonymous, they reason, a ‘shy Trump’ effect should reveal itself by comparing these two methods, and they find none.

However, we also know that people who internalise social norms often conceal their views in online surveys. The psychologist George Herbert Mead referred to people’s ‘generalized other’, a kind of mental peer group we carry around in our heads that sits in judgement upon us is even if no one is actually watching. For instance, in a recent survey of North American academics, I found that just 23% of academics were willing to state they would discriminate against a Trump voter for a job, but the actual share when using a concealed technique called a ‘list experiment’ was 42%. Likewise, a 2010 study found that the share of white Americans willing to endorse zero immigration jumped from 39% to 60% when the question was concealed in a list, rather than asked openly.

There is also a problem of blowback among elite Republicans. Frank Luntz has also said that feedback from Trump-supporting respondents revealed considerable resentment towards pollsters, who were perceived as part of a media establishment out to misrepresent them. Indeed, studies show that using words like ‘racist’ to describe Trump or his policies tends to increase support for them among conservative respondents by provoking what is termed a ‘reactance’ effect. Knowing you are perceived as racist by elites for supporting Trump may make you less likely to answer a call from a survey firm you associate with that chastising elite.

Again, this perception is likely to be stronger among Trump-supporting graduates than Trump voters with lower education levels, who are less likely to circulate in politically-correct social environments. Research confirms that highly-educated white liberals have the most skewed perceptions of the actual views of Trump supporters, in part because their social circles tend to be politically homogeneous. The problem is worst among those most attentive to politics.

This may explain why the polls didn’t do badly in predicting the white non-graduate vote but failed miserably among white graduates. According to a Pew survey on October 9, Trump was leading Biden by 21 points among white non-graduates but trailing him by 26 points among white graduates. Likewise, a Politico/ABC poll on October 11 found that ‘Trump leads by 26 points among white voters without four-year college degrees, but Biden holds a 31-point lead with white college graduates.’

The exit polls, however, show that Trump ran even among white college graduates 49-49, and even had an edge among white female graduates of 50-49! This puts pre-election surveys out by a whopping 26-31 points among white graduates. By contrast, among whites without degrees, the actual tilt in the election was 64-35, a 29-point gap, which the polls basically got right.

Even with reasonable caveats about the accuracy of exit polls, the size of the polling error among white graduates is the 800-pound gorilla in the room, and is arguably linked to problems of concealment and reactance which loom largest among white graduate Trump voters. That’s why, in order to fix polling, we first need to fix political correctness.

The most important effects of speech policing are often indirect, shutting down important conversations across value divides that could improve policies and reach greater consensus on hot-button issues such as immigration, education or policing.

Like a referee in a football game, we need to call penalties when real racist or sexist infractions have been committed, but must stand firm against cries to those based on false accusations grounded in hair-trigger suspicion and conceptual stretching. Failing to do so silences voices that need to be heard, such as college-educated Trump voters, while breeding anti-elite resentment that demagogues exploit. If America cannot reform its regime of speech discipline, it has no hope of overcoming its yawning cultural divide.

In church on Sunday, too, I could feel the anxiety radiate out from my coughing away behind the altar into a twitchy congregation. We have suspended sharing the peace for the time being. Instead of shaking hands or kissing, we wave at each other. So, too, we have decided to take communion in one kind only — that is, we share the bread but not the common cup of wine. And in this context, the symbolic handwashing the priest performs before the Eucharist is no longer simply a ritual act. It feels like a necessity. Cleanliness is next to godliness.

But this cross-over between cleanliness and moral and religious purpose is one that makes a lot of people even more nervous than the virus itself. The moralisation of disgust is regarded as a dangerous Right-wing/religious cross-over that has regularly been aimed against “unclean” menstruating women and against lesbian and gay people especially. Moralised disgust is a familiar expression of hostility to gay sex, for example. And as Ed West made clear in his excellent piece on the black death, it has historically been employed to stoke the flames of anti-Semitism. Jews were said to spread the plague. The politics of cleanliness is often a way we are encouraged to fear the threatening presence of the other.

Suggested reading

Will coronavirus change the world?

By Ed West

And no one is more adept at employing the language of disgust against his opponents than Donald Trump. As Hillary Clinton went for a bathroom break during the Democratic debate in 2015, Trump commented: “I know where she went, it’s disgusting, I don’t want to talk about it. No, it’s too disgusting. Don’t say it, it’s disgusting, let’s not talk.” And he was back at moralised disgust again this week, calling out Michael Bloomberg for the way he was eating a pizza: “Mini Mike, don’t lick your dirty fingers. Both unsanitary and dangerous to others and yourself!” he tweeted.

Which is why this dreaded virus is playing right into Trump’s hands at a pivotal electoral moment. For Covid-19 is amplifying the politics of the bathroom and its connection to a fear of the other. “The virus is a weapon” my barber explained to me this week, surveying his empty shop, “invented by the Chinese.” I mumbled disagreement through the hot towel wrapped around my face.

