“I’ve been to Vidal Sassoon,” she says, running her hand through hair that has been freshly shorn into a skull-hugging pixie cut.

Her husband, practically gagging, says, “Don’t tell me you paid for that.”

Of course he does. There’s something about very short hair on a woman that feels like a slap in the face — to expectations, or the patriarchy, or even just to the husband who liked her hair long. This latter preference isn’t so hard to understand; long hair connotes not just femininity but youth, vitality. fertility. A woman with closely cropped hair has been stripped of something vital, even sacred. It’s why women condemned to the guillotine would have their hair cut off first, before their heads; it’s why women who slept with the Nazis during the Second World War were dragged into the public square and forcibly shaved.

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As such, the most radical thing of all is a lady who has lopped off all her hair by choice, and they have long been objects of fascination in both fiction and in history, seen in their choice of hairstyle as representative of something greater: spiritual purity, sacrifice, empowerment. The short-haired woman is Joan of Arc, or the wife from The Gift of the Magi, or Fantine from Les Misérables; she’s Gwyneth Paltrow debuting a chic blonde chop to mark the end of her relationship with a cheating bastard in Sliding Doors; she’s the child star who marks the end of her Disney era with a punk-rock fauxhawk.

Whatever the circumstances, it’s understood that a woman who cuts her hair short must have a reason for doing it, and that the reason can never be “because it looks good” — which a howling chorus of male commentators invariably squirm out of the woodwork to announce that it certainly does not. The news cycle surrounding every celebrity pixie cut follows this same pattern: there is the debut of the haircut itself, followed by the wave of backlash from men demanding to know why this woman, and women in general, insist on ruining their (that is the men’s) lives by getting haircuts that they (that is, the men) find less than desirable. If feminists have done much to push the notion that short hair represents an explicit rejection of the male gaze, certain men have no doubt helped it along by treating these haircuts as something women inflict on them. When Emma Stone flaunted a pixie cut on the red carpet in January of this year, the most viral response was from a man on X who wrote, “Women, I can’t stress this enough, gay hairdressers love this and women that are competing with you love it because it knocks you down multiple pegs. Men hate it.”

That said, women’s hair has also always been at least somewhat entangled with politics. In the Twenties, they bobbed their hair in a conspicuous act of rebellion against traditional norms; in the wartime Forties, short hair was a practical necessity reflecting women’s entry into military service or factory work; and since the sexual revolution, the crop has served as a signpost for everything from liberal politics to alternative sexualities, revealing not just the contours of a woman’s scalp but also her disdain for gender norms and male-centered beauty standards.

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And even as there’s little left today that western women need to be liberated from, a dramatic haircut still registers as symbolic, rebellious, and hence worthy of notice — particularly when a bunch of women in one political space do it all at once, which brings us to the phenomenon known as the Power Bob.

The latest iteration of the Power Bob comes from Britain’s Labour Party, in which several women have lately been observed sporting the same hairstyle: chin-length or so, blunt, and usually (not always) with bangs. It is a haircut that practically begs to be (and often is) accompanied by the modifier “no nonsense” — although this has always struck me as a bit of a canard, all things considered. Spending two hours and a few hundred dollars so a stranger can give you the artisanal version of something you could replicate yourself, albeit crudely, with about 10 minutes and a decent pair of scissors: if this does not meet the definition of “nonsense”, what does? That these haircuts also require regular professional upkeep — a pixie, allegedly the hallmark of a low-maintenance woman, requires its wearer to return to the salon every four weeks lest she start looking like Anton Chigurh — represents more nonsense still.

But of course, that’s not the kind of nonsense we’re talking about. The Power Bob is not about eschewing frivolous expense or silly wastes of time, but the intrusion of male desire into one’s personal and professional life. And in this, it succeeds wonderfully at projecting the desired vibe. The shortness, the bluntness, and the generic unflattering-ness of this haircut signals a total lack of interest in male attention; however, and crucially, it is not so butch that it suggests you might be open to come-ons from members of the same sex, which would be nonsense of a different color but nonsense nonetheless. The Power Bob wearer is like the archetypal Pam of whom the late Victoria Wood so memorably sang, a woman who doesn’t hate men or sex — it’s just she finds the entire endeavor to be simply uninteresting. Not me, not my scene, I prefer a game of Rummy and an Ovaltine!

