Vance, in short, is rediscovering political gravity. And yet he remains the Right’s most viable and promising leader, and will likely retain that status regardless of what happens in November 2026 — or even 2028. Post-Trump, he is the only figure who can hold together a Republican Party that could otherwise easily splinter into four or five mutually suspicious factions. He has maintained bridges to each of these factions, and has learned to address himself acutely to the one anxiety all share, a fear that recently found a name — France.

France functions for America’s various conservative factions as a kind of crystal ball. In the looting, arson, and rioting that tore through major French cities over the past fortnight, America’s conservative groupings see their own future: that is, unless mass migration is halted and, at least to some extent, reversed. In France, they see the tipping point already past. So many culturally incompatible newcomers have piled on, in their telling, that society, properly speaking, is no more. What remains is an agglomeration of strangers, arrayed now in hostility, now in cold peace.

Several years’ worth of public and private conversations with Vance have convinced me that this is his central animating cause, the source of both his fears and his ambitions. The various factions on the Right, he feels, might have their disagreements — among themselves and with the Left — over issues ranging from tech policy to social welfare to war and peace. But all those other discussions must take second place to the complex of issues around immigration, assimilation, demography, and social cohesion.

For Vance, those other disagreements determine the shape of the polity — whereas the migration issue determines whether Americans have a polity at all. As he has repeatedly told me, it’s impossible to build up social solidarity “if society is always in flux”.

Turmoil in France has served as a foil for American statesmen going back to the two nations’ launch as twin revolutionary republics founded on Enlightenment ideals. Among the founding generation, Thomas Jefferson went furthest in championing the French revolutionary cause. As he saw it, the Jacobins had unleashed in the Old World the same spirit that had inspired American colonists: the spirit of a freedom that could no longer accept the yoke of kings and priests.

Yes, Jefferson wrote in a 1793 letter, the French Revolution had had its excesses: most notably, the killing of “guilty persons” without trial (how had they been judged guilty without trial? Jefferson didn’t say). But these excesses were par for the course in a “struggle which was necessary”. So necessary, in fact, that “rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated”, with only “an Adam and Eve left in every country”.

Others of Jefferson’s generation disagreed. Alexander Hamilton, speaking for the conservative Federalists, followed news of the Reign of Terror with great distress. Directly contradicting Jefferson, he argued in 1793 that the difference between the American and French revolutions is “no less great than that between liberty and licentiousness” — between orderly self-government and mob rule.

The French Revolution’s assault on religion didn’t seem to bother Jefferson one bit. But to early American conservatives, it was not only blasphemous, but self-defeating. While far from orthodox in their personal religious belief and practice, the more conservative-leaning Founding Fathers saw virtue as a necessary precondition of self-government, and they held up religion, in turn, as an indispensable support to virtue.

Thus, John Adams observed of revolutionary France: “I know not what to make of a republic of thirty million atheists.” On National Fast Day on 9 May 1798, instituted by President Adams amid deteriorating relations with the French republic, the head of Yale University, Timothy Dwight, took to the pulpit to warn that “to destroy us, our enemies must first destroy our Sabbath” — as they already had in Paris.

As has often been the case since, America’s geopolitical interests dissolved these ideological boundaries. When it became undeniable that the French Revolution had empowered a new emperor with an appetite for world domination, Jefferson shrank from his earlier Francophilia. In 1802, and now President, he described Napoleonic France as “our natural and habitual enemy”. France’s encroachments on New Orleans, and along the Mississippi on what was then the western frontier, should prompt the Americans to “marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation”.

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Through the 19th century, France’s image in America more or less solidified into what it is today: as a place that riots a lot, and whose politics seesaw between the extremes of revolt and reaction. There was an undeniable element of hypocrisy in this reception. Americans had their own volatile divisions, which escalated into civil war in the middle of the century, claiming some 600,000 lives. Class struggle in Gilded Age America and in the early 20th century didn’t look so different from the Paris Commune.

Then again, which quarrelsome couple doesn’t feel better about itself while listening to the family shouting match in the apartment next door? American conservatives have long framed their society’s internal contradictions and domestic rancor as foreign. An entire genre of US conservative thought is devoted to uncovering the European — specifically German and French — roots of progressivism, to the neglect of its origins in Anglo-American liberalism.

Which brings us to today’s French anxieties on the American Right: to US fears of immigrant “no-go zones” and seething multitudes apt to riot when their “paper” country — France — defeats their real homes — Algeria, Morocco — in a football match. Fear of ill-assimilated banlieues encircling major cities like Paris and Marseilles. Fear of Islamo-gauchisme, with the white Leftists mouthing the lofty slogans and the Arab or African toughs doing the nihilistic looting, all while making it clear that their political attachment to France is all but nonexistent.

It’s easy to caricature these fears as overblown, ignorant — or, at any rate, irrelevant. American immigration and assimilation dynamics are different from those in France (and Western Europe more generally). Unlike with the French or the British, Americans haven’t struggled to define a place for the descendants of former colonial subjects — they haven’t had to deal with the transition from empire to nation-state. And it’s a cliché but nevertheless true that US culture is easier to assimilate into precisely because it’s relatively “thin”: the culture of a commercial empire with a voracious appetite for labor and dynamism.

All the same, it’s a mistake to dismiss wholesale the American Right’s current French anxieties. For starters, there is more than a kernel of truth to the American conservative diagnosis. There are sensitive areas in France where the police must tread carefully. There are mosques and imams whose preaching casts into severe doubt the very possibility of expecting political loyalty of certain communities. Take a walk through Parc Georges-Valbon and Saint-Denis into central Paris — I did so at Christmas last year — and you can’t help but feel that the rate of demographic churn is so high that, in certain areas, majority-minority distinctions completely break down, leaving only different minorities mustering different levels of street-level and institutional “strength”. France, such as it is, is something vestigial in these areas, marked only in streets named after long-forgotten saints, kings, novelists.

Riots aside, this generates what I’ve described in these pages as diversity stress: a kind of constant, low-grade anxiety associated with having to negotiate normative and linguistic differences, public-resource competition, and simple unfamiliarity. It challenges people’s expectation of order and familiarity, which is just as much a part of being human as is the taste for novelty.

While the nature and source of the migration differs between Europe and the United States, moreover, the underlying dynamic is the same: the mass movement of people from the Global South to the Global North that began in the postwar decades and was turbo-charged beginning in the mid-2010s (coinciding, for an obvious reason, with the rise of populism on both sides of the Atlantic)

Why so many in the past decade — more than a million to Europe under Angela Merkel’s Wir schaffen das regime, and some eight million in the Biden wave? Partly to shore up aging demographics and the pension systems that depend on fresh labor; partly because migration is another form of wage arbitrage for employers; and partly (above all, perhaps) because migrants can more easily reach the West, thanks to prosperity in the Global South that allows a growing subset of people to cross vast distances relatively cheaply and quickly.

The upshot of all this is that the migration anxieties that twice catapulted Trump to the White House will long outlast his messy reign. A majority of Americans might disapprove of his handling of immigration, recoiling from the performative cruelty of ICE. But those same majorities still tell pollsters that they prefer the same or lower levels of migration as today (when Trump has already sealed the southern border and drastically cut legal migration and naturalization).

The result is that immigration restrictionism will remain the American Right’s top concern for the foreseeable future. It is the one cause upon which an otherwise notoriously fractious movement can converge even after Trump leaves the historical stage. Today, the movement is divided between five main factions. We might call them the Restorationists, the Tech Accelerationists, the Christian Nationalists, the Populists, and the Catholic Solidarists. All demand less migration, albeit for different reasons and in a different tone.

Start with the Restorationists, those who hope to restore the GOP’s old ideological fusion of pro-business libertarianism, foreign-policy hawkism, and moral traditionalism. Historically, this group was the most amenable to mass migration, not least because it’s what the pro-business donor class insisted upon. But things have changed. For one thing, this faction has been chastened by the rise of Trump and Trumpism, and its most classically liberal elements have more or less defected to the Democratic Party (where they will have to contend with an ascendant democratic socialism).

More important, supporters have come to view mass migration as one of the main drivers of anti-Israel sentiment — and they’re not entirely wrong. Politicians with names like Abdul El-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani are products of post-1965 immigration, when the United States threw open the gates to newcomers from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

The children and grandchildren of those migrants attended US universities where various grievance-studies courses were commonplace, where questioning American exceptionalism was de rigueur, and where campus activism meant backing Students for Justice in Palestine if you, as a member of, say, the Asian and Pacific Islander group, hoped to win support for your own pet causes. This is also why Vance, in a leaked address to the Republican Jewish Coalition, argued that anti-Israel sentiment could be mitigated by cutting migration. He was pushing on an open door: the remnants of the old-school GOP today are far less hospitable to migration than were their predecessors in the Reagan or Bush era.

Which brings us to the Tech Accelerationists — those who believe fervently that America’s salvation lies in staying ahead of China when it comes to artificial intelligence and other frontier technologies. This group, too, could historically be expected to support certain kinds of immigration to fill positions in research, data science, and the like with STEM workers from the developing world who’d work for much less than their American-born peers — and who didn’t dare demand higher wages or organize into unions, since their right to stay was often tied to a single employer.

But this, too, is changing. Like the Restorationists, the Accelerationists have been chastened by the populist tide. Insofar as they wish to remain part of the Right, they have to bargain and compromise with populism, just like every other faction. In December 2024, one of their chief spokesmen, Vivek Ramaswamy — a vocal champion of guest-worker programs — was attacked online after he blamed American cultural mediocrity for tech firms’ reliance on foreign labor (the subtext being that America still needs visa schemes that overwhelmingly benefit Asian, and specifically Indian, tech workers).

Then, too, the rise of AI and automation is rendering many lower-level tech jobs redundant, and an automated economy doesn’t need endless low-wage migrants. Here, too, Vance can bridge the gap between populists and Big Tech: as he told me in a 2024 interview for the New Statesman, immigration restrictionism is the “tech-forward” position, since the easy availability of cheap labor in certain sectors discourages firms from investing in efficiency boosting technologies.

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Of the Populists, not much need be said, since they are the most likely to oppose all immigration, legal and illegal, skilled and unskilled, for reasons that range from economic and cultural to nativism and outright racism. The Christian Nationalists form an adjacent and overlapping faction. They once served as the evangelical backbone of the old GOP but have now gone their own way, having concluded that the bargain with pro-business libertarians and foreign-policy hawks wasn’t worth the candle (the libertarians got their tax cuts, the hawks got their wars, but the Christians who marshaled the votes got… much less).

Largely because Protestantism is Christianity nationalized, this group has never been as comfortable with pro-migration moral universalism as Catholics. In places like Texas, this group’s economic anxieties about migration have blended with cultural concerns over the rapid build-out of mosques and Hindu temples associated with recent migrant flows. When Vance addresses the civilizational discomfiture brought on by mass migration in Europe, he hits this group’s sweet spot.

That leaves the Catholic solidarists (or the Common-Gooders, if you will). This group — in which, cards on the table, I count myself — isn’t exclusively made up of Roman Catholic intellectuals. But they tend to prevail and set the tone. Their objections to mass migration aren’t racial or identitarian — apart from anything else, Catholic doctrine bars that — but practical: mass migration undercuts the wages and bargaining power of American-born workers, squeezes welfare systems, and makes it harder to foster class-based solidarity. Union density in the United States is inversely proportional to migrant flows; for good reason, Whole Foods uses “heat maps” to track the risk of unionization at its stores, with those in diverse, high-migration areas seen as lowest risk, while those in relatively homogenous areas register as high-risk.

Here, again, Vance appears as a bridge figure. His Catholic conversion memoir, Communion, published this year, is in many ways a critique of the old religious Right that preached personal virtue and uplift while neglecting the material and political-economic foundations needed to shape virtuous souls. At one point in the book, he even favorably cites Herbert McCabe, an Irish Dominican friar who sympathetically engaged with Marxism and who once wrote, “The class struggle is not something we are in a position to refrain from. It is just there; we are either on one side or the other.”

Vance’s answer to those who criticize the second Trump administration for neglecting its pro-labor promise is, more or less: stop immigration first. That might be self-serving. But it isn’t illogical, for the same reason that most of the Right’s Solidarists emphasize restrictionism. At any rate, it’s what Vance believes the half of the country that elected him wants.

The danger in this tying of everything to immigration should be obvious. It can look like — and, perhaps for some, it is — an attempt to evade the domestic, homegrown sources of American malaise. But after decades in which discontent with high migration flows was pooh-poohed or written off as bigoted, there remains a lot of political space for addressing what nearly all of the Right’s factions view as a generational crisis. The negative example thrown up by France this month has been too urgent and searing to ignore.

Given this seismic shakeup, and Paxton’s polarizing past and personality, many are wondering if Texas — Texas! — can go blue. The answer is yes, but only if Paxton’s opponent, Democrat James Talarico, rejects the failed ideas that led to the Democratic Party’s decline in the state — and instead embraces Texas populism and the state’s surprisingly radical history.

Talarico himself is a different kind of Democrat. A young state representative and seminary student, he has garnered attention for his progressive brand of Christianity, which blends spiritual uplift with fulminations against the billionaire class. He has also raised boatloads of money and is surprisingly nimble with media, both traditional and digital.

But money and media savvy aren’t enough. Since Democrats lost control of Texas some three decades ago, a string of theories has tried, and failed, to envision a comeback. The latest one was “demographics as destiny”: the race-essentialist idea that as Anglos ceased to make up the majority of the population, the state would automatically become Democratic. Trump dashed those hopes, sweeping the state in part by winning over working-class Hispanics and African-Americans. 

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If Talarico has any shot at winning Texas, he will need to reverse this trend. He has some great examples to learn from. In Tarrant County, union leader Taylor Rehmet flipped a seat in the state legislature in an area that Trump won by 17 points. Rehmet’s secret? He ran a class-focused campaign, eschewing the culture war entirely in favor of speaking to the needs of Texas workers. 

But there is an even deeper tradition of working-class politics in Texas, going back to the mid-19th century.

When people think of politics in Texas, they assume “rock-ribbed” conservatism by default. But this is the result of a years-long political project to recast the history of the Lone Star State in the Right’s image. The reality is much more interesting. This is a state where cowboys mounted collective action to fight the privatization of the open range; that was once home to one of the largest socialist parties in the nation; and where a farmer-labor alliance almost toppled the capitalist elite. Texas is red, yes, but the color means more than one thing. 

Following the Civil War, Texas was economically decimated. The state government sought to attract business and finance to Texas with friendly policies, cheap land, and sweetheart deals. Major interests like the railroads took advantage, jacking up freight costs and cracking down on organized labor. A new set of Northern and European landowners entered the scene, like the Capitol Syndicate, a coalition of Northern businessmen and foreign capital, including the Earl of Aberdeen, who financed the Texas Capitol in exchange for 3 million acres of prime real estate in cattle country. 

Barbed wire, then a new invention, was used by a rising class of large landowners to choke off the “open range.” In alliance with the ruling political class in Austin, the new barons banished many Texas “nesters” off their lands. While corporate power swallowed land in Texas, the banks and the merchant class got to work on Texas farmers. Debt became a fact of life for many Texan farmers under the crop-lien system: cash-poor farmers who needed funds at the beginning of the growing season were trapped in a web of debt, as the merchant and banking classes conspired to buy cotton at low prices and keep interest rates astronomically high. It wasn’t uncommon for farmers to pay 100% to even 200% markups on needed goods. This usurious system led many Texans into the humiliating position of serving as tenant farmers on land their families once owned.

But Texans didn’t take these changes lying down. Instead, they launched a full-on revolt against corporate power — and even the very institution of private property. From striking cowboys in the Panhandle to the Fence Cutting Wars against the scourge of the “devil’s rope” to the Great Southwest Strike led by the union leader Martin Irons — Texans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries went to war against what used to be called the “money power.” Populism was thus born in Texas.

The Southern Farmers’ Alliance developed when Texans began asking themselves a simple question: why was it that “those who work most get least, and those who work least get most?” The cotton farmers who initially made up the movement soon struck up an alliance with industrial workers in the railroad system. They were united against the “shameful abuses that the industrial classes are now suffering at the hands of arrogant capitalists and powerful corporations,” as a movement statement put it. This farmer-labor alliance led to the founding of the People’s Party, often called the populists, which would soon become the second major party in the state, competing directly with the Democrats.

Populism today is a much-abused term, often just used to highlight politicians who use an us-versus-them style, even as they pursue the same-old market-friendly agendas. But real populism, especially in Texas, was much more than just a rhetorical approach; it was a revolt against the way in which capital subjugates all higher pursuits to the profit motive. It was a movement that demanded dignity for working people, who faced daily humiliations from the bosses, the banks, and a dismissive media.

These populists were very aware of the conflict they were fighting. Take, for example, this statement in the official paper of the movement, The Southern Mercury: “There has always been a bitter and irrepressible conflict between the capitalist and the laborer, and this relentless struggle will continue as long as wage labor exists, because the capitalist always seeks to enslave the laborer.” That’s Marx in a Stetson.

Thomas Nugent, one of the early leaders of the Texas populists and its candidate for governor, condemned the new system emerging in Texas not only for the poverty with which it afflicted the farmers, but for the spiritual indignities it engendered. He decried “plutocratic capitalism,” noting that the system “robs genius of its glory, makes of intellect a drudge and a slave, and utilizes the achievements of science to raid the stock markets and enlarge the margin of profits.” 

In a three-way race for governor in 1894, Nugent came in second place, overtaking the Republican Party as the main opposition party in Texas. 

The populists were as defiant of the ruling Democratic Party as they were of the bankers, the landlords, and the railroads. Their ambitious platform took direct aim at the elites. On the labor front, they demanded legal recognition for trade unions, a ban on the use of unfree convict labor, and the establishment of the eight-hour working day, among other reforms. 

They also called for the railroads and communication industries to be brought under common ownership for the benefit of all. And they insisted on government action to curb the unfair land giveaways to the rich and powerful — beginning with restrictions on foreigners from owning land, aimed at the growing class of European capitalists who’d acquired large holdings. 

The corporations and railroad syndicates would likewise be forced to relinquish the land that they were not using for productive purposes. It was only right, the populists argued, as the government of Texas had betrayed the people, “stealing the guise of heaven in which to serve the purpose of hades, they have … squandered almost all the available public domain, the heritage of the people of this and future generations.”

Far from a protest movement, the populists were successful at winning office in Texas. In a matter of a few years, they were able to send 22 state representatives to the legislature, along with two state senators. As a minority, they found themselves effective in working with the more progressive-minded faction of the Democratic Party.

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The rise of a political movement representing the working class prompted accusations of “socialism” from the era’s newspapermen. Nugent turned the intended slur into a badge of Christian honor, writing in the main populist newspaper: “If sordid and foolish men call this socialism, let us not be disturbed. Such socialism is so near akin to genuine Christianity that we can well afford to welcome it.”

Fearful of a future in which politics pitted the masses against the elites, the Democratic Party engaged in a campaign of outright fraud to destroy the populists. After Nugent’s death, the populists organized a compelling campaign for governor in 1896, falling short of outright victory by only a few thousand votes. They were not beaten honestly. Across Texas, Democratic goons threatened voters with violence, with one thug bragging that standing outside of the polling place had deterred all of the black voters from casting a ballot. Ballot boxes were stuffed, and populist votes were not counted. In the following years, Texas would institute a series of “voting reforms,” designed to limit the black vote and the vote of poor whites and thus ensuring that the populist project would no longer threaten the state’s comfortable elites. 

In many ways, the Texas of today mirrors that of the time of the People’s Party. The Lone Star State is fast becoming a playground for out-of-state billionaires trying to run away from tax obligations, labor protections, and democratic oversight. Their power, combined with the steady erosion of the working class’s hard-won achievements, is downright degrading. Texas, for example, leads the country in preventable deaths at work. And while under Texas law, dogs kept outside must have access to plentiful potable water, no such restrictions exist for those working outside. In fact, the Texas legislature has made rescinding local ordinances for water breaks for Texas workers a top priority. In Texas, we treat dogs better than we treat working people.

