Then, on 4 July, at Madison Square Garden, the iconic arena in midtown Manhattan, the billionaire pop superstar wed Kansas City Chiefs American football star Travis Kelce, in a celebration attended by 1,000 of the couple’s closest friends. There were barriers, and guards. No phones were allowed at the ceremony.

It was both the most public and the most private event of the year. It took place on the day of America’s 250th anniversary, and bore all the hallmarks of Swift’s longstanding talent for narrative reflexivity. And, above all, it offered proof positive that the 21st century is, once again, a time of lords and princes. Ironically, nowhere is this more evident than in the nation founded by those who left England to escape the medieval past, and its hierarchies.

Despite the secrecy, a few details have emerged. Notably, we’ve seen photos of the wedding favors received by every guest: a lace napkin embroidered with a special logo and — startlingly — a line from one of Swift’s most darkly self-destructive songs, “Blank Space”. It’s an odd choice of quotation for a wedding favor: the song is anthemic for every girl who has ever chased wild passion, knowing it’ll end in disaster. “So it’s gonna be forever,” reads the napkin. No one more deftly refracts her own self-image through her fanbase like Taylor Swift; the line was surely chosen knowing fans would immediately fill in the blank space, where the song’s next line would be: “Or it’s gonna go down in flames.”

Swiftological omens aside, what was so remarkable about the event was how much of a blank space it remained. Despite New York City surely having one of the highest densities of camera-phones per square mile anywhere on earth, the only footage to have leaked so far is a short clip filmed from the edge of the stadium’s interior. Guests can be seen processing toward a stage-set structure, decorated by greenery. There are verbal reports of the décor and food, but that’s it.

Outside in the streets, throngs of adoring Swifties gathered to participate in this radically exclusionary, wildly opulent, maximum-security event simply through proximity. And later, after the feasting was over, the catering company distributed left-over wedding desserts to fans, who screamed, scrabbled, and fought to consume a holy, sweet fragment from Travis and Taylor’s nuptial feast.

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No one could miss the eucharistic parody here — nor the echoes of feudal bounty, bestowed by the great within to the peasants at the gate: a form of lordly munificence that has largely vanished from the modern world. It survives today mostly as quirky traditions: for example at my alma mater, where the Masters celebrate Ascension Day by throwing pennies into the quad from the towers, and local children scrabble to gather them up.

Such gestures of charity to commoners were once part of the ordinary fabric of social life. Historian Eamon Duffy describes the liturgical calendar of pre-Reformation Christian England as including some 40-50 celebration days, on which “servile labor” was partly or wholly forbidden. On these days, those with means were often expected to show their wealth, and piety, by contributing towards communal feasting in charity to the poor.

This medieval holiday regime was scuppered in the 1530s, when Henry VIII broke with Rome. Shortly thereafter, the Crown abolished most of the local and national feasts, especially during the summer months, because all this liturgical partying was getting in the way of agricultural productivity. Nor was this dour onslaught on Merrie England’s pre-modern cakes-and-ale schedule the last: not long after, Henry also dissolved the monasteries, selling their lands to his friends and in the process ending a whole form of subsistence peasant life.

The more profit-focused new owners of former monastic lands didn’t always exhibit the same sense of obligation to the poor as their predecessors. Unscrupulous rent-extraction and callous landlordism became a persistent social problem, and songs and folklore from the period express an angry sense that the rich had reneged on what was expected of them. It got worse, in some respects: a century later, even kings were abolished, and the brilliant, ruthless Roundhead general Oliver Cromwell set out to transform England into a Puritan paradise — to the still greater detriment of that old regime of feasts and holy days. No more partying, even at Christmas.

A Royalist broadside ballad from the 1640s blames the loss of charity and free feast-day goodies on the Puritan leveling instinct:

To conclude, I’le tell you news that’s right, Christmas was kil’d at Naseby fight:
Charity was slain at that same time, Jack Tell troth too, a friend of mine,
Likewise then did die, rost beef and shred pie,
Pig, Goose and Capon no quarter found.
Yet let’s be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn’d upside down.

But in other respects it got better. The same reforms also drove the creation of a new middle class, shook up laws governing heredity, and kicked off a revolution in agriculture. The resulting transformation would remake modern England, driving the Industrial Revolution, turbocharging growth, and impelling the uprooted English outward into the empire — including her then-colonial lands in America.

The irony behind Taylor Swift’s opulent extravaganza is that the origin story of the United States lay in those Puritans who left England in the 17th century, in pursuit of still greater leveling than could be managed in the Old World. Some were disappointed by the failure of radical Puritan measures during Cromwell’s Protectorate; more were underwhelmed by the religious compromises and royal Restoration that followed Cromwell’s death. These radicals sailed away, to create their shining city on a hill somewhere unburdened (as Kamala Harris put it more recently) by what has been.

Now, 250 years in, the nation that spun off from those pioneers counts more billionaires than anywhere else on earth. And, ironically, their rise is downstream of a great hollowing-out of America’s own middle class, characterized by urban geographer Joel Kotkin as a coming age of neo-feudalism. This, he suggests, is sweeping away the middle-class characteristic of the modern age, in favor of a huge subsistence peasantry, a comparatively small “clerisy”, and an unthinkably rich aristocracy.

Kotkin’s book The Coming of Neo-Feudalism was intended as a warning, and a call to arms by the beleaguered middle class. Conversely, among the new aristocracy, many seem keen to lean into the corollary of this neo-feudalism: that just like in the olden days, the new lords and princes will be obligated to dispense alms to some portion of the peasantry. Tech plutocrats, especially those producing AI of the supposedly job-destroying kind, periodically float (and sometimes pilot) “Universal Basic Income” proposals that are post-modern variants on pre-modern subsistence peasant life. The subtext, whether explicitly stated or not, is that if things continue in the current direction the wealth gap will soon be so immense that some kind of redistribution will be prudent, simply as a hedge against revolution.

All of this makes for a much sweeter pill when refracted through the prism of lordly magnificence. At least one fan interpreted Taylor Swift’s pastry distribution thus, gushing in suitably feudal style that “She loves us”. But does she? Set against the eye-watering expense of her celebration, distributing a few left-over slices of cake to fans outside isn’t much in the way of hospitality. Was it even Swift who authorized the pastry distribution? Or just a departing caterer’s van that knew the cakes would otherwise go in the bin?

The question bites much more sharply for those who have grown rich not through entertainment, but more controversial (or even job-destroying) lines of business. The last household-name billionaire wedding to hit the headlines was Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, a man who acquired his unthinkable wealth rendering high-street hardware shops obsolete, and algorithmically optimizing delivery-drivers and warehouse staff to the point where they need to pee in bottles to keep up the pace of work. This time last year Bezos and his bride Lauren Sanchez took over great swathes of Venice for a three-day wedding that cost somewhere in the region of $50 million, and attracted at least as much criticism and protest as excited rubbernecking.

