Skepticism in China about Christianity predates Communism by quite some way. When Jesuit missionaries like Matteo Ricci (1552-1510) began to visit in the late 16th century, they found that even those elites who were sympathetic to their faith required a great deal of persuasion before entering the fold — God appeared to ask too much while offering too little and so many of the aspects of Christianity they would have to adopt seemed to clash with traditional Chinese life. Doing away with concubines seemed self-defeating, since they might furnish a man with an heir. Removing ancestor tablets from the home meant losing the means of paying filial respect. The crucifixion of Jesus struck many as shocking rather than heroic: corporal punishment was reserved for the very lowest in society.

Still, Christianity in China grew under the Jesuits and then again in the 19th and 20th centuries when missionaries from Europe, the United States and elsewhere began to travel there to spread the gospel. Fortunes changed, however, with the Chinese Revolution in 1949. For China’s early Communist leaders, Christianity was associated with the ravages of European imperialism and was seen as a clear ideological competitor. Its transnational connections, from the Vatican — where a number of modern popes have condemned Communism — across to America’s West Coast meant that it might readily become a tool of foreign subversion.

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Rather than seek to ban Christianity outright, the strategy from the Fifties onwards has been to build ideologically safe, state-sponsored Christian organizations. Protestant Christians were shepherded into a state-sponsored “Three-Self Patriotic Movement” (TSPM) — the three selves being self-governance, self-support and self-propagation. Catholics were asked to join a Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (CPA). In both cases, links with foreign organizations were banned in favor of a state-directed fusion of Christian with Communist and patriotic ideals. Most foreign missionaries operating in China at the time of the Revolution were thrown out.

Even then, given the CCP’s interest in managing people who possess the ability to influence whole communities in China, the ideological soundness of church leaders has never been taken for granted. Education at seminaries is tightly managed, with a strong focus on patriotism. Qualified clergy face constant pressure to demonstrate their loyalty, to which some respond by emphasizing Christianity’s proletarian credentials: Jesus was a carpenter, who chose fishermen as his early disciples and had harsh words for merchants and the wealthy.

Given these unpromising beginnings for Christianity under Communism, China-watchers were astounded by its rapid growth across the final three decades of the 20th century. In 1949, Protestant Christians accounted for less than 0.2% of the Chinese population — a million people at most. By the mid-Nineties, that figure had risen to 14 million. And that was only registered Protestants. Underground “house churches” were doing spectacular business, raising the overall number of Protestants to somewhere between 60 million and 90 million people. Breathless commentators began to predict big things for Christianity in China. Some claimed that by 2050, Christians might even be in the majority.

That now seems unlikely — and for two reasons.

First, Xi Jinping is a keen student of why the Soviet Union collapsed and some scholars in China regard religion as a factor. It served, they say, as a “sacred banner” under which anti-government elements could unite. It’s no surprise, then, that during Xi’s term in office the regulation of religion in China has tightened. Patriotic religious associations are now overseen by the United Front Work Department, which in turn reports directly to the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. New measures, in 2018, on “Internet Religious Information Services” linked religion to national security and required churches to apply for licenses before sharing religious content online, from live-streaming to micro-blogging. Most registered churches in China are thought to be under some form of electronic surveillance.

Christian organizations have meanwhile been required to re-evaluate their teachings in light of Xi’s push for “Sinicization”: a fusion of traditional Chinese values and ideas with the CCP’s vision for China’s future. Christmas hasn’t been cancelled, but local governments increasingly seek to steer local businesses away from erecting Christmas displays or selling Christmas-themed commodities.

A second reason why this might not, after all, be a “Christian century” in China is that statistics suggest a slowing-down of the growth rate of Chinese Christianity since the 2000s. Some urban churches are growing, but at the expense of rural Christianity: a consequence of large-scale urban migration in China. Once a rich, inter-generational weave of miracle healings, exorcisms and Spirit-infused worship, many village churches are now said to resemble old people’s homes, that are more sober, full of people in search of meaning through a combination of community and a rational, textual faith.

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The reality for Chinese Christianity is that over the next few decades, almost anything might happen. Even if Christian numbers begin to decline, match or run ahead of an overall fall in the country’s population, the lesson from countries like South Korea is that the cultural influence of Christianity can end up mattering more than raw numbers. “Sinicization” may backfire on the CCP if potent combinations emerge of Christianity and Chinese philosophy: Jesus, Confucius and Mencius forming an ethical dream-team, focused on love, self-sacrifice and prophetic critique of spiritually empty, narrowly growth-focused governance — of the sort with which the CCP’s critics within China charge it. At the same time, those same two traditions, Christian and Confucian, provide the basis for regarding government as God-given and thus profoundly legitimate.

Western culture may play its own modest role in what comes next, serving as it does as a vehicle for Christian values. Christian creations, from The Chronicles of Narnia to The Passion of the Christ, are the focus of discussion, where internet restrictions allow or where the use of a VPN permits. China is even home to a number of high-profile “cultural Christian” intellectuals like Liu Xiaofeng, who are capable of taking varying degrees of critical distance from the CCP.

Meanwhile, academics and journalists who study underground Christianity in China — with heavy use of pseudonyms for the people they interview and even the cities where they conduct their research — reveal grassroots churches in rude health. Branches of McDonalds have been used for sessions of the Timothy Training Course, a grassroots discipleship and leadership program. A different lesson from the course is taught at each plastic table-top, and when the police arrive to round everyone up, they cheerfully sign pledges not to do it again — or, at least, in that particular branch of McDonalds.

The bigger picture is of a country that has upended many of the predictions confidently made about it by Western commentators. It was once expected that market forces would drive political liberalization in China. Perhaps Xi Jinping enjoys a quiet chuckle about that one, now and again. In a similar way, secularization theorists once claimed that modernity brings a two-fold decline: first, in the social significance of religion, and then later in its salience for the individual. This hasn’t been borne out in South Korea or in China, where Christianity has grown in tandem with the economy and with urbanization. Xi no doubt finds this departure from expectations rather less amusing. The battle for China’s soul goes on.

The idea of working at McDonald’s generally carries this meaning in American culture. It’s one option of a tough choice, part of a bargain that’ll probably be a bummer either way. It’s McDonald’s or unemployment. McDonald’s or welfare. McDonald’s or getting kicked out of your mom’s house. Ice T’s depiction of this bargain is extreme in its terms, but it captures something that, even when the choices aren’t so stark, often attaches to the McDonald’s option — a hint of shame, because you’ve tumbled into the unhappy trope. You’re workin’ at Mickey D’s. It’s not really the worst job you can have, but, when people think of the worst job you can have, a lot of them think of McDonald’s. The idea of working in the back flipping burgers and dunking fries in spattering grease is pretty bad. But, especially for someone like Ice T’s ghetto hustler, working in front has to be much worse. Standing at a cash register when your boys roll in, wearing a brown uniform and a paper hat and mouthing an obsequious question scripted in a distant office, must be something like the existential death Hegel imagined in his master-slave dialectic, when the man who values survival over status surrenders himself to the man who values status over survival.