In this, the Power Bob suggests something interesting about the archetypal girlboss, particularly as compared with her male counterpart. It has always been understood that for men, the allure of power — and one of its benefits — is that having it makes you more attractive to women. For women, on the other hand, the greatest hallmark of power is to be so utterly uninterested in men that you intentionally adopt an aesthetic that excludes you from the sexual marketplace. It’s also a notable shift from the moment in which women were expected to demonstrate leadership by mimicking men, even aesthetically; consider the power suits of the Eighties, whose structured fit and massive shoulder pads gave the female wearer the same inverted triangle silhouette as your average Marvel superhero.

Outside of the long-running adventure comic Prince Valiant, the Power Bob haircut is most decidedly not a man’s haircut. Instead, the power comes from the fact that it is a haircut men do not like — and that the wearer knows this, and doesn’t care.

And yet, if the association between short hair and female empowerment is easy enough to understand in historical context, it also seems clear that the contemporary link really only persists because we want it to. The Power Bob isn’t a new phenomenon, nor is the notion that women with political aspirations must cut their hair to achieve them; a cursory internet search reveals a trove of articles about the “political bob”, most centered explicitly on Hillary Clinton’s signature hairstyle during her run for US President in 2016. It’s enough to make you wonder if the notion that women can’t be sexually attractive and also be taken seriously in politics is less a sad fact than a self-fulfilling prophecy, a holdover from a brand of feminism that has long since faded from relevance.

Surely it is significant that peak Political Bob discourse not only occurred during a failed campaign 10 years ago, but centered on a female candidate whose biggest claim to fame was losing to a boorish, leering, reality TV playboy who was formerly an owner of the Miss Universe beauty pageant. Certainly, it’s hard not to notice that the second Trump administration is a veritable buffet of women in high-level positions — some of whom look the part of the short-haired asexual girlboss, but many of whom have tresses befitting a Disney mermaid, as well as eyelash extensions, contouring, and faces visibly lifted and plumped by injectables. And while some might say this merely signals the President’s preference for a certain aesthetic, the sheer physical diversity of women in politics at present — in the US and around the world — suggests that we’ve actually arrived at last at a moment in which if you are a woman in politics, it simply doesn’t matter what you look like. For every Angela Merkel there’s a Sanna Marin; for every Nancy Pelosi, a Giorgia Meloni.

And when it comes to the Power Bob, the greatest irony might be that this hairstyle — once a hallmark of women’s liberation — is on the cusp of becoming as dated and traditional as the pantsuit with linebacker shoulder pads paired with sensible low heels. A hairstyle preferred by dinosaurs who don’t realize that times have changed, that femininity is no longer a political liability, and that if a woman still faces certain unique concerns when it comes to seeking political power, the length of her ponytail is no longer one of them.

The shrewd strategic moves began early. As soon as the doddery Joe Biden was evicted from his party’s ticket, the Democrats immediately rallied around his successor, with Biden himself endorsing his vice president as he shuffled to the door. Making Harris the candidate by acclamation, instead of having a “mini-primary” served several purposes. It demonstrated the unity of the party behind the new candidate, even as the nomination of a woman who is of black and Asian descent ticked off multiple boxes in identity politics, minimising the risk of defections by the identity-obsessed Left.

Was the last-minute swap of Harris for Biden — after the latter’s disastrous performance in his debate with Donald Trump — a coup by powerful Democratic donors and power brokers such as former president Barack Obama? Perhaps. But as the old saying goes, “politics ain’t beanbag”. The complaint by Republicans that the Democrats should have indulged a chaotic convention was so blatantly self-serving that nobody took it seriously, least of all Republicans themselves.

The switch, at any rate, had an immediate effect, reversing Trump’s erstwhile advantage in the polls and putting Harris comfortably ahead, a lead she’s retained. The presidential race was transformed from one between a vigorous if obnoxious candidate (Trump), and one who is demonstrably incapable (Biden). It’s now a fight in which the 78-year-old Trump is the flailing maniac and Harris the younger and relatively normal politician.