Bezos also seems to be fumbling toward lordly charity — at least, by proxy. He asked his guests not to bring gifts, but instead to make donations to local Venetian charities. Despite this, his wedding still attracted protestors. Perhaps this reflects a misunderstanding of how aristocratic bounty is supposed to work: Bezos didn’t spend any of his own money throwing a party for the Venetians; he just asked that his guests dispense alms at their own expense, in lieu of wedding gifts. Those pre-modern peasants who expected goose pie now and then might have thought this a contemptibly cheapskate approach, especially given the degree of magnificence expected of a figure such as Bezos.

But a simpler interpretation is that the protests are a natural reaction to what figures such as Bezos represent: both in terms of financial inequality, but more profoundly still in power. Taylor Swift has the kind of reality-altering wealth that can close entire streets in midtown Manhattan on the nation’s 250th Independence Day holiday weekend, and build a fairy-tale film-set castle inside an iconic concert arena, in near-total secrecy. Normal people, quite naturally, find this unnerving. What else might she do with that power?

Swift evinces little interest in more hard-edged uses of her clout. But her wealth — in old-fashioned terms, we’d say “rank” — abuts the kind of individual power that can change regimes, massage markets, or redraw continental maps. All the hue and cry over other household-name billionaires, such as Bezos, the Soros family, Elon Musk, or Peter Thiel, ultimately turns on this recognition of power on a par with nation-states. Are the individuals wielding it friends, or enemies? Does it even matter what any of us thinks? If we rubberneck at billionaire weddings, and project fantasies or protests onto their lives and desires, it’s because we correctly intuit that they could do things we might never even dream of. They are, in a very concrete sense, not like us.

Is this new hierarchy gonna be forever? Some think AI will make it vastly more extreme. Should we simply accept this state of affairs, and say thanks for the left-over pastries? Resisters say we can tax these new plutocrats back into line: can the faltering middle classes still resist? Is this all, as Taylor Swift’s wedding favors didn’t say, gonna go down in flames?

It’s probably too early to tell. But if I were to guess, I’d say that in the end the excited queue for pastries will outnumber the angry mob. Provided, that is, our new, glittering overclass manage to re-learn the lordly art not just of magnificence, but also of feast-day hospitality.

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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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. 

Yet next year, it looks like there won’t be a Food Lovers Festival in Malton. Nor will the town continue to host its monthly specialist food market. The annual Malton 10k — a running event with gourmet snack stations — is also off. Most gallingly of all, there will be no Christmas market in Malton this December, depriving the town’s traders of one of their most important weekends of the year. And all this was announced when traders were already deep into preparations, leaving them little time to make alternative arrangements.

The decision to cancel (almost) all food-related events in the food capital of Yorkshire comes down to one entity: the Fitzwilliam Estate, which owns more than 60% of Malton’s commercial property. The Estate is controlled by Tom Naylor-Leyland. Malton has been in his family since 1713, although it is only a tiny portion of a vast portfolio which also includes the 15,000-acre Wentworth estate, Milton Hall, in Cambridgeshire, and the 17th-century Nantclwyd Hall in Denbighshire. Nonetheless, until recently, it was a portion in which he took a special interest. It was Naylor-Leyland who decided Malton should become a foodie destination; now, apparently, he has decided that should change.

Back in the 2000s, Malton was a typical small British town, fading away as its younger population constantly flowed away to where the jobs were. But Naylor-Leyland saw potential: Yorkshire food was celebrated elsewhere in the country, so why not capitalize on the place it comes from? The estate invested heavily in food businesses, and many producers relocated to Malton to take advantage of the thriving scene. Now those same producers have been hung out to dry by the local aristocrat. The loss of the festival is a particular blow, one local trader (who asked to remain anonymous because he’s a tenant of the estate) tells me: not only did this account for a significant proportion of his takings, but it also brought new people to the town.

“I don’t think this will immediately put people out of business, or if it does, that business was in trouble anyway,” he says. “But what I can’t account for is the slow grind of people not coming to Malton. Without the festival, Malton will end up like any other Yorkshire town.”

For the producers who’ve been drawn in over the last 13 years by Naylor-Leyland’s promises and are now locked into leases, it’s a betrayal, and one made worse by the way the news was delivered: “All local businesses found out through the press and local gossip groups, and there’s no clarity or sense. We still don’t know for sure what’s happening.”

In a statement, the Fitzwilliam Estate (which did not respond to a request for comment for this article) claimed it had done its best to contact all affected businesses, and blamed the cancellation on “rising operating costs”, despite the fact that the last filed accounts show an increase in net assets from 2023 to 2024. But confusingly, the Estate went on to imply that the move away from markets was strategic: “Whilst the events bring welcome footfall and promotion for the town, this is often felt at peaks during the year, as opposed to all-year-round. We are dedicated to making Malton a go-to destination and thriving rural community where businesses can flourish year-round.”

This is, bluntly, nonsensical. The food industry is highly seasonal, and particularly for luxury goods, the lead-in to Christmas is where the profits come from. Producers rely on the feasts to get them through the leaner times. The idea of consumers thoughtfully spreading their posh food budget across the entire year, rather than blowing through it all during Advent, is a bizarre fantasy. The Estate cannot possibly be serious about this.

But the Estate doesn’t need to be serious. Malton is its possession, and it can do as it pleases. Naylor-Leyland has cheerfully played the part of the enthusiastic dilettante, saying in one interview: “I never studied accounting — I probably should have. But if you look at it only that way, you would struggle. You have to connect with people and bring them along with you.” It’s just bad luck for everyone who “connected” with him up till now that he’s decided not to “bring them along” any further.

Besides, Naylor-Leyland appears to have other priorities these days. Though his Instagram is @tominmalton, he hasn’t posted about the town since May this year. Instead, his attention is focused on a very different enterprise: his wife Alice Naylor-Leyland’s “tablescaping” and interiors company, Mrs. Alice, which recently launched in the US.
(Tom Naylor-Leyland is the second-biggest shareholder in Mrs. Alice after his wife, and a director of the company; in her own social media, she likes to refer to him as “Mr Alice”. )

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On Alice Naylor-Leyland’s Instagram, Malton is never mentioned at all. The couple and their children live in a big pile in Cambridgeshire, and own a flat in Chelsea. Alice Naylor-Leyland has also alluded in interviews to a family home in Wales (“stunning”) and her father’s house in the Bahamas (“heaven on earth!”), but apparently the food capital of Yorkshire has never captured her imagination. In fact, she doesn’t seem very interested in food at all: she’s much more enthused by all the non-edible things you can lay out for dinner guests.

