So when New York State killed Peanut the celebrity squirrel, there was uproar. This bushy tale became a lightning-rod for Right-wing resentments about safetyism, women in politics, and uneven application of the law. But what makes Peanut a note-perfect metaphor for the electoral crunch moment now under way is none of these things: it’s the porno plot twist.

For anyone less terminally online, a recap: Peanut was a squirrel, orphaned as a kit and raised by Mark Longo, 34 — whose videos made Peanut a social media star. Then, on 31 October, Longo’s home was raided following an anonymous complaint. Armed agents impounded Peanut and a raccoon named Fred — then, in a decision Longo called “surreal”, euthanised Peanut and Fred, reportedly “to check for rabies”.

All hell broke loose. Peanut was reincarnated overnight, as the face of protest against over-mighty, impersonal and callous bureaucracy. Elon Musk weighed in; a torrent of memes has depicted Peanut as George Floyd, as a ghost animal on Donald Trump’s shoulder, or even as a replacement for the Republican Party’s elephant logo. Then, just as abruptly as the memes began, they halted again. For it transpired that as well as working as an engineer Longo was also what’s politely known as an “adult content creator”, who used Peanut’s social media platform to direct viewers to his considerably more NSFW “Squirrel Daddy” content on OnlyFans.

Yes, this is all happening several thousand miles away from me, and officially in a different country. But as its enemies are forever pointing out, “The West” is de facto the American Empire, and Britain one of its protectorates. In other words: this is also our election, and who occupies the White House is intensely relevant to us. We just don’t get to vote.

If a nutty story about a pet squirrel tells us anything about electoral contests on the scale of the United States, it’s that you can forget policy-based campaigns. With 161 million registered voters, all you can really contest is vibes. And in its sheer virality, Peanut’s martyrdom offers insight into one of those clusters of vibes. Meanwhile, the circumstances of his original celebrity hint, far more darkly, at why those grievances may remain unsatisfied — even if, as now looks likely, Trump will soon be back in the White House.

The Peanut moment crystallised two interconnected features of Trump’s 2024 campaign. First, the rise to prominence of people, views, and aesthetics from an extremely online Right that, back in 2016, was a subculture without institutional power. Love it or hate it, this tilt was reflected in the choice of J.D. Vance, a man who drops Right-wing meme allusions in mainstream press interviews, as Trump’s running-mate. And, secondly and relatedly, Trump’s principal 2024 backer: Elon Musk. Musk’s 2022 purchase of the website formerly known as Twitter, his adoption, re-platforming, and mainstreaming of e-Right aesthetics and talking-points, and his all-in backing of the Trump campaign in turn stand metonymically for a broader Right-wing shift in political allegiance among tech bros.

The Democrats’ pivot away from a historically laissez-faire approach to a determination to regulate Big Tech likely plays a part in this tilt. But so, too, does ideology — and especially the single-mindedness and practical focus required to found new enterprises. Among devotees, this “founder” ethos is almost cartoonishly personalistic, propounding a high-tech version of Great Man Theory.

The positive vibe on offer, then, is one of dynamism, innovation, growth, and agency, all symbolised by Elon Musk’s SpaceX achievements and aspiration to colonise Mars. Its advocates contrast this with a perceived Left-wing preference for collectivism, over-regulation, and safety-obsessed mediocrity. Is this a fair depiction of Trump’s enemies?

Supporters of regulation might point out that in its absence, powerful individuals can do great things — also ride roughshod over everyone else. But alongside such practical and — dare I say it — populist caution, there is also a sensibility at work among the anti-Trumpers. Some at least are clearly as repelled by heroic, masculine individualism as Musk and Trump fans are attracted.

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This, then, is the other basket of vibes on offer: that of a polity more comfortable than its Trumpian opponents with ordinary life, proceduralism, and diffuse accountability. The recent, evident ability of Joe Biden’s administration to continue on autopilot, despite a cognitive decline in its elected leader so visible it could eventually no longer be kept out of the press, offers an illustration of both the strengths and weaknesses of such a system. The clear inference is that the system itself is what’s governing, and who nominally heads it is less important.

For those to whom this represents “Our Democracy” it’s obviously good: overall a more stable, consistent, and equitable system. Its opponents, meanwhile, crystallised their distaste for this order in the martyrdom of Peanut: a cluster of objections more commonly conveyed by two online Right-wing terms: “the longhouse”, and “anarcho-tyranny”. The former borrows a metaphor from those anthropologists who describe early human societies as matriarchal, and living communally in village “longhouses”. In contemporary usage, this figurative “longhouse” is a bad thing: a negation of individuality, masculinity and ambition. It’s associated with women, with bureaucracy, with smallness of vision and stifling constraints on anything risky or heroic. For “longhouse” disrespecters, the fact that both Peanut’s alleged snitch (though she denies it) and the head of the agency that killed him are both women was viewed as emblematic of this pernicious state of affairs.