But those who want to resist these dangerous conclusions, need to do more than mumble their opposition to it. They need to understand where it comes from.

Back in 2012, the political philosopher Jonathan Haidt published the hugely influential The Righteous Mind: why good people are divided by politics and religion, a book that sought to explain the appeal of the conservative world view to liberals —who generally find it totally incomprehensible. At the heart of Haidt’s explanation is the point that conservatives employ a more extensive palate of political values, including values such as purity and disgust. These, Haidt contends, are values that the right employs — to powerful electoral effect — but liberals denigrate and misunderstand.

As Richard Dawkins tweeted last year:

Tissue culture “clean meat” already in 2018? I’ve long been looking forward to this.https://t.co/p41NR3NEZn
What if human meat is grown? Could we overcome our taboo against cannibalism? An interesting test case for consequentialist morality versus “yuck reaction” absolutism.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) March 3, 2018

Which is why my UnHerd colleague Peter Franklin describes himself on his Twitter bio as a “yuck reaction absolutist”.

Consider another example. Is there anything morally wrong with having sex with a dead chicken in the privacy of one’s own kitchen (or bedroom?) — not one specifically killed for the purpose, for that introduces an element of harm — but one purchased at the supermarket? Strictly from the perspective of the liberal world view, where harm is understood as the deciding moral factor, there doesn’t seem to be anything obviously wrong with having sex with a dead chicken. After all, what or who is harmed in the act? Yet the sense that there is indeed something wrong here would be a common reaction. Would Dawkins see this, too, as yuck absolutism?

In my view, the best person to read in order to understand the workings of disgust and purity as a moral reaction is the anthropologist Mary Douglas. For Douglas, the nature of impurity only makes sense in terms of a world view in which things have a certain place. An ‘impure’ substance is not, in and of itself, impure — it is simply in the wrong place. And, so, saliva is not disgusting your own mouth. But is disgusting if you are invited to spit it in a glass and then re-swallow it. Dirt is a good thing in the garden, but a bad thing when trampled through the house. In other words, impurity and disgust are context dependent. And here is the big point: disgust and purity only make sense with reference to a sort of map of the world in which things have a certain place.

Suggested reading

I don't miss the nastiness of the Left

By Polly Mackenzie

The phrase “a place for everything and everything in its place” – often associated with Benjamin Franklin – has its origin in a religious world-view: “The Lord hath set everything in its place and order”, preached Bishop John Hacket in 1675. The sentiment behind “a place for everything and everything in its place” is probably a popular Victorian rendition of this religious idea. God sets things in a certain order during creation. And disgust is a gut reaction to things not being as God has set them up to be, or — in a secular rendition of the same basic idea — as nature intended.

Small wonder Dawkins is not a fan. The Bible proposes a map of the world where all things have their place. Ritual washing is a form of boundary maintenance. And the nightmare from this perspective is when boundaries are effaced and things come together that shouldn’t come together.

As the barber was jabbering on about the Chinese, the plot of Mission: Impossible II started running through my head. The baddies make a weapon out of a virus. Ethan Hunt has to save the world. The virus is called Chimera. Significantly, the chimera is a figure of Greek mythology, an animal that is composed of different parts of different animals: the body of a lion, the head of a goat, and a tail that becomes a snake. The chimera represents perfectly the fear of things coming together that shouldn’t come together.

Suggested reading

How knitters got knotted in a purity spiral

By Giles Fraser

But unlike Peter Franklin, I wouldn’t describe myself as a “Yuck reaction absolutist”. In fact, I don’t think he is one either. Because there are yuck reaction absolutists who would, for instance, regard the marriage of a non-Jew to a Jew — my marriage — as a contravention of the need for strict boundary maintenance. The hostility to so-called miscegenation is a variant of the fear of the chimera. And we are right to be having none of it.

There is, though, an ocean of space to negotiate between Dawkins’s refusal to recognise anything to the wisdom of repugnance, and Trump’s desire to weaponise it against minorities. And this is territory that the Left is so much more uncomfortable exploring than the Right. For boundary maintenance is not just a visceral refusal to eat human tissue or have sex with frozen chickens. It is also about protecting the vulnerable from unrestricted capital flows and the community-dissolving properties of globalisation. This should be territory the Left gets involved in: boundaries are not just ways of othering people, they are also mechanisms of legitimate protection from harm.

What liberals generally don’t get is that the desire for a world in which everything has a proper place is a reaction to a radically uncertain world, a world in which boundaries have been effaced, and thus a world in which nothing is protected, nothing is safe – especially for the most vulnerable. Our fear of the virus is partly that it knows no boundaries. That it is the great disease of globalisation. And unless the Left finds a way to distinguish good boundary maintenance from bad boundary maintenance, it will keep on handing electoral victories to the likes of Donald Trump.