It’s true that Harris is famously inarticulate, whipping up word salads with the skill of a master chef. But even that reinforces her relative normalcy. So far, the Harris campaign has shown that it has learned from the mistakes of Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016. The former California senator has not yet dismissed a quarter of voters as “a basket of deplorables”, as Clinton did in her infamous speech eight years ago. And unlike Clinton, Harris hasn’t neglected the Midwest, with its swing votes in the electoral college.

The widely ridiculed phrase “the politics of joy” to describe Harris’s banal and conventional campaign was rapidly abandoned. But the opposite of the politics of joy is the politics of fear, which Biden had made central to his floundering campaign. And unlike Biden, Harris has not made saving democracy a major issue of her campaign. Nor has she gratuitously offended millions of Republican voters by describing them as “quasi-fascist”.

Politics 101, in its American guise anyway, teaches that during general elections nominees should compete to win the political centre. Ever since her installation as the Democratic Party’s substitute presidential candidate, Harris, despite her long record of far-Left positions on social and cultural issues, has been sprinting to the Right as fast as she can. Consider guns. Rebutting accusations that she’s soft on crime and hostile to the Second Amendment, Harris has highlighted her own gun ownership, telling Oprah: “If somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot.”

Another lesson of Politics 101 is that parties should try to win over independents and split the opposition. The disciplined, professional Harris campaign has been following the book in both respects.

To appeal to independents, Harris has been emphasising her support for abortion rights. And to win over disgruntled Bush Republican voters, dismayed by the rise of Trump and the populist Right, Harris has gone so far as to praise Dick Cheney. Despite being denounced by many Democrats as a war criminal, Cheney announced he would vote for her instead of Trump. Harris, for her part, was quick to thank the former vice president, praising him for “what he has done to serve our country”.

Not since the Nazi-Soviet Pact have so many Leftist heads exploded. But the cliché about politics and strange bedfellows remains as true as ever.

The competence of the Harris campaign is also evident from what she’s left unsaid. In her earlier political career, and as a product of the Left-wing San Francisco Democratic machine, Harris had been identified with hard-edged racial identity politics. Before dropping out in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, Harris attacked Biden for his erstwhile opposition to busing, common in the Seventies to achieve quota-based racial balance in public schools. It was a policy so unpopular that even progressive Democrats stopped talking about it years ago.

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In her presidential campaign, however, Harris wisely has taken care to distance herself from identity politics. Her campaign has not emphasised her black and Asian ancestry, nor has she made breaking the gender glass ceiling central to her campaign. In this, again she’s repudiated the example of Hillary Clinton.

Have Kamala Harris and her aides run the perfect campaign? Even though she has done an interview with tough questions on 60 Minutes in addition to being interviewed by friendlier hosts like Oprah Winfrey and Alex Cooper on the Call Her Daddy podcast, some in the media fault her for not doing more interviews with major media organisations. But then they would, wouldn’t they? To date, the interviews apparently have not hurt or helped in the polls, and as long as she has a respectable lead over Trump, Harris would be foolish to risk open-ended interviews in which something she said could be used against her. In any event, anyone who still hasn’t decided between Harris and Trump are probably “low-information voters” who pay little attention to politics — and so are unlikely to be swayed by wonkish proposals on tax benefits.

If, moreover, the Harris campaign has been a masterclass in how to run a presidential campaign at short notice, the opposition offers lessons in how to blow a lead. When it became clear that Trump would be the Republican presidential nominee for the third time running, many Republicans hoped that America and the world would see a “new Trump” — more disciplined and less abrasive.

In the event, their hopes were dashed. The wheels came off the Trump campaign bus during his speech at the Republican convention, when he squandered much of the goodwill he had gained after the assassination attempt, characteristically launching into a rambling and self-centred diatribe. Since then, Trump has thrashed about without gaining traction, as it has become clear that his lead over the deposed Biden reflected Biden’s unpopularity, not support for him.