Tablescaping, according to Alice Naylor-Leyland, is an “art”. “For my table decor, I am really inspired by the seasons,” she has said. “I use whatever I can find in my garden and then layer with complementary colors and textures.” Luckily for mere plebs who don’t have access to the flora of multiple estates, there is another way to tablescape: buy a £200 box of tat from Mrs. Alice to ensure your guests know you’ve made an effort. Is a dinner party even a dinner party without a Joy of Autumn Decoration set featuring, among other things, three kinds of velvet mushroom and a set of “owlettes”? And while you’re stocking up, don’t forget to pick up Mr. & Mrs. Fall Squirrel (£28) and Tomasina the Turkey (£32 the pair) to complete your look.

What’s most notable here isn’t the fact that adult women are being convinced to buy what are, effectively, overpriced toys you can’t even play with; it’s that the marketing is all US-centric. Brits don’t have “fall”, we have autumn. But then Brits, on the whole, are resistant to this kind of flannel from the upper classes: we know that someone with a houseful of heirlooms isn’t really “inspired” by a polymer pumpkin.

It’s the Americans who are suckers for this stuff: according to a recent interview in The Telegraph, the US accounts for 65% of Mrs Alice’s sales. In the states, continued the breathless copy, “she’s regarded as a Martha Stewart for the Instagram age”. It’s silly to politicize a set of beaded velvet mushrooms (£66), but Mrs. Alice is surely just the ticket for the MAGA elite and those who aspire to join it: conspicuous consumption with the taste stripped out, hinting at a fantasy of elevated WASP origins.

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Alongside the article, there was a picture of Alice Naylor-Leyland dressed in a lavish green ballgown standing next to a table heaving with coordinated knick-knacks, in the grounds of Bath’s Prior Park. “I’m unashamedly into the frills and the fun of dressing up,” she trilled to the journalist. “But then, you’ve got one shot at this life. Why hold back?” It’s an image of purest Marie Antoinette: the noblewoman playing at pastoralism. Meanwhile her family estate’s subjects are left facing an uncertain future thanks to the Fitzwilliam Estate’s act of caprice.

It is bizarre to think that in modern Britain, practically a whole town can be handed down as an inheritance, then reshaped according to the landowner’s whim — and abruptly palmed off when those whims change. But under the skin of modernity, this remains a deeply feudal nation, and Malton is paying the price of that truth. The town has been treated like a table to be “scaped”: tinkered with until it made a pleasing showcase for its owner’s wealth, then bundled back into its box. “The town has been treated as a plaything of the rich and landed gentry,” says the trader I speak to. “He’s done with us, and we need to work out how to pick up the pieces.”

Mrs. Alice sells Americans the dream of gracious British country living, while her husband guts the business model that for 13 years has enabled actual country-dwellers to make a living. It is cruel, but it should not be surprising. Tom Naylor-Leyland was able to present himself as a caring “steward” to Malton, when he should always have properly been described as its owner. Strip away the gentle euphemisms from Britain’s unequal society, and the injustice of it all becomes as crassly obvious as a gold glitter pheasant in the middle of your table.

I’ll spare you further analysis of his proposed programme for the “BRUV Party”, aka Britain Restoring Underlying Values, save to say that “BBC Punishment” merits an essay on its own. But his foray into politics is perhaps less a serious proposal than a symptom of the accelerating collapse of legitimacy across almost all of mainstream British institutional politics. More profoundly still, the shake-up now underway isn’t just of political parties or ideologies, but of the mechanisms themselves: a tectonic shift, in which ancient forms of power are re-emerging, and the terms of political engagement are suddenly radically up for grabs.

The backdrop to this is the decisive Covid-era shift, across the West, to a digital-first culture: a transformation has proved two-edged for the very elites who promoted it hardest. Our newly digitised world looked, at first blush, like a final consolidation of wealth and power for globalising, post-national and monolithically liberal oligarchy of “knowledge workers” or as NS Lyons put it, “Virtuals”, over those reactionary “Physicals”, the peons doomed to mere real-world toil. This is all true; but it has also turned out to be a powerful amplification device for any renegade oligarch willing to take (or even just appear to take) the peons’ side.

What this has, in turn, exposed is a world in which nation-states on the post-1945 model are not yet fully redundant — but where these entities, their associated political forms and processes, and their mechanisms for generating political legitimacy map at best uneasily onto the new reality of where power actually rests. For digital wealth consolidation has catapulted us back into a world of lords and princes: titans whose riches accord them a status more akin to (say) a Lorenzo de Medici than anything the West has seen since the two World Wars.

It was the actions of such a prince — Elon Musk — that tipped last November’s Presidential election for Trump, first by buying Twitter (now X) and then by triggering a preference cascade that moved several other tech princes to the Trump side. And it’s Musk, too, behind the brickbats currently raining down on Starmer in relation to the grooming gangs, a campaign of posting persecution that’s generated so much noise and chaos it appears to have spurred Tate to launch the “BRUV Party”.

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This in turn highlights another aspect of the new feudal order: namely that these lords and princes are beginning to test their strength against elements of the legacy political system. Once an individual’s net worth is higher than the GDP of a medium-sized nation-state, after all, it is far from clear who ranks higher: plutocrat or Prime Minister? This is the broader context in which a domino-chain of internet events led from Musk trolling Starmer with the UK’s shameful record on the rape gangs, to a kickboxing (alleged) “loverboy” announcing his intention to stand for Parliament and replace him.

For if Musk’s status and role doesn’t compute at all, in terms of the postwar order, it makes perfect sense as a 21st-century update of a medieval one. He is fabulously wealthy, commands a principal field for political battle, is an enthusiastic and unabashedly partisan participant in that battlefield, and (not unconnectedly) also most favoured courtier to the man soon to enter office as leader of the world’s preeminent superpower – and who now, also not unconnectedly, owes Musk a favour. This all adds up to a rank and power perhaps akin, in the pre-democratic world, to “grand duke”: below kings and emperors, but above mere sovereign princes or dukes.

How does a grand duke — the real, toothy kind, not the handshaking ceremonial modern sort — interact with elected heads of state who offend him? To his sorrow, Keir Starmer is in the process of finding out. Since Starmer displeased Musk last summer with his conduct during the Southport riots, Musk has pursued an escalating war of words, that intensified recently when Musk began a campaign of X amplification of the ongoing rape gang scandal.

Musk’s declarations that Starmer should be in prison, and polls on whether the USA should “liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government”, have now prompted Downing St to hit back on his “lies and misinformation”. The pearl-clutching in Westminster is such that (according to the BBC’s Nicholas Watt) his “incendiary remarks” have prompted “absolute horror at the highest levels of government” and could even threaten the UK-US security relationship.

So far though, slap-downs in the usual diplomatic register have not had the desired effect. A postmodern Grand Duke with an American passport and more money than the GDP of Finland is testing his political weight against a democratically elected, but widely hated, leader of a state so dysfunctional that some erstwhile loyal subjects are beginning to complain that its principal means of keeping order is subjecting the nation’s ethnic majority to colonial-style repression. And this leader has now discovered that the handbook of modern British politics contains no advice on how to survive the encounter.

