This matters. National renewal requires a radical policy agenda, finally banishing the zombie economic model that failed in 2008 and only endures on life support. Yet it also needs a national narrative, an accessible story of decline and renaissance. This, of course, is a Sisyphean task even for the great political speakers of our time, such as they exist after a precipitous decline in the quality of our parliamentarians.

In an age of schizoid media, with the pillars of the national common culture giving way to takes, apps and newsfeeds, cutting through is hard. Rhetorical brilliance is rare even for skilled political orators, and Keir Starmer is not one of these. Yet at the root of his troubles is a policy agenda that’s almost as empty as his words, altogether speaking to a politician without any politics at all.

Perhaps the most obvious problem with Starmer’s reset was the language. In the place of inspiration, we were offered vague, laboured, soporific consultancy-jargon, and now the return of targets: sales floor KPIs transposed onto creaking hospitals and collapsing schools. “This plan will land on desks across Whitehall with the heavy thud of a gauntlet being thrown down,” the Prime Minister told his audience at Pinewood Studios, mixing his metaphors with Brent-like gusto. “Many people in Whitehall are comfortable with the tepid bath of managed decline.”

It’s not just that communication that’s lacking. If the form is grey then the substance is too. Compared to the gargantuan task of ending the longest-running dent in living standards since the Napoleonic Wars, Starmer’s vision is threadbare, painfully constrained by global economic slowdowns, geopolitical stand-offs, superpower rivalry, and bearish bond markets.

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Rather than an epic mission of national renewal — or even a new growth model based on Reevian “securonomics” — we’ve instead seen a reversion to Labourite tax-and-spend and a return of Blairite micromanagement. More than 92% of NHS patients will be seen in under 18 weeks. Three quarters of children will start school “ready to learn”. Laudable aims, but hardly memorable, totemic policies that you would put on the side of a bus. Nor are these ideas the basis for a grand national project. Ultimately, all Starmer’s speech involved was tinkering with the symptoms of decline without addressing the systemic cause.

After Donald Trump’s resurgence, then, there’s no sense in promising to emulate a defeated Bidenism. Britain’s ability to enact expansive industrial policies was always limited by our more modest fiscal and economic heft, with the Federal government and the Federal Reserve together presiding over a continent-sized economy. And even there, the “modern supply-side” playbook of Democratic policymakers, all manufacturing subsidies and Rust Belt investment, failed to halt populist revival in America. Whatever echo bounces back across the Atlantic to Whitehall is unlikely to do much better. No wonder steelworks, oil refineries, and shipbuilders have all gone to the wall since July.

A green paper has promised that an Industrial Strategy Council will be formed on a statutory footing, but the strength of the prescription is again dwarfed by the scale of the sickness. The solution to decades of industrial decline? A “national wealth fund” capitalised with £8 billion in public money — or around two weeks of NHS spending. GB Energy will do little to remedy among the highest domestic and industrial energy prices on earth. A dramatic deconvergence between the productivity and disposable income across Britain and its peers is met with a vague promise to deliver “rising living standards” over the course of this Parliament. That, at least, would be an improvement: the last session was the first in peacetime history where living standards didn’t rise at all.

And then there’s migration. Though Starmer at least acknowledged its bewildering scale, with Britain welcoming nearly one million net arrivals in 2023, he made no definite commitment around how and when numbers would fall. If, moreover, the Government’s target of 300,000 new houses a year was actually achieved, that would only just be enough to keep our dwellings-per-head steady at current levels of migration. What it certainly wouldn’t do is spur on an expanded supply that dramatically lowers prices.

In lieu of any big ambitions, the Prime Minister instead fell back on Fabian technocracy, a formula surely repeated more in hope than expectation, especially without the buoyancy of a healthy world economy, and when state capacity is flatlining and migration soaring. Dovetailed with the Prime Minister’s congenital inability to frame an attractive story, and there’s no question that won’t be answered by a review, a consultation, a taskforce, a commission, an inquiry, or the formation of some gormless NPC committee.