In his televised debate with Harris, for instance, Trump engaged in bizarrely anachronistic red-baiting: “Her father’s a Marxist professor in economics, and he taught her well.” On his Truth Social account, and channelling Joe McCarthy, Trump riffed on the same theme. “Comrade Kamala Harris is terrible for our country,” he said. “She is a communist, has always been a communist, and will always be a communist.” It goes without saying that this kind of stuff may play well with the lunatic fringe. But when Trump should be appealing to undecided moderates, it counts as political malpractice, especially when Harris herself is totally at home on the corporate wing of the Democratic party alongside Hillary Clinton and Wall Street.

Nor did Trump stop there. An even greater example of political ineptitude was his questioning of Harris’s race — “Is she Indian or is she black?” — in front of the National Association of Black Journalists. This rhetorical incontinence is all the more self-defeating, of course, given that growing numbers of black and Hispanic voters have been casting their ballots for Republicans, though majorities of each group still support the Democrats.

With Trump as their standard-bearer, the Republicans cannot take advantage of Harris’s inanity. Trump himself seems unable to make a coherent case for his own candidacy. Quite apart from his own foibles, meanwhile, Trump’s choice of running mate also illustrates his failings as a candidate. J.D. Vance may impress even his opponents with his mastery of detail — but much of that comes by comparing the Ohio senator with Trump himself.

Will their different styles of campaigning translate into similar personal styles of governing? Probably not. In the case of Kamala Harris, who has hastily sought to reinvent herself as a bland and uncontroversial centrist during the campaign, pressure from progressive interest groups along with her own instincts would probably cause her to move to the Left on policies like immigration and climate change if elected.  In the case of Trump, his shambolic first term suggests that in a second term he would be as undisciplined as a chief executive as he has been as a candidate.

If presidential campaigning were an Olympic sport, then, the Harris campaign would bring home the gold. But in spite of her competence, she could still lose in November. As always, swing states are key. And though she’ll almost certainly win the popular vote, as the Democrats have done in every election bar one since 1992, a handful of voters in Pennsylvania or Wisconsin could yet deny Harris her prize.

One factor here is the “shy Trump voters” — and who knows how many there are. But a more important factor may be the burden of the last four years. Harris has had to signal that her presidency would be different, without criticising the Biden administration in which she served as vice president. The most effective criticism the Trump campaign has made against Harris is therefore this: if you propose doing this or that now, why didn’t you push for it as vice president over the last four years?

And then there’s the fickleness of voters, which can defeat even the most professional of campaigns. American political operatives are fond of the fable of the dog food company whose executives held an urgent meeting to discuss why an advertising campaign to sell their newest product had failed. After a number of senior executives had proposed various possible explanations, a junior executive speculated: “Maybe the dogs just don’t like the dog food.” In just a few weeks, the Harris campaign will discover whether America’s electoral canines are fans of what they’re offered.

You would struggle to find a pithier encapsulation of elite disdain for the working class. But perhaps it is unfair that the comment should so define her; by the standards of her tribe, it is fairly mild. This is especially true when it comes to the white rural poor, who are widely regarded in refined circles as a benighted pox upon the country, a deluded and potentially violent mob fortunately doomed by demographic trends to extinction, though, alas, not soon enough. Indeed, I have lost count of the number of articles lamenting that the American electoral system gives rural populations too much say over how the country is run.  

The freewheeling contempt shown by those with much towards those with little is especially galling when you consider the harshness of life in America’s impoverished rural communities. The most famous example is Appalachia, which is home to the first people to be labelled and characterised with the infamous stereotype, “hillbillies”: it has lagged behind its neighbours economically since at least 1850. “Diseases of despair” are endemic among the region’s 26.4 million residents: according to the Appalachian Regional Commission, “overdose-related mortality rates for people ages 25–54” were “72% higher in the region than the rest of the country”. Yet when opioids were flooding the region, executives at one pharmaceutical company derided those addicted to their products as “pillbillies”.  Indeed, there is no end to the epithets: hillbilly, hick, yokel, white trash, redneck. But don’t worry, none of them will get you cancelled. 