Given all this, it’s wild to see a campaign battle between America’s two presidential candidates over which of them can more believably claim the exalted mantle of having worked at McDonald’s. In case you haven’t kept up with the drama, it grows from a claim by Kamala Harris that, during the summer of 1983, she worked at one in Alameda, California, where, she’s said, she “did fries”. Harris first mentioned her McDonald’s job in 2019, and has brought it up several times this year. Alas, no one has produced reliable evidence to confirm this item from her work history, and Trump has seized on this tiny epistemic void, her McDonald’s job hovering in its limbo of unconfirmability, to mount his own much splashier, much Trumpier claim: Harris is lying about having worked at McDonald’s. And then, to more fully exploit this moment of uncertainty, Trump visited a closed McDonald’s in the small town of Feasterville, in the swing state of Pennsylvania, and exuberantly pretended to work there for 15 minutes. The crowds outside, Trump said as he dunked sliced potatoes in boiling grease, were huge. His very brief McDonald’s stint was a big success.

Now, the first question to clear up, the question Ice T’s hustler would probably want answered, is why the hell anyone would pretend to work at McDonald’s, or lie about having worked there, or brag about it at all, however honestly. In Harris’s case, there are two slightly different answers. In 2019, it would have made sense as a way of appealing to the progressive voters she thought controlled her path to the Democratic presidential nomination. Working at McDonald’s would be a badge of low or oppressed status, especially for a female or uterus-having candidate of colour, and badges of low or oppressed status were valued highly by progressives of the time, especially when worn by people who are also, in the more conventional terms of education and employment and cultural refinement, undeniably high status. In October 2024, the calculation is slightly different. Instead of advertising her erstwhile low status as a fast-food worker, as a way of cementing her claim to high status as a progressive politician, Harris would like her former job at McDonald’s to endear her to the working-class voters she needs in crucial swing states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan. (That “working class” in Pennsylvania is now signified by a french-fryer job at a rural McDonald’s rather than unionised work in a Pittsburgh steel factory is something to pause over, I suppose.)

Trump’s calculations were more straightforward. The uncertainty around that 1983 summer job gave him enough (for him) latitude to accuse his opponent of lying, and Trump, a prolific liar himself, really likes to accuse his opponents of lying. Indeed, one suspects that Trump staged his 15 minutes of french-fry making fame entirely as a set-up for the punchline he delivered when he was finished — “I’ve now worked [at McDonald’s] for 15 minutes more than Kamala.” Several times, while speaking out the drive-through window to friendly reporters, he repeated that Kamala had lied about her McDonald’s job, while also lying about McDonald’s confirming his claim that Harris was lying. It hadn’t confirmed this.

For me, Trump calling Harris a liar on this seemingly trivial point is irresponsible. I think you should have solid proof before you accuse someone of lying. Then again, I’m sort of pathologically credulous, dangerously slow to suspect the person I’m talking to might not be as childishly earnest in conversation as I am. Lying is destructive of communicative trust, but so is accusing people of lying.

Yet Trump’s accusation does have a little behind it. Reporters friendly to the Harris campaign have produced one person who backs up Harris’s claim, but only third-hand. That is, an old friend of Harris’s when they were teenagers remembers Harris’s mother later saying something about Kamala having worked at McDonald’s. Media have treated this bit of hearsay as serious evidence, but you only have to imagine the tables being turned to see how little evidentiary work it really does. If it were Trump, in other words, reporters would roll their eyes. And the Washington Free Beacon provides a big enough stack of circumstantial evidence that Kamala haters can keep believing what they believe already, and others with more open minds can reasonably wonder if this might be a case of stolen fast-food valour after all.

For example, a job at McDonald’s seems like something Harris would have eagerly discussed in her two autobiographical books, which strain to present her as a plucky product of a humble upbringing. But neither book mentions it, even though, as the Free Beacon notes, her 2019 campaign biography These Truths We Hold “devotes a chapter to the struggles of the working-class and assails the service industry’s ‘starvation wages'”. Not brandishing such a shiny autobiographical nugget in this discussion does seem uncommonly modest for a presidential candidate.

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And why have we heard nothing from Harris’s sister Maya, the Stanford-trained lawyer who earlier worked on Harris’s campaign, and who’d have been a teenager when Kamala was supposedly working at Mickey D’s? Smells generate some of the strongest memories, and making fast-food french fries is notorious for how it leaves people smelling. One of my best friends in high school worked at our town’s A&W, the chain of drive-in hamburger joints famous for its root beer. I remember him smelling exactly like french fries when he got off work. Does Maya Harris remember her big sister smelling like french fries when she got home from her summer job at McDonald’s?

No one seems to have asked her, which points to a depressing side-issue. Uncertainty around Harris’s summer job in 1983 has presented a sort of test to elite media, and they have failed. With Trump rushing in to exploit this uncertainty and rake in a huge pile of free and favourable publicity, while littering the ground with his own lies and partial-truths, they’ve responded in a way that exhibits, as if in pathological symptoms and uncontrollable tics, a chronic syndrome in their journalism. A New York Times article from last Sunday is a prominent example. Its sub-headline says: “Donald Trump has claimed without evidence that Ms. Harris never worked at the fast-food chain. Her campaign and a friend say she did.” This is echoed in the body of the piece: “Lacking a shred of proof, he has charged that she never actually worked under the golden arches.” In these formulations, a political campaign’s mere assertion and one woman’s memory of something Harris’s mother told her at some unspecified time count as proof, while all the circumstantial evidence amassed by the Washington Free Beacon doesn’t even count as evidence.

And you can see the Times trying to sculpt their one piece of substantiating evidence so that it looks more solid and imposing than it really is. The article states that “Waanda Kagan, a close friend of Ms. Harris’s when they attended high school together in Montreal, said she recalled Ms. Harris having worked at McDonald’s around that time.” This makes it sound as if Ms Kagan has conveyed a direct contemporaneous memory of Harris and her job. But in the next paragraph we read, “Ms. Kagan said that Ms. Harris’s mother, who died in 2009, had told Ms. Kagan about the summer job years ago.” So, Harris’s close friend Wanda Kagan knows that Harris worked at McDonald’s because, at some later date, Harris’s mother told her? Not Harris herself? This seems like the sort of curious, murky account of a live issue that a self-respecting reporter would try to clarify a little further, but the Times presents the Wanda Kagan story as if it settles things, as if there’s no journalistic need to corroborate that story by, say, contacting Maya Harris and probing her olfactory memories, asking whether she remembers a smell of french fries from the summer of 1983.