In a sense, Starmer’s legalism is the inevitable upshot when skull-crushing rhetoric and policy mediocrity come together. Wallowing in process, viewing himself as an administrator-in-chief with the utmost respect for even our most plodding institutions, the Prime Minister never needs to actually change things — much less bring the public along with him. There are nods to anti-SW1 iconoclasm, to that “move fast and break things” energy briefly associated with the early Johnson premiership. Yet the real vibe with Starmer is ultimately much more cautious. Rather than driving his missions forward by any means necessary, we instead get yet another relaunch.

Nor do Starmer’s latest personnel decisions offer much either. The appointment of Chris Wormald as cabinet secretary is again indicative of the bifurcation between the mammoth task and the proposed solution: the “complete re-wiring of the British state” touted by Labour was followed by the appointment of a consummate establishment insider and famed grey bureaucrat in the most senior role of the sprawling Whitehall system.

With that in mind, Starmer’s claim at Pinewood that he’s dissatisfied by Whitehall sluggishness rings rather hollow, especially when the targets he announced actually add yet another layer of bureaucracy to public services already drowning in a maelstrom of directives, unintegrated systems, outside consultants, and the legacy of failed top-down reforms. Rather than a Leninist zeal to take on the inertia of the Blob, then, Starmer will instead fall victim to his over-identification with the institutional architecture of a state that has long since given up on transformational projects, and now seeks merely to administer stagnation according to strict HR overtures.

Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister, once described her boss as “the least political person I know”. That is a highly unusual accolade for a resident of No. 10. It’s even more unusual for a man of his background. The young Keir, in the heady days of the late Eighties, sat on the editorial board of Socialist Alternatives: the in-house magazine of a Trotskyist micro-sect, followers of a Greek Marxist called Michel Pablo. The miners had been defeated, recalcitrant socialist council rebellions squashed, and the trendy New Left dominated progressive politics. Socialist Alternatives advocated a kind of deep entryism, what was called “entryism sui generis”: communist radicals would join mass parties like Labour and influence politics by embedding themselves in established institutions.

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The kind of people that advocate such strategies are deeply political. They mix in closed, bizarre circles, and obsess over grand theories of history, political philosophy and strategies for power. Most of it is faintly ridiculous, fanciful, quixotic. But it does, at least, constitute a vision. If Starmer is still subscribing to Pabloism and entryism sui generis — as still postulated by Peter Hitchens — then it is the deepest, dullest form of covert political subterfuge in political history. In this reading, the Prime Minister isn’t hiding his real political radicalism under a more respectable veneer, but rather trying to convince the world he has no politics whatsoever.

The reality is far more disturbing. There’s no secret Marxism — there’s nothing. Starmer’s youthful idealism has been dumped. If it’s been replaced at all, it is by a cold desire for efficient administration and an instinctual aversion to bombast, radicalism, grand theories, narratives, gestures, or bold ideas. His dry, administrative approach to politics would suit the measured ordoliberalism of Germanic polities, with their traditions of consensus, Lutheranism and the Protestant work ethic. To be painfully measured is a virtue, in Starmer’s reading. The public disagrees. Britain is impatient, volatile, restless, tired of the politics of polite automatons. The party system is breaking apart.

And yet there’s one area of legislation that counts as an easy win for a cold utilitarian like Starmer. The passing of the Assisted Dying Bill portends the most significant change in social legislation since the Abortion Act. Starmer’s administration, like Harold Wilson’s, will likely fail in its attempts to re-make Britain or initiate a renaissance of our industrial base, no matter how many “relaunches” we get. A new economic model is difficult to build, particularly if you’re unwilling to challenge a status quo of broken middle managers. But the dawn of British assisted dying will be a morbid and lasting legacy that could define Starmer’s premiership, even as the country slides further in behind in economics and growth.

Ashraf, the father, was the country’s last president. A trained anthropologist, he believed in books, and the power of the ideas within them to move the world. His wife, Rula, a student in Paris in 1968, said she believed in women. Mariam, their daughter, became a filmmaker — she believed in Art. Their son, Tarek, believed in his father. His two-decade career in American academia and philanthropy is an echo of Ashraf’s own cloudless trajectory through blue-chip universities, the World Bank and think tanks. It was a tribute.