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Meanwhile, as the election approaches, the media continues to warn us that the threat level from Hillbillystan is “red”. “White rural Trump supporters are a threat to democracy,” declares The Daily Beast. “White rural rage is arguably the single greatest threat facing American democracy, I have no good ideas about how to fight it,” says Paul Krugman. These particular warnings owe much to White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, which was published earlier this year. Its authors, Tom Schaller, a professor at the University of Maryland, and Paul Waldman, a former columnist at The Washington Post, marshalled the data to demonstrate that when it comes to the awfulness of rural whites, the science is settled. In an interview on MSNBC, Schaller described them as “the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay geo-demographic group in the country”. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they are also “anti-democratic” “white Christian nationalists” prone to conspiracy theories who are also “the most likely to excuse or justify violence”.

See? I told you Hillary Clinton was being nice.  

Admittedly, White Rural Rage was a bit much even for The Guardian and The Atlantic, and the book was criticised by the very researchers whose work was cited in its pages. But none of that stopped it from hitting The New York Times bestseller list. 

Although contemporary in form, White Rural Rage is only the most recent expression of a contempt that dates back to before the American Revolution, when Appalachia and the Ozarks were settled by a population Americans refer to as the “Scotch-Irish” — i.e. lowland Scots who had traded border raiding against the English for colonising Ulster in the days of James I, before undertaking a much greater voyage across the Atlantic. In 1765, Charles Woodmason, a visitor to the North Carolina colony wrote of its Scotch-Irish inhabitants: “The Manners of the North Carolinians in General, are Vile and Corrupt — The whole Country is a Stage of Debauchery, Dissoluteness and Corruption.” 

The reputation of the “Scotch-Irish” for clannish behaviour, violence, drinking and general deplorableness grew over the next century. In the 1860s, the Hatfields and McCoys began their famous feud, which was still raging in the early 20th century. It was around this time that the people of Appalachia were christened “hillbillies”, a word said to derive from Scottish “hill folk” and “billy” (alternately a Scots term of endearment or reference to William of Orange). However, given that the term didn’t appear until 300 years after the “Scotch-Irish” had left Scotland, this seems debatable, at the very least. 

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Following on from these murky origins, “hillbilly” eventually spread from Appalachia and today is used as a catch-all insult for any member of the rural white poor. But there is an ambiguity to it: America has a rich lore of outlaws and renegades, and the hillbilly — stubbornly self-reliant, wilful and loyal to his family — also fits this archetype. This ambiguity is reflected in popular culture: Hank Williams Sr, widely regarded as the greatest songwriter in the history of country music, was known as “The Hillbilly Shakespeare” not because he feuded with his neighbours but for the primal eloquence of his pain songs. The Beverly Hillbillies made fun of its family of yokels turned millionaires, but the characters were good-natured and moral and much more likeable than their scheming banker neighbour. The Andy Griffith Show was full of homespun wisdom, and featured a hillbilly band called The Dillards which introduced many Americans to Bluegrass music. This is also where Ron Howard got his start as a child actor, little realising that 60 years later he would tell a very different version of rural life in his film adaptation of J. D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy. 

In the Seventies, shows such as The Dukes of Hazzard still portrayed hillbillies in a favourable light, but this is also when horror movie tropes about depraved, inbred yokels sexually assaulting, torturing, killing and eating urbanites who had wandered off course became entrenched in the culture. In 1972’s Deliverance, Ned Beatty’s character was instructed to “squeal like a pig” by his hillbilly rapist. In 1974’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a group of college students stumble upon a house where Leatherface murders and carves up his victims while wearing a mask made of human skin. In 1977’s The Hills Have Eyes (purportedly inspired by the legend of the Scottish cannibal Sawney Bean) a family headed out on vacation are attacked by a clan of mutants with a taste for human flesh. The old monsters — mummies and ghouls and werewolves and the like — had lost their ability to scare. True evil was a demented hillbilly. 