More generally, the “longhouse” also alludes to the perceived way bureaucracy has metastasised into what one Right-wing critic calls a “total state”: shorthand for critiques of managerialism stretching back to James Burnham in 1941 and centring on the deadening effect of such orders on innovation and agency. As one commentator put it, in a post mourning Peanut’s death: “Like Gulliver, we are held down by thousands of tiny threads, a net of laws and regulations, all of them enacted ‘for our safety’.” And the poignancy of Peanut’s tragic martyrdom to this state of affairs was intensified by a second feature of the same critique. Namely: that the problem with this total state is that it’s not actually total. Rather, its resources are asymmetrically applied: a condition the late paleoconservative Sam Francis called “anarcho-tyranny”.

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Francis is a risky figure to cite, having been expelled from polite conservative circles some decades ago for forbidden opinions on race. More recently, though, he’s been hailed — albeit controversially — as having anticipated the ideological core of Trumpism. Anarcho-tyranny, in Francis’s formulation, describes a political order in which armed dictatorship coexists with lawlessness. It’s widely used online to denote an order that represses society’s law-abiding members, while ignoring favoured and often far more antisocial castes.

Francis first used it to describe efforts to impose gun control on ordinary Americans, while armed drug gangs roamed the streets; the term has also recently been applied to the case of Daniel Penny, a former soldier who restrained a schizophrenic man on the New York subway after he threatened other passengers, only to end up on trial for manslaughter when the man died. Penny, whose trial is ongoing, has become a byword for Right-wing frustration at a perceived official policy of punishing public-spirited action, while turning a blind eye to antisocial behaviour. Now Peanut, too, has been framed as its victim: Marc Andreessen, a noted Silicon Valley Trump supporter, denounced Peanut’s death as textbook anarcho-tyranny.

And even with Trump in the White House, my hunch is that Sam Francis would be at least partially disappointed — for either way, the war on Middle America that he so deplored may be unstoppable at this point. In Francis’s 1991 memoir, he described how “Middle American groups” suffer “exploitation at the hands of the dominant elites” via methods including “hypertaxation”, the replacement of manufacturing with services, “the managed destruction of Middle American norms and institutions” and — centrally — “the regimentation of Middle Americans under the federal leviathan”.

It’s not hard to see the Trumpian grievances there in outline. On the X remodelled since 2022 as Musk’s personal Trump megaphone, video montages now circulate collating a sugar-rush of Middle American highlights in support of his candidacy: a kind of Adderall paleoconservatism, all Nascar, “forgotten men and women”, McDonalds, WWE, and loathing of “globalists”. Amid that mood, the now-notorious MAGA catchphrase taps directly into the fear and loathing engendered by that middle-class decline already observed by Francis in the Nineties, widely credited for contributing to Trump’s victory in 2016, and furiously evident in 2024.

But watching election fever peak from across the pond, amid Britain’s even grimmer crucible of war on the middle class, I can’t shake the feeling that despite Trump fever, nothing is going to deliver quite the longed-for restoration of 20th-century middle-class life and mores. The Democrats smear its memory as fake news, or even white supremacy; and even the faction now powering Trumpism is less aligned with its bourgeois values than with a more patrician Right-wing progressivism. And while this is distinctly more upbeat about the future than its enemies, it’s more characterised by libertarian tech-optimism, acceptance of inequality, and disdain for bourgeois mores than anything which could easily be termed “traditional”, let alone “conservative”.

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Nor are Trumpist policies likely to be much more oriented toward Middle America. Will he bring back the manufacturing jobs? Perhaps the factories might re-shore, but chances are the work will be much more automated, meaning Middle America won’t see its 20th-century jobs return. And while the personalistic Trump/Musk approach might free the talented few to soar, and might even reduce the flow of illegal migration, early indications are that it will also create still brisker headwinds against — for example — the dull work of challenging the monopoly capitalism that’s a major contributor to the downward pressure on Middle America.

In sum, and at the risk of stating the obvious: neither side is going to bring back the 20th century. And nowhere could we find this more vividly illustrated than in the story of Mark Longo and Peanut the squirrel. In the bourgeois 20th-century culture that now survives mainly in social media video reels, Longo might have made a decent living as an engineer. Only his neighbours would have known he had a pet squirrel. In the 21st century, he made better money instrumentalising this cute relationship, and the wholesome, practical visual aesthetic of his IRL job as engineer, to promote pornographic content.

Longo is only one of some two million Americans selling such material. I don’t think there is any reversing so far-reaching a moral, economic, and technological shift. Nor is there any reversing the rest of the digital revolution. In its wake, tradesmen now tame squirrels and make porn, and the future is (maybe) brain implants, robot dogs, and space colonies. Middle America has, it seems, rejected egalitarianism, anarcho-tyranny, and “power without responsibility” under the Democrats’ swarm regime, in favour of a (SpaceX) rocket-powered Trumpian future. The world had better strap in.