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In a long thread on X, conservative media reporter Drew Holden includes this article among a startling number of examples of news outlets giving snide, niggling, gratuitously skeptical commentary as they reported on Trump’s McDonald’s performance. Holden portrays these as “outrage porn”, but, with a few exceptions, it’s not really outrage we’re seeing. It’s fretfulness and worry. It’s helplessness. As I said above, it’s panic.

Theoretically at least, there was a journalistic balance to strike when Trump pulled his McDonald’s stunt. The press could have done its reporting from the sidelines, quoting Trump’s accusation that Harris lied about working at McDonald’s while noting that such a strong accusation should be backed up by something like proof. They could have, as they have done, reported that Trump himself openly lied when he said that McDonald’s has confirmed his claim about Harris. They could even have reported some of Trump’s odd behaviour has he pretended to fry those sliced potatoes. They might have described his awkward movements, his odd and yet familiar fixation, before all that boiling grease, with the size of the adoring crowds surrounding the humble restaurant. They might have related how he made a big, germaphobic deal about the special technology McDonald’s has for making sure those sacred potatoes are never touched, never despoiled, by “the human hand”.

They could have done this while also conceding that Harris’s claim about working at McDonald’s is indeed light on corroboration. Instead, they’ve seemed desperate to put themselves in the action, to undo Trump’s (sleazy and undeserved, if also enviable and impressive) PR triumph through sarcasm and bad framing, while pretending that obvious questions about Kamala Harris’s McDonald’s story have been answered, when they haven’t. The media have, thus, looked like they’re trying to weaken Trump and protect Harris. They’ve looked, in other words, like they’re a little freaked out, a little scared that a faithful telling of this McDonald’s story might help him win. It’s not exactly the Hunter Biden laptop story, but it kind of feels like the Hunter Biden laptop story.

I have my own suspicions about Harris’s claim, and I’m obviously a little disgusted with how the press has handled it. But I can’t help feeling sorry for her. She had no way to foresee the Trumpian Kung Fu she was opening herself up to when, truthfully or not, she claimed she once had a low-status fast food job. The most clairvoyant politician or political strategist could not have anticipated what Donald Trump, with his greasy and smelly methods, would make of the greasy and smelly mythos of the lowly job at McDonald’s.

It’s a sorry episode all around, but maybe it’ll have an upside. Maybe all the political bragging about having a job at McDonald’s will kill the stigma that attaches to this essential work. And maybe, in the future, on their way to higher education and better jobs and happy lives as successful adults, some larger number of young men will end up flippin’ burgers and dunkin’ fries at Mickey D’s, instead of trying their finite luck as ghetto hustlers.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, its last President, Mikhail Gorbachev, signed on to do an advert for Pizza Hut, in which a family gathering of Russians debate whether the introduction of fast-food chains like Pizza Hut was truly worth the fall of the USSR. Unsurprisingly, the pro-Pizza Hut faction win. And though that particular advert is somewhat on the nose, it wasn’t a great leap from the post-Soviet reality. When the first McDonald’s opened in Moscow in 1990, hundreds queued to get a chance to taste American fast food.

Today, however, the “McDonald’s era” in Russia has come to a close, as all of the franchise’s restaurants have been sold off. Most of them are still being operated, but they carry new names. The elusive “magic” that those Big Macs held in the Nineties in the eyes of Russians as harbingers of modernity, symbols of a new, global market society, is now well and truly gone.

But American fast food was never only important for the ways it could dazzle the Russian proletariat, or anyone else in what is now called the Global South. It has become part of the American self-conception, at the lowest and uppermost reaches of society. Pictures of Burger King lorries being unloaded from US military cargo planes in bases across Afghanistan and Iraq were a powerful symbol of American power; the now-abandoned US military base at Kandahar, for example, once boasted a Burger King, a Pizza Hut and a TGI Fridays serving alcohol-free margaritas. Like the Roman legionaries before them, wherever American soldiers and marines deployed in force, they brought their own culture and preferences with them. Far from being a white elephant and a pointless waste of resources, that McDonald’s or Burger King inside the Green Zone was a little piece of America, one that soldiers — often worn down from their long deployments into the sandbox — genuinely appreciative. For them, it really was a little slice of home.

The Kandahar Burger King closed down a long time ago; ordering Pizza Hut at Bagram air base in Afghanistan is likewise a distant memory, as the US military slowly cuts back and retreats from the world. But even on the home front, inside the continental United States, fast food isn’t what it used to be. The industry is now locked in a genuine affordability crisis, and it is unclear when — or even if — things will ever improve. The famous McDonald’s dollar menu has been renamed to the “$1, $2, $3 Dollar Menu”, and an increasing amount of items on it — even the chicken nuggets — now cost upwards of $4.

In the early years of the post-Cold War era, the ridiculous affordability of American fast food was a point of pride, waved in the faces of the snobs of Europe. Michelin chefs be damned: in the US, mass prosperity and mass culture were the order of the day. The average American could be proud of the fact that he could eat more calories and afford more stuff than the average citizen of any other country in the world (even if nothing else).

But this is no longer the case, as massive cost increases, coupled with shrinkflation, have eaten away at this central aspect of American living standards. Those same supermarkets that Boris Yeltsin salivated over are putting locks on the displays. Once, Russians queued up in droves to get a taste of Pizza Hut or Burger King; now, Americans marvel on social media at just how cheap the hamburgers in Moscow seem to be compared to their own. But though many things are becoming increasingly unaffordable for ordinary Westerners these days, the rising price of hamburgers comes with its own poignant cultural significance. And this new reality is the source of a new type of dissatisfaction on social media.

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One of the internet’s most popular content creators, John Jurasek — commonly nicknamed “Reviewbrah” — posted a cri de coeur on the topic several months ago, in which he described how the fast food he reviewed had skyrocketed in price and nosedived in quality over the last few years. After listing his own experiences and complaints, Jurasek opened up the floor to people to report their own experiences in the comments section. More than 10,000 comments later, the picture painted was overwhelmingly clear: the fast-food industry inside America seemed to be in a state of near-collapse.

In response, some might be tempted to ask: so what? Fast food is bad for your health; why would the unaffordability of a greasy pizza or a cardboard box of processed chicken nuggets even be a problem? These complaints are reasonable on one level, but they ignore the broader social, economic and political reality that this affordability crisis speaks to. The United States is possibly the only country in the world where the term “food desert” is in semi-regular use, denoting areas within the country where there is little or no access to supermarkets selling fresh vegetables and the like. In this nutritional frontier country, fast food is the only game in town. Though the extent and severity of this problem shouldn’t be overstated, it is an issue, and some Americans are, for various reasons, at least partly dependent on cheap fast food in the way that the citizens of ancient Rome were dependent on cura annonae: the provision of state-subsidised bread and grain.