For half a century, Afghanistan was simultaneously obscure and at the centre of world events. It had swallowed the fading comet tail of the USSR and absorbed the late afternoon light of American Empire. It had been a hideaway for renegades and a bazaar of ideologies. From Hippie free love to political Islamism, from Marxist-Leninism to market democracy — all had been hawked and bartered over in Afghanistan.

Whether it was itself a “real” country at all, or simply a vast outdoor laboratory worked by imperial meddlers and narco-criminals was hard to say. But every force and idea that acted on Afghanistan acted on the Ghanis too. They were both the victims of events and the instigators of them. They had been exiles, then leaders; they had been scattered across the globe and enthroned in Kabul. The family was Pashtun, and prominent, with a history of political influence. The Ghanis first left in 1977, as the communists began their takeover.

Ashraf Ghani fled again this week. Mariam posted about it — “I’m pretty burned out” — on Instagram from her home in New York. Tarek and Rula have so far remained silent. This time it was widely reported that Ashraf had attempted to upholster four cars and a helicopter with millions of stolen dollars. This was surely — hopefully — untrue, and not because the source was a Russian news agency.

By Afghan standards the Ghanis were not that corrupt. It was for other politicians to mainline America’s billions into lavish compounds, or to be apprehended in Dubai’s airport with $52 million in cash. Ashraf did not believe in money. He believed in books.

When he became President, in 2014, after a fraught and nervous election, he indulged his obsession. Like all Afghan presidents, Ghani moved to the Arg — a labyrinth of palaces within a 19^th-century fortress in central Kabul. But unlike his predecessor, he immediately set about restoring the ruined royal library, with all its decaying antique volumes. His personal library was his most valuable asset, according to a New Yorker profile. He owned seven thousand books. Every day he woke up before the sun rose and read them under his favourite chinar tree. He would have taken his volumes, not cash, when he fled on Sunday, wouldn’t he?

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Ghani didn’t just read books — he wrote them. With his collaborator, the British human rights lawyer Claire Lockhart, he published Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World (2008). “Novel strategies” were needed, they argued, to stabilise failed states that were contaminating “our fully globalised world” with anarchy.

By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, these chaotic zones were spreading. Ghani believed he had the ideas — a “sovereignty index” to be annually published by the UN, and a “citizens-based approach” to state-building — that could mop away the disorder. Fixing Failed States offered, according to a small review in Foreign Affairs, “a surprisingly hopeful vision”.

The vision was delivered as a TED talk in 2007. Ghani’s manner is cerebral, candid, impish, shrilly excitable — theory excites him. His voice is as squeaky as an old floorboard being stepped on. The TED stage suited a pedagogue like Ghani. It was not so different from the lecture halls and seminar rooms of John Hopkins, where he’d spent the 1980s teaching. He never looks uncomfortable.

America was comfortable enough for the Ghanis. It was their main chance, as it was for other exiled Afghans. It gave Ashraf, Rula and Tarek the opportunity to collect the academic prizes that are today’s proof of intelligence and moral worth. It allowed Mariam to transform herself from the child of exiles to an artist; not merely an artist working in “installation, performance, photography, text and video”, but, according to the Guggenheim Foundation, an “activist, archivist, writer and lecturer”.

A 2015 New York Times profile found Mariam in her loft apartment in Clinton Hill, worrying about being “a Brooklyn cliche”. The Times sketched her “as well-versed in the politics of extraordinary rendition as she is in the very Brooklyn pursuit of homemade chile-passion-fruit sorbet”.

Mariam’s work was exhibited at Tate Modern in London, and the Guggenheim and MOMA in New York. One exhibit, “Afghanistan: A Lexicon”, was made in collaboration with Ashraf over Skype. Over 72 panels of text and photos created by the Ghanis, the history of Afghanistan is shown to be cyclical — an endless rotation of invasion, revolt, reform, collapse and recovery. A country cruelly frozen in dynamism.