Texans must revive the questions asked by the Texas populists: “Why does he who works most get least, and he who works least gets most?” If James Talarico is searching for a model for how to win Texas, he should not look toward demographic fantasies peddled by “progressive” race essentialists, nor a return to the HR-style politics that have dominated Democrat politics since the neoliberal turn of the 1970s.

A fight for dignity and for economic populism is much needed in the Lone Star State. While his denunciations of oligarchy are promising, Talarico should plant his feet in the Texas soil and reclaim our long-held populist and radical traditions, demand dignity for working people, and run on an explicit pro-working-class agenda. Not just in rhetoric but in practice.

This essay was adapted from the author’s new book, The Myth of Red Texas.

The young Republicans aren’t alone. A subsequent Politico story exposed racial animus in chat by Paul Ingrassia, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel (Ingrassia has since withdrawn). On the other side of the aisle, Graham Platner, a Left-populist Democrat and former Marine running for the Senate in Maine, has been exposed for having an SS tattoo on his chest, and making obnoxious comments on Reddit a decade ago (blacks “don’t tip,” rural whites are racist and stupid).

We can and should take this stuff less seriously. 

Yes, the suggestion is horrifying to the olds — which includes you, Millennial readers. But we don’t live in the Civil Rights Era, or the Jim Crow South, or even within their recent memory, whose traumas and reconstructions created the language regime most of us are used to. America has a legacy of slavery and segregation, but America’s racial demographics and multi-ethnic makeup have also been explosively evolving. Zoomers and Alphas are growing up in a world that’s unrecognizable from the one in which our sensibilities were formed.  

First, the obvious: The young Republicans are edgelording and joking. Common sense employed by anyone who has ever been in a group chat knows that this is deliberately provocative anti-woke signaling. Chats make dumb jokes; every person among us could be condemned if the contents of their phone were made public by a hostile media outlet. We’ve had too many scandals and cancellations in which normal human behavior — and humor — have been taken out of context and made to look terrible to continue like this, tempting as it is to declare some things inexcusable.

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It’s unfortunate that the repressive language policing and obsessive hammering on race of the past 15 years have given rise to this problem, but here we are. I have personally seen this play out in city schools, to distressing effect for a person raised on liberal codes of speech. The progressive Brooklyn private school that my two children attended (they now go to public school) taught anti-racism and social justice, and focused every year anew on slavery and black history. The result of its well-meaning efforts was to create a hysterical focus on naughty race talk among the school’s little-boy population, and to resurrect antique slurs like “monkey” and “watermelon eater” for blacks and “rice-eater” for Asians. By middle-school standards, the number of slurs found in the 2,900 pages of chat documentation turned over to Politico — a mere 251 — is very low.  

On the surface, this might seem less forgivable in adults, but a closer look at the dynamic complicates the picture. Our private school had little class diversity but was highly racially diverse, and my son and the children around him played basketball on city playgrounds, took fashion cues from the young black guys who worked in the deli next door, and hung out with racially diverse kids from all over the city. While they were being subjected to a relentless narrative of racial animus and remedial propriety at school, the culture all around them was giving different messages. 

For one thing, there wasn’t actually much meaningful difference — or racism — between the white kids, on one hand, and a “waysian” (mixed-race white-Asian) private-school kid, or the half-black son of scientists, on the other. All hailed from similar class backgrounds. How does a kid account for that, given that it’s utterly forbidden to say so? You surely can’t ask questions in the designated forum of class discussion. As for the legendary N-word: At school, the word was grounds for expulsion; yet on the street and in the culture the kids consumed and admired, it was an honorific.

This confusing state of affairs led to a situation where the N-word became every day’s biggest entertainment and hottest sensation for a certain type of little boy — the good kind, I’d posit, who thinks for himself and whose masculinity hasn’t been completely crushed by the Nurse Ratched types who lord over much of his life. They talked about who used it, who didn’t, who whispered it to himself in the bathroom, if the “r” was hard or soft, and so on. 

They wrote it on their scientific calculators by using numbers and letters and turning the calculator upside down. They “tricked” each other into saying it. (Wondering how anyone would do that? Say “Monica” three times fast.) The black kids declared white friends “honorary N-words,” and “gave passes” to use the word, or in some cases sold the passes for things like a haul of Halloween candy. I’ve heard of nearly Talmudic debate on what the protocol is for using your pass. (Only with the person who gave the pass? In the hearing of another black person?)

I mentioned this state of affairs once to a school administrator, who looked utterly crestfallen and said, Well, then nothing we’re doing is working. But he was wrong. The little boys really did take the words seriously — a mis-deployed N-word is a firebomb of transgression. In the absence of sensible adult guidance on the matter, however, they were taking a complicated, divisive, and scary topic and working it out among themselves, inter-racially and un-fragilely — with roasting and insults, passes and upside-down calculators.

Much of this is the insult-and-razzing culture of boys and men. It is a traditional method of blowing off steam, navigating tension, and building mutual tolerance. And even in its current racially offensive formation, it represents a vastly more diverse and tolerant world than the polite, supposedly race-blind one I grew up in.

There were issues, however. The school prosecuted speech crimes because it had to — as we all feel we have to, even in situations where the speaker is probably or definitely joking and no one has been “harmed.” I felt this undermined the kids’ respect for authority, and confused them about what might actually be hurtful or offensive. It also created an economy for tattling on others’ speech violations by way of prosecuting social grievances, which was vigorously taken up — almost universally by girls.  

The analog to the current adult world is pretty sound. The woke Leftist definition of racism has far outstripped the social realities, and our silent-majority fed-up-ness with the state of affairs has played a large part in the rise of Trump. In America, racism doesn’t exist structurally, as any fair reading of our distributive systems will conclude. It doesn’t exist unconsciously, as we’ve seen with the debunking of the great “unconscious-bias” studies. And though it is often defined as such, it rarely exists openly, overtly, or in a self-identified fashion. How many people are really white nationalists, versus guys who say they’re not a racist but feel threatened by immigration? Bad, maybe, but dogwhistle-bad, and people are tired of having their speech decoded by others and turned against them. 

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In many senses, generations of race-sensitive education have won. The responses to Ingrassia’s offensive comments — which included the use of an Italian N-word slur — are telling: his Republican peers censured him. The story on the Republican chats bleeps out the words used (at least, it appears to be doing so; it doesn’t explicitly say so, leaving open the possibility that the transgressive Republicans themselves were writing “n—guh”) but it’s worth noting that even in this bastion of edgelords, we’ve got obedient soft r’s. Platner, meanwhile, says he got the tattoo one evening while drunk in the Marines, had no idea of its SS affiliation, and plans to remove it. Fellow Marines have found this credible. 

And yet, we do have problems. Our school, for example, despite its commitment to anti-racism, told a very different racial story in its demographics than it did in its classrooms. Despite the careful, boutique diversity among students, teachers, and administrators, the service personnel were overwhelmingly black and brown, and from the lower economic classes. Such “members of our community” — the bus drivers, the bus monitors, the recess monitors, the guards, the weekend guards, the women who work for the cafeteria service, the cleaners — were mostly lower-paid contract workers employed by outside organizations, who came and went. What, really, does this teach the kids? 

One year as a parent coordinator in charge of collecting money for holiday teacher-and-staff gifts, I tried to include everyone who worked at the school. This quickly became difficult. Our school didn’t employ the lower-level workers directly; in some cases, the outside contracting agencies, when contacted, didn’t seem to know or care whom they’d sent to us. And then the more people were included, the smaller the slices of parent-giving pie became. Suddenly our inclusive rhetoric changed to pious suggestions that we really should be offering larger gifts “for our teachers.” The next year, the initiative was dropped. 

Generations of race-sensitive education have done absolutely nothing to change the second-class treatment of less-paid workers. And credible cases have been made, most notably by sociologist Musa al-Gharbi in his brilliant book, We Have Never Been Woke, published last year, that accusations of “racism” are more of a cudgel for in-group status warfare, than they are a route to equality. Woke Leftist rhetoric, in al-Gharbi’s telling, is little more than the shameless scramble of elites to cloak themselves in virtue while pursuing personal wealth and power, a process that allows them to fool themselves about the economic circumstances of the mostly black and brown people whose underpaid labor they’re benefiting from, one DoorDash order at at time.

So it’s no surprise that some conservative figures, now in power, are picking up the cudgel and using it: firing staffers for chats, rescinding jobs, and hand-wringing in op-eds. What better way to secure our in-group status than to declare our worth in the same old lingua franca of the elite? What better way to dispatch our enemies than to make these popular, incendiary, and high-traffic allegations? Peter Giunta, a now-disgraced figure who was formerly the chair of the New York State Young Republicans organization, claims that his chats were released as part of a “coordinated character assassination” by a fellow Republican. All the dirt on Platner was dug up by opposition research. This is corrupt, and it’s time to end it. 

Many Americans of the populist, Trumpian bent identify much more with the economically disadvantaged contract worker than they do with the virtue-pushing elites. They understand that all the politically correct language in the world is meaningless when it’s papering over the ugly divide between the private-school parents and the people who drive their kids’ buses. In the rowdy online forums, and among ordinary people confronting street-level conflicts between blacks and whites, people are working it out for themselves, or trying to. If we don’t like each other, why? If someone is to blame for our misfortune, who? If this kind of speech makes elites uncomfortable, that just might mean it’s working. 

To “allow” this kind of speech, of course, raises the specter of a world where we haven’t taken into account the American legacy of slavery, or where open racial hatred is encouraged. This is legitimately alarming and extremely undesirable. However, by not allowing it in the current heavy-handed and distorted fashion, we are draining education and the media of their moral authority, shutting off healthy avenues of negotiation, and empowering legitimately unsavory figures like Ingrassia. The only thing scarier than realizing — to put it in middle-school parlance — that much so-called forbidden speech “is not that deep,” is not realizing it. 

Both the Senate Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer, and House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries, could end up victims. Or at least, they may have to sweat very hard through their re-election campaigns. Some of this might be because both men are based in New York City, ground zero for Left-wing activism. But the threat is baked into their jobs at a time when Democratic voters, nationally, are taking a dim view of their party overlords.

This great suspicion of the Democratic Party is what distinguishes the first Primary Spring from the second. In 2017, President Trump had just been elected for the first time, and liberal activism was reaching its apogee. This was the #Resistance era, when every conceivable cause — immigration, policing, loathing Russia — was amplified to a stunning degree, and public protest was seemingly inexhaustible. Though anti-Trump marches still take place today, they are nothing like they were in 2017 and 2018, when resistance to Trump was culturally dominant and “woke” politics were just beginning to peak. Put it this way: the Sydney Sweeney American Eagle ad campaign could not have appeared during the first spring.

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In addition to being more woke, Democrats liked their party back then. There was genuine excitement for their upstart candidate, and party elders like Schumer and Nancy Pelosi were not yet considered too old, too disconnected. They were cheered as heroes of the anti-Trump war. In 2017, these two ideas — liking the national party leaders enough, while also demanding change — could exist in harmony. Pelosi resented Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, and followers of the young upstart could be fiercely critical of the party mainstream. But once the fireworks died down, there was some sense of unity: everyone agreed that beating Trump was critical, and there were plenty of ordinary Democrats who could have warm feelings about both Pelosi and AOC. Unlike now, the Democratic Party itself largely polled well.

The true beginning of the first Primary Spring was AOC’s shock victory over Joe Crowley in a district straddling The Bronx and Queens. Crowley was one of the highest-ranking Democrats in the House, but he wasn’t a well-known national figure. Rather, he was a political boss in Gotham, where he was regarded as a power broker poised to one day ascend to the speakership. Beyond a few local Leftists, no one saw AOC’s triumph coming. Overnight, she was transformed into a national star feted on talk shows, and she embodied a new Millennial generation that was, with great fanfare, asserting itself politically. Moderate Democrats may have been rankled by AOC, but her star power was undeniable.

In the first Primary Spring, progressive challenges to sitting members of Congress and state legislators were prized most. Bernie Sanders’s second presidential campaign, in 2020, was seen as the expected culmination of several years of intense activism. If very few believed Ocasio-Cortez could defeat Crowley, Sanders, following his aggressive challenge to Hillary Clinton in 2016, was far less of a dark horse. Leftists, around the fall and winter of 2019, truly believed that the Vermont socialist could seize the nomination and bring his “old Left” vision to the White House.

Sanders’s obvious defeat in 2020 — the Democratic National Committee or scheming Clintonites couldn’t be blamed this time around — sapped much of the energy out of the first Primary Spring. But there were more progressive victories that came that year, after Sanders conceded to Biden. One of them was Jamaal Bowman, the Squad congressman who unseated a long-serving pro-Israel hawk, Eliot Engel, in a Democratic primary as the pandemic raged. On the same day Bowman won his primary, a young socialist organiser from Queens named Zohran Mamdani triumphed, as well, beating a local assemblyman to enter the Albany legislature.

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When Biden became president, progressives had more power, but the sizzle was gone, and Democratic incumbents were much better-positioned. AOC’s Squad plateaued. The Democratic Socialists of America began to see a net decrease in membership. And the wind-down of the pandemic meant certain causes that were once dominant, like Black Lives Matter, were going to matter less. Corporations, which enthusiastically backed Black Lives Matter and other progressive causes during the pandemic, would return to business as usual by the time the next presidential election rolled around.

And here we are now, facing a second spring. In one sense, there is nothing surprising about a Trump presidential victory triggering a new Primary Spring. Squint hard enough, and you’ll spot the parallels between 2017 and 2025. Special elections are breaking the Democratic Party’s way, and GOP town halls — if congressional Republicans even bother to hold them — are filling up with constituents alienated by Trump’s Medicaid cuts. What’s different now is the internal sourness: Democrats hate Trump but aren’t feeling much better about their own leaders, Schumer in particular. The remarkably durable leader — he’s been in politics for half a century, and the leader of the Senate Democrats for a decade — seems in danger of losing.

The good news for Schumer is that he has time to recover his standing: he won’t face voters again until 2028. The bad news is that the primary date could fall on the same day as the presidential primary, leading to a turnout boom that sinks him. In the New York City Democratic mayoral primary in June, Mamdani benefited from a turnout surge, especially from 20-something voters who don’t typically participate in local elections. Like Trump, Mamdani performed very well with the casual voter. These kinds of Democrats — anti-establishment, less reverent of party leadership — would not be friendly to Schumer, who will turn 78 in the fall 2028. Mamdani proved, too, that pro-Palestine politics are a winner in a primary, and Schumer’s tireless defense of Israel won’t be viewed fondly.

The challenge for Schumer isn’t just age. Sanders, at 83, is still popular with the youth and revered by the Left. It’s that Schumer’s political strengths no longer play well in the current environment, especially as Democrats hunger for compelling national figures to lead them out of the wilderness. They want another Barack Obama, or at least someone who possesses that sort of verve — a natural storyteller, above anything else.

Democrats lack a narrative. Schumer has always been a small-bore legislator, relishing constituent work and passing somewhat notable but inoffensive bills. He is not a Harry Reid or Lyndon Johnson; he has never had much of a vision for where Democrats or the nation should go. Rather, he’s always been stronger at wrangling votes and cajoling colleagues. Under Biden, this was beneficial, as Democrats passed sweeping infrastructure and green energy legislation with the narrowest of majorities.

Under Trump, however, Schumer has little to offer.

Who primaries Schumer remains to be seen, but AOC already looks like a strong contender. She has played more of the inside game since coming to Congress, and she still retains a strong fan base among the young. She’d raise gobs of money. If she doesn’t run for president, a campaign against Schumer seems inevitable. And if, for whatever reason, she decides against it, New York has no shortage of younger legislators and high-profile politicians who could knock out Schumer; Letitia James, the state attorney general known for tussling with Trump, would be formidable.

Less vulnerable, but no longer completely safe, is Jeffries, the House minority leader. Jeffries, like Schumer, is based in Brooklyn. He’s much younger, still in his 50s, and he’s a stronger public speaker. He has deep roots in the black community, which has traditionally been important for primaries. Unlike Crowley, he won’t be a sleepy campaigner. His district also has enough moderate and conservative chunks to save him from a Left-wing challenger.

But Jeffries must look over his shoulder now because Mamdani was a serious contender in his district. In the northern sections, younger, Left-leaning voters are eager for change. It doesn’t matter to them that Jeffries, in 2027, appears likely to become speaker of the House, with Democrats favored to flip the chamber. They aren’t moved by the power that’s potentially in reach.

Jeffries will, at the minimum, be motivated to offer a message for the Democrats that transcends reviling Trump. Eight years ago, Trump hate went a long way. Now, voters are demanding more. They are, if anything else, less naïve than they once were. If Schumer is challenged in 2028 — or if the rumblings of internal dissent get louder — Senate Democrats will have to rethink how they organize themselves, especially as they struggle to get out of the minority. Is Schumer really the man to lead them back? Or do they hunt for another leader, someone with a sharper vision and more of a fighting spirit? These questions, for the Democrats, will only become more urgent as the Trump era drags on.

In reality, Trump might be the most radically libertarian commander-in-chief in US history. This, contrary to the fears of #Resistance liberals who created an entire cottage industry devoted to fighting Trumpian dictatorship; contrary, too, to the dreams of populists, “post-liberals,” and others in the so-called New Right who imagined that Trump would reconcile American conservatism with the state and promote the use of government power for Right-wing ends.

The fascist theory of Trump remains prevalent among progressives to this day, and received a boost in the closing days of the election when a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, and former Trump chief of staff John Kelly went on record calling Trump a fascist — which allowed Harris, Hillary Clinton, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, and a whole host of Democratic leaders to pile on with the fascist assertion. In The New Yorker, the Yale historian Timothy Snyder greeted the news of Trump’s electoral victory by calling Trump a fascist along with his “close fascist allies,” Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin.

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Trump is vindictive, no doubt. By one estimate, he has made more than 100 threats to “investigate, prosecute, imprison, or otherwise punish his perceived opponents”. But fascism has come to be a slippery label. As The Washington Examiner has archly put it, “fascism is anything Democrats don’t like”.

The libertarian explanation, by contrast, is becoming more plausible by the day. Trump has made no secret of his leanings in this regard. In May, he spoke at the Libertarian Party National Convention — the “first president in history” to do so, as he boasted. His address, in which he attempted to stake his libertarian credentials, was remarkably on-message: “I will be a true friend to libertarians in the White House, and I am proud to be the only president in 70 years who started no new wars. I took on the military-industrial complex. I broke the stranglehold on neocons and warmongers on the Republican Party…. I withdrew from the Paris Accord. I withdrew from the anti-gun UN arms treaty, and I withdrew from the corrupt and very expensive World Health Organization”. He concluded by saying: “We want libertarian votes because you stand for what we stand for”.

The address was a somewhat strange spectacle, since Trump was booed by the crowd through much of it. Deep-dyed libertarians from the crowd shouted that he was a “tyrant” and “had crushed our rights”; one held up a sign calling him a “wannabe dictator”. But Trump’s position was that he had simply made libertarianism work tactically by tying it to the GOP. “What’s the purpose of the Libertarian Party getting 3%?” he argued with the crowd, inviting it to join forces with him.

Trump’s October interview with Joe Rogan — featuring his largest audience of the entire election cycle — was distinctly libertarian, as well. He argued for eliminating the income tax and railed against government regulation. He declared an intent to remove all governmental impediments to business, to make government truly as small as possible.

In tandem with his tax-eliminating, government-downsizing rhetoric, Trump developed a partnership with a number of Wall Street and Silicon Valley barons, culminating in Musk throwing his massive financial weight behind the GOP ticket. The two things — the libertarian rhetoric and the new alliances in tech and finance — went hand-in-hand, resulting in policy moves that should have utterly confounded Trump’s populist fans during the campaign.

Take Trump’s stance on legislation to ban TikTok unless the social-media platform separates itself from its Chinese owners. It should have been a perfectly Trumpian policy, striking at two birds, Big Tech and “Chy-na,” with one stone. Yet Trump came out against the ban, having earlier backed it, without offering a coherent explanation. It was notable, though, that one of Trump’s big libertarian backers, the hedge-fund honcho Jeff Yass, controls a minority stake in TikTok estimated to be worth north of $30 billion as of spring 2024.