On another level, however, tutting at Americans who resent that their burgers are now twice as expensive and increasingly filled with sawdust is just the Western equivalent of tutting at Soviet citizens for coveting American blue jeans. The USSR collapsed in part due to its citizens being disillusioned with the promises of socialist prosperity that had been made to them. Looking at their own shabby reality, blue jeans and hamburgers became symbols of something greater. America, by contrast, is now a consumerist society where the ability to actually be a happy consumer is rapidly collapsing. Just like the Soviet Union before it, the once-alluring story of American society is now being seen as an increasingly shabby fraud by a growing segment of its own citizenry. The same feelings of anomie and cynicism that once animated Soviet political jokes are now spreading to more and more Americans, forced to contrast the newspaper headline stories of economic growth and prosperity for all with their experiences of food inflation and wage stagnation.

A very stark illustration of this fact came recently, as the American journalist and cable TV profile, Tucker Carlson, travelled to Russia. The official goal was to interview Vladimir Putin, but there’s a fair chance their meeting was the least culturally impactful moment of the trip. It’s what Tucker decided to do afterwards that has now really stirred up consternation and controversy on social media: in an ironic repeat of Yeltsin’s visit to that American grocery store, Tucker decided to visit a Russian grocery store in Moscow, ride the Moscow subway, and then visit a Vkushno i tochka — Russian for “Tasty, that’s it”, the new hamburger chain that has taken over where McDonald’s left off.

In Tucker’s own words, his visits to Moscow “radicalised” him, in a sort of mirror image of how citizens of the USSR were once equally radicalised by seeing how the other side lived. Moscow simply wasn’t that bad: the groceries were cheap, the store selection was wide, nothing was locked down to prevent theft — which is becoming extremely common in many parts of the West — and the streets were free of drug addicts and homeless people. The burgers were far cheaper than in the United States, and they were indeed tasty.

Given that Russia is, according to the official narrative in the West, a backwards tyranny, run by an incompetent, brutal kleptocracy, ridden with crime and lacking in basic services, things in Moscow reasonably shouldn’t be quite so, well, normal. Why can’t we in the West, with all the natural, inherent superiority our societies supposedly possess, manage to have clean public transit, cheap fast food, or stores where you don’t have to ask an employee to unlock the deodorant shelf?

History might not repeat, but it sure does rhyme: after Tucker posted these videos from Moscow to social media, a massive firestorm broke out, as people tried their best to debunk the very idea of Russians enjoying anything close to a decent living standard or a functional society. Statistics, often decades old, pointing to Americans spending only some 8-10% of their total income on groceries (compared to Russians who supposedly spent almost 50%) made the rounds, but it is hard not to get the sense that it is all, in a very real way, a futile effort at this point.

The problem isn’t that people suddenly love Russia — it’s that they remember when the West had affordable fast food, and when stores didn’t put half their wares under lock and key. They remember living in functioning societies, and now they increasingly feel that they don’t, anymore. What Tucker — like Boris Yeltsin before him — inadvertently did is simple: he revealed that the belief in the grand narrative of his own society has withered away and died. It doesn’t matter how many statistics and graphs are posted about PPP and GDP growth and how America is richer today than it has ever been before: people don’t feel richer. They see the decay around them and they now feel they are being lied to, and that the system is broken. And not least when it comes to their hamburgers.

Almost a freak accident of history, the hamburger has been pressed into service as a grand symbol for the past half century. In 1990, it was a symbol of American cultural and economic dominance, as Muscovites waited in line for their taste of the future. In 2004, as airlifted Burger King trucks rolled off the tarmac at Bagram air base, it became a symbol not just of cultural and economic dominance but of military power too. A mere 20 years later, the hamburger is now coming to symbolise very real feelings of political and economic decline, as people take to social media to bicker over whose fault it is that they’re no longer affordable.

Anger over expensive burgers won’t bring down America, just as the lack of blue jeans didn’t cause the collapse of the USSR. But they point to exactly the same thing: a shared vision of the future, once commonly held, is now in the process of dying. And nobody knows how to repair that vision, or what to replace it with when it’s gone.

The first Wetherspoon I went into was The Cherry Tree in Huddersfield, to hide from a morning rain shower. Even at 10.30am, it was buzzing. At first glance, it appeared to be filled with more outwardly broken people per square foot than almost anywhere I’ve been in the world: alcoholics (functioning and not), people with disabilities (mental or physical), and the very poor. If I were that way inclined, I could easily paint it as a scene to be gawked at, mocked, pitied, or all three. I could make a clown of the perfectly and precisely dressed bald gentleman who sat four tables down from me, alone, staring straight ahead, sipping his pints and periodically lifting up his tie to lick off the drops that fell on it. Yet as I sheltered in The Cherry Tree, what I saw in him, and beyond him, were hundreds of warm, human and moving scenes of otherwise lonely people not being alone.

The table directly next to mine catered to an evolving mix of mostly elderly people who seemed to all know each other. They would come, hug, sit, sip, gossip, get up, hug again, then move on. It ebbed and flowed like that through lunchtime, until by 2.00pm the table sat only a single couple, across from each other. They eventually invited me to join them. When they introduced themselves, they explained they were not a couple. Not like that, you see. Just friends, drawn a little closer now, because each had recently lost their spouse, and they were more alone than they’d ever been.

She had lost her Oliver eight months before, after 53 years of marriage. He was everything to her, and her to him. Oliver had been a builder, she had been a dinner lady, and after they raised a family, they retired to live their dream of travelling the world. Nashville, Italy, Spain, Vegas. Then he passed away. She tried to tell me more, but kept teetering on the edge of tears.

Her tablemate, a retired military man, had a similar story, although instead of tears there was a measured stoicism. A lost spouse of 22 years, and now confusion. Life wasn’t supposed to be lived without her.

So, they both came to The Cherry Tree daily, to forget and connect. We talked for two beers, and they tried, with all they had left, to keep the conversation positive — even though Huddersfield isn’t what it used to be, the world’s become crueller, and everything is going down the gutter. You have to make the best of the ups, and weather the downs, and focus on the grandkids.

It was an eerily similar conversation to one I’d once had with two widowers in McDonald’s outside of Houston, Texas: a conversation that had helped me to see the fast-food chain not as the soulless corporation to look down on, but as an essential part of local communities, especially “downscale ones”. A welcoming space in a world that’s becoming ever colder and more mechanical. Society needs these inexpensive, judgement-free zones, for people who are used to being judged; places where those of any race, class or age can get together simply to be together; where someone can escape loneliness and the elements, and sit all day in a quiet corner, reading the paper.