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She made films about the discovery of oil in Norway, and the melancholy difficulties of translation. She was born in New York, but identified “most with the border”. What Edward Said called the “essential sadness” of exile was there in Mariam, and in all her family. Perhaps that’s why the “Lexicon” had one telling absence from its story — the Ghanis themselves.

Ashraf had returned to the country with Rula in 2002 almost as soon as the Taliban were banished. First a finance minister under Hamid Karzai, he was an unsuccessful candidate for the presidency in 2009, and then the winner of that disputed election in 2014.

Afghanistan was a problem for the family in a way that America — where they had flourished — was not. America only needed Ashraf’s theories in the classroom. Afghanistan, Ashraf believed, could be saved by his theories. It was all in his book, and his TED talk. Opium farmers would make t-shirts. Embroiders in Kandahar would partner with Versace. Guns would become ploughshares. One day the daughters of Afghanistan would be like his own, free to study in America; free to make jam in Brooklyn; free to exhibit their work in Berlin.

Afghans were not fools. They only needed jobs. The people, Ghani said in 2005, were internationalist by temperament — “they’re much more sophisticated than rural Americans with college degrees and the bulk of Europeans.” Well, perhaps.

Becoming President gave Ghani the chance to govern the country that shone in his mind. Afghans would learn about sheep raising from New Zealand, and hydroelectricity from the Swiss. Afghanistan was a blank slate. Ghani began to doodle his beautiful diagrams on it.

Sigmund Freud once said there were two “impossible professions”: education and government. Ghani was a wonderful educator. He proved to be an impossible President. He micromanaged his illusions and his staff. He took anger management classes.

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Why was he so angry? Was it the pressure — grinding and invidious — of watching his theories of the state become exposed as just another exile’s hopeless fictions?

Either way, he grew ever more solitary behind the blast walls, barbed wire, and checkpoints of the Arg. The library was his succour and support — one journalist described Ghani’s office, filled with open books on every surface, marked neatly with pencil annotations. This is what most intellectuals (quite rightly) do in a crisis. They retreat, like Michel de Montaigne did during the 16th century French wars of religion, to brood in their towers and libraries, hoping that solitude will yield new ideas. Montaigne, though, only advised the king of France, he had no pretensions to power itself; Ghani was supposed to be something like the king of Afghanistan.

At least, as everyone said, he was not corrupt. That was a blessing in a country where the MPs alone ritualistically stole over a billion dollars a year. But there was the rest of the family. Ashraf’s brother, Hashmat, and his nephew Sultan.

Hashmat will be remembered, not for driving a bulletproof Mercedes Limousine, or the 23,000 square feet of his Kabul home, but for the SOSi scandal. It was extraordinarily complicated; it involved hugely valuable rights to mineral deposits in Kunar province, illegal links between US special forces and militias — and the Ghani family. It was Hashmat who owned significant shares in the US company that wanted to buy the rights to the minerals, and it was President Ghani who signed off on the deal. Was it corrupt? “If there was a colour redder than red, that’s what colour this red flag would be,” said one American expert in procurement law.

Sultan, meanwhile, styled himself the President of ‘The Ghani Group’ on LinkedIn, and the co-founder of ‘The Institute for Afghan Women’ on his website.  As the country started to tremble a few weeks ago, he shared photos of himself on Instagram walking towards a Learjet 75 Liberty.

Ashraf had promised to clean up grift when he first ran for President, but if it flourished in his immediate family, what hope did Afghanistan have?

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When Ghani fled on Sunday he left behind half the population in poverty, a third of the population facing emergency levels of food insecurity, stagnant GDP, a massive trade deficit, a restive and furious countryside, and, in the words of one report, “a largely lawless, weak, and dysfunctional state”. Now the Taliban control it, down to the very last bumper car.

A few days before, Mariam Ghani’s latest film had its theatrical release in the United States. It’s title? What We Left Unfinished. For Ashraf — intellectual and politician, then, at last, a corrupted idealist — it was all unfinished.