Another telling campaign moment came when Trump appeared on an X (formerly Twitter) space with Musk and congratulated the world’s richest man for swiftly firing workers who organise to defend their mutual interests. A better Harris campaign might have made more of that unguarded moment for the way it belied Trump’s pro-worker rhetoric. Even Sean O’Brien, the president of the Teamsters and a rare trade-union leader willing to work with the GOP, was forced to accuse Trump and Musk of waging “economic terrorism”.

On immigration, too, Trump has allowed his libertarian instincts to run wild. This might appear surprising, since border restrictionism was and remains one of the signature elements of his agenda. But opposing chaos at the border isn’t incompatible with a libertarian stance. Many libertarians object to illegal migration, even as they support making it easier for labor to cross borders as a means to lowering its price.

During his campaign, for example, Trump said that the advent of artificial intelligence requires the United States to bring in “more people.” He also offered green cards to all graduating foreign university students, even those taking two-year associates degrees. These stances should have raised concerns among Trump’s populist supporters, but their enthusiasm swept all doubt.

Now, as his administration takes decisive shape, Trump is translating his libertarian instincts into personnel choices. The planned Department of Governmental Efficiency — headed by Musk and the venture capitalist Vivek Ramaswamy — is only the most visible. Musk has claimed that he could eliminate up to $2 trillion worth of expenditures from the federal government. In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Musk and Ramasaway described themselves empowering a “lean team of small-government crusaders … to cut the federal government down to size.”

Likewise, on the use of H1B visas that allow tech firms to import cheap workers, Trump sided with the likes of Musk and Ramaswamy — over and against his populist base. Last month, the president-elect told the New York Post, “I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas. That’s why we have them. I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program.”

Other personnel choices bespeak similar intuitions: from snubbing his first-term tariff guru Robert Lighthizer for the top job at the Treasury in favor of Wall Street stalwart Scott Bessent; to tapping Howard Lutnick, another Wall Street man who has advocated for eliminating the income tax, to serve as commerce secretary. True, there are a handful of exceptions, such as his choice to lead the Department of Labor, Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer of Oregon, a rare Republican who favors strengthening collective bargaining; and Gail Slater, an antitrust crusader nominated to the Federal Trade Commission.

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These exceptions damn Trump in the eyes of “official” Washington libertarians, who view him as not nearly pure or orthodox enough. But Trump isn’t pure or orthodox on anything, and the salient question isn’t whether he qualifies as libertarian for the purists, but the overall makeup of his political inclinations. On that front, his plans for a massive reduction in government are a better fit for libertarianism than for populism, much less fascism.

This isn’t to play down the Trump threat from a progressive perspective. Libertarianism is a naïve ideology that risks cutting deeply into the core functions of a state. What’s insidious about libertarianism is that it looks good at first. Listening to Trump talk about over-taxation and overregulation with Rogan, I couldn’t help but nod along. The problem is the erosion of state capacity and mounting red ink.

In his first term, Trump increased the deficit by $8 trillion — a direct result of tax cuts that endeared him to Wall Street while slashing the US tax base without generating any other source of revenue to replace it. This time around, Trump and the Republicans are determined to maintain his earlier tax cuts while dramatically diminishing the state. That’s a recipe for a plutocratic order that rewards those at the top, while squeezing the working- and lower-middle-class Americans who sent Trump back to the Oval Office.

There is simply no way to trim $2 trillion from the federal budget, as Co-President Musk aims to do, without eating into entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare. So-called entitlement reform is deeply unpopular among nearly all social segments, Republicans and Democrats — except for the Wall Street fee-skimmers who’d benefit from administering privatized benefits and, of course, libertarian think-tankers in Washington.

Trump’s penchant for pulling all attention toward himself is reminiscent of a Mussolini type and thus seems to foreshadow an authoritarian takeover. But real authoritarianism takes work that Trump is uninvested in — and a state he’s unwilling to fund. He has a businessman’s revulsion for taxes and regulations. The other aspects of his worldview, including ones that seem to contradict his aversion to the state, amount to tactical maneuvring in service of his deeper pro-business agenda. That puts him in the libertarian camp, whether the libertarians themselves like it or not.

Haley’s recent comments about the Republican primaries tell the tale. Speaking on a local Iowa PBS station, she remarked: “[The Iowa Caucus] starts it. You change personalities, you go into New Hampshire.” These words encapsulate her approach: adapt, morph, become whatever the moment demands. In Iowa, where she is rising in the polls but still trailing both frontrunner Donald Trump and DeSantis, who has several political endorsements influential in Iowa, she paints herself as the tribune of patriotic, God-fearing America.

But in New Hampshire, where she is polling much higher and even getting within striking distance of Trump, she adopts a different persona, one that supposedly resonates more deeply with the emotional and forthright nature of its independent-minded voters. The gameplan, however, is the same, as she told the state’s voters last week: “You know, Iowa starts it. You know that you correct it [in New Hampshire]… And then my sweet state of South Carolina brings it home. That’s what we do.” This flexibility is both her secret weapon and her Achilles’ heel, betraying her lack of a core, enduring identity. It’s a remarkably transparent act of political shape-shifting that indicates a deeper identity crisis within Haley’s campaign.

Haley’s political biography is rife with instances of flip-flopping, none more illustrative than her stance on the Confederate flag. Once a staunch defender of its presence at the South Carolina statehouse because — one cannot make this up — “not a single CEO has complained”, Haley quickly reversed her position following mass shooter Dylann Roof’s attack on a Charleston church. This pivot, while a response to a seismic shift in public sentiment, highlights a pattern of opportunistic realignment rather than principled leadership; her hand was forced, in her words, because Roof had “hijacked the flag”. She added that it had to go because “no one should feel pain” at the sight of it, even as it remained a symbol of “service, sacrifice, and heritage” for “some” South Carolinians. It’s always a dance of two steps forward, one step back, leaving observers confused about where Haley truly stands amid all the practised corporate doublespeak.

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Haley’s relationship with Trump continued her career of political vacillation. Initially a critic, particularly during the 2016 election when she won a modicum of fame by replying to an attack from the GOP insurgent by saying “bless your heart”, she gradually warmed to Trump and ended up supporting him despite her reservations. “I will not stop until we fight a man that chooses not to disavow the KKK,” she once said, only to later call Trump, of whom she was still “not a fan”, the “best person based on the policies”. For her trouble, she received a post as UN Ambassador — from which she resigned in December 2018 after news came to light of her receiving improper luxury plane trips from South Carolina business leaders. (She met the much sillier allegation of a possible affair with Trump raised by journalist Michael Wolff with justifiable derision.)

Following the events of January 6, her stance shifted again, oscillating between criticism and support. This remains the tightrope that Haley — unlike DeSantis, Ramaswamy or Christie — spends much of her time walking. And in comparison with those three, who each have their signature issues, whether it be DeSantis’s putative Right-wing march through Florida’s institutions or Christie’s blustery anti-Trump posturing, Haley occupies a place of no-place. She must offer a safe alternative to Trump — or, perhaps more cynically, make herself attractive enough to be a possible running mate for him — while keeping her rebukes within acceptable bounds. One need only analyse her public statements to understand how strange this is: she chastised Trump for his response to the Capitol riots, yet strongly opposed his second impeachment (“Give the man a break”).

A month later, Haley was writing in the Wall Street Journal that she largely supported all of his “outstanding” policies, which “made America stronger, safer, and more prosperous” — policies she has spent much of the current primary season promising to protect and extend. However, she has also said that Trump himself, the architect of all this outstanding policymaking, “cannot win a general election”. Nevertheless, she added: “I would support him because I am not going to have a President Kamala Harris” after Joe Biden steps down. How, one wonders, could she avoid this eventuality if she is throwing the weight of her endorsement behind a figure she regards as unelectable?

This love-hate dynamic with Trump speaks to a deeper issue: Haley’s inability to carve out a distinct political identity independent of the prevailing winds within the GOP. Her strategy, however, is not without its small measure of cunning. She targets the “moderate” conservative voter, a shrinking but well-off demographic disillusioned with the extremes yet hesitant to embrace the Republican Left, especially in the narcissistic “NeverTrump” guise it has adopted à la Liz Cheney. It’s a savvy move, but one that may underestimate the intelligence of these voters. Perhaps they seek substance, not just a polished veneer of diversity and business acumen. If so, Haley offers them little more than platitudes and carefully calibrated sound bites.

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Then again, maybe this is all such voters want. I recently found myself on a long car journey with a well-off, self-described “moderate”, Right-leaning boomer. Between discussions about the challenges facing Biden and the state of our investments — his certainly put mine to shame — he expressed a certain admiration for Haley, describing her as “attractive and well-spoken”, and sympathising with how she, much like Biden with the “loony Left”, is in a sympathetically “tough spot”. As our conversation continued, it became evident that his support was superficial, rooted more in her persona than her policies. He couldn’t quite articulate what she stood for — and indeed was even confused about her valuable “diversity”, wrongly thinking she was Native American — only that she seemed like a palatable alternative to the more polarising figures in the GOP.

In a field of candidates which includes the sharp-minded Ramaswamy and the policy-focused DeSantis, the vacuum of Nikki Haley raises critical questions about the nature of modern political leadership. Is the GOP electorate content with a candidate whose silhouette mirrors their own, or do they yearn for a leader with a steadfast compass, unwavering in conviction? As Haley treads her way through this carefully choreographed ballet, one wonders if the larger audience — the vast expanse of the American electorate — will tire of a performance that recalls similarly unsavoury and power-hungry Democrats such as Hillary Clinton, who never met a regional accent she wouldn’t affect.

Will Haley somehow find her place in a fixed orbit around the bright orange sun that is Trump, or will she be consigned back to the storeroom closet as her party’s ultimate empty suit? Only time, and the ballots, will tell. In the meantime, the curtain continues to rise on the 2024 primaries, and the spotlight is unforgiving.

Manchin’s rejection of the Democrats has been a long time coming. His voting record is complex, diverging from the party line on numerous occasions. A lifetime member of the National Rifle Association (NRA), Manchin opposed the more progressive elements of his party after Sandy Hook. And as one of the few anti-abortion Democrats in Congress, he has consistently voted in favour of restrictions on abortion access. Meanwhile, his support for the coal industry — an important economic driver in his home state and the industry that made him a millionaire before he entered politics — has often put him at odds with their green agenda. He was also the only Democrat to vote in favour of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination in 2018, drawing the ire of many within his party, and he voted with Donald Trump more than 50% of the time.

Manchin’s ideology is consistent, though. It’s grounded in the history of West Virginia, a former Democrat stronghold that has become solidly Republican in recent years. And his conservative bent could be perceived as a survival strategy. After all, he is currently staring down a 55% disapproval rating in West Virginia, as he contemplates seeking another term in the Senate. His opponent is likely to be the state’s Republican governor, Jim Justice, a former conservative Democrat who switched parties. And one does wonder: why doesn’t Manchin jump ship to the Republican Party, given his voting patterns seem slightly more aligned with theirs? Trump, in 2022, actually suggested on Truth Social that Manchin be brought into the GOP.

But Manchin’s comments signal a desire to reject both major parties. In America, there is a large cadre of “politically homeless” voters: roughly 49% of the electorate according to some polling. Where once they might have been drawn to candidates who could see the other side’s point of view, these voters now seem disenchanted with party politics altogether, put off by the extreme fringes of the Republicans and Democrats alike. Manchin is appealing to them.

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While polls show dissatisfaction with candidates within both parties, Manchin’s potential candidacy would inevitably benefit one of them. He could appeal to a critical 1% or 2% in Rust Belt swing states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan, which would probably be enough to tilt the scales in favour of the GOP.

More broadly, his rhetoric is a sign of a shift in American politics. Bipartisanship and consensus decision-making, celebrated ideals for nearly three decades after the end of the Second World War, have lost their lustre, ceasing to animate the base of either party. Marginal struggles currently define internal and external political battles. But Manchin and allies, such as former Democrat Krysten Sinema — now representing Arizona in the Senate as an independent — believe there’s still a silent majority to be found in the centre, one that is indifferent to the culture war that drives the loudest political engagement. 

Manchin’s paradox is that, while the most active voters are increasingly drawn towards the extremes of their respective parties, he is gambling on the centre. While his voting record paints a picture of a moderate Democrat — often erring on the conservative side — this suggestion of a third-party candidacy implies a critical redefinition of his political stance. Instead of being the swing vote within his party, Manchin would be a fulcrum between the two major political forces. Would he survive it?

Much of Manchin’s political career has been characterised by his unusual resilience in the face of the onrushing deep-red political tides in West Virginia. His endurance owes much to his somewhat unconventional stances, which resonate with a Rust Belt populace disenchanted by what they perceive as the Democratic Party’s preoccupation with identity politics at the expense of working-class concerns relevant to their area, such as the protection of jobs in fossil fuel industries.

But is there a national appetite for this brand of centrism? The country is polarised. The Pew Research Center has found that twice as many members of the two main American parties now view their opponents unfavourably, compared to 1994. In a sociopolitical environment where labels — LGBTQIA, America First, MAGA, they/them — have become essential to the identities of young people, not to mention their self-marketing, will there be significant support for a “No Labels” campaign?

Third-party bids have gained some traction in America’s political history. Billionaire Ross Perot’s Reform Party campaign racked up some impressive numbers in 1992 and 1996. But while Perot aimed to transcend partisan politics in order to win, Manchin appears more focused on exerting influence to create a moderate shift in policy. If he runs, he’s more likely to follow in the footsteps of activists such as Green Party nominee Ralph Nader, remembered more for inadvertently tipping the scales in favour of Republican George W. Bush in 2000 than for his actual campaign. And since America today is even more polarised than in the Nineties, ultimately the implications of a third-party bid are more dangerous.

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The mooted “No Labels” party does seem like a hurried experiment in political transcendence, a far too simple answer to the broad discontent with the current political binary. But if Manchin wants to be remembered as the man who shed the shackles of partisanship, this move may tarnish the legacy he has already created for himself. His bold attempt to coax the country towards the centre could end up deepening the divisions he has exposed.

This has been the case with his prior attempts to preserve or create a “centre” on controversial issues. On gun control, Manchin co-sponsored the bipartisan Manchin-Toomey bill following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, which proposed expanded background checks for gun sales. Seen by much of the Left as an inadequate middle-ground solution, it failed to gain traction. As a result, the United States has been unable to make even minor changes related to background checks, and the two sides have only become more entrenched.

On energy policy, Manchin’s support for the fossil fuel industry is out of step with his party’s support for a progressive “Green New Deal”, while his reluctance to fully endorse the coal industry’s unregulated expansion has drawn ire from the Right. Manchin has recently joined with Republicans to oppose the climate legislation to which he had added a degree of moderation. But in general, seeking the centrist position in America does not lead to a union of the factions; rather, it leaves the centrist isolated, at odds with both sides.

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His campaign would simply highlight the structural flaws of America’s political system, in which centrism can empower extremism. Part of the problem is the dynamics of party primaries. Candidates often find themselves compelled to pander to the ideological extremes to gain the nomination, pushing them away from the centre. Even if they later shift, their original stances are remembered; in the long run, this discourages bipartisan cooperation.

Here is a lesson for moderates, if they really want to effect change: instead of conforming to extremism, they should look to their long-term influence on political norms and the policy-making process, as Manchin at least tried to do prior to signalling his frustration with the Democrats. They need to somehow communicate the importance of pragmatic governance, and the necessity of compromise in a democracy — ideally through political advertising that emphasises the value of bipartisan dealmaking over ideological purity, of “fighting gridlock” and “getting things done”.

It won’t be easy. Divide and conquer has always been a potent strategy for generating enthusiasm, and centrists such as Manchin are working in an atmosphere where both parties are cynically leveraging polarisation. Democrats have recently started funding extreme Republican primary candidates, whom they believe will be easy to beat in the general election. It’s a manoeuvre that, while it may yield short-term electoral gains, could backfire, by enabling candidates with more extreme views to gain power. And, if moderates abandon the major parties, they will only empower these extreme candidates, driving the Democrats and Republicans further and further apart. It would be an ironic outcome for Manchin, who claims to want the parties to come together.

So what is Manchin really trying to achieve? He has been a self-avowed independent within the Democratic Party for years; his last-ditch embrace of a potential “No Labels” movement, then, could be characterised as an act of egoism. At the age of 75, Manchin is probably not seeking political longevity. Rather, “No Labels” feels like a legacy move. Manchin might just be looking back at his long career of crossing party lines, and making a final, and perhaps sincere, plea for American politics to move back to the centre. 

Then again, if he is against the erosion of collective solidarity by personal politics, there would be an irony in him launching a highly individual campaign. There’s no point standing in the ideological centre if you’re there all by yourself.

The modern Republican Party, aiming to re-establish itself in the aftermath of Trump’s shambolic administration, should pay close attention. The path to a successful future may not lie with the likes of Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin or South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, as competent and capable as they appear to be. These figures, though skilled, often appear hesitant to challenge the MAGA base on divisive issues such as immigration, foreign policy and LGBT rights — yet offer the base far less red meat than leading contenders like Trump or Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is strongly courting this contingent. Instead, the party’s future might be best served by the extraordinarily unassuming figure of New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu. This leader, far less contentious, embodies a less polarised approach that might resonate with a broader spectrum of voters — particularly the Independents who swing the crucial elections in America’s toss-up “purple” states.

Born and raised in Salem, Sununu is firmly part of the state’s premier political lineage: his father, known for his terrifyingly high IQ, also served as New Hampshire’s Governor, while one of his seven siblings was elected as the state’s Senator. Yet despite hailing from arguably the most “boring” political dynasty in American history, Sununu may well be the steady hand the Republican party needs. Of course, his candidacy is rightly considered a long shot — but the allure of his pragmatic approach to politics is increasingly compelling.

Consider the striking figures of former North Carolina Congressman Madison Cawthorn and New York Congressman George Santos, both of whom have made headlines for less than desirable reasons. Cawthorn, the youngest elected official in Washington D.C. and a wheelchair user, made claims about his Paralympic aspirations, academic background, drug use and even his sexuality that were subsequently debunked or exposed during a primary campaign that he lost to a boring Chamber of Commerce-style Republican rival. And Santos, an openly-gay representative seen as a symbol of the party’s diversification as well as a habitual liar, is now facing a litany of serious charges including wire fraud and money laundering. Then, of course, there is the inescapable Trump: the bright orange sun, recently found liable in a civil proceeding for battery and defamation, and immersed in a half-dozen other legal proceedings.

Amid such turbulent times for the party, Chris Sununu’s steadfastly fiscally-conservative approach and well-grounded governance stand in stark contrast. His political journey over four terms in office exhibits a balance between maintaining personal convictions and adapting to evolving societal demands. His record on abortion rights, for example, shows a clear progression. Starting from a vote while serving in New Hampshire’s legislative assembly to defund Planned Parenthood in 2015, he reversed his stance and has repeatedly endorsed contracts with the organisation, even declaring himself a “pro-choice governor” in response to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.

Furthermore, Sununu has demonstrated allyship to the LGBT community during a period when even Trump, who once declared “the gays, they love me”, has seemingly disappeared from that scene. He has enacted legislation to protect LGBT rights, such as laws prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity and banning conversion therapy for minors. He has also supported the inclusion of a non-binary gender option on driver’s licences and vetoed a bill that could have resulted in trans children being inadvertently outed to their parents in schools. Admittedly, this could be viewed as excessively progressive or perhaps something a “Republican in name only” governing in a Northeastern state might be compelled to do. It may, however, serve as an effective strategy to pacify the GOP base and shift focus towards major economic issues. This strategy, of course, could be precarious during the primaries, as MAGA voters may oppose him. Yet, there’s a slim possibility that figures such as Trump and DeSantis could split the hard-Right vote, allowing Sununu to eke out a victory with the support of centre-Right voters.