After The Cherry Tree, I would go into a Wetherspoon whenever I was near one, and I came to respect them even more than I respect McDonald’s. Partly because they are so pleasant: there is no blasting music or blinding lights. They have comfortable chairs with actual fabric. They are thoughtful, too, with separate spaces for every type of customer, from large families with rambunctious toddlers to sullen singles wanting to bond only with their pint. The employees are polite, which puts the customers on their best behaviour, even those who’ve been drinking for hours straight. I’ve now been to over 40 Wetherspoons, in all parts of the UK, and there are no clunkers.

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It is easy to take those things for granted, if you are well-off. But Wetherspoons are also beautiful. Other large chains aim to be dull in their consistency, but every Wetherspoon is unique. With rare exceptions — The Cherry Tree being one of them — each one is in a refurbished historical space, done up in neither a gaudy nor a sterile fashion, honouring the past while keeping it alive in the present. The preservation spirit alone ought to make cultured people gush about Wetherspoons, but, as I quickly learned, when I did gush about them, few gushed back. In fact, they tended to be downright scornful. I learned that I wasn’t supposed to love Wetherspoon, except perhaps ironically, because the chain is “problematic” with an owner “who’s a closed-minded arse”, who supported Brexit and “was wrong about Covid”.

The founder and owner of Wetherspoon, Tim Martin, is not loved by journalists, or others in the credentialed class. When I first picked up the chain’s in-house magazine, I found that the feeling was mutual. The issue in question had a blood red cover blaring, “Does Truth Matter?” with the subheading: “Many untrue statements were made about Wetherspoon during the pandemic. Wetherspoon News sets the record straight.”

The case he makes — about a snobby media class twisting his words to make him sound like an Evil Boss — might have merit, but it really doesn’t matter. The snobs can adjudicate over the finer details of the morality of going to a ’Spoons for breakfast when they’re hungover; meanwhile, the regulars’ loyalty has never wavered.

I find it particularly odd that people object to Wetherspoon because the owner supported Brexit. Because the other reason the chain gets judged is because it’s killing off smaller, family-owned pubs: undercutting them in price, due to its size and scale. I won’t deny that, after a week of going to such pubs, I was shocked at their prices. Was I really getting my favourite locally-made cask ale — the work of a craftsman, from an American perspective — for around £2? The same one for which I’d paid over double a few nights before? In short, Wetherspoon is doing exactly what the EU was doing.

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One of the main reasons for voting against Brexit was for more open markets: for the cross-border, neoliberal agenda that encourages global uniformity, and consequently larger corporations offering lower prices — like Wetherspoon. Those well-travelled, well-educated Londoners, with careers in big global corporations and enough money to pay the £7 for a pint in their uptight South Kensington local, sneer at the poor for drinking in a big corporate chain run by a bad man. But if they were consistent, they’d cheer it on, as one of the more pleasant and socially useful manifestations of corporatisation.

Because ultimately, what matters is this: that Wetherspoon is good for people. Politics has absolutely no bearing on whether that couple will keep meeting to share their sorrow over a drink, or whether that solitary man with the 1,000-yard stare will find shelter in a well-upholstered corner. It does not explain why I will continue to tour the Wetherspoons of England. All of us will keep going simply because we take ’Spoons at face value, and like them without irony. They are simply great establishments to have a pint in — which is how a pub is generally judged.

I now tune out when people start telling me the political reasons they don’t like a Wetherspoon. But I also skip over the editorial at the front of Wetherspoon News, before I read the rest of the magazine, which tells the stories of regular customers and long-time employees, such as shift leader Carol, who skipped 100 times a day for a month to raise money for cancer research, in honour of her late grandmother. 

Not surprisingly, my favourite profile to date is of a former medic, Steve Jones, who’s halfway to his retirement goal of visiting every Wetherspoon in the UK — using only trains and his feet. Wetherspoon is not its owner’s politics or even its owner. It is this: human stories, told simply.

The Bible declares that those who do not work shall not eat, and our secular society clings onto that idea: the harder you work, the greater your reward ought to be. There is a glut of articles, for instance, expressing outrage at how many junior doctors are paid less than fast-food workers. If you’re being compared to a McDonald’s employee, you know it’s bad.

I worked in McDonald’s for a few years, and it’s true: the wages set the lowest bar. If junior doctors are earning so little, that is a scandal. But drawing attention to the paltry pay of working-class people just so you can make a point about the treatment of overwhelmingly middle-class public servants isn’t exactly progressive.

Fast-food work is derided because it’s an “unskilled” job that supposedly any fool can do. It was my first job, and the same was true for many of the people I worked with. Three quarters of McDonald’s employees are under the age of 25. The workforce at my store was young and diverse, many coming from immigrant backgrounds, very few of us university educated. The sort of people ignored by society.

Around 100 current and recent McDonald’s staff have recently testified, in a BBC report, to enduring a toxic culture of sexual harassment, bullying and racism. Female workers as young as 16 described experiences of groping and intimidation, from both customers and staff members. Managers were accused of turning a “blind eye”.

Though I can’t testify to personally witnessing any sexual harassment while I worked at McDonald’s, I did hear about it. When I first started, a male crew member who was notorious for hitting on female colleagues was suspended for making inappropriate sexual comments. He left soon afterwards. There was also a 16-year-old worker was hit on by a middle-aged, lecherous dad, while he was overseeing his own 11-year-old daughter’s birthday party.

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To some extent, such objectification is true of any workplace. In History and Class Consciousness, the Marxist György Lukács developed the concept of “reification”, which describes how, in a capitalist society, human relations are treated as relations between things. Human themselves are treated as objects, while abstract ideas like “capital” or “the market” become active subjects that determine human activity. In other words, humans are controlled by capital, rather than vice-versa.

Being a fast-food worker is perhaps the most extreme example of this condition. It is a job that allows no room for autonomy. For a good portion of my day, I was a piece of equipment that the bosses had paid for, and they wanted to get their money’s worth. Orders were issued from on high, the managers enforced them, and I was supposed to obey them without question, on pain of sanctions such as getting fired or denied decent hours. We were all overworked, because the store was understaffed — unless it was a Friday or Saturday night. Management needed to keep labour costs as low as they could get away with, to maintain profitability. There were busy shifts when I would be dumped on fries, to cook them and box them by myself, hour after hour. On summer days, it was excruciating.

Because the job is so monotonous and automatic, I felt like I was more robot than person. Working in McDonald’s made me feel what Marx meant by his theory of “alienation”, as opposed to just understanding it as an abstract intellectual concept. Alienation, for Marx, was how workers became estranged from the product of their labour, never reaping the benefits of production. It’s something that is impossible to complain about, when you feel like you’re just another cog in a machine, disposable and easily replaceable. When your work is seen as near-worthless, it’s hard to protest that you are being underpaid for what you help produce shift after shift.