Only time will tell if he does. Meanwhile, others in this Grand Duke’s more immediate orbit are also being brusquely schooled as to the proper forms of deference. Musk has previously indicated his support for Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, and before Christmas was rumoured to have been in talks with the party about making a large donation. But then Musk expressed his support for the Right-wing provocateur Tommy Robinson in connection with his activism on grooming gangs, and in response, Farage countersignalled both Robinson and Musk’s views on his GB News show. Now Musk appears to have cooled not just on the donation but also on Farage, posting on X that he “doesn’t have what it takes” to lead the party.

Once we pan out of all this pandemonium about rape, immigration, racism, Farage, Starmer, foreign political interference, “the far-Right” and the rest, we’re left with a big unanswered question. What is the relative status of elected leaders and postmodern lords and princes? The latter aren’t “legitimate” in the sense of elected, after all; but by virtue of their position, they’re able to re-order political and cultural realities around themselves, like iron filings round a magnet.

Musk’s influence-peddling is obviously extra-democratic, in this sense. But many other more progressively inclined lords and princes meddle openly in the democratic process without triggering nearly the same fury. Given this, for most, the outrage over Musk’s interventions may be less about the meddling as such, than anger at a major player siding with the plebs over the bureaucracy for a change.

But Musk is himself, in some respects as close as a knowledge worker can get to being a Physical, which is to say someone who works in the “real” world of atoms rather than bits. As evidenced by his achievements with SpaceX and Starlink, he’s less a data manipulator or finance guy than a visionary engineer, in the tradition of such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel. And this somewhat closer relation to materiality may have accorded him enough pragmatism to recognise what Peter Turchin has warned: that while, historically, elites have often been selfish and frequently exploitative of the lower orders, it doesn’t follow from this that you can simply ignore the peasantry’s interests altogether. The strong may, as Thucydides observed, do what they can, while the weak suffer what they must; but history is littered with elites that didn’t survive the weak deciding they’d had enough and taking collective action.

In other words: even if we don’t strictly live under liberal democracy any more, political legitimacy still matters — just as it did before everyone could vote. But how a leader gains that legitimacy seems once again to be up for grabs. It’s no longer necessarily enough just to win an election, as illustrated by the swiftness with which Keir Starmer’s “historic landslide win” was followed by plummeting popularity, curdling to widespread loathing. If Trump is anything to go by, it works the other way round: you garner political legitimacy first, using the international personality-plebiscite engine called “the internet”, and only then confirm it via elections.

This has left us in a bizarre position. The serious money and power has retreated and consolidated, into an international, borderless power-structure more neo-feudal than liberal-democratic. Public discourse itself — now a crucial engine of mass political legitimacy — is owned by the lords of this post-national, post-democratic overclass. Meanwhile, we still have to keep going through the national electoral motions, even though these are dominated by a bureaucratic class that no longer believes in nation-states, and is incapable of thinking outside the political dogmas that lock in our ongoing dysfunction — because we still can’t (and surely don’t want to) entirely do without them.

Now, though, one of the real overclass has made a hobby of poking fun at the Potemkin leadership this has produced in Britain. Under this assault, both our creaking institutions and the chancers and stuffed shirts that inhabit them, look so absurd that sleazy influencers are popping up to get in on the act, LARPing “getting elected” for clicks like Instagram tradwives pretending to ferment yoghurt for a video. It is difficult to see this situation resulting, at least in the short term, in anything but more chaos. And perhaps the only way out would be a political leader able to bridge the divide: a talent for garnering meme-lord adulation, and also a willingness to smash sacred cows, in the name of getting things done.

Could that be Prime Minister Tate? I struggle to picture it, though I’ve been wrong before. Perhaps it’s a forlorn hope, but it remains my wish that when Anglo-Bukelism finally, inevitably arrives, it will have better taste in cardigans than Tate Britain.

I’m not referring to the so-called “neo-feudalism” described by Joel Kotkin — a socially ruinous and politically dangerous polarisation of wealth within nations where the middle class is rapidly vanishing. This primarily economic phenomenon is more accurately described as an extreme form of oligarchy. It is a product of liberal globalisation.

What I see developing is an alternative system of relationships among armed world powers, one which we might call “feudal globalisation.” Liberal globalisation seeks to universalise a “rules-based” order of nation-states cooperating to facilitate economic prosperity and to elevate mutual consent as much as possible over physical violence, which serves as a last resort when negotiation fails. Feudal globalisation embraces intimidation and violent domination of people and resources — embraces it forthrightly, except when trying to play the rhetorical game of liberal norms for diplomatic purposes, as Vladimir Putin occasionally does in his territorial claims.

Putin is one of the great lords in this alternative system. His vassals include the presidents of Syria, Belarus, and (to a lesser degree) Turkey. When Viktor Yanukovich was president of Ukraine, his was shaping up to be such a vassal regime, and there are rumours that when Putin began his invasion he had hopes of reinstalling him. Iran, Xi’s China, and Maduro’s Venezuela are also players in this alternative system. A year ago, Anne Applebaum dubbed this cadre of heads of state “Autocracy Inc.”.

Meanwhile, in the US, Shivshankar Menon, a former National Security Adviser to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, recently observed that large a part of the “foreign policy establishment… has embarked on an ideological quest to divide the world between democracies and autocracies”. This is certainly how the Biden administration frames the stakes of its opposition to Russia in Ukraine.

This belief rests on the assumption that we are engaged in a struggle over what kind of nation states will shape world politics. But if this 400-year-old premise is really what is at issue, then something structurally deeper than democracy is at stake — namely, the question of whether world politics will operate according to nation-state logic or feudal logic.

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Applebaum helpfully points out how the feudal alternative functions as a system:

“Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy, but by sophisticated networks … connected not only within a given country, but among many countries. The corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with the corrupt, state-controlled companies in another. The police in one country can arm, equip, and train the police in another…. Their links are … designed to take the edge off Western economic boycotts.”

It is crucial to recognise, however, that these networks do not only consist of states and entities within them. Since the end of the Cold War, militarised “sub-state actors” have multiplied and taken on increasing importance in this system. As strategic analysts Ramon Blecua and Douglas Ollivant observe: “The influence of powerful non-state actors is becoming more relevant at shaping state policy than the classic power competition among states… The presence of this myriad of sub-state actors means that if one is looking only at states, one is missing a good part of the picture.”

In feudal globalisation, these sub-state actors serve as lesser vassals to the lords who, in the classic formulation by Max Weber, maintain a monopoly on the permissible use of violent force within their defined territories. In Blecua and Ollivant’s words, sub-state actors’ “capacity to mobilise support among local constituencies gives them some sort of legitimacy, and their control over the use of force in a certain territory provides a quasi-state character to them”.