The visceral loathing that today’s US elites have for the rural poor shares a psychic undercurrent with this realm of fantasy. I once knew a Russian psychoanalyst who argued that to feel hatred was inevitable, and that if you denied yourself an outlet for so powerful an emotion you would become ill. The important thing was to be careful who or what you chose to hate, how much, and for how long. This can help us understand much of the vitriol that is aimed at the rural white poor today. Most of the groups it was formerly acceptable for American elites to despise are now off limits, and there are severe social and legal consequences for attacking them. But the Hillbilly Trump voter exists in a state of exception. Compassion is not forbidden — you will recall that Hillary Clinton argued that some form of “deprogramming” might be possible for deplorables. But it is not compulsory: you are free to deride, abuse, even to cheer along their ultimate extinction if you feel like it. The hate is liberating.

Needless to say, we can expect to see a lot more of this style of liberation as the election approaches, even more if Trump wins, and still more if he selects J.D. Vance as his vice president. The Hillbilly Elegy author turned senator is an especially potent hate symbol as, although he is of Appalachian stock and experienced serious familial trauma in his youth, he subsequently studied law at Yale before becoming a successful venture capitalist: the insults write themselves. However, this makes Vance a more interesting figure. He could have left his roots behind and adopted the mores and shibboleths of the elite society to which he had gained access, but instead he chose to stay loyal to his original tribe. He is the hillbilly at the gates, albeit in a well-tailored suit.

Sometimes, when contemplating the possibility of a Trump victory in November, I wonder how the media and elites will respond. The first time around, there was a brief moment of self-reflection when they considered that perhaps they had misread the country, and that they ought to stop condemning the evildoer and go out there and try to understand him. But as Dostoevsky pointed out, that is difficult, and so these efforts at empathy lasted about five minutes before they went back to condemning.

So, I am sceptical that it will be any different this time around. But then I ask: are they really going to just repeat the same tropes over and over again for four years? How can they bear it? And then I remember that the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise is now up to nine films, and that there are many, many, many variations on the hillbilly horror theme out there. So of course they are. Like the producers of low-budget slasher fare, they don’t want new ideas — the ones they already have work just fine. 

The first step towards an understanding of the political dimensions of magic, then, is to remember that Harry Potter has as much to do with real magic as the Mel Brooks movie Young Frankenstein has to do with real science. Dion Fortune, one of the 20th century’s leading theoreticians of magic (and a crackerjack practitioner), is a better source of insight here. She defined magic as the art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will. That definition is trickier than it looks. Whose consciousness? Whose will? Those are crucial questions, and they are political in nature.

Let’s start with a straightforward example. At some point during the last 24 hours you probably saw an advertisement for fizzy brown sugar water. That’s not what the ad called it, of course, and that distraction — think of it as a spell of invisibility — is an important part of the sorcery we’re discussing. Notice that the ad didn’t try to convince you of the alleged merits of the syrupy goo it was pushing at you, nor did it aim anything else at your rational mind.

No, the ad deployed imagery meant to set off emotional reactions that have nothing to do with the product. Here’s a group of people on a billboard. They’re young, they’re attractive, they look healthy, they’re wearing clothes that tell you they have plenty of money, they’re having a great time, and they’re all clutching cans of fizzy brown sugar water. If I tried to convince you that guzzling the contents of one of those cans will make you young, attractive, and the rest of it, you’d roll your eyes. Yet that’s the message the deep levels of your mind absorb, and your behaviour shifts in response. In magical terms, the ad cast a spell on you: that is, it caused change in your consciousness in accordance with the advertiser’s will.

This works because the rational mind is a thin veneer on the surface of a standard primate nervous system. Scratch that veneer, and you’ll find all the raw biological cravings and vague associative thinking that most people in industrial societies like to pretend they’ve outgrown. Repeated exposure to a spell — that is, a set of emotionally charged images and words designed in accordance with the rules of magic — punches straight through the veneer and speaks to the archaic primate-mind underneath it. Unless you’re aware of the effect and adjust for it, the images affect you, and you reach for that can of fizzy brown sugar water, even though you know perfectly well that the only thing you’ll get from it is tooth decay.