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Customers often reinforce this feeling. There is a general belief that people working in the food industry are servants and, therefore, lesser beings. Places such as McDonald’s cater to the masses; in their own work stations, its customers will often experience the same anxiety, alienation and precariousness. But McDonald’s is one of the few spaces where someone, downtrodden by their own boss, can feel like they have power — where they, as the customer, are king.

Those who exploit this transaction know that the power relations are lopsided in their favour. If they become aggressive and hurl abuse at a fast-food worker, for mostly minor infractions, the worker can’t defend themselves. They must maintain their composure, respond politely and just take the abuse on the chin. Otherwise, they may be damaging the company’s reputation for providing quality customer service, and even risking their job. I know of someone who was “written up” for getting angry at a customer who was swearing at him while complaining about cold fries. Usually if you have three write-ups, your contract will be terminated.

Meanwhile, the ubiquitous presence of CCTV cameras reminded us that we were always being watched. Indeed, McDonald’s must have recorded so many incidents of sexual harassment and bullying against workers. Yet footage is seldom used to bring about justice. One of the workers who testified in the BBC story said that, even though her sexual harassment was caught on camera, she had to carry on working with the perpetrator.

The harassment and bullying that goes on within McDonald’s isn’t simply a problem of gross lechers, then; it is a symptom of structural tendency in these workplaces to objectify human beings. It is a symptom, too, of the precarity of the job market for young people. Many of those I worked with had second jobs, often similarly low-waged, just to bolster their paltry income.

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Perhaps part of why fast-food work is devalued is because the food served is seen as a vulgar indulgence, unlike junior doctors. But in this respect, how is it different from other source of pleasure? People want to eat fast food, and someone has to serve them. Those servers work long, hard hours. Beyond deserving basic respect, they should be able to earn a living, afford decent housing and a social life, raise a family.

But McDonald’s won’t give them these things, unless pressed. “Capital,” as Marx rightly stated, “is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society.” Fast-food restaurants have got away with treating their workers badly simply because they can; but they have been enabled by a tacit view, among the public, that these workers are somehow unworthy. It’s tempting to see the unionisation drives and strikes that have occurred in the past few years as the beginning of a fairer era. But it’s also hard to imagine a future in which fast-food workers aren’t the benchmark for bad wages, offered in exchange for their humanity.

Now, though, McDonalds is pulling out of Russia — a move laden with heavy symbolism. The hamburger giant was among more than 1,000 Western companies to close down operations following Putin’s Ukrainian invasion. Most swiftly saw the potential collateral damage to their brand if they stayed in the Russian market. Yet the fast food firm has moved beyond its initial suspension of sales to announce that it is selling its 850-strong chain in the country to a local buyer.

“It is impossible to imagine the Golden Arches representing the same hope and promise that led us to enter the Russian market 32 years ago,” Chief executive Chris Kempczinski told staff and suppliers as he announced that the company was to permanently withdraw from the country.

Hundreds of Russians were waiting outside when the first branch — a 900 seater in Pushkin Square — opened its doors in January 1990, a moment that presaged the end of the Soviet Union with its infamous consumer shortages. Some excited citizens dressed in Disney costumes to mark their admiration for America and a record 34,000 burgers sold on the first day alone. Later the firm imported special potatoes to Russia and flew in foreign experts to help develop special baking and cattle-rearing systems. Now there are 62,000 staff and branches in 11 different time zones.

Michael Gorbachev, then general secretary of the Communist Party, won the Nobel Peace Prize in the year McDonald’s arrived and later went on to star in a Pizza Hut commercial. But he was banned from Ukraine after backing Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea and later spoke about his admiration for Putin. “The manual control of authoritarianism was needed to overcome the situation that our friends, our former friends and allies, created for Russia by pushing us out of geopolitics,” he told Time, echoing the President’s own distorted narrative that has led to this shocking war in Europe.

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I ended up eating chips smothered in alleged cheese and mayo in a Ukraine McDonalds a couple of weeks before the conflict kicked off —  the only place open late in Kharkiv. Now the streets of the country’s former capital are in ruins, the city devastated by Putin’s bombs, while the burger chain has temporarily departed Ukraine. It is paying staff and giving assistance to refugees — but it would be far more helpful if such Western brands re-opened their branches to show support for the country in places away from the frontline. Walking around Kyiv yesterday, it was noticeable how many foreign-owned stores remain closed.

Before Kharkiv, my previous McDonalds was in Belarus, where I was reporting on pro-democracy protests two years ago. I was chased in to a Minsk branch by paramilitary thugs, who grabbed a few demonstrators for their torture chambers as we scanned the menu hastily trying to look like customers. Such is the firm’s ubiquity. The significance of its place in global capitalism led The Economist to invent an index using the cost of a Big Mac to assess purchasing power in nations. There was also another theory that no two countries containing franchises of the firm would go to war, intended to show how rising wealth led to falling violence, but this hubristic idea was quickly crushed by conflict in the Balkans.

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Removal of the Golden Arches from Moscow spotlights the arrival of another Cold War between democracy and dictatorship. For the moment, it is focused on Russia after Putin’s atrocities in Ukraine. But his allies in China are looking hungrily at Taiwan as they watch this war play out — another reason why this fight is so important. The retrenchment by McDonalds comes after the pandemic focused corporate minds on the pitfalls of long supply chains while exposing how Beijing’s rulers could not be trusted after a global battle broke out against a mysterious new disease that emerged within its borders. Even now, they resist global efforts to discover the truth about Covid’s origins.

Russia was already cutting itself off from the West — like China — with a war on foreign media and technology firms to protect the ruling circle of thieves even before the imposition of wartime sanctions and exodus of foreign firms. Now McDonalds is the perfect illustration of how how Ukraine’s existential struggle for survival is accelerating the divide between autocracies and liberal democracies. The economic fallout from this war with rising energy and food prices is being felt around the world — and I suspect there are more explosions still to come as the shock waves ripple around the planet.

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Since the success of McDonald’s is largely down to marketing rather than culinary finesse, the gap it leaves in the Russian market will be rapidly filled. Already firms are filing applications to trademark names and logos that look suspiciously familiar. When the burger behemoth  pulled out of Donetsk after the Russian-backed separatist takeover in 2014, its branch in the city was replaced by ‘Donmac’, complete with a Golden Arches logo and little red boxes for fries.

But while Russians continue to enjoy their burgers and fries, the rest of the world — which has become wealthier through co-operation, consumerism, democracy and globalisation — is becoming more fissured, more fractious and far more suspicious. Ultimately, we may all end up as losers from these turbulent events.