In Syria, for example, “Iran and Russia finance their proxies directly without going through the Syrian Government, and thus exert real control over military operations. This means that Assad finds himself in the uncomfortable position of being a vassal sovereign in a land ruled by armed bands of uncertain allegiances.” Similarly, the militias that Russia has supported in the Donbas region of Ukraine for nearly a decade have prepared the ground for the recent “referenda” held there.

The basic character of the state as a monopoliser of violence is crucial for understanding the history that is playing itself out now as these monopolies increasingly falter. In land-based feudalism, the capacity for violence is necessarily decentralised; it resides in and is primarily for the defence of local agrarian economies. Only rarely and with difficulty can it be organised to serve the purposes of monarchs.

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After the Second World War and the founding of the UN, and especially during the period of decolonisation, the aspiration to a global system of nation-states dominated the political imagination. Our world maps with their clearly drawn national borders reinforce this wishful picture. Nevertheless, there continued to be plenty of “failed states”— or in other words, regions of the world where the nation-state never managed to really catch on and sub-state groups continued to exercise violence and local control. The history of Colombia, for instance, is a story of ever-recurring civil wars, and today roughly two-thirds of the territory of this “nation-state” is ruled by rival militant groups, corporations employing mercenaries, and drug cartels.

During the Cold War, a kind of vassalage to one of the competing Superpowers was usually the best option for sub-state groups seeking more power. The Superpowers generally hoped to help their vassal groups become the monopolising state powers, and thus the illusion could be sustained that, in one way or another, history was moving toward a global nation-state system. And so for decades, the United States supported the Nicaraguan Contras as a rival to the socialist Sandinista regime, though the Contras seem to have had more success entangling themselves with drug profiteers than in making progress toward taking over the state.

Now, after the Cold War, the illusion that the nation-state system is history’s endgame is ceasing to be quite so convincing. Decentralised feudal order is returning — and sub-state groups have a variety of attractive options for alliances with powerful patrons.

This feudal order, however, is not based on agrarian economies. It is based on resources and products that yield money. The money supports warlords and soldiers and buys sophisticated weapons, and the warlords’ well-armed soldiers control the resources —petroleum, minerals, narcotic crops — that generate money. Like the Mafia, many militarised groups straddle the lines drawn by “rules-based” liberalism between criminal and legitimate profit. Mexican gangs, reports The Economist, “are no longer just drug-peddlers. They traffic people, steal oil and control the markets for avocados, tortillas and chicken in some states.” They have also doubled in number since 2010, and their violence plagues Mexico. Now that Cold War pressures no longer give a decisive advantage to a small number of large groups with putatively state-building aspirations, opportunities abound for militarised local powers to forge profitable dominions and alliances of interest.

There are even reasons to think that, in the competition for access to and control of resources, feudal globalisation has begun to have some advantages over liberal globalisation. Cartels, militias and autocrats don’t have to worry much about satisfying liberal international norms or watchdog groups when offering carrots and sticks to local populations or corruptible governments.

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One of the great liabilities of liberal democracies in this contest may be the very one that seemed to be its great strength in the “end of history” euphoria: its faith in its own legitimacy. When I earlier cited Weber’s description of the state, some will have noticed that I substituted “monopoly on permissible violence” for Weber’s “monopoly on legitimate violence” — the latter being more apt as a description that privileges the self-conception of the liberal state. The “monopoly on permissible violence” better reflects the psychology of autocratic states and is adaptable to the brutal reign of sub-state actors. While all ruling bodies offer justifications for their rule, the need for a sense of legitimacy, of being fundamentally in accord with a deeper lawfulness, is in some way distinctive to liberal states.

The historical reasons for this need are complex, with roots in the legal culture developed in medieval Europe. But it is not hard to see that liberal democracies are experiencing an acute crisis of legitimacy in our time. Liberal political theory legitimates the state’s monopoly on violence by promising to use it to protect potential victims of violence, but liberal states are riven by disagreements about who qualifies as victim and deserves this protection, what constitutes violence, and what forms of violence are permissible or tolerable.

These internal crises of legitimacy render it increasingly difficult for foreign policy elites to sustain national commitments to liberal globalisation. Citizens are asked to make real sacrifices in the service of a project that shows little promise of succeeding and seems increasingly fantastical; and the unwavering commitment of many to this quixotic agenda further erodes the sense of liberal democratic legitimacy at home. While Putin may have unexpectedly breathed some new life into the Nato alliance, the cost of sanctions for domestic politics within the member states may be further loss of trust in ruling elites and, along with it, of faith in the legitimacy of the liberal order.

During the Cold War, liberal states could ally themselves with some unsavoury rulers and sub-state actors under the colour of ultimately promoting the vision of liberal globalisation in opposition to the communist vision. This accorded tolerably well with the need for a sense of the legitimacy of their foreign policy choices.

Today, however, as the rest of the world turns increasingly feudal, realistic foreign policy may require liberal states to ally themselves with forces manifestly out of step with the programme of liberal globalisation. Failure to resolve this conundrum is likely to hasten their collapse — and thus ensure the victory of globalised feudalism.

The Delavals are no longer in residence, though. When the male line died out in 1814, the estate passed through marriage to the Astleys of Melton Constable in Norfolk — holders of the ancient barony of Hastings — and that’s why, as well as working for Edward Delaval Henry Astley, 22nd Baron Hastings, in the gift shop of his stately home, I spent my youth hanging out in Astley Park, collecting glasses in the Astley Arms or waiting for the bus on Astley Road to attend Astley High. (Our school’s local rivals at Ridley High were named for the viscounts who’d turned their Blyth fiefdom into a Victorian boomtown, and whose scion has just stood down from the House of Lords.)

“The feudal tradition is strong in Northumberland,” wrote the sociologist Henry Mess in 1928, and well into the 20th century, half of the county was held in great estates of over 10,000 acres. This was in part a legacy of the way the Far North of England had been governed in the Middle Ages. Being far from the royal centres of power in the South, and on the frontier with the usually hostile Kingdom of Scotland, a caste of Northumbrian warlords (and, uniquely in Durham, a Prince Bishop) were given quasi-royal authority to muster armies, hold courts, and punish disobedience. As Parliament treated the defence of the border as a purely local affair, and never raised any taxes for this purpose, they relied on the few northern magnates and their retainers, whom they compensated by adding barony to barony and office to office — until, by the 14th century, the greater part of England north of the Trent was held by the three great Houses of Neville, Lancaster and Percy.