How shocked, how distressed he looked, when he surfaced this week in the UAE, exiled once more. When his security team extracted him, he said, he was “in a condition where I couldn’t even put on my shoes”. Did Ashraf Ghani realise that the things he put his faith in, the codes by which he lived his life — ideas and books, globalisation and rational governance — had been diminished? That if the reports were true, and he really had left the country, not with his library, but with $169 million dollars, that he had maimed his life’s work, as well as Afghanistan?

Maybe he knew. All year, until almost the very end, he had promised his army could hold out against the Taliban, “forever“. But there was lucidity amidst the delusion.

“The future will be determined by the people of Afghanistan,” he told the BBC in February, “not by somebody sitting behind the desk, dreaming.”

He was wrong about the people of Afghanistan. Whether they stayed or fled, they would still be dragged into the conflicts of others. But he was right about the dreamer behind the desk. Ashraf Ghani, unable to determine Afghanistan’s future, was describing himself.

Critical race theory is now widely accepted by the liberal-Left media and much of academia. It’s not just the bad laws of the Jim Crow south. And it’s not just a few racist people here and there. Racism is not some bad apples; it is as American as apple pie.

For Martin Luther King and, later, Barack Obama, American racism was the consequence of a liberal and egalitarian country failing to live up to its principles; for supporters of critical race theory, by contrast, these principles were predicated on the subjugation of black people. The American Dream is rotten to the core.

In critical race theory, then, the key historical moment is not the abolition of slavery — or the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, which brought an end to segregation in public places — but the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that “separate but equal” public schooling was unconstitutional. It violated the fourteenth amendment — which, after former slaves were granted citizenship, had assured all citizens “equal protection of the laws”. If black Americans have separate schooling, they can’t realise that equality: so concluded the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case.

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This seems like a tremendous achievement. Indeed, in many standard textbooks on the history of the civil rights movement, Brown v. Board is seen as the first big crack in the edifice of Old Jim Crow. But the founding father of critical race theory was sceptical about its positive impact. In an article published in the Harvard Law Review in 1980, Bell argued that the decision was based on:

“value to whites, not simply those concerned about the immorality of racial inequality, but also those whites in policymaking positions able to see the economic and political advances at home and abroad that would follow abandonment of segregation.”

In other words, the decision was motivated not by principled idealism but cynical self-interest. Domestic legislation in the fifties was shadowed by the Cold War — and in the battle against communism, America wanted to be seen as a moral exemplar.

But Bell’s critique of Brown v. Board runs deeper than this. Bell considered himself a realist, and viewed those who celebrated Supreme Court victories with bemusement. A few laws don’t change 250 years of slavery followed by 100 years of segregation and terror. “My position”, he wrote in his 1992 Faces at the Bottom of the Well, “is that the legal rules regarding racial discrimination have become not only reified (that is, ascribing material existence and power to what are really just ideas) … but deified”. This is because “the worship of equality rules as having absolute power benefits whites by preserving a benevolent but fictional self-image, and such worship benefits blacks by preserving hope”.

Hope was the very emotion, however, that animated the politics of King and Obama. (The latter’s second book was entitled: The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.) But Bell is having none of this.

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“I think,” he writes, “we’ve arrived at a place in history where the harms of such worship outweigh its benefit”. Those who persist in clinging on to the vision of the nation as a bastion of enlightened values are, according to him, at best naive.

This display of world-weariness, in contrast to doe-eyed idealism, is one shared by the most esteemed black American intellectual in the second term of Obama’s presidency: Ta-Nehisi Coates. No one writes much about Coates anymore. Perhaps because he left Twitter. The last memorable thing he did was base a villain in a comic book on Jordan Peterson. But six years ago, after the publication of his book Between the World and Me, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, he was anointed by Toni Morrison as James Baldwin’s successor — the nation’s intellectual and moral conscience on matters of race.

Coates isn’t a theoretician like Bell; he is a polemicist. In his writing, the realist attitude central to Bell’s critical race theory is expressed with piquant force. Racism is a constitutive part of America’s identity, Coates argues, and anyone who deviates from this fact is deluded, naive or malevolent. “There is nothing”, Coates writes about racists, “uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy”.