Pull off somewhere, anywhere. Years ago, my family and I eased our lumbering people carrier down an exit ramp a few hundred miles south of Washington DC, close to Charleston, South Carolina. There was a McDonalds with a huge enclosed playpen for young children. Coffee refills were free on weekdays. No spitting was allowed.

Outside, underneath an impossibly huge Stars and Stripes, the seediness of America was spread out as far as the eye could see. Gas stations, tattoo parlours, Bojangles Pizza, Dunkin Donuts, $30-a-night motels, car showrooms, gun shops; the air was filled with the smell of sweat and fried chicken and car oil.

I realised that afternoon that I was in love with it all. In love with the seediness; but in love too with the gentle, beaten-up faces of the folks who lived in these parts or were passing through. I should offer up a BBC series on McDonalds, I thought (I was the Washington Correspondent at the time) — just hearing from all the people who worked in them, ate in them, wandered through en route to start a new life or leave a lover or escape a jail bond.

Damn. I forgot to do it. Got excited about Obama and busy with stuff. And now the market has been cornered by Chris Arnade, author of Dignity. A book, he says, about “poverty, dignity … and McDonalds.” I wrote about it when it was was published in 2019, and haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.

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Arnade is a former Wall Street guy who photographs people at the bottom of the American pile. Trust me: that is a very long way down. You will need to have teeth missing to get into Arnade’s books — teeth and a lot else you can’t even remember you had.

But you will also be more relevant than you know. That is the 2021 truth. Anyone who thought the Trump moment was going to be the last time a Manhattan-based journalist was going to have to visit a West Virginia diner is going to have to think again.

In his writing, Arnade has a single crystallising insight. In a nation we associate, rightly, with striving — a nation born with ants in its pants, laying waste, refashioning, rethinking, now even inventing its own facts — there is a very large group of people doing none of these things.

They are just getting by, or trying to. Great swathes of America, huge numbers of Americans, often with rheumy eyes and saggy faces, are not going anywhere. And here’s the kicker: They don’t want to go anywhere. 

In a piece written recently for the American Compass think tank, which campaigns for community to be at the heart of the Republican message, Chris Arnade recalls a typical scene:

 “The young man and older women working the afternoon shift alone in a Louisiana Waffle House, her serving, him on the grill, gossiping about work to pass the time. After he complains about everything and everybody for ten minutes, ending with a threat to quit, she matter of factly asks him, “Well, what do you want with your life?”, to which he responds, “Job that pays enough to get a home, have a family, and do my hobbies.”

Arnade points out that this is an inexplicable response to those at the top of American society, both Democrats and Republicans. They don’t understand the experience of ordinary Americans who work with their hands:

“Work is something to endure, and most do endure it, with an impressive resiliency. Our technocratic class, politicians, and the elite media rarely see this, and if they did most would be hard pressed to understand it, because their resume and career define who they are. They are careerists, so they assume everyone else must be a careerist, and they look at everyone else working, including the guy in dirty clothes driving the F150, and assume he is a careerist as well, just one in a different and mostly icky career.”

An F150, by the way, is a basic and rather boring pick up truck.

The politics of the Arnade insight is simple but I am not sure all Democrats take it fully on board. If he is right, they need to appeal to people who are not going anywhere and do not want to be told they can, or should. Campaigns of social betterment look fake to these people, because they often have been.

He certainly seems to be onto something: Democrats’ margins of support among those earning less than $30k per year have dropped every year from 2008 through to 2020. Obama won these voters by a whopping 33 percentage points in 2008. By 2020, even with blue collar friendly Biden at the top of the ticket, the Democrats’ lead was down to 8 points.

When Hillary Clinton talked of breaking glass ceilings, what did that really mean in the Waffle House? Nothing. She may as well have been addressing the populace of a different galaxy altogether.

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The Democrats’ problem in widening their appeal is often portrayed as a nervousness about the identity politics pursued with such vigour by some Left-wingers. But that’s not quite it. The problem is not really an objection to anti-racism or anti-sexism. People in Waffle Houses do not want to be victimised any more than anyone else.

The problem is the idea that it can be drummed up into a movement in which you must take part. The assumption that you want to make your own life perfect. You want the job! You want the corner office! You want power! Freedom! Sex with anyone who consents!

In the Waffle House, in McDonalds, in the front seat of the pick up truck, it just feels fake. It feels like talk from another planet. It doesn’t unite: it separates. It creams off all the “deserving” strivers from everyone else and it makes everyone else sullen and angry. And apt to vote for Donald Trump or one of his acolytes or children. Not because you like them but because you know the Clinton pant-suit brigade don’t. That’s good enough for you.

The point that some in the Democratic party are making is that the choice — in constructing a determined effort to win these people back — is not between Left and Right. It is possible to be Left but not woke, just as you can be Right but not against government spending. An obvious example is the campaign for a high federal minimum wage. This matters in the Waffle House. It matters for people who are not energised by anything more than earning decent money.

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Ah, decent money. Not knocking down the civil war statues or changing the names of schools or refighting battles about transgender children winning girls’ races on sports days.

According to the think tank The People’s Policy Project, if you took all the wealth in America and divided it up equally per person every family of four would get $1.2 million in the bank and an income of $208,000 a year.

Of course, there’s no end of all-American reasons for not doing this, but it’s a surprise, to put it mildly, that given all the riches there are in America, and the level of inequality, the argument for redistribution is so far outside mainstream debate. The project campaigns for a high minimum wage and universal child benefit. It’s not exactly communism.

Will the Democrats run with these ideas now? Does the threat of Trump-style politics mean that the non-strivers, the low achievers, finally get a look in? There are hints that it could happen. In his CPAC speech last Sunday Donald Trump hit notes he’s hit before, in particular on illegal immigration. If you are down on your luck in Oklahoma City it may well have made sense to you.

But turn over the TV and what do you see? On the same day as Mr Trump made his speech, Joe Biden released a video with a striking new message. Around 6,000 workers at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama are voting on whether to join a union. Mr Biden took the time to support their right to do it.

“Today and over the next few days and weeks, workers in Alabama and all across America are voting on whether to organise a union in their workplace,” said the President. “This is vitally important — a vitally important choice, as America grapples with the deadly pandemic, the economic crisis and the reckoning on race — what it reveals is the deep disparities that still exist in our country.”

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What makes the Biden intervention especially delicious is that Jay Carney — Senior Vice President for Global Corporate Affairs at Amazon — is the very same Mr Carney who was then-Vice President’s Biden’s director of communications and later President Obama’s press secretary.

Carney’s move, since the days of Bill Clinton, has been the modus operandi of the well-heeled Democrats. When things get rough in DC you hop off to the West Coast. You fly over the (many) diners on the way. And when you get back into office you fly east again, sometimes getting your jet to write “Screw you” in vapour trails in the big sky high above the duel carriageways and corn fields of middle America.