The greatest of the blue-blooded Northumbrian magnates were the Earls, and later the Dukes, of Northumberland. One history of the House of Percy has noted that in the tumultuous North, the “Southern king’s writ hardly ran. In Percy country, there was Percy law backed by a Percy army paid for by Percy money”. The dynasty began with a Norman knight from Calvados who was granted lands in northern England. In the following centuries the family’s fortunes rose and fell with the vagaries of court politics, but they always had their Northumbrian stronghold at Alnwick Castle, from which they dominated the lands from the Tweed to the Tyne — with the assistance of lower-ranking armigerous families like the Delavals of Seaton.

By the 18th century the male line had died out, and, in an aristocratic sleight of hand, Sir Hugh Smithson — an obscure but wealthy Yorkshire baronet who had married a descendent of the last Percy Earl of Northumberland — assumed the famous surname and was elevated to ducal status. (Marcel Proust was fascinated by the sonority and evocation of high lineage of certain ancient titles and was always delighted when he came upon the name of the Duke of Northumberland, which he thought had a “sort of thunderous quality”.)

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Not all of England’s landed gentry had the good luck to find that their estates contained colossal mineral wealth, and as David Cannadine showed in The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, the 20th century saw them lose a generation of sons in the First World War — as well as much of their prosperity, prestige and power, as they were assailed by death duties and democratic politics. It wasn’t long after Lloyd George’s famous speech in Newcastle in 1909 — where he quipped that “a fully-equipped duke costs as much to keep up as two Dreadnoughts; and dukes are just as great a terror” — that the House of Lords lost its powers of veto over the commons, a key watershed in British history.

But while other great houses struggled to repel these assaults on their privileges, this was not the fate of the Kings of the North. As Henry Mess pointed out, “there is not the sharp divorce between feudalism and the new industrialism which is found in most other areas”. For the vast landholdings of the Percy dukes included some of the richest coalfields in Britain. This made their fortune and saw them take their place in the North East among a new industrial aristocracy of sharp-elbowed “Lords of Coal” — a group so wealthy that at her wedding to the Scots nobleman John Lyon in 1767, Mary Eleanor, the daughter of the Durham coal baron Sir George Bowes, was probably the richest heiress in Europe. The dynasty they founded led directly to the marriage of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon to the Duke of York in 1923: Queen Elizabeth II carries the DNA of hard-nosed Tyneside coal-owners.

The Percy family has survived setbacks. When George Orwell wrote in The Lion and the Unicorn that the “English ruling class are morally fairly sound” because “in time of war they are ready enough to get themselves killed”, he probably had in mind Lieutenant Alan Percy, the 9th Duke of Northumberland, who, in an odd echo of Harry Hotspur, fell leading a bayonet charge by the Grenadier Guards on the retreat to Dunkirk. The death of the playboy 11th Duke in 1995 after an amphetamine overdose was another blow. But the Percys endured by diversifying their coal wealth into a vast property portfolio, which has secured their place in the Sunday Times Rich List ever since.

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Certainly in comparison to, say, the Australian-born 13th Duke of Manchester, who was jailed for burglary in Las Vegas in 2016, the Percy family maintains a certain Edwardian grandeur, with their great castle in the country and Syon House, opposite Kew Gardens: a luxurious seat in the capital. Indeed, few places could match the Ruritanian splendour of Lady Melissa Percy’s marriage in 2013 when she travelled with her father Ralph (“Rafe”), the 12th Duke, through Alnwick with a retinue of liveried footmen in the yellow state coach that had carried the 3rd Duke of Northumberland to the coronation of the Bourbon King Charles X in Reims in 1825.

The Percy family still maintains a visible presence in the public life of the region. Among other patronages, the Duke of Northumberland is the President of the Charitable Community Foundation, and his wife is the Lord Lieutenant of the county of which she is the Duchess. There was even a charity football match at St James’ Park in 2007 between the North and South of the region, where star players such as Alan Shearer and Niall Quinn turned out under the respective colours of the Duke of Northumberland and the Earl of Durham to raise money for the Prince’s Trust. But the longevity of Northumbrian aristocrats like the Percys of Alnwick has been a story of adaptability — and alliance.

On Hood Street in Newcastle, just near the Theatre Royal, stands the graceful premises of one of the oldest private members clubs in the world. “The Northern Counties” was founded in 1829 by the nobility and gentry of Northumberland and Durham, and a painting on the Club’s main staircase shows a gathering of red-tailcoated Northumbrian grandees in the Fifties, including the Duke himself, with Viscounts Ridley and Allendale, and Field Marshal Sir Francis Festing (whose son Matthew became, in 2008, the Prince and Grand Master of the Order of Malta) — alongside representatives of the local monied classes who’d gentrified themselves through the coal trade.

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It’s somehow apt, therefore, that the family with the greatest fossil fuel-based wealth of all now has a major presence in the birthplace of carboniferous capitalism. When the Duke of Northumberland’s niece Lucy Cuthbert married the Saudi Prince Khalid bin Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud in 2011, few could’ve predicted that this would foreshadow the purchase of Newcastle United by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia ten years later. And it was striking, too, to observe that at the first match at St James’ Park after the Saudi takeover in October 2021, there in the director’s box next to the club’s new chairman, His Excellency Yasir Al-Rumayyan, were representatives of the old and new Geordie aristocracy, as the 5th Viscount Ridley took his place alongside the famous presenting duo (and Ambassadors of the Princes Trust): Anthony McPartland and Declan Donnelly.

As they entered the 21st century, the Percys could justifiably look out from the ramparts of Alnwick Castle with some confidence, knowing that if they face a cashflow problem they can always look down the back of the sofa for a spare Raphael. And yet the deference that they once enjoyed — and expected — is harder to sustain. When the 5th Duke’s tenants gathered for their annual dinner in 1859 they could still state their loyalty to the Percys with unfeigned enthusiasm:

Those relics of the feudal yoke
Still in the north remain unbroke:
That social yoke, with one accord
That binds the peasant to his Lord…

And yet just this year The Times reported a “second peasants revolt” as the citizens of Amble mustered in defiance of the Duke’s plans to build new homes on an area of common land. The relics of feudalism may live on in Northumberland, but the ties of lord and peasant, it seems, have started to fray.

On the one hand, hundreds of thousands of small and medium businesses were forced to shut down, triggering one of the worst jobs crises since the Great Depression. In 2020 alone, workers around the world cumulatively lost $3.7 trillion in earnings — an 8.3% decline.

On the other, a handful of mega-corporations, particularly in the Big Tech and Big Pharma sectors, have made a killing, raking in hundreds of billions more in “pandemic super-profits” than over the previous four-year average. Topping the list are behemoths such as Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Facebook, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca and Merck.

The success of the Tech giants — Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Facebook — is easily explained. As people found themselves confined to their homes, they turned to the internet for pretty much everything: shopping, dining, working, schooling, entertainment, socialising, even sex. In other words, what represented a curse for countless small and medium traditional businesses, represented a blessing for a handful of corporate behemoths.