This kind of sorcery is pervasive in today’s industrial societies. Back in 1984, in his brilliant book Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, Ioan Couliano pointed out that most countries in the industrial world had discarded the jackboots and armbands of old-fashioned authoritarianism for subtler methods of social control rooted in magic. The industrial nations of the world, he argued, were “magician states” in which most people are kept disenfranchised and passive by manipulative images and slogans projected by the mass media. It’s a persuasive analysis and does much to explain the nature of power in modern societies.

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Not all of the magic that surrounds us, after all, focuses on goals as straightforwardly mercenary as the example just discussed. Consider the vacuous slogans brandished by the three most recent presidents of the United States: “Yes We Can”, “Make America Great Again”, “Build Back Better”. All three incantations are meant to manipulate voters using the same kind of magic applied by manufacturers of fizzy brown sugar water. They target a different set of emotions, those that work on the contrast between dreams of a better future and the increasingly miserable conditions of life in today’s America, but they use the same strategy of exploiting non-rational emotions to market an unappealing product.

Widespread as it is, this approach to magic is far from omnipotent. Sometimes it fails because the spell is badly designed: Hillary Clinton’s impressively clueless slogan “I’m With Her” flopped, for example, because she lacked the charisma to make the prospect of identifying with her appeal to the emotions of enough voters. Sometimes it fails because a competing spell is stronger: “I’m With Her” also had to contend with Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again”, which drew on much more powerful emotional drives.

Yet the mass-produced sorcery of advertising suffers from another critical weakness. No two people have exactly the same structures and content in the deep places of their mind, and their responses to magic varies unpredictably. Advertisers try to get around this by targeting a handful of simple biological drives linked to sex, safety, and status, which are common to all social primates and affect most people in something like the same way. Magic aimed at these drives, using suitably crass stimuli, tends to be successful enough to push products and sway elections, and so long as that’s all that matters, no more focused magic is needed.

But pushing products and swaying elections is not always enough. Here we need to draw a distinction between the political class of a society — the people who have a significant and privileged voice in public decisions — and the rest of the population. The political class is always a minority, and often a very small minority, however enthusiastically it may wrap itself in rhetoric of majority rule. Its hold on power depends on its ability to come up with reasonably effective responses to pressing social problems. So long as it fulfils this problem-solving function, the rest of the population shrugs and goes on with life.

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Now and then, however, the political class of a society fails to address the most pressing problems of the time. Sometimes this is a matter of simple incompetence, but more often it happens because those problems are caused by policies that benefit the political class, which the political class is unwilling to abandon. Arnold Toynbee, whose 12-volume opus A Study of History explored this process in detail, coined a neat turn of phrase to describe the change. He terms a political class that is still fulfilling its problem-solving function a creative minority; when it abandons that function, it becomes a dominant minority, and the society it manages tips into decline.

Certain social phenomena reliably show up whenever a political class loses the ability or the desire to solve the most pressing problems of its era, and tries to cling to power anyway. The one that’s relevant to our present purpose is that in such an era, magic explodes in popularity — and the kind of magic that becomes popular is the kind that individuals practise on themselves, using rituals, meditations, affirmations, and other traditional occult tools to change their behaviour and affect how other people respond to them. Look at a period when personal magical practice flourishes and you’ll find that era dominated by a failing elite in charge of a society full of problems that are not being addressed.

In the United States, for example, occultism had its first golden age between the end of the Civil War and the Roaring Twenties. During those years the robber barons of Wall Street treated the federal government as their wholly owned subsidiary and the majority of the population knew from hard experience that their concerns would go unheard and their needs unmet. That helped drive a widespread interest in magical workings of all kinds, ranging from rootwork spells for prosperity to magical lodge initiations aimed at higher states of consciousness. When the Great Depression and the New Deal brought that era of blatant kleptocracy to a close, interest in magic and occultism dropped off sharply.

Thereafter, magic stayed unfashionable until the late Sixties, when the managerial aristocracy that rules the United States today started treating the issues that mattered to most people as annoyances to be brushed aside. A second golden age of American magic followed promptly, partly drawn from the legacy of older American occultism and partly inspired by half-understood imports from other culture. Yes, it’s still ongoing. Magic will thrive in the United States despite the fulminations of rationalists until the managerial state either learns how to listen to the people it claims the right to lead, or has the levers of power wrenched from its hands.