There, Sununu has maintained conservative stances, supporting state-funded school choice vouchers for disadvantaged and low-income students — critical at a time when more and more parents are pulling their kids out of failing public schools — and vetoing a bill for a paid family leave policy which entailed a state-wide payroll tax. In essence, Sununu’s record presents a unique blend of principled conservatism, fiscal responsibility and an understanding of social shifts. While the spectre of scandal or stupid sloganeering looms large over other figures in the party, Sununu’s comparatively mundane, yet effective, political career offers a refreshing divergence that could represent the Republicans’ saving grace in this politically tumultuous era.

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By Oliver Bateman

Consider how this has worked for the Democrats. President Joe Biden, a centrist Democrat for as long as he belonged to the party, has somehow made good on four decades of blustery “Middle-Class Joe” and “Amtrak Joe” rhetoric. From the perspective of his conservative critics, he’s an aged figurehead manipulated by “woke” elites, while to some progressives, he’s perceived as a detached incumbent under the sway of corporate interests. An objective analysis, however, shows that Biden is handling the complex challenges of presidency in a more nuanced way than he’s often given credit for.

Initially, expectations were tempered for the elder statesman: could he merely get out of bed each day, mumble a few words to the camera, and avoid wetting himself on television? Yet Biden’s administration has spearheaded significant policies — from the withdrawal from Afghanistan to the bipartisan $1 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act — which, if associated with a more vivacious ideologue, might have sparked significant enthusiasm across the political spectrum. Perhaps even more surprisingly, the Democrats fared remarkably well in the 2022 midterm elections — a success that can partly be attributed to the party’s capacity to resist ultra-conservative contenders backed by influential figures such as Trump.

Who knows, perhaps Biden’s centrist approach might offer a blueprint for a novel style of leadership that could reshape America’s political landscape — a style of leadership that the much younger and much sharper Chris Sununu, who lacks only national name recognition despite a fairly well-known political surname, could emulate for the Republicans. Certainly, as we look towards the 2024 elections, it’s worth considering the importance of a calm, steady contender against President Biden.

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It’s unfortunate, then, that the prospect of a tranquil political landscape seems improbable. The potential return of Trump to the Republican ticket will be good news for media outlets and social media platforms that thrive on conflict, but less so for the functioning of a society we call home. Indeed, in the coming months, the likely reality is that we’ll be inundated with Trump-centric media coverage, reminiscent of the intense attention he received during a recent CNN town hall in which he used the hapless former Daily Caller listicle writer Kaitlan Collins to dust off his greatest hits. Potential contenders like Sununu, in comparison, may remain relatively unknown, much like former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley in the 2016 Democratic race, or Ohio Governor John Kasich on the Republican side. We’re all set to lose from this situation, becoming the victims of content algorithms designed to prioritise engagement over quality discussion.

The resulting indifference towards a “mundane” Sununu candidacy reveals a profound predicament: a political landscape that undervalues stability and practical policymaking. Addressing this is not merely a matter of preferring dull personalities over dynamic ones, but electing leaders committed to the collective welfare, rather than those who thrive on division and disharmony. In this context, Sununu emerges not just as a quiet politician, but as a soothing balm to the heated partisanship that has marked recent years. His calm demeanour could be just what we need to restore tranquillity in the turbulent sea of American politics. As Sununu said earlier this month: “If you can’t assure the Republican Party that you can cross the line in November of 2024 — and it’s pretty clear [Trump] can’t — then we have to find somebody else. That’s it. It’s nothing personal. We’re moving on as a party.”

The party does indeed need to move on: it’s time to allow reasoned dialogue and pragmatic policy to echo within the not-so-hallowed halls of our fraying democracy. It’s time to make America boring again.

A survey from the Pew Research Center released last month showed that there is a rapid decline in Catholisism among American Hispanics — tumbling from 67% in 2010 to 46%. “That’s consistent with other Latin American countries, such as Brazil, where large numbers of Catholics have converted to Evangelical Christianity,” says Dr Andrew Chesnut, Professor of Religious Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. The “health and wealth” promises of Pentecostalism in particular are driving people across the continent to Evangelical churches. “The interesting difference between Latin America and the United States,” says Chesnut, “is the percentage of religious ‘nones’, which has tripled to 30 percent in 12 years. In Latin America, they’re only usually in the 12-14 percent range.”

Nones are people who have no faith at all, and they are fast swallowing up white Christian America — now firmly a minority. In 1996, the year Bill Clinton was sworn in for his second term as president, almost 65% of Americans identified as white and Christian. Now, only 44% do. In 1990, only 7% of Americans said that they were nones, but that figure has increased four-fold over the last 30 years, largely because of young people. Today, almost half of Gen Z — young adults born from 1997 onwards — say they have no religion.

For a long time, American exceptionalism saw the United States buck the European trend of secularisation. And faith among Hispanics, who tend to come from more religious backgrounds than white Americans, remained particularly strong. Catholicism was seen, even among the young, as part of their identity — but “the inflexibility of the Church to modernise its dogma and doctrine in terms of blessing, same sex marriage, and female clergy really is culturally out of touch with Millennials and Generation Z”, Chesnut says. High-profile sex scandals have also put people off — too much even for the Latino community’s cultural Catholics. People who once ticked the box identifying as Catholic, even if they weren’t regularly attending, are now firmly in the “none” camp. And Hispanics are now abandoning the faith as fast as the rest of the country.

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Ryan Burge, author of The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going, suspects that changes in Hispanic faith have to do with how devout your parents were when they came to the United States. “If they are super devout, you’re more likely to stay Catholic,” he says. “If they really weren’t religious at all, you’re much more likely to become a none.” But there is a third way: “If they’re kind of on the fence about religion, then you might become Evangelical.”

The material promises offered by born-again churches are also attractive. A Pew study in 2014 found that 49% of Hispanics who were raised as Catholics but have become Protestants say that an important factor was finding a church that “reaches out and helps its members more”. Moreover, the prosperity gospel preached in Evangelical churches rewards hard work — a philosophy that often appeals to those who’ve signed up to the American Dream, which reassures them that if they put in the effort, they’ll be rewarded. Faith healing is also an attractive offering, given that health care is usually out-of-reach for working-class people in the United State.

Assimilation is often a primary aim. “We’re seeing a rising number of conservative Hispanics jumping the fence from Catholicism to Evangelicalism, because Evangelicalism is a very American religion,” says Burge. Immigrants to the United States often have more malleable identities, and “becoming an Evangelical is a way to jump into the mainstream of your town or city”, says Burge.   Evangelical Churches are a marker of a new life and new identity. Being born again is both a spiritual and actual experience: you’re baptised as a follower of Jesus, and as an American. Some scholars describe conversion to Evangelical faith as a kind of safety mechanism, stemming from the belief that Hispanic immigrants become more American, and less deportable.

The change in the religious landscape reflects a bigger picture in American politics: the stark, and increasingly pronounced, city-rural divide. The “God Gap” is a part of that: if you’re in a big city,you’re likely to be secular; in a rural area, you’re likely to be church-going — or at least religiously-identifying but not attending. Politically, these religious shifts are beginning to have a real impact: the Democrats are making gains in secularising regions, while the Republicans are on the march in places where religion is on the rise.

Hispanics are increasingly adopting the cultural markers once dominated by white Americans — and with that has come a change in party allegiance. In the 2020 election, Hispanic Evangelicals voted almost 50/50 for Trump and Biden, while two-thirds of Hispanic Catholics voted for their co-religionist Biden. In Hispanic-majority Miami-Dade County, which Hillary Clinton won by 30 percentage points in 2016, Biden won by only seven in 2020.  Even more striking is Texas, long vaunted as a state preparing to turn to the Democrats. This would be electorally disastrous for the Republicans: Texas is the second largest state in the electoral college. But along the Texas-Mexico border, in the Rio Grande Valley, the number of votes for Republicans has jumped astronomically. After losing Starr County, in southernmost Texas, by 60 percentage points to Hillary Clinton in 2016, Donald Trump lost it by just five to Joe Biden in 2020. Next door in Zapata County, which Clinton won by 33 percentage points in 2016, voters flipped entirely for Trump. These are counties that identify as almost entirely Hispanic or Latino — and who have long been assumed to be flag-waving Democrats.

But Hispanics here, unsurprisingly, feel the threat of deportation more keenly than most, given their proximity to the border. That anxiety often manifests as a preoccupation with job security, and one’s place in the community — ideas central to the conservative worldview.

“Hispanics who are conservative culturally, socially and religiously are moving into places around the Rio Grande Valley,” Burge says. “And they’re really changing the political and social culture of those places.” Religiosity, like Republicanism, has massively increased in the region. In 2010, about 33% of Starr County claimed they were part of a religious congregation. By 2020, that number was 73%. Conservative Texas Democratic congressman Henry Cuellar describes the region as “homogenous, deeply religious, pensively patriotic, socially conservative, and it’s hurting economically.” In other words, naturally Republican.

Whether the conservative or the Evangelical turn came first is difficult to say, but they often go hand in hand, motivated by the same feeling: that the liberal, secular world is closing in on people with conservative values. And given the GOP is so clearly losing the demographic battle, it has been willing to accept Hispanics — particularly evangelical Hispanics — as all-American patriots. Though Catholicism has historically been tied to Hispanic identity, for first and second generation migrants who feel compelled to prioritise assimilation over their heritage, a fork in the road is clear: become a non-believing, big-city Democrat, or a small-town Evangelical Republican.

The GOP’s restrictionist abortion platform appears to have played a major role in its subpar results in the 2022 midterms, even as spiralling inflation seemed sure to boost the party’s fortunes. In the months since, its vulnerability on reproductive rights has continued to play out in a number of statewide contests — most recently, in the commanding victory of pro-choice liberal challenger Janet Protasiewicz in Wisconsin’s State Supreme Court election.

All of this has proven frustrating to those who are convinced, with some reason, that the GOP should be winning — not only because of Biden’s economic woes but because of the Democrats’ commitment to unpopular positions on culture-war topics, from transgender athletes to racial preferences. How can the Republicans be bleeding votes on one culture-war issue when they hold a decisive advantage on so many others?

The answer, in part, is that there is no longer just one culture war, but (at least) two distinct battlefields with different terrains — let’s call them Culture War 1.0 and Culture War 2.0. Culture War 1.0, exemplified today by the abortion debate, dates to the conservative backlash to the sexual revolution in the Seventies. It has seen the cultural Right fight a series of losing battles — with the overturning of Roe v. Wade last year standing as an exception that proves the rule. Culture War 2.0, consisting of a varied array of race and gender-related conflicts that have consumed public life in recent years, dates back barely a decade, but it did not truly come to the fore until the convulsions of 2020.

The GOP’s attraction to this second iteration are obvious. The positions increasingly embraced by the Democratic coalition on the relevant cluster of issues — for example, that a woman is anyone who identifies as such, that biological sex is not real, or that present discrimination is needed to counteract past discrimination — are broadly unpopular outside certain affluent, highly educated settings. Moreover, those leading the charge against the new liberal consensus are often disaffected liberals and establishment centrists, which suggests there is a potential for the Right to make inroads beyond its traditional base. Abortion, in contrast, is of greatest concern to religious voters, who make up a rapidly declining share of the electorate.

So, why do the Culture War 1.0 politics of abortion remain so resilient within the GOP, even as it threatens to torpedo the party’s chances in many contests? The answer lies in the difference between these two battlefields. Consider Florida governor and likely presidential contender Ron DeSantis’s recent decision to sign a bill limiting abortion to the first six weeks of pregnancy. DeSantis has capitalised more than any politician to date on Culture War 2.0 issues, having declared war against critical race theory and gender ideology in schools, and against the progressive turn taken by corporations like Disney. These aggressive moves have polled well in Florida, even beyond the Republican base, and helped propel him to a midterm victory last year that set him apart from the mediocre performance of his party.

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Why, then, has DeSantis embraced abortion restrictions, which poll poorly in Florida and have proven a losing issue even in solidly conservative states such as Kansas and Kentucky? In a recent commentary on DeSantis’s decision, political scientist Eric Kaufmann voices an exasperation shared by many Culture War 2.0 advocates: why would the GOP’s rising star make such a “withdrawal of political capital” given that barely a third of Florida voters support the measure? According to Kaufmann, the pursuit of abortion restrictions reflects the preferences of the anti-abortion GOP donor and activist class — whose support would obviously be vital in a presidential primary — over and against those of moderate swing voters.

Kaufmann hints at an alternative approach centred around a Republican version of what some Democratic strategists dub “popularism”: ignore the moral manias of activists and insiders, and foreground proposals that poll well with the electorate — such as ending affirmative action and banning the teaching of critical race theory and gender theory in schools. A number of major Republican pundits have lately offered a similar assessment; as Ann Coulter exasperatedly tweeted: “Stop pushing strict limits on abortion, or there will be no Republicans left.”

But the weakness of popularism, whether Democratic or Republican, is that it emphasises polling at the expense of organisational and institutional dimensions of power; that is, it conceives of politics as a contest between aggregate individual opinions. Political success, for the popularist, comes from identifying positions that appeal to the largest number of individual voters and highlighting them to draw these voters in on election day.

This might seem obvious, but what it misses is the fact that any political coalition is made up of what are derogatorily called “interest groups” — not atomised individuals weighing their stances on a laundry list of issues (the model of citizenship implied by public opinion surveys), but individuals embedded in social formations with shared interests and preferences, and a particular positioning in relation to institutions: churches, parties, NGOs, the media, and so on.

This basic reality accounts for many phenomena that often seem mystifying in our polling-obsessed political culture. What accounts for the many policies that command broad support according to surveys but have no chance of being enacted? The answer often given is that the preferences of the wealthy and powerful override those of the broader electorate, and there’s surely something to that. But in the case of abortion — as opposed to, say, marginal tax rates — there is no obvious reason why rich donors would favour outright bans, or on the opposite side, the maximal liberalisation of abortion laws. The question, here as elsewhere, is how partisans of a particular cause that isn’t overwhelmingly popular have managed to organise and cultivate support in order to achieve their desired ends.

The anti-abortion cause remains politically potent within the GOP because it has emphasised the slow, unglamourous work of building networks of single-minded activists and establishing institutional power where it mattered. The fact that it achieved a key goal despite its relative unpopularity — polling prior to Dobbs suggested fewer than a third of Americans supported overturning Roe — is the crucial sign of the movement’s formidable force.

And yet, Culture War 2.0 will likely prove irresistible to GOP candidates in general elections in the coming years, as the need for culture-war appeals clashes with the unpopularity of Culture 1.0 issues with moderate voters. As The New York Times recently reported: “Polling suggests that the public is less likely to support transgender rights than same-sex marriage and abortion rights” — the same goes, as Kaufmann notes, for teaching critical race theory in schools and racial preferences in admissions and hiring. Surely, given losses like Wisconsin, such a pivot would be prudent.

But in the long run, Culture War 2.0 may prove a paper tiger, because beneath its polling strengths and prominence in the news cycle, it lacks organisational depth, clear institutional ambitions, and even coherent political objectives. Organisationally and institutionally, it heavily consists of political influencers of various sorts: podcasters, YouTubers, Substackers, and the like. To the extent the movement includes people engaged in contests over power, rather than the battle of ideas, these tend to be imperfect proxies for a generalised opposition to contemporary liberal ideology. Overturning Roe, for instance, strikes at the heart of a practice the anti-abortion movement views as evil. In contrast, bans on teaching critical race or gender theory in schools, transgender athletes competing in school sports, or even youth gender transition only chip away at the object truly targeted by Culture War 2.0: the nebulous “woke” ideological complex, which, due both to its vague contours and speech protections, cannot itself be banned.

All of this is compounded by the fact that Culture War 2.0’s broad coalition is internally incoherent in its long-term aims — in what it hopes will supplant progressive hegemony. It includes people who desire colour-blind policies and adherents of “race realism”; people who want to abolish gender and people who want to reinforce traditional gender roles. The strength of Culture War 2.0 — its broad base of support — is thus also its weakness.

That is not to say any of this is permanent. Culture War 2.0, as already noted, is new; the movements under its umbrella could theoretically evolve into forces as durable, well-organised, and ruthless about the pursuit of institutional power as the anti-abortion movement was over the decades leading up to Dobbs. But the incentives of the media and political landscape differ immensely from the period when Culture War 1.0 took shape: winning the news cycle and achieving maximum virality now take precedence. The anti-abortion movement, incubated in a different cultural landscape, learned to ignore most of this in its single-minded pursuit of a clearly defined, difficult objective. Rather than dismissing insiders, donors and interest groups, those attempting to build any political movement would do well to follow suit.

Admittedly, expectations were low: an elderly caretaker of America. But Biden’s administration has promoted policies that, were the stuttering octogenarian a more charismatic ideologue, either Left or Right might have excitedly endorsed. There was the withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan; the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act, which facilitated a surprisingly smooth pandemic recovery; and the $1 trillion bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, supported by almost three quarters of voters. Along the way, he has presided over a hot-and-cold economy that continues to offset rising inflation with suspiciously strong job creation numbers, even as other key indicators still point toward a looming long-term recession.

Biden has been lucky, remarkably so — the party’s midterm election performance in 2022 was unexpectedly strong. A punishing loss for the party holding the presidency is usually taken as a fait accompli. The party even expanded its majority in the Senate. In part, this success stemmed from the Democrats’ ability to fend off far-Right challenges from candidates who had managed to seize victory in Republican primaries thanks to the backing of important figures like ex-president Trump. In other words, the GOP has been hamstrung by its drift towards its more extreme ends.

Biden’s greatest asset, meanwhile, has been his wobbly centrism — a late-stage, cracked-mirror version of the pugnacious, energetic centrism that made him a presidential front-runner in the 1988 Democratic primaries, until allegations of plagiarism in his speeches and academic work torpedoed his candidacy. In the style of a grandparent simply unable to hear the complaints of his arguing grandchildren, Biden has alternated between offering lip service to the social-justice issues that animate his party’s Left-wing base, while reiterating his own more traditional support for police, law and order, and the middle class.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that Biden has given every indication that he will run for re-election in 2024. Genuine one-term presidential administrations are rare — only three presidents served four years and chose not to run again. But Biden is still working on borrowed time. There are a variety of ongoing issues that could take a turn for the worse. The long-promised Russian offensive in eastern Ukraine could weaken Nato’s resolve to continue subsidising that embattled nation. The layoffs seen primarily in the technology and entertainment sectors could spread more widely across the economy. Mounting infrastructure disasters like the recent train derailment and hazardous materials spill in East Palestine, Ohio could give the administration a black eye. Police shootings such as the violent arrest and death of Tyre Nichols in Memphis could send protestors back to the streets across the United States. All of this could provoke conflicts between Biden and other senior figures in his party, who might apply pressure to prevent him from running again.

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Even if he runs and wins, Biden will be 82 when he takes office in 2024. This is unprecedented territory for a democratically elected leader. His health could fail suddenly. The mounting personal scandals involving the handling of confidential documents and his “black sheep” son Hunter could topple, or he could make one too many a gaffe-ridden speech. (Biden recently received praise from 76-year-old former president Donald Trump for delivering a relatively coherent State of the Union Address.) But most alarmingly for the American Left, there are no obvious candidates waiting in the Democratic wings — in fact, Biden’s surprisingly strong performance has caused would-be rivals to fall in line, with The New York Times interpreting the deference of party heavyweights as evidence that it’s “Biden or bust” in 2024.

Whether or not he runs, Biden’s success as a wobbly centrist could serve as a guiding light for his successor. We might even see a candidate with the energy of Biden during his brief Eighties heyday. That Biden, as The Atlantic writer William Schneider explained in a detailed 1988 profile of the leading Democratic candidates, was frequently described as a “completely political creature, in the best sense of the word”, as well as a “guy with unrealised potential” on the cusp of becoming a “political heavyweight”. This version of Biden — still prone to stuttering and fulminating, but far more focused than the current model — was the perfect remedy for a Democratic Party reeling from the failed campaign of traditional Left-leaning presidential candidate Walter Mondale in 1984, and the far-Left insurgencies of Ted Kennedy in 1980 and Jesse Jackson in 1984, which had badly divided the base — just as Bernie Sanders would go on to do in 2016 and 2020. This iteration of Biden was known for “shooting straight” — standing before women’s groups, labour unions, and the NAACP, telling them things they don’t necessarily want to hear.