The golden egg for the pharmaceutical companies, however, came later with the vaccines: the companies behind two of the most successful Covid-19 vaccines — Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna — made combined profits of $34 billion in 2021. And if the “new normal” ends up including permanent booster shots, such super-profits will become the norm. Crucially, these profits are then distributed to shareholders who predominantly belong to the richest 1% of society. It’s hardly surprising then that billionaires around the world saw their wealth increase by $3.9 trillion just in 2020. As Oxfam starkly put it in a recent report: “The wealth of the 10 richest men has doubled, while the incomes of 99% of humanity are worse off”.

To see what this means in practice, one need only turn to Latin America, whose billionaires increased their wealth by 52% during the pandemic. In Mexico, meanwhile, multimillionaires saw their wealth increase by 31.4% in 2021 alone. On the other hand, over the last two years, 78 million people in the region were plunged into extreme poverty, while 13% of children abandoned education altogether.

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In Africa, where low-income countries predominate, the picture is equally stark. A report this month noted that not only had GDP fallen by as much as 7.8% in some cases, but that remittances from abroad had fallen by 25%. In a context where remittances from rich countries accounted for over half of private capital flows to Africa shortly prior to the pandemic, this has had a devastating effect on the daily economy, with over 40 million additional people in extreme poverty.

Couple this with a debt crisis, and it is not surprising that the impact on daily lives has been devastating: in Angola, a recent report described how youth unemployment doubled to nearly 60% in the past two years. Meanwhile, the continent’s billionaires have seen an uptick in their fortunes, as elsewhere; a January report from Nigeria found that Africa’s 18 billionaires had seen their wealth increase by 15% in 2021 alone.

Yet in many ways this is a global phenomenon; on every continent, there has been a hyper-concentration of wealth, and poorer communities have suffered. Wealth has been further racialised, with minority communities suffering the most in rich countries, and poorer continents the worst affected.

Why, then, have Left-leaning commentators supported the policies that have led to these terrible outcomes?

The usual explanation is that these impacts were an inevitable impact of the pandemic. And yet the evidence for this is weak, not least because most of those affected by the virus have been elderly people often beyond an age of active employment. In Africa, a 1% increase in mortality from Covid in a country like Nigeria cannot explain the 20% collapse in formal employment. In fact, Tanzania — one of the very few countries that did not impose Covid restrictions in 2020 — was also almost the only country in Africa to see its GDP increase, by as much as 5% according to some reports. Meanwhile in Sweden, where restrictions were much milder than in the rest of Europe, the country returned to pre-pandemic levels of production by the middle of 2021, in contrast to many other European countries (while registering lower per capita mortality rates than many other countries).

And so it seems that the staggering increase in inequality, and in the concentration of capital, must be the consequence of the Covid response measures, not of Covid-19. What, then, are some of the likely consequences of this massive accumulation of capital by a tiny number of people, expropriated from SME owners and the global working class?

A dystopian future seems to be emerging from the ashes of the pandemic — one in which not only is wealth more concentrated than ever in the hands of a small elite, but in which practically every sector of the economy is dominated by a handful of all-powerful mega-corporations. Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that those who have most profited from the pandemic response, such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, also supported that response and removed information from their portals which criticised it.

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However, there’s a further element that makes this scenario even more disturbing, if possible, and that is the growing consolidation not only within, but also between, sectors. This becomes evident when we look at the investment funds that actually “own” these corporations. BlackRock and Vanguard are the two largest asset management firms in the world, respectively managing $10 and $8 trillion. That’s 3.7 and 3 times more than the UK’s annual GDP. These two funds are the top “owners” of all the major Big Pharma (Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Merck), Big Tech (Facebook, Twitter) and Big Media (New York Times, Time Warner, Comcast, Disney, News Corp) corporations. Even more worrying is the fact that despite having shareholdings of “only” 5-7% in these companies, there is growing evidence that institutional investors such as BlackRock and Vanguard try to influence company management and boards on strategy.

It would appear that these funds also coordinate among themselves. When analysing the voting behaviour in board meetings of the two funds, researchers found that they coordinate it through centralised corporate governance departments. This is hardly surprising if we consider that BlackRock and Vanguard are also each other’s main institutional investors: in other words, they partially “own” each other through cross-shareholding. So, we are effectively in the presence of a single super-entity that “owns” and controls a huge chunk of the Western economy. While this was already the case before the pandemic, the latter has accelerated this trend. More importantly, it has brought to the surface the way in which these funds, through their cross-sector corporate control, can “harmonise” these companies’ behaviour to further their interests.

We can see this in the case of debate around pandemic strategies on social media, and the censorship exercised today by social media platforms against any critical voice, no matter how qualified. A good example might be the removal from YouTube of a video of a senior editor of the British Medical Journal, Peter Doshi, discussing the Pfizer Covid vaccine trial in a US Senate hearing — in which among other things Doshi had questioned the accuracy of the reporting of the Pfizer vaccine effectiveness.

This is worrying in itself. But it becomes even more worrying when we consider that the companies selling the vaccine, the media outlets shaping the mainstream vaccine narrative and the social media platforms enforcing that narrative are, to a large degree, “owned” and controlled by the same two funds: BlackRock and Vanguard, which, incidentally, are raking in billions from the vaccines. This harmonisation among sectors (and between the latter and governments) points to the rise of a new ultra-powerful complex — the techno-media-pharma (TMP) complex. This is evident in increased “synergies” between these sectors: take Google’s growing investments in the health, pharmaceutical and pandemic-prevention sectors, for example, or Amazon’s investment in Covid-19 research.

Of course, none of this would be possible without the active support of governments, which create an enabling environment that rewards participants in the TMP complex. This is evident, for example, in the secrecy, overpricing, cronyism, and inefficiency that has characterised Covid procurement deals: Covid tests, PPE, vaccines, and now vaccine passport technologies have all been parcelled out to transnational corporations without proper tendering processes or legislative oversight. In other words, this is not a scenario in which governments disappear, but rather one that relies on increasingly powerful and authoritarian state apparatuses furthering the interests of big capital.

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This is hardly surprising when we consider the extent to which these corporate giants have meshed with our political systems. The US is a good case in point. Obama was very close to Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, who later became a close collaborator of the Pentagon in developing military applications of AI. Today, Biden’s economic policies are heavily influenced by the director of the National Economic Council, Brian Deese, a former BlackRock executive. This ultra-elite is now in a position to shape every aspect of our lives — and it’s frankly terrifying.

If the Left is to recover from the catastrophic policies that it has supported during the pandemic, it must begin by recognising that it is lazy and misplaced to denounce those who point out these inconvenient truths: that wealth is hyper-concentrated as never before, that this is as a result of the policy choices during the pandemic, that these choices were unprecedented, and have been supported by those who enriched themselves enormously along the way, and censored any alternative point of view.