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By Matthew B Crawford

Two significant social forces drive the rise of magic in a society ruled by a failing political class: one affecting the population as a whole, the other affecting the political class. Among the underprivileged majority, magic becomes popular because it offers a way of bettering your life when all other options have been slammed shut. Even when you can’t change anything else, after all, you can change your consciousness in accordance with your own will.

That has several advantages. First, using magic allows you to evade the effects of sorceries directed at you by institutions controlled by the political class, so that you can pursue your own goals rather than being subservient to theirs. Second, because human consciousness isn’t as tightly confined to the insides of individual skulls as currently fashionable philosophies like to claim, changes in your consciousness can affect how other people react to you, and that offers various avenues for improving your own life. Third, magic — like its more respectable twin, religion — also offers the possibility of attuning consciousness to sources of energy and meaning that transcend humanity. Discussing these sources and their implications would take us far afield from the present theme, but the higher and deeper dimensions of occult tradition are central enough to magic that it’s worth acknowledging them here.

So the underprivileged have good reasons to embrace magic. So do the overprivileged. Here the problem is simply that no political class wants to face the reality of its own decadence. Central to the self-image of every political class is the notion that its members deserve their privilege by some combination of practical competence and moral virtue. Even — or especially — when this isn’t actually the case, members of the political class base their identities on the idea that they are the good people, the capable and compassionate people, whose wealth and privilege are nothing more than they deserve. Magic, in turn, is one of the ways they prop up that illusion.

Some of the spells in question are charmingly simple. It’s standard practice, for example, for a dominant minority to pretend to fill their ostensible role as society’s problem-solvers by going through the motions of solving problems, choosing for this purpose problems that matter to no one outside the political class itself. (The antics of today’s corporate wokesters offer plenty of examples here.) Yet this sort of expedient rarely does an adequate job of shielding members of a decadent political class from an uncomfortable awareness of their own failure, and so the overprivileged — like the underprivileged — turn to individual magical practice.

Suggested reading

Why the elites have no shame

By Mary Harrington

American society today offers a bumper crop of examples. Consider the various forms of watered-down Buddhism, carefully stripped of the robust moral self-examination and ascetic habits that play such important roles in traditional Buddhist teaching, which are marketed so assiduously to corporate clients as non-chemical tranquillisers. Consider the cult of positive thinking so neatly eviscerated by Barbara Ehrenreich in her book Bright-Sided, which serves the function of convincing the comfortable that all is well with the world, especially when it’s not. There are plenty of other examples, from weekend-workshop shamanism to the more lucrative ends of goddess spirituality and the New Age movement.

It’s easy to make fun of the embarrassing features of these social phenomena, but they serve a serious purpose. Most members of the political class in today’s America would be appalled if they let themselves realise just what the policies they support have inflicted on working people and the poor. Half a century ago, it bears remembering, a family of four in the United States with one working class income could afford a home, three square meals a day, and all the other necessities of life, with a little left over for luxuries now and then. Today a family of four in the United States with one working class income is probably living on the street.

That immense shift, which plunged tens of millions of people into poverty and misery, did not happen by accident. It was the direct result of policies enthusiastically embraced and promoted by the American political class: the offshoring of America’s industries, the tacit encouragement of mass illegal immigration to drive down wages and working conditions, and the metastatic growth of government regulations that crushed small business for the benefit of huge multinational corporations, among others. That is a thought that the American political class cannot allow itself to think. Magic — the art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will — is an essential tool for keeping that realisation at bay.

That said, there are definite drawbacks to a set of practices that encourage the dominant minority of a society to bumble blithely along, convinced that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, while the society they govern plunges down the steep slope of decline around them. It bears remembering that magic was practiced with great enthusiasm by the overprivileged and underprivileged alike in France in the decades leading up to 1789, Russia in the decades before 1917, and Germany in the decades that led up to 1933. I think most of us remember what happened thereafter in each of these cases.