Biden was one of several promising centre-Left candidates of that era who offered outside-the-box solutions to national problems that the Democratic Party of the New Deal era could not address. What appealed was tough-on-crime talk, to assuage voters’ fears about urban violence; a rollback of social security, to push the long-term unemployed off the dole and back into the workforce; and a move away from unequivocal support for organised labour. The US in 1988 looked a lot more like the country of today than people remember — it was a deindustrialising colossus that was militarily entangled with the Soviet Union and economically out-competed by a rising Japan — and the subsequent prosperity of the Nineties owed in considerable part to the Left’s willingness to steer itself, and the nation, toward the centre.

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Biden’s momentary, scandal-ridden downfall in the 1988 primaries was followed by a Democratic resurgence in the 1992 presidential election, during which Bill Clinton wrested the office from George H.W. Bush. Clinton was one of the party’s various late-Eighties rising stars who helped revive its fortunes by appealing to America’s roughly 10 million independent voters — who decided the country’s razor-thin electoral contests in its handful of swing states. This left plenty of room in the party for far-Left stalwarts such as Ted Kennedy, Jesse Jackson and, eventually, Bernie Sanders — old welfare-state lions and civil-rights warriors who could be confined to safe districts. But in states where the parties were competing on relatively even terms, the Democrats needed to field candidates who could at least moderate the party’s rhetoric on more controversial subjects like immigration.

There, the lessons of the Democratic Leadership Council — founded in 1985 by political strategist Al From — paid dividends. Prominent members, including Biden, Clinton and future Vice-President Al Gore emphasised crime, tax reform and welfare reform as a way of winning back middle-class voters. That isn’t to say there weren’t identifiable differences between Democrats and Republicans on these issues; rather, the goal was to minimise or at least talk past those differences, while fielding a non-ideological candidate who was broadly likeable rather than infamous. The tactic worked. So much so that the party was still using it during Barack Obama’s two successful campaigns for the presidency, even if he leavened his centrism with some of the soon-to-be unavoidable social justice rhetoric. In fact, likeability was the chief difference between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton during their heated primary contest in 2008 — both were moderates, but Obama could speak convincingly to both the base and the general public.

Right now, it is not entirely clear who could carry the torch of centrism. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who was a Republican during the Eighties and Nineties and only changed her party affiliation in 1996, could conceivably moderate the rhetoric she deployed in 2020 to compete with Bernie Sanders — though, at 73, she’s not exactly a spring chicken. Other potential candidates are either untested on the national scene, such as Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, or have been otherwise unsuccessful in their pursuit of national office, such as the Ohio senate candidate Tim Ryan.

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The 2022 midterms demonstrated that moderation can win close elections over the vestiges of Trumpism: witness boring former astronaut Mark Kelly beating “based” techbro Blake Masters for an Arizona senate seat, and the uninspiring Raphael Warnock defeating inveterate liar and former football star Herschel Walker in a Georgia runoff. Where Republicans prevailed “bigly”, it was the work of similarly dull, indeed somewhat nerdy, governors with track records to tout: second-generation wonk Chris Sununu in New Hampshire, big stick-wielding former Yale baseball player Ron DeSantis in Florida, and Ohio political lifer Mike DeWine.

In an increasingly polarised country, fearful middle-class swing voters — force-fed a diet of ratings-grabbing news about world calamities and impending social collapse — desire nothing so much as a steady hand on the wheel. Not Ronald Reagan riding in on a horse or Franklin D. Roosevelt chatting by the fireside, but Glenn Youngkin in a red vest or Mark Kelly with a well-shined bald head, each reading a carefully-prepared speech in a well-rehearsed monotone. Whether it arrives sooner or later, the post-Biden future for the Democrats still goes through the centre-Left. Unfortunately, there are plenty of people in the party capable of derailing further efforts toward moderation. The nine progressive members of the House of Representatives who comprise “the Squad” can certainly reach the Democratic base, as Ted Kennedy and Jesse Jackson did during the Eighties, but polling shows that swing voters don’t care for what they’re selling.

As unexciting as it sounds, the American system depends on these swing voters. And what they want is some level of police funding, some level of control over the curriculum in their schools, and a chief executive who will cool off the superheating partisan debate they hear incessantly on the various news entertainment networks. Elderly Biden, years past his competitive peak, managed to deliver a condensed version of this in 2020. Lest it lurch further Left and risk running candidates every bit as unelectable as out-of-touch Walter Mondale in 1984, the party would be well-advised to trade in the President for a newer model as soon as the opportunity presents itself.

With The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Survival, DeSantis very clearly frames his prospective candidacy in light of our historical moment: he is the tribune of the red states and antidote to the ills of progressivism. He is keen to highlight his achievements as governor: resisting lockdowns, fighting wokeism in schools, and standing up to big corporations like Disney, one of the state’s major employers. His record won him a landslide re-election in November with 59% of the vote, flipping Miami-Dade (with its concentration of Latino voters) and Palm Beach counties from the Democrats. But will his success be enough to snatch the nomination from Trump and the presidency from Joe Biden?

Though the book is generous with praise for Donald Trump, the unstated premise of DeSantis’s run is that he can do what the former president once did but without the outsize flaws. If DeSantis truly wishes to displace Trump as the party’s leader, he must prove that he is a superior vessel for the populist impulses that now predominate in the GOP (“Trumpism without Trump”). The problem with the 45th president, as I have argued before, is that he was not able to follow through on the authentically populist and nationalist instincts that won him the White House in 2016. Under the influence of institutional Republicans, his administration largely stuck to the standard party line, or else failed to deliver in the few instances when the president’s advisers did try to break free of Reaganite dogmas. (In a strange twist, Trump disowned his administration’s most impressive executive achievement — the vaccine roll-out — in order to win culture war points.)

Trump also failed to grow his coalition by winning the support of moderates and independents, who are less likely to care about his partisan vendettas. Per Theodore White, a president with a sharper historical sense would have been more alert to the transformative potential of the present moment which, like the New Deal or the end of the Cold War, marks the epochal movement from one paradigm to another. Such a leader would also not have been so easy to derail or distract.

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So, does Ron DeSantis fit this bill? By all accounts, he is a far more cerebral politician than Trump ever was, and, being more conscious of the shifting ideological tides in the GOP, he is in theory less likely to be co-opted by the professional conservatives in Washington. DeSantis’s intellectual streak can be seen in his CV: he is an Ivy League graduate, had a stint as a history teacher, and authored a now forgotten 2011 book, Dreams From Our Founding Fathers: First Principles in the Age of Obama, in which he derived his vision of conservatism from the framers of the Constitution. DeSantis is able to engage with groups like the National Conservatism Conference (“NatCon”), a gathering of heterodox thinkers, in ways that more pedestrian elected officials can’t. Looking at his pronouncements in these intellectual settings can help piece together DeSantis’s own distinct “sense of history”.

In September, DeSantis gave the headline speech to the NatCon gathering on his home turf in Miami. He seemed aware of what made this era different from Reagan’s: “when Reagan came on the scene, for example, it was really big government that was to blame… You now have a woke mind virus that has infected all these other institutions.” DeSantis was saying what many populist Republicans have been thinking, which is that the private sector needs to be reined in just as much as the state — a sea change in conservative philosophy. And if “culture war is class warfare”, as J.D. Vance (another rising star of the Right) said, then one can expect cultural and economic grievances to be bundled together as the Right takes stands against firms like Disney, fighting against cultural wokeism while also fighting for the material interest of the working class.

But taking a closer look at DeSantis’ war on Disney shows that this is not actually how it works. DeSantis was ruthless in stripping the various privileges that the state had long granted to Disney in response to their opposition to Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill. As one impressed conservative columnist put it, here was clear evidence that the governor was ready “to take on Big Business on behalf of the little guy”, which was “Reagan-era Republican heresy”. However, conspicuously absent in DeSantis’s case against “The Happiest Place On Earth” is any mention of its exploitative working conditions or its refusal to pay decent wages to its workers. DeSantis appears to be indifferent to the properly economic dimensions of populism and is only concerned about calling out corporations in so far as a cultural dispute over wokeism is involved. Man cannot live on culture war alone, and it was left to Bernie Sanders to speak up about these bread-and-butter concerns. It doesn’t help DeSantis’s populist bona fides either that even after their feud, Disney lobbyists remained co-chairs for his inauguration.

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DeSantis is equally constrained in his conception of populism when it comes to immigration. The governor has been perfectly willing to make an “own the libs” show of bussing migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, but has been terribly reluctant to enact universal mandatory E-Verify in his state as a means of screening out undocumented migrant workers from the labour market. Why? Because it would be burdensome on business. After four years in power, it was only a few days ago (and now that he is about to run for president) that DeSantis came out in favour of universalising E-Verify — though this was also his promise when he ran for governor in 2018. But even if he succeeds in getting a law passed, much will depend on the sincerity and effectiveness of enforcement. As Bloomberg reported, “E-Verify Laws Across Southern Red States Are Barely Enforced… Even the most anti-immigration states don’t like cracking down on business.” It seems as if DeSantis (like Trump) wants to come across as an immigration hawk for culture-war purposes but without offending the business-donor class.

What about the anti-woke crusade in education? Surely, as DeSantis must be telling himself, the great mass of voters can get behind that. However, Florida’s war on woke schools is emblematic of what happens when the Right takes culture war as the be-all-and-end-all of politics. Yes, parents have no patience for woke excesses, but neither do they endorse the other extreme, which results in the same pathologies (book bans, political uniformity) but in a conservative direction. Republicans often interpret public opposition to wokeness as license to indulge in their own peculiar moral and cultural tastes, which can be no less alienating. Polling shows that banging on about Critical Race Theory has failed to resonate with all but a small slice of parents across the country. At the end of the day, most voters have little time for the ideological fixations that animate partisans of the Left and Right, and simply want an America that can deliver stability and opportunity for all.

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In his 2011 book, DeSantis identified with the founders who supported proposals for a strong national government, or what would eventually become the Constitution. Chief among these were the authors of the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. DeSantis even declared that Hamilton was “one of the greatest American statesmen never to serve as president”. Opposing them were the Anti-Federalists, who argued against the idea of an American nation-state and wanted to retain a minimal confederation. These tendencies have remained in tension ever since. The Anti-Federalists tended to be reactive, defined more by what they were against. And despite his professed Hamiltonian affinities, DeSantis has governed more from this negative position, building his political brand in opposition to things, be it wokeism or “Fauci-ism”. (Re-litigating the pandemic in 2024, when most Americans wish to move on, is also not likely to be a vote-getter.) The GOP itself seems to be moving toward an open embrace of Anti-Federalism: witness Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “national divorce” idea.

However, what is needed now is a revival of the Federalist tradition, defined more by what government is for, and infused with a greater level of institutional creativity and ambition. To build a new post-Reaganite order, it is not enough to wage a culture war without also working to change the material and institutional frameworks that shape American life. Like the Federalists themselves, who renovated the republic and used the power of the federal state for economic modernisation, the next generation of statesmen must present a national vision that is more positive than oppositional. One wonders if Ron DeSantis has enough of a “sense of history” to do just that.

This week, Nikki Haley launched her own bid for historical sub-footnote status (she is polling around 3%) when she declared her intention to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. The former South Carolina governor and ambassador to the United Nations is the first official challenger to her former boss Donald Trump. Commentators and bookmakers are largely agreed on her campaign’s (wholly non-existent) chances. The real challenge to the former president’s hold on the GOP will most likely come from Florida governor Ron DeSantis. But his appeal to the base is that he is a younger and more disciplined version of Trump, who can essentially continue what Trump started in 2016. With her appeals to the conservatism of the George W. Bush era, Haley can be expected to play the same role as Breckinridge: the swansong of a dying breed and the harbinger of her party’s irrevocable transformation. But even so, for the future of Republican politics and strategy, there is more to Haley’s bid than the sense of inevitable defeat that infuses it.

Clues about the true significance of the Haley campaign may first be found in retracing the relationship between the 45th president and his one-time ambassador. Nimrata Nikki Randhawa was born and grew up in Bamberg, South Carolina, the daughter of Sikh immigrants who came to the US by way of Canada from India. After graduating from Clemson University, she rose through the ranks in local politics and married national guardsman Michael Haley, converting to Christianity and later getting elected as a Republican to the state legislature in 2004. Haley became a national figure upon winning the governorship of South Carolina in 2010 as part of a Tea Party wave. Combining traditional conservative positions on taxes and social issues with an energetic populist style, Haley and the Tea Party represented a revival of GOP fortunes in the Obama years. She is also remembered for her call to take down the Confederate flag in 2015 after the Charleston massacre, and was touted as a serious presidential contender in 2016 though she opted to stay out of a crowded field.

Of course, that was the year both mainstream conservatism and liberalism were shattered by the insurgent force of Trumpian populism. Going well beyond the Tea Party, the real-estate mogul openly repudiated Bush-era conservative shibboleths, such as the Iraq War and free trade, while vociferously rejecting the establishment’s relatively moderate stances on immigration. As one of the party’s leading figures, Haley faced a choice between calling out Trump on principle or falling in line. Like many establishment conservatives at that juncture, she chose wisely: she did both.

At times, Haley appeared to criticise Trump, such as during her 2016 state of the union response when, in a veiled reference to her party’s frontrunner, she warned against the temptation “to follow the siren call of the angriest voices”. When her preferred candidate, Marco Rubio, was eliminated, she indicated she would vote for Trump but made clear that she was “not a fan”. In the end, Haley managed to say just enough to maintain her image as one of the respectable Republicans, but not nearly enough to anger or alienate the nominee. After Trump’s victory, Haley accepted the offer to serve as America’s envoy to the UN: it was an appointment that seemed to confirm the newfound unity between the president and the party establishment.

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At the United Nations, Ambassador Haley brought this political balancing act onto the international stage, gaining a reputation as the “good cop” of the Trump administration. This often meant adopting a of tone of rhetorical moderation to counteract Trump’s less statesmanlike instincts, while still pledging fidelity to the president. Nonetheless, Haley’s positions seemed to illustrate the distance between Trump and Bush-era foreign policy. For instance, while Trump was in favour of forging closer ties to Putin’s Russia and, at least initially, questioned the viability of Nato, Haley made a point of reaffirming the Atlantic alliance throughout her ambassadorship and took stands against Moscow and other authoritarian regimes.

When Haley stepped down in 2018, Trump praised her and she returned the favour in her memoir, in which she lauded her former boss as a strong president who was “great to work with”. A breach in relations due to January 6, after which Haley denounced Trump, was soon repaired when Haley later went back to supporting him. In 2021, she made clear she would duly make way for the former president if he opted for another run . “I would not run if President Trump ran, and I would talk to him about it… That’s something that we’ll have a conversation about.”

Even now, however, with Haley reneging on her pledge, Trump doesn’t seem all that bothered, writing on Truth Social, “Nikki has to follow her heart, not her honor. She should definitely run!” Unlike with DeSantis, Trump appears to be content with going soft on Haley, despite many lines of attack being open to the former president, such as tarring her as a disloyal “Republican In Name Only”, which can be enough to excommunicate someone from the party. Instead, the task of attacking her has fallen to Tucker Carlson and Trump’s other backers, who have referred to her as the “Carly Fiorina of 2024”, his one female rival from 2016.

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The lack of any real antagonism between Haley and Trump has led some to suggest that the former’s campaign is just a prelude to a possible vice-presidential selection (though he would likely be better off picking someone ideologically closer to him to avoid a repeat of the awkward relationship with Mike Pence), or part of some divide-and-conquer strategy to diffuse opposition to Trump and weaken the chances of Ron DeSantis. In this case, Nikki Haley’s run is not as pointless as it seems. Whether she is fully conscious of it or not, her campaign could very well be a welcome exercise in “regulated opposition” within the Republican Party.

That still begs the question: why is there so little tension between the two divergent wings of the party represented by Trump and Haley? After all, to hear Haley speak is to be transported to the halcyon days of post-Cold War Republican orthodoxy, when global market capitalism (neoliberalism) and military interventionism (neoconservatism) were unquestionable. This is a world away from the “America First” nationalism of Trump and the newer crop of populists, with its echoes of prewar isolationism and protectionism. Yet the Republican Party seems to have room enough for both of these tendencies without any big protracted battles over policy.

And while there now appears to be a brewing war of words between Trump and the Right’s traditional powerbrokers (like the pro-business Club for Growth and Americans for Prosperity, who are threatening to withhold their support in favour of more orthodox candidates such as Haley), the understanding seems to be that this is a mere pantomime act. The parties will go through the motions of dissent and protest before inevitably rallying to Trump (as they had done after 2016). Indeed, the Club for Growth has already made it clear that they would support Trump in the general election if he became the nominee.

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The explanation for the lack of genuine ideological conflict is simple: surface-level squabbles belie a practical convergence on policy. As president, with the partial exception of tariffs, Trump readily outsourced his agenda to Washington insiders with either neoliberal or neoconservative inclinations like John Bolton, producing a record that is in many ways a continuation of the old regime, on everything from tax cuts to immigration to foreign entanglements. In return for acquiescence to party regulars on policy, Trump was given free rein to ratchet up the culture war and to rebrand the GOP into the MAGA party, while effectively retaining much of the four-decades-old conservative programme.

Unlike Henry Breckinridge, who really did disagree with FDR (and who bolted from the party), the contrast between the likes of Nikki Haley and Donald Trump is mostly one of posture and aesthetics. In distancing herself from the former president rhetorically while nonetheless working to ensure that national policy follows party orthodoxy, Haley embodies the non-dilemma of the Republican establishment. Their struggle is not in deciding between principle and power, but in preserving the appearance of principle while reaping the spoils of power.

In the 1979 film Being There (based on the 1970 novel by Jerzy Kosiński), Chauncey Gardiner — memorably played by Peter Sellers — is an illiterate, mentally stunted, middle-aged man. Owing to his lifelong isolation in the townhouse of an elderly patron, he knows only two things: gardening and television. He dresses in Thirties-style double-breasted suits and speaks with an upper-class accent. But when his patron dies, Chauncey is unleashed in the streets of Washington DC and by a series of accidents soon rises to the heights of power, his mundane gardening commentary eagerly interpreted as sage advice by politicians and the press. Released in the year before the election of actor-president Ronald Reagan, the film has been seen as a harbinger of the postmodern turn in US politics, given expression by the likes of Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan: when appearance came to subsume substance in seemingly new and radical ways. Santos makes sense when viewed as a product of this distinctly late 20th-century, media-driven descent toward a fetish for the fake and superficial.

Meditations on the centrality of image in politics, however, also have a much older pedigree, stretching back to Machiavelli and the classical histories he drew upon. In contemplating what it took to hold power in a corrupt world, the Italian famously wrote in the passage on “the lion and the fox” that “the prince must be a great simulator and dissimulator”. Indeed, the same events in the story interpreted differently (“What if Chauncey was not the dumb beast of burden we were led to believe but was conscious of what was happening?”) would make Being There the ultimate tale of Machiavellian cunning and Chauncey Gardiner the ideal prince.

Santos, of course, knew what he was doing when he, for instance, claimed to have developed new carbon capture technologies or to have been the victim of an assassination plot. Taking the view of him as a calculating con-man would seem to confirm another comparison made of the legislator with a fictional character: Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley. But even this is off, for there is nothing of Ripley’s grace, nothing of the subtle or the suave, about Santos. And it is in any event hard to imagine Matt Damon (or a young Alain Delon) playing him in a film. More likely, it is this very tension between the possibility of his being either a Chauncey or a Ripley — a moron or a Machiavel — that makes George Santos such a frustratingly opaque and therefore fascinating figure. That he was found out so soon and so spectacularly suggests the former, but the fact that he is now a national figure who is set to gain more influence (thanks to Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s gift of two plum committee assignments) hints at the latter.