Coates is known for his essays in The Atlantic, which are stylish, personal, historical and very long. The overall mood is one of disenchantment. The American Dream is not for black people. Between the World and Me is written as a letter to his son, and it contains no consoling words for the future: “I have no praise anthems, nor old Negro spirituals”. The view that the moral arc of history bends towards justice is an illusion. “America”, Coates writes, “understands itself as God’s handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men”. He is an atheist.

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Bell was not; he was a Christian. And his detached pessimism was tempered by an aggressive moralism. In his book, Ethical Ambition, which mixes memoir and self-help, he emphasised that:

“humanity at its essence is both an ongoing readiness to recognize wrongs and try to make things better, and the desire to help those in need of assistance without expecting reward or public recognition”.

So there is a point in being human, and that point is to do good. The virtues that are most important to Bell are “passion, courage, faith, relationships, inspiration and humility”. He often reads less like a radical subversive than a hokey Grandpa, slipping you moral maxims rather than sweets. Which raises the question: how can someone with such piety end up conceiving an ideology characterised by doleful pessimism?

Bell is in truth an unlikely candidate for the godfather of critical race theory, an ideology sceptical about the positive impact of anti-racist legislation. When he was younger, he worked for the NAACP, the establishment anti-racism group that believed American society could be transformed through the legal system. He worked, in particular, as a civil rights lawyer in the fifties Deep South. But eventually the US Justice Department’s Civil Rights division asked him to stop being a member of the NAACP: they thought he couldn’t be objective. He quit his position in the department, but continued to work for the anti-racist organisation.

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One plausible way to reconcile these two sides of Bell — the moralist and the pessimist — is to emphasise his Christianity. He believed in the permanence of racism just like any Christian believes in the inevitability of sin — nevertheless, the inevitability of sin does not mean we shouldn’t try to be better.

But perhaps a better way to account for this tension — a way that explains the similarities between Bell and non-Christians like Coates — is to view his conception of critical race theory as a case of thwarted idealism in the American Dream. America did not become a post-racial utopia after the civil rights revolution; therefore racism is a permanent feature of American society. Just like every passionate atheist is in some sense an inverted believer, people like Bell who are so antagonistic to American idealism belie their underlying attachment to it. This is true of critical race theory in general.

Although he is not a Christian, Coates is as profoundly American as Bell. His criticism of the nation is animated by his acceptance of American exceptionalism. “One cannot”, he writes, “at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error”. His proposal is this: “to take our countrymen’s claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard”. In other words, he takes at face value the ideals of the American Dream (the very same American Dream that, he argues, is not for black people).

Meanwhile, the opponents of critical race theory see its ideas as hostile to — or at least inconsistent with — America (Fox News has mentioned it over 1,900 times in four months). In an exact inversion of critical race theory’s contention that racism is present in every aspect of American life, many on the Right — in this case, Christopher Rufo — now complain that critical race theory has “pervaded every aspect of the federal government” and poses “an existential threat to the United States”. Rufo and his ilk aren’t opposed to, say, teaching the history of slavery and segregation in American schools; what they oppose is schoolchildren acknowledging their whiteness. Rufo calls it state-sanctioned racism.

The irony is that critical race theory is not, as it sees itself, a realist’s ideology. And it is not, as its main opponents view it, fundamentally un-American. Like many on the conservative American Right, it espouses an idealised view of the nation’s self-professed values: if they truly believed these values were fundamentally corrupt, then what would be the point, as Bell and Coates do, of holding America to them? The truly realist position is one like Coleman Hughes’s: he has shown, with evidence and dispassionate argumentation, that black Americans have made material progress in recent decades.

Although Rufo may deny this of himself, many on the conservative Right do cling on to a form of American idealism that is insensitive to the existence of racism. But critical race theorists cling on to their own idealism by concluding that, because America is not yet a post-racial society, racism is an inexorable feature of the country. The vision of the shining city on a hill becomes the sole means by which to judge the nation — while the material realities of black people fade into the distance.