Well, metaphorically anyway. But now — well, who knows?

As well as backing union membership, Biden is proposing a doubling, in four stages, of the minimum wage. This — if it happened — would transform life for people in those bits of America that Jay Carney and other top Democrats only notice at election time.

In the great greasy wastes of land sprawling for miles around the intersections of roads. In the McDonalds, in the Waffle House, they are approaching the counter for a refill. Perhaps politically they might do the same. And Joe, the fill-in candidate, the elderly man keeping the Oval Office desk warm — Joe from whom the smartest Democrats expect nothing — might be preparing something rather extraordinary.

Extraordinary because it is ordinary. An abandonment of the hifalutin. A repudiation of the Twitter blue ticks.

Joe Biden might greatly assist his party and millions of Americans if he delivers something modest but massive. Dignity. That’s all.

I came to Tarnowskie Góry, in Upper Silesia, back in 2013, knowing almost nothing of Poland and absolutely nothing of the town. What would it be like? How could I live there? Would there be reliable Wi-Fi? “There is our new bus station!” my new boss cheerfully announced as we drove through the centre. This came as a relief. How bad can a place be if it has a new bus station?

I soon realised that Tarnowskie Góry was not bad at all. In fact, over the last six years of living here I have come to love it. This is partly with the slow-cooked subjectivity with which most of us love our homes. Could I convince somebody of the charms of the old communist-era estate I used to live on? Probably not, but I liked it because I was there.

What I also love about my town, though, is its character: the way the Polish reserve melts into Polish warmth once an acquaitance has been made, the shady parks, the murky pubs, the cluttered old antique shops. It has taught me, a native of Bath, about localism in a large-scale world.

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The post-communist and increasingly post-industrial world forced Polish towns and cities to sink or swim. In some places, layers of dirt have accumulated on grand old buildings; employment has dried up and streets have emptied. People are leaving their hometowns in search of distant wealth.

Tarnowskie Góry might have lost the income that mining equipment, lead and zinc brought in but its economy has diversified. Many people commute to larger cities in the Katowice Urban Area; new businesses have emerged and thrived. In 2017, a nearby silver mine gained UNESCO heritage status and tourism became a larger industry. The town has swelled, as the fields I walked through in my first years have become dense with housing. (This seems rather sad as I veer around new fencing but one day, no doubt, I shall want a house as well.)

This is great news, but prosperity, even on a modest scale, brings new problems. Economic progress enables the homogenisation of urban spaces as multi-nationals, chains and developers move in, vulture-like. I have wondered if the distinctive character of Tarnowskie Góry can survive the town’s success.

This might sound like privileged NIMBYism but locals were concerned about it even before I moved here. In a book of personal reflections, Krzystof Mazik, owner of the much-loved local bar “Galeria Inny Śląsk”, where little has changed in 25 years except the coffee machine and the art exhibitions, writes of how following Poland’s entrance into the EU, “behind marble facades…representatives of the most serious banks and insurance companies sat in former meat and vegetable shops.” The commercialisation of the town centre, Mazik writes, meant that “after dusk even a lame dog did not go out onto the streets”.

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Globally, men and women have been struggling to find a place for local character and human scale amid modernity. Localism is a term that has nostalgic connotations, conjuring up images of traditional communities which, for all their charms, are hard to recreate: rural hideaways, farmers’ markets and fêtes. In practice, localism can be an elite exercise. Wealthy citizens can isolate themselves from society with local produce, services and cultural establishments that are prohibitively expensive for the common man.

In a recent BBC article on the controversy surrounding McDonald’s decision to open its first restaurant in the county, for example, we are told:

The picturesque county of Rutland boasts a Michelin-star restaurant, dozens of gourmet eateries and regular farmers’ markets – but what it doesn’t have is anywhere to pick up a Big Mac.

Now, in fairness, I am no expert on the restaurant scene in Rutland, but people who want quick, affordable meals are hardly going to frequent gourmet eateries. At the very least, there has to be something between a Big Mac and a medium-rare steak. For localism to be at all scalable it must have broad appeal.

Here is a small example: there is an independent coffee shop on the market square of Tarnowskie Góry, Cafe Silesia, that is so popular it seems to have cornered a market that might have filled a tedious Starbucks. Its magic lies in having good, cheap coffee: not Don Pablo Columbian Supremo infused with almonds, cinnamon and turmeric for twice the average hourly wage but tasty coffee, made quickly, which most people could afford. It is characterful, but also accessible.

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Since our silver mine earned UNESCO heritage status, local shops have benefited from a lively trade in “I TG” shirts and accessories, with the red heart of the classic “I NY” brand replaced with hearts in TG’s traditional colours, black and yellow. At the annual town festival, in September, one could see dozens of people in such shirts, swarming around ice cream stands and fairground rides like honeybees.

This may strike people as kitschy, and to some extent it is, but in a post-modern world identity inevitably entails some level of knowingness. In-group solidarity is fostered through a cheerful absurdism, which acknowledges our smallness in the face of the grand metropolises of Poland, Europe and the world that we see through television and the Internet — but also embraces that smallness as a proud alternative. It might not be New York City, but it is ours.

Few engines of international homogenisation have been as powerful as social media, through which we find the same music, the same movies, the same fashions, the same opinions and the same desires, all wrapped up in the superficial glamour of the high status. Social media can be channelled for local purposes, though. In Tarnowskie Góry, for example, we have a Facebook community page which has a good sixth of the town’s men and women as members — a page which publishes beautiful drone footage of the region, and a page which publishes old images of the town throughout the decades. People can be connected to the past, connected in the present and connected for the future — not deeply, perhaps, but it is something at least.

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Advertising and social media, as obnoxious as they can be, have also given local businesses the chance to band together to raise their profile. Independent cafés, restaurants and bars barely have money to open their doors, let alone enough for a marketing department, but the organisation Tarnowskie Gòry Smakuja, or Tarnowskie Góry tastes, has emerged to promote the little bistros and backstreet pubs that might otherwise have escaped people’s attention.

Of course, coffee shops, t-shirts and Facebook pages are the venues and accoutrements of community and not community itself. None of them would be at all valuable if people did not meet, talk, laugh, share, work and love. Still, the sense of home that cradles our relationships depends on the refreshment of tradition — new experiences mingling with old memories. “The book of events,” as the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska wrote, “is always open in the middle.”

In the lovely city park there is an old pavilion. When I came to Tarnowskie Góry I wondered why no one seemed to use it except for groups of teenagers on skateboards and bikes. Now it seems that every weekend there are film screenings, open-air theatre productions, charity events or picnics. And the kids still come to meet there, as they always should. Nothing will survive without them, after all.