Yet for all his mysterious airs, Santos did not materialise in a vacuum. And as easy as it would be to single him out for ridicule, there can be no full accounting of the man and what he represents without acknowledging the context that made his ascent possible. Just as Chauncey could not have risen without the many cues of encouragement and support, unwitting or otherwise, given by his elite benefactors, so too should Santos’s career be seen as rooted in the broader culture and example set by the political class to which he now belongs. While Santos may still shock by the sheer volume and brazenness of his deceptions, he essentially broke no new ground. The content and pattern of his lies closely tracks those made by his predecessors in the political arena. And while Santos’s false claims are evidently more flagrant — and admittedly distant from the artful manipulation recommended by Machiavelli — they are only the more exaggerated renditions of the exact same narrative material provided by others.

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In his attempt to inflate (or rather invent) his academic record, Santos carried on where Joe Biden left off in 1987, when the then-first time presidential candidate famously lost his temper after being asked about his grades, challenged the reporter to seeing who had the higher IQ, and bragged of law school honours that could not be verified. (This was also when Biden was caught plagiarising a Neil Kinnock speech.) In his effort to burnish the scarcely existent business career he supposedly had in the top firms of Wall Street, Santos echoed Donald Trump, a flailing businessman with a history of major bankruptcies who parlayed his outsize image into a reality show and then a political career — no less premised on his skills as a huckster. Santos even parroted a signature Trumpian expression when he pointed to his (fictional) experience handling “billions and billions on spreadsheets”. In both instances, Santos played to the most seductive of American myths, meritocracy, beloved by Republicans and Democrats alike.

Santos offended many after he claimed to be descended from Holocaust refugees (in addition to having a mother who died on 9/11), and this was shown to be false; later, he had to revise his identification as Jewish to “Jew-ish”. But his was only an especially crude take on an old trick favoured by American elites — claiming ancestry from an oppressed group to gain admission into a prestigious institution. Senator Elizabeth Warren once pulled it off and so do countless college applicants every year across the country’s best schools. The footage that emerged recently of Santos dressed in drag in is innocuous enough, but running as a conservative Republican at a time when “Drag Queen Story Hour” has become a flashpoint in the culture war makes such a sight more politically compromising than it would otherwise be. And Santos is by no means the first Republican to run on a wholesome, straightlaced image in public only to be revealed as having a far more colourful private life.

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But even more than internalising the elite’s instinct for lying about their ethnic identities or private proclivities, Santos has excelled in adopting their appetite for the oil that greases the wheels of US politics: big money. Asked by another “colourful” Republican, Matt Gaetz, where he got $700,000 in self-donated campaign funds, Santos responded like a pro: he quickly deflected to an attack on partisan enemies and appealed again to his “self-made” credentials. “Well I’ll tell you where it didn’t come from. It didn’t come from China, or Ukraine, or Burisma… I’ve lived an honest life. I’ve never been accused, sued of any bad doings. So it’s the equity of my hardworking self that I invested inside of me.” Among the allegations levelled against Santos, the ones having to do with campaign finance violations are the most serious and could potentially bring him down. But whatever Santos may have done (he has since revised his claims), he would be punished for breaking the rules of a campaign finance system that is already known as among the most nakedly venal and dysfunctional in any major democracy.

Machiavelli scandalised Christendom with his blunt take on the “mirror of princes” genre, in which he aimed to instruct the power-seeker on how to mantenere lo stato (“maintain the state”). Santos appears to be playing a similar role in modelling, perhaps a little too well for anyone’s comfort, the principles and methods by which the rulers of the American state gained and maintained their power. In his lies can be seen reflected back the pathologies of elites at the helm of both parties. To invoke the memory of yet another fictional character who embodied the moral and political zeitgeist of his era, Santos may steal a line from Malcolm Tucker and say to the whole political class: “I am you, and you are me.”

At the very least, then, we may ask: can there be anything of the redemptive or even the heroic in the Santos saga? Does beating the elite at their own hypocritical game and showing them up on their own turf count as a commendable instance of princely virtù in Machiavelli’s book? If the ghostly wraith of the Florentine philosopher wandered the halls of Congress, would it descend upon the New York delegation and give George Anthony Devolder Santos a pat on the back?

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For all his centuries-long reputation as a teacher of amorality, Machiavelli was never a mere cynic or nihilist. He was so unscrupulous with the means precisely because he was so terribly devoted to the ends. As he confessed to a friend, “I love my country more than I love my soul.” He was clear that the object of power was not self-preservation alone but the restoration of good government, not to enlarge the cesspool of vice but to drain it. As he wrote in the Discourses on Livy: “And truly, if a prince seeks the glory of the world, he ought to desire to possess a corrupt city, not to spoil it entirely as did Caesar but to reorder it as did Romulus.”

George Santos will have neither the glory of Romulus nor the infamy of Caesar, nor even the innocence of Chauncey Gardiner. Nevertheless, in his farcical mediocrity, he stands as the symbol of his time.

Youngkin took up residence in the Virginia statehouse in 2021, unexpectedly defeating (51% to 49%) the incumbent, Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe, in a state that is increasingly Left-leaning. The election was decided by independents, who split for Youngkin 54% to 45%. There is a lesson here: the back-and-forth tendencies of the unaffiliated — usually driven by the desire to punish incumbents for failures in the run-up to the election — decide most American elections, which often come down to little more than a coin flip. Youngkin’s election therefore offers a blueprint for a Republican Party free from Donald Trump and trying to win over a nation that’s only getting more liberal.

Youngkin focused his campaign on education. He leaned heavily on the issue of removing “critical race theory” from classrooms and giving parents and local elected officials more control over public school curricula. Meanwhile, private-school graduate (and parent) McAuliffe handed him some excellent fodder for attack ads. The Democrat, who wanted to veto legislation that would have required schools to inform parents about sexual content in educational materials, told his opponent: “I’m not going to let parents come into schools and take books out and make their own decision… I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” This blunder did not go down well with voters.

Since his victory, the liberal media has cloaked Youngkin’s success with a narrative: his privilege appealed to Virginia’s conservative elite. But this is a fiction. Youngkin may be rich (the former private equity executive is worth hundreds of millions), but he actually didn’t over-perform in the state’s wealthy northern counties — Ken Cuccinelli, the Republican candidate who opposed Terry McAuliffe in 2013, fared considerably better in suburban Fairfax, Prince William, and Loudoun, three of Virginia’s five wealthiest counties. Youngkin’s campaign did, however, dramatically increase turnout in the southern and western corners of the state. For instance, he won 80% of the vote in southwestern Dickenson County, the poorest county in Virginia. Winning these areas by massive margins, partly by significantly increasing turnout relative to the 2018 midterm elections enabled Youngkin to more than offset his losses in the suburbs.

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This is the Republican Party’s most viable plan for long-term success: swaying independents, or at least not driving them away, while also increasing turnout in poor rural areas. (The prosperous suburbs are likely lost forever, at least in terms of winning majorities and congressional seats.) Key to achieving it in 2021 was the delicate balance that Youngkin maintained vis-a-vis Trump’s legacy. Initially, he benefited from an event staged by Steve Bannon, at which Trump himself appeared via video. Youngkin thanked them for their endorsements, but later criticised the fact that attendees had pledged allegiance to a flag that had flown at the January 6 rally. Youngkin also found ways to dodge issues related to the propriety of the 2020 elections and whether he would certify its results.

Youngkin walked a fine line when it came to the classically Trumpist issues as well. After securing the nomination, he quickly pivoted from stressing his opposition to abortion (he supports banning the procedure after 15 weeks) and expanded handgun purchase limitations, as he had done during the primary. Instead, he emphasised education, even declining to fill out the candidate survey necessary to secure the formal endorsement of the National Rifle Association.

Crucially, though, he refrained from making these strategic moves in an obvious way. His team did not scrub abortion-related language from his website after he won the primary, as losing Arizona senate candidate Blake Masters’s did. He issued no ringing denunciations of Trump in the style of Wyoming Congressperson Liz Cheney or Utah Senator Mitt Romney. He merely segued from one set of advertisements that were intended to win over the base, to another set of advertisements that would appeal to independents (though he did, once safely atop the party’s ticket, acknowledge Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election).

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Youngkin understands something that is overlooked by both good-government, establishment Republicans, such as Mitt Romney, and potential head-to-head Trump competitors, such as Ron DeSantis: you cannot drive up turnout from the base if you veer too far from their red-meat social issues and support for Trump, but you cannot win the general election if you fail to appeal to independents. Youngkin, according to University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato, is sitting around 0% in the 2024 presidential polling; but he is playing a much longer game than either Trump or DeSantis — he is, as one might expect of someone with a background in finance, engaged in succession planning. 

There is precedent for this, particularly within the Republican Party, and particularly after the departure of a conservative whose rhetorical style set the tone for an entire decade. When then-Vice President George H.W. Bush was preparing to run for president in 1988, he had to fill the shoes of Ronald Reagan, a man who defined the priorities of an increasingly conservative, family values-oriented GOP.

Bush’s similarities to Youngkin are striking but unsurprising — tall, soft-spoken former college athletes with elite pedigrees tend to have political instincts that incline them to moderation. And the course Bush took to victory in his first presidential election mirrored Youngkin’s approach to winning Virginia last year. During the primary, Bush tacked to the Right, noting that he had repudiated his Seventies-era support for Keynesian economics and now backed the idea of a Human Life Amendment that would have effectively overturned Roe v. Wade. Lacking Reagan’s endorsement, Bush finished third in the Iowa caucus, behind centre-Right Senator Bob Dole and far-Right televangelist Pat Robertson. It forced him to curry favour with moderate New Hampshire governor John Sununu, whom he would reward with an appointment as chief of staff following his victory in the general election, while running even harder to the Right to peel the base away from Robertson, who had shocked the political establishment with his strong Iowa performance. Thus was an initial polling deficit in the New Hampshire primary turned into a resounding victory for Bush, the momentum from which carried him to the nomination. 

During the general election, Bush faced Michael Dukakis — Massachusetts’s longest-serving governor and the ostensible architect of the “Massachusetts Miracle”, one of the fastest service-driven economic turnarounds in the history of the rapidly deindustrialising United States. Bush quite astutely ran towards the centre during the general election, hammering home a pledge to oppose tax increases — popular with independent voters, as this was the part of the Reagan legacy that resonated most strongly with them. He paired this with extremely effective attack ads tied to Willie Horton, a convicted felon from Massachusetts who raped a woman while on furlough during Dukakis’s administration, to paint the centre-Left Dukakis as dangerously soft on crime.

He also seized on Dukakis’s opposition, while governor of Massachusetts, to a law that would have required all students to recite the US Pledge of Allegiance — another issue that polled well at the time with independents and painted Dukakis as an extremist and Bush as the patriotic centrist. In one of his most famous campaign speeches, Bush called for a “kinder, gentler nation” in dealing with discrimination, illiteracy and even the environment (a speech derided by Trump in 1990, a mere two years after Bush gave it). The result was a resounding victory in the electoral college, where Bush won the popular vote in 40 of 50 states.

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Bush offers Youngkin, and any aspiring Republican leader, a useful model. He took the popular language of activists and ideologues and finessed it, in order to move the party back towards the centre sufficiently to win over independent voters. The base will always be there, as long as they’re not infuriated by your criticism of their supposed backwardness. But you can increase their turnout if you focus your attack ads on subjects that relate to the nature of governance, but demand minimal expense or executive follow-through to deliver on once elected. Attempting to rewrite the public school history curriculum, which members of both parties have been doing since the early 20th century, is relatively cheap, for instance, compared to issuing pronatalist family subsidies such as those those championed by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. But thunderously condemning that curriculum can pay dividends at the ballot box.

Youngkin is going to have to maintain this balance until he can run neither alongside nor against Trump. At the moment, he is having less success than many had hoped during this year’s midterms. In perhaps his worst gaffe of the campaign cycle, he told the audience at a congressional campaign rally for former Latino police officer Yesli Vega that her election could help “send Nancy Pelosi back” to be with her husband Paul, who had been attacked inside their house in California. This kind of tough talk might elicit laughter were it coming from Donald Trump, but from Youngkin — whose relaxed Southern prep-school bonhomie can lapse into something akin to former Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s sad exhortation to “please clap” — it came across as odd and off-putting.

In a closely-watched congressional election, incumbent Virginia Congressperson and centre-Left “Blue Dog Democrat” Abigail Spanberger withstood a fierce challenge from Yesli Vega. This defeat was cited as a failure of the Youngkin model, but not only was Spanberger — a former CIA officer — arguably the most moderate Democrat in the running, she actually underperformed relative to Terry McAuliffe in her own district, suggesting the tide is still swinging in Youngkin’s direction. 

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If Youngkin is experiencing growing pains, no matter: he is a youthful 55-year-old amid the gerontocracies controlling both parties. Like Bush in 1988, he has a long road ahead of him, but issues he has championed, such as school choice, have major support behind them. On the subject of Covid vaccines, lockdowns and employment mandates — towering issues over the past three years — his middle-of-the-road positions, coupled with recent data suggesting that school lockdowns had a negative impact on educational attainment, suggest he’s comfortably on the winning side of the current national consensus. And so far he’s resisted spitting the excessive venom that could cost him votes from independents. 

If Youngkin is to challenge the likes of DeSantis for the party’s throne, his admittedly thankless job will be to carefully guide the Republican Party back to the centre. As he does so, he needs to pick his culture wars wisely, focusing on issues that offer the greatest return on investment from a marketing cost and the least post-election investment in their fulfilment.

This might seem cynical, but politics is a game played by cynics, or at least by practical operatives — and if Republican leaders generally fail to think like this, the party is in danger of splitting in two. Imagine a nationalist wing for Trump and DeSantis and another, smaller, pro-business wing for Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney. That sort of shock therapy might be what many diehards sorely want, but it isn’t what they — or the party — actually need, at least if they’re planning to win elections over the next decade or so. It is certainly not in the best interest of the independent voters splitting their tickets and budgeting their inflation-ravaged paychecks, for whom a flourishing, bipartisan civil society is preferable to civil war. 

At issue is the very nature of populism. The 38-year-old Vance, a Republican who emerged from Appalachian poverty to serve in the Marines and attend Yale Law School, epitomises the grassroots radicalism of the Scots-Irish in America: anti-elitist, culturally conservative, sceptical toward draconian climate policies and hostile toward China. Ryan, after 20 years as the Democratic representative from the former industrial stronghold of Northeast Ohio, touts a more traditional, pro-union, but also firmly anti-globalist politics.

The state’s size, and its location in the politically volatile Midwest, render it a critical battleground. Ohio is home to 11 million people, making it the seventh largest state in the union. It has all the basic components of 21st-century America: challenged, largely minority cities such as Cleveland and Toledo, relatively prosperous Cincinnati, an emerging boom town in Columbus (the university town that also serves as state capital), and a vast array of rural towns and villages.

Ohio may no longer be the decisive “bellwether” of America — it has been trending Republican for over a decade — but it is still a competitive state. Veteran political scientist Herb Asher notes that despite its GOP leanings, Ohio remains open for Democratic challengers in a way that is hard to imagine in deep-red states such as Texas. In Ohio, successful Democrats are not gentry types like California Governor Gavin Newsom, but hard-bitten, pro-working class New Dealers like Senator Sherrod Brown. Ryan is cut from much the same cloth. At a time of heated polarisation, he has cast himself as a folksy, open-minded family man who puts country over party.

To his credit, Ryan has been willing, at least on the campaign trail, to declare his independence from Democratic orthodoxy. He has supported fracking and opposed Joe Biden’s student-loan forgiveness scheme. He has praised Trump’s protectionism and opposition to China. He does not much appeal to the tech-and-finance elites who now dominate the Democratic Party — one reason, suggests Midwest scholar John Russo, that he has been slow to attract big donor money.

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Vance, by contrast, is not a great candidate. On stage, the hillbilly turned intellectual and venture capitalist is rigid and off-putting — you would rather sink a couple of bourbons with Ryan. Even Vance’s populism seems less people-friendly than Ryan’s. Vance’s biggest blessing, and greatest curse, is Donald Trump, who carried Ohio twice, and whose endorsement saved Vance in a hard-fought Republican primary. Like many conservative intellectuals, Vance opposed Trump at first but then quickly cosied up to him after he won. Ryan has not hesitated to make hay of this about-face, saying that Ohio needs “an ass-kicker not an ass-kisser”.

The outcome of the race will depend on two swing demographics: working-class whites and suburbanites. According to Russo, the fall-out from the Supreme Court’s abortion decision, combined with the increasingly rancid stench of Trumpism, could alienate affluent suburban voters, particularly in burgeoning cities such as Columbus. “The middle-class suburban moderate voter is the key for Ryan,” Russo notes.

If the American economy were not experiencing massive inflation under a Democratic president, Ryan would most probably win. But, like other Democrats, he is haunted by the state of the economy under Joe Biden. Crime, on the rise in Ohio cities, is another vulnerability. Vance has also tried to score points by associating Ryan with Biden’s border policies, which the Congressman has criticised but not opposed. But perhaps the most effective Republican talking point is that Ryan has raised campaign funds from some of the biggest distributors of opioids — this in a state that has been devastated by the opioid epidemic. Yet here, too, Vance has his own skeletons in the form of a failed non-profit he set up to combat addiction.

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Ultimately the decisive issue may turn out to be energy. Much of Ohio’s recent resurgence has relied on massive growth in the state’s natural gas sector, which has boomed as the vast Appalachian basin has increased production fivefold since 2010. This has proved not just a spur for direct employment, but has also attracted investment into the state. In 2020, Ohio gained more than four times the total investment than California. Perhaps the biggest boon has been Intel’s proposal to invest $20 billion in a new chip plant in the Columbus suburbs. And just this week, Honda and LG Energy Solutions announced a $4 billion car battery plant in another adjacent county.

Much of the credit for this growth must go to Republican Governor Mike DeWine, whom Democrat Asher describes as “a non-Trumpster”. He is on his way to a landslide re-election; this form of Republicanism — conservative but not crazy — has also characterised current Senator Rob Portman, a pragmatic Republican who in 2016 won 300,000 voters more than Trump could muster in the state. But DeWine also does not have Donald Trump on his back, and is not running against anyone as effective as Ryan.

Ryan’s key problem lies with the increasingly progressive, climate-obsessed Democratic Party. Even as he describes fracking as a “great opportunity” to blue-collar audiences, Ryan also supported Biden’s drilling moratorium and opposed legislation to deregulate the permitting process for oil and gas pipelines. He even embraced the anti-fossil fuel jihad of the Green New Deal.

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If he loses, Ryan can thank the influence of these coastal, establishment initiatives. “Tim must deal with national Democrats who are a drag on his campaign,” Asher notes. “They are seen as anti-exploration and anti-pipeline. These positions are less popular here than in California.” Ryan’s riposte, labelling Vance a “San Francisco phoney” seems a bit desperate when hurled at someone who, after all, grew up in one of Ohio’s most hardscrabble communities, served in the Marines, and then chose to return to his home state. Ryan has to hope there’s not an early onset of the cold winter that will see much higher heating prices, further highlighting the energy issue.

Many working-class Democrats, notes long-time consultant Ruy Texeira, rightfully see the current green policies essentially as an abandonment of their interests and communities. But just as Vance can’t ditch Trump (who has been losing support in the state), Ryan is stuck with Pelosi, Schumer and Senator Bernie Sanders. Ryan’s earthy Left-populism may be appealing, but Biden’s standing in the state is about the same as in deep-red Texas. The winner in Ohio will be the candidate who can overcome the burden of their political affiliation — an indictment ultimately of both national parties, and their contemporary detachment from flyover America.

Yet McCarthy also appears to face a big problem. He already can’t control some of his wilder junior colleagues, including far-Right representatives like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, who are a constant source of embarrassing headlines. Now, a new wave of MAGA mavericks — including Mayra Flores, a “far-Right Latina” known for sharing QAnon hashtags — are on their way to join them. 

There’s no doubt that these new Republican members will be controversial. But the question for followers of the American political scene is, how much will they really matter? A quick look at the recent history of the GOP suggests that the answer is: not much. Loose-cannon legislators are nothing new, and while they might cause headaches for party elders, they almost always vote with mainstream Republicans on the issues that really matter to the party. In other words, for all the sound and fury about an emerging QAnon caucus, don’t expect the Congressional Republican Party to change much any time soon. 