If we don’t want a world dominated by a very few ultra-wealthy people, and their vision for retaining that wealth, an unprecedented collective effort will be needed to fight for a different future. The huge TMP conglomerates will have to be broken up and their profits used for the benefit of all humanity, and not just their shareholders. This will be the struggle against the post-pandemic capitalist nightmare — and we are already losing.

But unlike the social democracy movements that followed World War Two, the New Socialism focusses not on material aspirations but on climate change, gender, and race. While the old socialism sought to represent the ordinary labourer, many on the Left today seem to have little more than contempt for old working-class base and its often less than genteel views on issues such as Critical Race Theory.

Yet perhaps the most critical difference between traditional socialism and its new form relates to growth. The New Socialism’s emphasis on climate change necessarily removes economic growth as a priority. Quite the opposite, in fact: the Green agenda looks instead towards a shrinking economy and lowered living standards, seeking to elevate favoured groups within a stagnant economy rather than generating opportunities for the general population.

As a result, this new variant of socialism seems more feudal than Marxist. As Edwin Aponte, editor of the socialist blog The Bellows, has observed, Marx opposed utopian socialists, with their dreams of a return to the cohesive social order of feudal times — instead, he favoured using technology and economic growth to lift them up.

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Did critical race theory lose Virginia?

By Joel Kotkin

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may not realise that the much-admired European socialist system was built on the back of a private sector. But the truth is that virtually all the successful welfare states — Germany, Netherlands, Scandinavia — rose on competitive economies: Swedish steel, Dutch chemicals, German machine tools and cars were critical to funding socialist programs in capitalist countries. But as this model slowly crumbles, as Europe loses its competitive edge to China and elsewhere, this lesson appears to have been forgotten. And in its place has risen a New Socialism that serves Wall Street, the City and the tech oligarchy.

The usual response from environmental activists is that the rapid transition to “zero carbon” will create oodles of new, well-paid jobs. In reality, however, these jobs generally pay less, offer fewer hours and are rarely unionised. The reality facing the middle class is an acceleration of our class divides and lower living standards. It’s long been de rigueur on the Green Left to cut back on homeownership, limit use of private cars or even fly on vacation. In other words, those who will suffer most are the very people whom socialism is supposed to save. Already energy poverty is on the rise in those places — from California to the EU — where punitive fuel costs have been increased.

Elsewhere, supply chain problems and inflation are now dismissed as “high-class problems”, even if it also means high prices for essentials such as milk, gas and rent. The Atlantic, a premier voice of the gentry Left, grumbles that “America’s central organizing principle is thoughtless consumption”, echoing the kind of homily handed out by Medieval clerics to disgruntled serfs.

Yet nowhere is the hierarchical nature of feudalistic socialism clearer than in the property markets. Social democrats may have once celebrated people owning homes or cars, but new green-tinged policies would lead to those becoming an option only for the rich, while opening a vast market for financial firms to buy single family homes and turn them into rentals. Just look at California, where Green progressives wield almost unlimited power, and which is now home to rising inequality, the nation’s highest poverty rate and the second lowest percentage of homeowners.

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Of course, this mindset is not confined to the Left. In the UK, for example, Boris Johnson’s Conservatives have proposed climate-based rules that would force homeowners — their political base — to retrofit their homes for thousands of pounds, while forcing them to abandon affordable gas heaters for less effective electric ones. This reflects what one socialist neatly labels “eco-Thatcherism in Britain“.

But there can be little doubt that the biggest change is taking place on the Left. Historically, the British and Australian Labour Parties, the French Socialist Party, America’s Democrats and Canada’s Liberals evolved from a strong working-class base. But in recent years, for both economic and cultural reasons, these parties have become dominated by professionals, academics and government workers increasingly bent on introducing paternalistic, puritan policies.

Ultimately, many of the old Left-wing parties may end up losing out to the ascendant Greens, who could be the real winners of the rise of New Socialism. It is not inconceivable that they could take power across Europe — particularly in Germany where the country’s traditional industrial base has shrunk. In the US, although there’s not much chance of the Greens challenging the ruling political duopoly, there are clear signs that the Democrats could find themselves torn between the need to represent both progressives and the party’s blue-collar base.

Yet it didn’t have to be this way. The Left’s Green policies might be big on virtue, but moves to eliminate energy and industrial jobs make no sense if we are going to depend on fossil fuels for at least the next few decades. It seems futile to be shutting down domestic pipelines, curbing energy production and raising electricity prices while begging the Saudis or the detestable Putin regime to drill more.

A more traditional socialist would promote domestic production, particularly natural gas, while also trying to shift production away from coal-dependent China, the world’s primary emitter. China’s Xi continues to build new coal plants and arrange for long-term oil supplies from the Middle East. Unlike our Left-wing parties, Xi knows the grip on keeping power rests on meeting the aspirations of his subjects, not dampening them.

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The West has lost its roots

By Paul Kingsnorth

To remain relevant, the Left needs to return to the basics. Social democracy, as first developed in places like Sweden, sought to bolster families, and allow for improvements in daily life. Throughout history, economic growth has been critical to making societies wealthier, while making it far easier to distribute salves to the poor, invest in environmental improvements and work to improve conditions for historically disadvantaged minorities. Good jobs and “economic expansion,” notes economic historian Benjamin Friedman, are the best antidote for “rising intolerance and incivility”.

Is there still hope for a more socially beneficial kind of socialism? Certainly, elements of the recently passed bipartisan infrastructure bill could help American industry compete with China. People, more than anything, want roads, bridges and ports fixed. But all this risks being undone if the Democrats continue to press for more extreme measures: more moderate Democrats will lose their seats, and the GOP will gain control of the House.

Many on the Left deny the electoral reality, and claim the party can only win by moving towards more assertive redistribution, anti-racist and draconian climate policies. Meanwhile, the Republicans are redoubling efforts to forge a social democratic agenda, crafting an aggressive programme of tax breaks for working families, upholding educational choice in states such as Virginia, and committing to aggressive re-shoring for industry. Florida’s Senator Marco Rubio has even called for a “divorce” with the financial and corporate elite.

It’s an encouraging sign, even though such moves will be adamantly opposed by the bearers of libertarian orthodoxy who have shaped the party for a generation and have the support of many of the party’s big funders. In the end, then, both the libertarians and feudal socialists could find themselves rejected by the majority of the population. After all, a society bedevilled by rising inequality, racial tensions, a pandemic and complex issues around climate change is as unlikely to accept honeyed words about ‘the market being efficient’ as it would tolerate an increasingly intrusive state that squashes their aspirations in the name of environmental virtue.

Something else is needed: policies that address the competitive economy while preserving upward mobility, economic growth and an environment improved by technological changes. In other words we need a socialism that is rooted in the needs of the working and middle classes — not one that seeks to keep them in their place.