McCarthy’s trouble with his party’s Right began in earnest earlier this year, when an audio recording circulated in which he could be heard discussing the need for Donald Trump to resign after the January 6 riot. Whereas most in the press derided McCarthy for his cowardice in only criticising Trump behind closed doors, some of the Trumpiest members of the House saw the recording as evidence of McCarthy’s disloyalty. The minority leader drew harsh criticism from the far-Right Freedom Caucus, a group founded in 2015 to advocate for an “open, accountable, and limited government” that now serves as the home base for many of the party’s most truculent young members. 

The Freedom Caucus is certainly a colourful group. Take Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who chanted “build the wall” in unison at President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address in March. Later that month, the pair found themselves in a heated argument about Greene’s decision to attend the America First Political Action Conference in February alongside Iowa Congressman Steve King. King, of course, was taken off U.S. House committees by McCarthy and the GOP leadership after asking when the term “white supremacist” became offensive. 

King, however, is a moderate compared to the conference’s host, Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier and veteran of the 2017 Charlottesville riots who claims that “having sex with women is gay”. Breaking bread with Fuentes was apparently too much for Boebert. But Boebert is no stranger to controversy herself. In addition to voicing support for QAnon, the Colorado Republican has recently come under fire for abandoning her then-sister-in-law after a 2020 off-roading accident that occurred two months prior to her victory in a Republican congressional primary. She’s also been fending off salacious — and seemingly spurious — rumours that she used to work as a sugar-daddy call girl.

The Freedom Caucus was also home to Madison Cawthorn, the troubled MAGA stalwart who recently lost his primary after falling afoul of the DC Republican establishment, which he had accused of tolerating orgies and cocaine use among its members. The establishment fought back with a classic “dirty tricks” operation, digging up salacious rumours and passing them on to sympathetic journalists. The same American Muckrakers PAC that is now attempting to smear Boebert released documents and videos suggesting Cawthorn was sexually harassing his male second cousin, and someone leaked to The Daily Beast that Cawthorn’s chief of staff had received tens of thousands of dollars in outside money beyond what is permitted by House ethics rules. Cawthorn, having made himself into an annoyance, was unceremoniously shoved out of Congress. 

As strange as that saga was, Cawthorn’s brief tenure speaks to the fundamental strength of party politics in the American system. Crazies may get elected, but they live and die based on their ability to make themselves useful to the party. Rising MAGA candidates such as New York’s Carl Paladino, who called Adolf Hitler “the kind of leader we need”, and Washington’s Loren Culp, a former police chief who tweeted his support for hanging a black man who could be seen on video pushing a senior citizen down the stairs, may generate bad press, but they will vote with the party much of time — and if they make more trouble than they’re worth, they’ll be kicked to the curb. Trump himself was a shining example of this phenomenon: Although he exasperated Republican grandees, he was able to secure their support by pushing party priorities like tax cuts and conservative Supreme Court appointments.

This isn’t a new problem. Every few years, a new generation of GOP radicals emerges to shock liberal sensibilities, but the party’s priorities remain the same. The “Republican Revolution” of 1994, engineered by Georgia Congressman Newt Gingrich, broke the so-called “conservative coalition” of conservative Republicans and “boll weevil Democrats” that had worked together since the New Deal. But while Gingrich’s “Contract with America” contained novel proposals like term limits, these never came to fruition. Instead, the party hewed closely to its post-Barry Goldwater identity: Bill Clinton was forced to move to the right on issues such as crime and welfare, and his Republican successor, George W. Bush, worked with the GOP to pass sweeping individual tax cuts, expand the surveillance state, and conduct military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some legislators elected in 1994 evolved into establishment figures and major power brokers, while others were quickly defeated following gaffes and controversies.

The Tea Party movement, which coalesced in 2009 following CNBC reporter Rick Santelli’s call for a “Chicago Tea Party” to chasten big government, underwent a similar evolution. It failed miserably in its goal of shrinking the US federal government, but it succeeded in launching new Republican political careers, including those of pundit Glenn Beck, Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, and the aforementioned Iowa Congressman Steve King. At the time, some commentators saw the Tea Party as the voice of America’s forgotten heartland, but political scientist Robert Putnam was nearer to the mark when he observed that the Tea Party’s activists were simply Republican voters who wanted increased border security, restrictions on immigration, and a renewed infusion of some elements of traditional Christianity into public life. They were, in Putnam’s terms, “super-Republicans”, even if the rhetoric they used sounded alarmist, extremist, or unorthodox.

Even Trump himself — the seeming bête noire of Jeb Bush and all the other corporate Republicans he crushed in the 2016 primary — was another outgrowth of the Tea Party era. His rise to fame was built on the back of a quixotic campaign to determine the national origins of then-President Barack Obama coupled with clever tweets about things like Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank’s protruding nipples. Trump’s own reputation as a charismatic, unorthodox speaker with a socially libertine lifestyle led many to believe he could be all things to all MAGA hat wearers. But controversies and crises aside, this avowed fan of “Two Corinthians” came through on taxes and abortion, the core Republican political issues since Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency in 1980. Despite his rhetorical disdain for Mitt Romney and other old-guard leaders, Trump, once in office, delivered the goods that the party had long promised its base.

At the end of the day, then, Kevin McCarthy need not worry about what Carl Paladino and Loren Culp will do to the Republican Party. It will keep doing what it does best, asserting issues of public morality and low taxation that resonate with its long-term base, which is gradually assimilating more Latino voters. In doing so, it will be reasserting the power of historical continuity and frustrating the hopes for a more genuinely populist course espoused by “post-left dissidents” and members of the “New Right”. But McCarthy, who has served in Congress through the Speaker of the House tenures of John Boehner and Paul Ryan, surely knows that failing to find the right mix of velvet glove and iron fist could empower challengers and cost him his own position of authority. Political fortunes are always rising and falling in America, even if the partisan song remains the same. 

Still, there are times when a refusal to engage in self-criticism can be a hindrance to your tribe — as both the American Right and Left are now discovering.

Since 2016, the American Left has desperately cut itself off from reality: its unwillingness to concede that Donald Trump won the election precluded the Democrats from being able to consider why their candidate lost. But the American Right is equally capable of deluding itself. In fact, with Biden in the White House, it is now as much a problem for the American Right as it was for the Left during the Trump years.

Absent any self-reflection, political tribes are condemned to return to the same question: what is it about their opponents that makes them so belligerently wrong? This is why Democrats and Republicans responded to the 2016 and 2020 elections in a similar fashion. What on earth was there to dislike about Hillary Clinton? What could possibly be said against the character of Donald Trump?

Sometimes, however, this lack of self-criticism is more profound. Towards the end of last year, I was invited to speak at the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida. Being, as I told one of the organisers, only about two-thirds in agreement with the conference agenda, I didn’t feel it was my place to give a speech. So instead, I took part in an interesting panel discussion with Dave Rubin, Sohrab Ahmari and the conference’s convenor, Yoram Hazony.

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It was a rich discussion, but we passed over too lightly a subject which demands serious focus. At one point during the panel, Dave brought up the popular talk-show host Bill Maher. In recent years, Maher has singled himself out on the American Left for his willingness to criticise the excesses of his own political side, in particular “cancel culture” and the “cult of woke”. Dave suggested that, given how much Maher agrees with conservatives on these points, it is strange that he still identifies with the Left. In other words, why should he not come over and join the merry men of the Right?

There are a number of possible answers to this question. The first, which many conservatives would offer (while no doubt patting themselves on the back), is that Maher somehow lacks the bravery or courage needed to commit such an act of apostasy. He may have moved Rightwards, but he is not willing to concede as much.

The second answer, which I imagine Maher himself might offer, is that he hasn’t left the Left — the Left has left him. He has stayed precisely where he was, and remains as true to his principles as ever. There is, perhaps, some truth here. But this still fails to address the key question: why, in the face of the current Leftist orthodoxies, are so many on the traditional Left reluctant to admit they now have more in common with the Right?

After all, previous generations of American public figures had no problem with making a move from Left to Right and admitting as much. Both Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz flirted with Marxism before coming out for conservatism. British public life is also peppered with individuals who made similar journeys without any embarrassment: Malcolm Muggeridge, Paul Johnson and Kingsley Amis, to name but three.

Yet in America today, such apostasy is almost unheard of. There have been semi-regular defections from the Right, especially during the Trump era, when people such as Max Boot broke publicly with their own side to support a Democrat president. But there is a glaring absence of any movement in the opposite direction.

Bill Maher, Bari Weiss and a slew of other liberals who have fallen out with their own tribe have chosen not to identify as conservative. And that should be a cause for concern. Rather than ignoring this trend, conservatives need to ask themselves: what is it about the Right that is so unappealing that people who agree almost entirely with its views resile from joining its ranks?

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As it happens, I suspect the one of the answers to this question can be found in one of the speeches given at the National Conservatism conference. During his talk, the distinguished conservative scholar Patrick Deneen offered — and I do not say this to do him any injustice — a lament for the Fifties; for the change in people’s habits of dress, manners and sexual etiquette. I listened to all of this with great interest and considerable disagreement. But as I did so, I could not help thinking that here in a nutshell was the main reason why disenchanted liberals like Maher would never in a million years join the American Right.

All political and social movements have their own oddities and obsessions. Many of the obsessions of the American Right, however, are too illiberal to possibly win over anyone but that type of person who jumps political sides, boots and all, because they favour the political certainty of its all-encompassing ideological home. Why won’t thoughtful ex-liberals consider joining the Right? Well, perhaps it has something to do with the type of conservative they’d be associated with.

What liberal or former liberal would want to find themselves in an ideological movement in which opposition to the right to abortion, opposition to no-fault divorce, and a nostalgia for the era before the invention of the pill are commonplace? This isn’t to say that the conservative movement in America should not make these arguments. They can make them as much as they want. But they can hardly be surprised if others outside of their flock refuse to join them as a consequence.

At the heart of this lies a centuries-old tension in America between the worlds of politics and religion. It was always said that the genius of keeping religion in the background during the founding of America was that it allowed it to flourish in the foreground later on. By contrast, the centrality of the established church in England almost guarantees the obscurity of religion’s place in public life.

And yet in America, the desire on the Right to mix religion and politics remains a significant temptation. The National Conservatism conference was filled with a disproportionate amount of Catholic social doctrine, and it is not the first time I have observed this encroachment. Most gatherings of conservative intellectuals fracture along this same line. The Vanenburg meetings fell into this problem at the start of the last decade. And I was once at a meeting of conservatives on the continent where, on several occasions, an American participant gleefully referred to gay couples as being in “sodomitical relationships”. Should we be surprised that so many liberals instinctively revile conservatism?

All of which is to say that this overlap between politics and religion remains a special type of kryptonite to any separation-of-church-and-state liberal. And that would be a subject of niche interest were it not also for the fact that it is electorally disastrous for the American Right, however enjoyable it may be as a religious or intellectual enterprise.

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As many as three in ten American adults are now religiously non-affiliated; fewer than half of Americans belong to a religious congregation. In such a world, the idea that a conservative movement can succeed while being intrinsically tied to religion — let alone one particular denomination — is a steer into the political wilderness.

After all, why would people who share 95% of your political attitudes not wish to join you? More often than not, the answer is not because of any lack of fortitude, but because of that 5% of beliefs you had hoped they might overlook.

Perhaps that small portion of ideas is worth fighting for; perhaps even to the extent that it’s worth alienating would-be conservatives. But these are questions the Right needs to answer, rather than blaming liberals for pointing them out.

That, at least, is the impression given by discussion about the New Right, kicked up by two recent pieces in left-of-centre magazines. The first, a dispatch from last November’s National Conservatism conference by David Brooks, paints a dark portrait of a radicalised and paranoid young conservative movement dominated by the “psychology of threat and menace”. The second, by Sam Adler-Bell in The New Republic, is a mostly sympathetic, if somewhat bemused, profile of some of the Gen Z conservative intellectuals who see themselves as “counterrevolutionists”.

How seriously should we be taking this “threat”? Given that the New Right consists of  people who read anti-democratic writers such as Bronze Age Pervert and Curtis Yarvin, who disparage “liberalism” and sound themes about family, patriotism, and the state that carry a whiff of Vichy, does it mean that fascism is the wave of the future?

There is reason to be skeptical here. It is true, as Adler-Bell notes, that the energy among young, elite right-wingers is with what is broadly referred to as the New Right. In part, this is because the “New Right” is as much a subcultural aesthetic as it is a political movement — with a lingo and transgressive sensibility that it has borrowed largely from social media. Good things are “based” and bad things are “cringe”, media pseudo-events are “fake and gay”, and virgin/Chad and wojack memes are everywhere. It is no coincidence that this is a subculture made up largely of young men, operating within the confines of a progressive elite culture in which the crude humour typical of male bonding is heavily taboo.

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But while calling things “based” or “gay” might be a political act, it is not a political program. Two years ago, I wrote a piece for Tablet on the New Right. At the time, it was possible to describe the New Right as a real political faction centred around a handful of Senator’s offices, drawing hope from Trump’s flirtations with economic heterodoxy. These were, generally speaking, young party elites and intellectuals who wanted to drag the GOP away from the neoliberalism (or “Reaganism” or “libertarianism”) that dominated prior to 2016. Some were culture warriors and some were not. What they did agree on was that the small-government politics of Paul Ryan and the Wall Street Journal editorial page had outlived their usefulness.

Today, the dividing lines between this version of the New Right and the rest of the party are not so clear. Rhetorically at least, populism is the coin of the realm. Even relatively “normie” Republicans have been radicalised by the experience of the Trump administration and the first year of Biden; as Jacob Siegel observed, you now regularly hear Republicans expressing sentiments about the FBI worthy of Noam Chomsky. Everyone on the Right is a culture warrior, including buttoned-up private-equity barons like Glenn Youngkin, and everyone is a China hawk. It is not uncommon to hear Republican politicians inveighing against “woke capital”, threatening to break up Big Tech, and speaking ominously about “the Regime”. Even the national campaign against “critical race theory” might be seen as a fulfilment of Sohrab Ahmari’s 2019 call to “fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy”.

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At the same time, populist energy on the Right has been diverted away from trade and economics and toward #StoptheSteal and opposition to restrictive Covid measures. Inflation and rising crime, meanwhile, have allowed Republicans to prosper, including among Hispanics, by shifting back to their traditional themes of law-and-order and fiscal responsibility. Even the GOP’s rhetoric on woke educational propaganda and school shutdowns is merely the latest twist in a long-running war on teachers’ unions. The tone may have shifted, but the ultimate aims have not.

Parties out of power always tend to downplay their internal divisions in favour of opposing their rivals’ agenda, and we can expect the substantive political disputes exposed by Trump to re-emerge in the primary in 2024. And culture war is popular, for good reason. The Democrats’ turn toward a fundamentalist version of identity politics is, in the short run at least, a major political blunder — an example of intra-elite dynamics among the party’s leadership forcing the adoption of positions and slogans that are actively antagonistic to most Americans. As long as the Democrats are the party of permanent Covid restrictions, rising murder rates, and woke excesses in schools, they will struggle outside of their deep-blue strongholds. And conservatives are not wrong to worry about the capture of seemingly every major national institution by ideologues hostile to their existence, given the ability of media and the school system to shape the values and perceptions of the public.

But there is a risk that the New Right might win the rhetorical and aesthetic victory only for zombie Reaganism to come crawling in through the back door — for everything to change just so that it can stay the same. As Richard Hanania observed, the anti-woke culture war may poll well for the Right, but it is essentially unwinnable, since “wokeness” is written into federal anti-discrimination law. Universities and corporations are militantly race-conscious in part because they are catering to progressive students and employees, but mostly because they are shielding themselves from legal liability under Title IX and Title VII. Absent some coherent plan to change these incentives, conservative anti-wokeness, no matter how rhetorically incendiary, is little more than a strategy for turning out the base. It may help to win elections, but once in office, a Republican president will have to actually govern. And if party grandees can convince the electorate that Biden really is “the second incarnation of Jimmy Carter”, they may be able to argue that the solution is the second incarnation of the Gipper.

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It is worth remembering that the main promise of the Trump-era New Right was that it had a real idea of what was wrong and how to fix it. Building on the work of the Bush-era reformicons, the intellectuals of the New Right attempted to take stock of the fact that the GOP was becoming, sociologically, a party of the less-educated, many of whom were ill-served by the neoliberal trade and economic policies favoured by the party’s wealthy donor class and intelligentsia. Given the yawning gap between the Republican establishment and its voters, and the full descent of the Democrats into professional-managerial class “socialism” (i.e., sinecures for the well-educated but downwardly mobile), the GOP was ripe for a takeover by a new generation of elites with a new set of priorities.

In the most sophisticated version of this diagnosis,  those priorities were to use the American state to re-orient the economy away from parasitic rent-seeking and labor arbitrage back toward high-productivity manufacturing, with the dual benefits of providing broad-based economic growth while preparing the United States for a looming era of great-power competition with China. Although even the most watered-down versions were regularly denounced as “socialism” in the old-guard conservative press, they received an impressive vindication in Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, possibly America’s most successful large-scale government project since the end of the Cold War (ironically, the post-2020 politics of vaccines have prevented the GOP from bragging much about it). And Trump’s other deviations from economic orthodoxy, in particular his trade war with China and restrictions on low-skill immigration, may help explain why, in 2019, the bottom 90% saw its share of earnings increase for the first time in a decade.

The pandemic and its attendant disruptions have scrambled American politics, subordinating longer term questions of political strategy to urgent questions about what to do here and now. But, on the American Right at least, the longer term questions are yet to be settled. At the moment, the great danger facing the New Right is not that it will be the vanguard of an American Reich, even if you can find some pimply teenagers on Twitter who lust for such a possibility. Rather, it is that it will meet the fate of so many other American political movements and devolve into a grift: a way for a handful of Washington-based journalists and think tank functionaries to make careers, solicit donations, and brand GOP politics for a slightly younger and edgier audience — while changing nothing fundamental about the party and its program.

But comparisons to Weimar are a dime a dozen in the West, and their explanatory power is incredibly questionable. Our modern historical lexicon often seems to be a book with all the pages ripped out, save for one or two badly smudged chapters on the European interwar period. And this is a shame, because there are many other historical periods that could do more to advance our understanding of current political events, both in the US and elsewhere. History is, after all, quite expansive.

More than any other, one particular moment, mostly unknown today, may have a lot to tell us about where the US is headed next: Japan’s bakumatsu period — the polarised and chaotic end period of the old Tokugawa shogunate.

To understand the bakumatsu, one should know what came before it. In 1600, Japan’s ‘warring states era’, or the sengoku jidai, came to a close with the Battle of Sekigahara. Soon afterwards, the victorious Tokugawa clan implemented a policy of almost total national lockdown, known as sakoku (literally: locked country). Generally, foreigners were forbidden from entering the country, and Japanese commoners banned from leaving on pain of death. Though there were some minor exceptions, Japan essentially closed itself off to the rest of the world.

There were a host of benefits to this, including more than two centuries of internal peace, economic growth and innovation in the fields of arts and culture. Under the surface, however, contradictions in Japanese society slowly built up. The samurai were now a caste of warriors without any wars left to fight, while low-born merchants grew in wealth, slowly undermining a society that assigned status according to birth.

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Moreover, the divisions that led to the battle of Sekigahara were never really mended; Japan’s most powerful samurai magnates, or daimyo, were split into two different camps: the tozama, and the fudai. The former were descendants of magnates who had been neutral or against the Tokugawa in 1600, while the latter came from families that had been on the winning side. Still, the tozama remained quite rich and powerful, even later in the 19^th century, but they were barred from almost every important post in the Government. Their resentment at this never dissipated, but merely simmered on a low boil for centuries, waiting for an opportune moment to roar back to life.

This brings us to the bakumatsu period itself. In 1853, the US Navy forcibly entered the bay of Edo (modern day Tokyo), and demanded that the country open itself up to trade. The Japanese, after their centuries of isolation, could do very little to defend themselves against Commodore Perry’s Black Ships. At gunpoint, the Japanese were forced to abandon a policy that had been the cornerstone of their existence for the last two centuries.

The immediate result of this shift in policy was the start of an extreme social and political chain reaction; abandoning isolationism at the hands of foreign barbarians upended not just Japanese public opinion, but the very basis of legitimacy for the Tokugawa shogunate. Meanwhile, uncontrolled foreign trade also led to a collapse of the Japanese currency system, which only inflamed public opinion further. Suddenly, Japanese society went from (a somewhat deceptive) placid calm, to rapid, uncontrollable polarisation. Street violence became common; there were attacks on foreigners by patriotic mobs, and armed violence between supporters of the Shogun and increasingly organised opponents of the status quo.

Sound familiar? Of course, elite consensus in 2016 America turned out to be, if anything, built on an even more precarious foundation than Tokugawa’s peace in 1853. Beneath the surface, all manner of social and economic ills had already built up; deindustrialisation was slowly choking America’s working and middle classes, while the wars in the Middle East were poorly run, costly, and corrupt. And, just as with Commodore Perry, the election of Trump merely served to topple the first domino, unleashing a chain reaction that was already primed into the system, inaugurating a period of intense polarisation that exists to this day.

What bakumatsu Japan and modern America share is a straightforward problem: that smashing an old, non-functional system to the point where it can no longer be repaired is not the same as building anything new. On the American Right, people today refer to the ‘dead consensus’ when they talk about political positions that everyone in the GOP had to hold to be taken seriously pre-2016. They do not talk about a ‘new consensus’, however, because no new consensus exists. And that doesn’t look like changing anytime soon.

To return to the bakumatsu, Japanese society eventually polarised into two broad factions; those who were loyal to the Shogunate, and those who supported the Emperor returning to political power (at this point, the Japanese royal family have been powerless figureheads for about 800 years). What followed was a civil conflict defined by its confused and contradictory nature.

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The backers of the Emperor attacked the Shogunate for being too friendly with the West. But many of the most powerful backers of this putatively xenophobic, anti-Western faction had also been the most eager importers of foreign instructors and weapons, who had then managed to defeat opposition forces with their smaller, far more Westernised armies. And indeed, once they won the ensuing civil war, their post-unification agenda turned out to be… the abolishment of the feudal caste system, the disarmament of the samurai, and the rapid industrialisation and modernisation of Japanese society. Whoops!

While ideology always plays a part in civil conflicts, the bakumatsu is not so much a story of traditionalism versus progressivism as simply what happens when a large political vacuum is created almost overnight, and there’s no good alternative on hand. The result is a very chaotic period of political free-for-all, as old coalitions rapidly collapse and new ones form, and centuries-old grudges suddenly come rearing back to life. And the creation of that vacuum, and the polarisation that fills it, is precisely what we are seeing in America today.

In the case of America, the empire is clearly in a very deep, systemic crisis. The military machine is deeply broken, the policy of spreading liberal democracy is a total failure, and the globalised economy has now frozen and seized up. Nobody, whether they’re on the Left or the Right, really has any solution to these problems. The vacuum is simply too big. And thus, we are slowly beginning to see the same sort of political dynamic manifest in America as it did in Japan during the bakumatsu. In America, just as in Japan, political street violence proliferates, and people form into armed and organised political gangs.

Yet, if 19^th century Japan offers some interesting parallels in terms of what has already happened in the last five years or so, it also gives us some hints of what is in store in America’s immediate future. First, the chaos that defined the bakumatsu suggests it’s probably foolish to expect American polarisation to cool down or improve anytime soon. If anything, it is likely to get a great deal worse, as nobody really has any sort of practical solution on hand to address the fundamental rupture introduced into the American political economy by deindustrialisation. This problem is especially acute, given the supply crisis that is now slowly choking producers and consumers. The current model is broken, but that breach is the result of decades of active policy choices. It can’t be unbroken in a week, and like a rotting tooth, it’s a problem that will keep spreading pain until it is finally dealt with.

Second, one of the most serious potential flashpoints in the years ahead is going to be the relationship between the federal government and various recalcitrant states. In the bakumatsu period, the Tokugawa government slowly lost control over the tozama magnates, who increasingly came to either ignore orders from Edo, or explicitly worked to undermine the Shogun.

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In America, this sort of political brinkmanship is starting to play out. Recently, Oklahoma’s Governor, Kevin Stitt, brazenly defied Washington by firing the commander of the Oklahoma National Guard, replacing him with a man whose first order of business was to free Oklahoma’s guardsmen from any obligation to comply with the Covid vaccine mandates. Though its effect didn’t extend beyond state borders, it’s a fairly ominous sign of where things are headed; the weight of federal writ is clearly not what it once was in America, and if the country continues to polarise and experience economic crisis, these sorts of conflicts will become increasingly common, and increasingly serious. In a couple of years, for example, if federal agents are ordered to arrest or imprison a popular state governor such as Ron DeSantis after some vexing display of Floridian insubordination, nobody really knows what could happen as a result.

More than anything, the most important lesson of the bakumatsu is simply to expect the unexpected in the days and years ahead. Political hypocrisy, back-stabbing, the embrace of exceedingly strange bedfellows, rapidly changing alliances, and much more; these things are not just likely but more or less guaranteed in times like these.

Just like the Japanese weren’t actually fighting merely for or against modernisation, or for or against the Emperor, the figurative (and increasingly literal) battles inside America today aren’t really about race, or taxes, or personal autonomy. They are about the heart, soul, and future of the nation, about what gets to fill the hungry vacuum left behind by the Black Ship that conquered the country in 2016.

These books are a sort of ultra-niche entry into the “own voices” category of fiction: written by an author (in this case, a President) who shares key identity characteristics with his characters (also Presidents.) In fact, the president in Clinton’s new book, Matthew Keating, becomes an ex-president himself just 60 pages in, after his power-hungry VP, Pamela Barnes, leverages the fallout from a botched kill operation in Afghanistan to defeat Keating in the Democratic primary.

Keating is understandably demoralised by this experience; on the eve of Barnes’ inauguration, we find him standing morosely on a snowy tarmac, lamenting his one-term presidency while his wife attempts to comfort him: “Matt, you could have done so much more if the entire system hadn’t been crippled long before you entered the Oval Office,” she says. “From Twitter mobs to focus groups, nothing can get done anymore.”

Ah, Twitter: a destructive force capable of crippling democracy itself! But when the narrative jumps ahead by two years, Keating remains at loose ends: procrastinating on his memoirs, and filling the hours by challenging his long-suffering security agent to canoe-racing competitions. (In what is perhaps a bit of wish-fulfilment on the part of the book’s author, Keating is the repeated winner of these races. He is also, he makes sure to tell us, not wearing a shirt.)

Needless to say, these books are not great works of literature. The President’s Daughter is in many cases profoundly silly. Barnes, in particular, is a Machiavellian caricature whose nightly routine involves sipping Scotch like a James Bond villain while her wormy husband massages lotion into her cracked and aching feet — “a constant irritant since she stood up for herself and others and entered politics years back.” It is representative of the overall writing quality that one cannot tell if this is simply a clunky accident of sentence construction, or if we are meant to believe that Barnes’ feet literally hurt from figuratively standing up.

But choppy writing and crappy character development aside, Bill Clinton’s little renaissance as a co-writer of pulpy political thrillers is fascinating for what it reveals about the unique conundrum faced by the men who used to be President — and, per American tradition, retain the title for life — but are now, alas, just men.

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There’s a certain expectation, or at least a desire, that American presidents step back from public life after they leave office. George Washington set this bar when he retired to his farm in Mount Vernon in 1797, expressing “a determination not to intermeddle in any public matter” for the rest of his life. It’s an example that has proved inspirational: when Barack Obama left office, he too referenced the “wise American tradition of ex-presidents gracefully exiting the political stage and making room for new voices.”

Obviously, this tradition is not being observed in our present moment. America’s most recent ex-president not only eschewed the graceful exit, but is reportedly expecting to be declared the real winner and reinstalled in office any day now.

But it’s also never really been a tradition, or at least not a universally popular one. For every George Washington, there’s a John Quincy Adams, who not only refused to retire from public life but ran for Congress and served nine terms in the House of Representatives (a politician to the end, he collapsed on the House floor during a heated debate over the Mexican-American War and died two days later.) William Taft advised his successor on foreign policy and eventually lobbied his way into a supreme court appointment. Herbert Hoover left office only to spend the rest of his life bitching furiously about Franklin Roosevelt to anyone who would listen.

Some of this behaviour may stem from a lack of examples to follow. Hoover, for instance, was the sole living ex-president for a full twenty years after he left office in 1933, and perhaps felt a special obligation (or at least no particular compunction) when it came to being a thorn in the side of his successors. But in recent decades, the field of former presidents has become much more crowded, with up to half a dozen of them milling around at any given time.

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And while it was once possible to imagine these men as toothless entities, politically neutered and doddering away at some pet humanitarian project or hobby for their remaining years, being a public figure is a different thing in 2021 than it was a few decades ago. In the age of the influencer, anyone who’s ever occupied the public stage of the American presidency is granted a degree of permanent cultural power that can’t be simply shrugged off. Social media makes it much easier for ordinary people to become famous; it also makes it much harder for a prominent person to step back, to disappear. Even Obama, who has more or less kept his promise to stay out of politics after his presidency, is still wielding influence in the form of a massive Netflix deal that has expanded to include podcasts.

It’s no surprise, then, given how difficult it is for presidents to fade away, that our political parties’ relationship with their one-time leadership has gotten complicated. The past ten years have seen the emergence of an especially strange alchemy, whereby former presidents lose their own party support while gaining it across the aisle.

George W. Bush, for instance, was reviled by the left when he was still in office: we called him the “worst president ever”, we were immensely relieved when his second term came to an end, and we were delighted when he kept a relatively low profile in the years that followed. But then, in 2016, Bush was suddenly back on our radar — when he reportedly walked away from Trump’s inauguration speech saying, “That was some weird shit.”

It was the start of a transformation: the so-called worst president ever suddenly seemed more like a benign uncle, one with a cute painting hobby and a bleeding heart for immigrants. The GOP rejected Bush as a traitor to the cause, but on the Left? Some hated to see it, but an undeniable rehabilitation was occurring in the form of internet memes, political nostalgia, and even praise from his Democratic successor.

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Meanwhile, a version of this same phenomenon can be seen playing out in the opposite direction with Barack Obama, who has lately riled the radical Left (and delighted the folks at Fox News) by coming out against the excesses of progressive orthodoxy. “This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically woke and all that stuff, you should get over that quickly,” he said, addressing an audience of young people in 2019 — and then, just days ago, reiterated his concerns in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper. But while these comments play well among Right-wingers, who commend Obama’s reasonableness, they irk many of his former supporters. In one representative article, a writer bemoaned the former president for “yet another needless prescription of acquiescence to a bloc of Americans on the wrong side of history.”

Which brings us to Bill Clinton and his complicated legacy. Even if he’d wanted to, this is one ex-president who couldn’t just disappear into the ether once his White House tenure was up. He’d had his turn, but now it was hers — and as a former president-turned-political spouse, Bill was obligated to stand dutifully by Hillary’s side while she climbed the ladder of power, up to and including a quest to hold the same office he’d vacated sixteen years previous.

It was hard to fully appreciate the cascading series of absurdities that surrounded Bill Clinton’s new role in public life: that the President who’d been impeached over a sex scandal was now expected to play, of all things, a devoted and supportive husband. That his presence was required on Hillary’s campaign trail because, despite everything, people still liked him better than her. That his wife somehow ended up running against the only guy in the world whose vulgar and boorish behaviour could make Bill — the alleged rapist, the intern defiler — look positively genteel by comparison. That a mere fifteen months before #MeToo became a decade-defining movement and media obsession, the biggest Bill Clinton story of the year was that he had frolicked with balloons at the 2016 Democratic National Convention like an adorable, demented child. (The second biggest was Trump’s press conference just before the October 9, 2016 presidential debate, featuring three women who’d accused Clinton of sexual assault.)

Could this have been a new way forward for a former American president? Might Bill Clinton have enjoyed a reputational renaissance as First Gentleman to Hillary’s Commander-in-Chief, at least until the #MeToo movement came along to make things awkward? It’s possible, but since Hillary lost that race, we’ll never know — and we’d also rather not talk about it.

In a party that aims to position itself as the safest space for women, to make no apologies for abuse or assault, the lingering presence of a confirmed-pervert-maybe-worse is a terrible liability. Sure, we were willing to pretend we’d forgotten about all that, back when Bill Clinton was the grimy ribbon wrapped around a package marked “important” and “historic,” a package that contained the first female U.S. President. But now, we’d rather he just went away.

And while co-writing pulpy thrillers with James Patterson isn’t quite retiring to a Mount Vernon farm, it does give the man a way to occupy himself, and to garner attention on a different, non-political stage. A Clinton who is ensconced in a fictional world full of kidnappings, terror plots, and shirtless canoe races is a Clinton who won’t get in the way of Democratic policy-making or interrupt the long march toward progress.

Unless, of course, “The President’s Daughter” turns out to be Chelsea’s 2024 campaign slogan.

Harper’s argument is that the forces underpinning populist sentiment are real and here to stay. Conservatives in America – and by implication, elsewhere – must either adapt or cede power to the “liberal Left”. I’ve long admired Harper, and have argued for nearly a decade with my fellow American conservatives in favour of the very points he makes. Yet, as he notes, American conservatism continues to look on Canada’s less doctrinaire conservatism as lukewarm socialism.

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Two years after Trump easily swept aside 16 Republican primary opponents and blasted through the Democrats’ vaunted Midwestern ‘blue wall’ to seize the White House, conservatives remain in denial about why he won – and largely refuse to acknowledge the moral legitimacy of his supporters’ demands. Trump’s desire for a large infrastructure building program has gone nowhere, and Republicans otherwise supine before him roar with dismay at his deviations from free-trade orthodoxy. Now Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell suggests that cutting pensions and government-funded health care are next on the agenda, notwithstanding the President’s clear campaign promise that he would not do that.

Harper’s calm and reasoned arguments against this narrow Republican position present an entirely different notion of what it means to be conservative. Edmund Burke is Harper’s intellectual lodestar; he subscribes to the argument that conservatism is as much a disposition as a set of ideas. As a result, Harper sees a way to respond to current concerns and challenges that seems to elude most American conservatives.

Populism and Trump arose, Harper suggests, because “the world of globalization is not working for many of our own people”. Trump is right to contend that mass illegal immigration and poor trade deals have reduced many working people’s incomes and cost millions of jobs. At the same time, Harper heartily agrees with Goodhart’s ‘Anywheres’ versus ‘Somewheres’ analysis that elites who are economically and socially connected across the globe have lost touch with their fellow citizens whose worldviews and lives remain highly dependent upon the nation state. Conservatives, he argues, must back the Somewheres in this struggle and “be the champions for working men, women, and families in the twenty-first century”.

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To do that, American conservatives need to be more like the Canadian Conservative Party Harper led – less beholden to ideology. He notes that Canada experienced levels of immigration as high as America and signed a host of free-trade deals during his tenure, but Canadians have not suffered income declines or massive job losses like Americans, nor have they turned against immigration. Indeed, Canada stands out as perhaps the only major advanced economy that does not have a significant populist movement, either of the Corbynite Left or the Trumpist Right. That, he says, is due to his government’s choices.

Those policy choices combined support for free markets with targeted interventions to ensure that the gains from those markets are spread evenly throughout society and the nation. Harper touts his government’s support for increased vocational education and apprenticeships, and their continued subsidy for higher education to keep it affordable for average incomes.

On immigration, he notes that his government made Canada’s system more focused on the skills an immigrant could bring and less reliant on family relations. He also ensured that immigrants had to learn more about Canadian history and values in order to become citizens. The result is that migrants are better equipped to integrate and natives feel less threatened. No wall, but no open door either.

Harper most consciously breaks with American conservative consensus on the issues of trade and regulation. He says with pride that Canada did not follow America’s path in financial deregulation, and as a result did not see its banks collapse in the wake of the 2008 crisis.

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The trade deals his government struck took care not to bring down barriers without considering which Canadian interests would be harmed or advanced by the details of the deal. He specifically praises Canada’s supply management system that regulates agricultural production, which ensured that thousands of communities were not devastated by the flood of cheaper, imported goods, as happened in America. His government also provided for both ample funds and ample time to those sectors that would be hurt by freer trade enabling them to adjust to the new competition. America’s failure to do likewise simply baffles him.

His time in office was also marked by making Canadian government smaller. He cut taxes 14 times in nine years, reducing the national goods and services tax from 7% to 5%, lowering the corporate income tax rate, and delivering a panoply of targeted credits and deductions aimed squarely at helping Canadian families keep their after-tax incomes high. For him, keeping demand high is as economically important as encouraging supply.

As a result, Canada’s unemployment rate might be slightly higher than America’s today, but its middle-class prospered as America’s stagnated – during Harper’s term, median income in Canada grew, far outpacing that in America. There also are many fewer devastated regions and towns in Canada; most Canadians still live in areas that don’t have the shuttered stores and abandoned mills which characterise so much of the American Midwest. Canada is not perfect, but it’s a pretty good place to live and raise a family.

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Politically, Canada has been dominated by the Liberal Party since the Great Depression. The ‘Grits’, as they are known up north, are a party of the centre, swaying Left or Right with the wind to hold power at all costs. And yet, Harper steered his Conservative Party to three straight election wins, earning him the unremitting hatred of Canada’s academic and media elites.

He also earned the votes of millions of Canadian immigrants, votes that returned to the Tories in the most recent Ontario elections when Tory leader Doug Ford ran on a very Harper-like platform. Harper’s nine years as prime minister were the longest of any Conservative since the great Sir John McDonald in the late 19^th Century.

Harper’s Canada was prosperous, peaceful, and conservative. So why aren’t American conservatives flocking north to learn from the master of principled victory?

The trouble is, American political culture, especially conservative political culture, is shaped by two historical documents that remain very difficult even for fellow Anglosphere conservatives to understand: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Both Revolutionary period documents favour individual rights above government power in a way that has no comparison in the British, Canadian, or Australian experience. Both state that government’s powers must be limited to ensure those rights are protected. As a result, much conservative thought and action is predicated on the idea that the modern state runs contrary to America’s ideals, and even the nature of man. Interventions and prudential decisions such as Harper made are often considered by conservatives to be either wrong or unconstitutional down south.

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The American Left responds to these pressures with a very different view. It implicitly contends that the notion of rights trumps the notion of limited government. Thus it is entirely American to intervene in private life – whether economically via taxes, spending, and regulation or socially via anti-discrimination laws and the like – in order to uphold every American’s right to live a freely-chosen life. This in turn has made American political debate a lot less about policy and a lot more about rights, which by definition cannot be the subject of political debate. Much of the increasing anger and hostility that characterises American politics can be traced to this underlying dispute.

This rights-based view of politics explains why American conservatives remain resistant to Harper’s views. Protecting farming communities or regulating the Canadian banking industry to ensure social harmony is viewed down south as illegitimate; doing this abrogates the rights of those who would win if the government allowed unfettered competition.

America’s trade deals hollowed out the Midwest because protecting Rust Belt workers would have meant limiting the rights of American business people to make contracts with anyone they want. In this view, the gains accruing to the winners are theirs by right, and the losses accruing to the others are deserved. But even Republican voters, much less average independent voters, do not share the Republican old guard’s extreme rights-based view of American liberty.

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Which was why Trump won. He was not schooled in American conservative thought and thus was not blinded by it. But he remains woefully unsophisticated in the governing arts and has failed to develop the sort of comprehensive governing agenda that could refound American conservatism.

Every American conservative should read Harper’s book with this in mind. Romney’s defeat and Trump’s victory should be seared into their consciousness, as together they show how Americans want a principled response to the challenges in their everyday lives. Harper’s book provides a blueprint for that response. The person who grasps this first can reshape the Republican Party, and in the process become Trump’s heir.