Over the past few days, the very brave and very blonde Ukrainian MP Kira Rudik has been tweeting various pictures of herself posing with an AK47. She began last Friday:

https://twitter.com/kiraincongress/status/1497264543428448260

What is striking about the photos is not that Rudik posted them: she is a people’s representative in a time of war — it’s exactly the sort of thing she should be posting. What’s so interesting, and smart, is how she did it. Rudik does not pose in a uniform, or even in camouflage fatigues. She does not salute or lift the AK triumphantly; in fact, the way she holds it makes it clear that she’s not used to holding a weapon of any sort. The photo is taken not in a base or even in an office, but clearly in the living room of her home, just by a window that looks out onto a small patio.

The final touch though — and it’s a genius one — is that she doesn’t have shoes on; instead she stands barefoot, her toes painted a delicate pink.

In one sense, this all seems irretrievably amateurish — but that’s the point. Of the many things the internet craves, authenticity is sacrosanct. And this is a model of the genre. The tweet is designed to do two things: first, to show that Ukrainians will stand and fight for their homeland; and second, to humanise those whom we are told will be doing the fighting. And it does this by showing them to be the most ordinary of people; people standing in their bare feet, vulnerable and ordinary — just like civilians across the world. As such, they stand in total contrast to the stormtroopers invading their lands. It’s pink toenails versus mud-encrusted jackboots; smiling mothers versus bearded Chechens — all shorthand for the battle playing out between Ukraine and Russia.

It’s taken us a long time to get here. It was mid-2014, when I was in occupied eastern Ukraine, that I first realised that 21st-century warfare had finally come to the 21st century. Both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars may have been already fought, but they were, in their peak, largely 20th-century conflicts, fought out before the arrival of social media and the advent of the user-generated content Web 2.0.

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Back then, Russia was the only social media player in the conflict. The Ukrainians were outgunned on the ground and online. Back then, in the occupied east people told me that Kyiv was run by Nazis and hated everything Russian. Back then, I watched the Kremlin flood social media and Russian-language TV with endless narratives about Kyiv’s desire to kill Russian speakers. Back then, the Ukrainians offered little by way of response.

But boy have they learned. Yesterday, I spoke to Peter Lerner, former Head of the Israel Defence Force (IDF) social media unit, who headed up its online operations during 2014’s Operation Protective Edge. He was in no doubt as to who is winning this info battle. “The game plan from the beginning has been two languages: English and Ukrainian and to a lesser volume Russian for PsyOps needs,” he told me. “Their comms goal appears to be rallying international and public support. All of their official accounts are synchronised — the same messages, nuanced and amplifying each other. ‘#Ukraine’ has been the number one trending hashtag since Thursday.” He continued: “And beyond the odd sporadic effort, there is very little social media personification beyond the president.”

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has become vital to Ukraine’s war effort on the ground and the star of its online battle. In a powerful 33-second video clip, filmed last week as he stood in a central Kyiv Street flanked by four other politicians, he announced he was not going anywhere. The clip was striking as an address from a state leader. It was unadorned by formality or rhetorical flourish, and it was designed to paint Zelenskyy as two things simultaneously: leader of his nation and (literal) man in the street.

Now contrast these images to those relentlessly broadcast of his enemy, Vladimir Putin, who sits far from the frontline, and therefore from danger, isolated not only from the battlefield but from those around him. Like a proper supervillain he sits alone, insistent on keeping everyone at least ten feet away from him. It’s Ukraine’s very own Jewish James Bond versus an ageing Blofeld with anger management issues and a Botox habit. There’s only ever going to be one winner in the popular imagination — and the court of Twitter.

This is the new grammar of statesmanship for the social media age and it’s about being brief, edgy and demotic. Our public sphere is curated by Big Tech platforms that are algorithmically geared toward virality; and what goes viral are not long speeches about having a dream or fighting people on beaches but short and arresting words and images. Gone are the lofty phrases and verbal curlicues; gone are the digressions on policy. What you say needs to work on a short YouTube or Instagram or Twitter clip — and it will ideally be easily remembered.

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This, then, is the central battle playing out. Lerner is shocked at how bad the Russian response has been. “This is all very strange,” he continues, “just like their perceived lack of battlefield accomplishments.” Lerner wonders if there is a rift in the government between Putin and those around him more reluctant to go to war, pointing to the recent fraught exchange between Putin and his head of intelligence who urges him to give Russia’s “Western partners” one more chance.

In the meantime, Russian State channel RT posts away as if in a different reality. “Video sequence of the development of Russia’s offensive in all directions in accordance with the operation plan,” it tweeted, with footage of armoured vehicles moving bovinely across dirt tracks and over bridges. Of the actual realities of the war on the ground: not a trace.

It may well be, as Lerner speculates, that the Kremlin knows that the world doesn’t accept its case for war and sees little point in trying to push it. If so, the focus will now be on internal comms and shoring up Russian support. But one of the first things Lerner told me years ago when we first met was this: if you leave a void in online information wars, you cede it to the enemy. Russia has done exactly that — and Ukraine is reaping the rewards.

And it’s reaping them globally. I can’t think of a single country in the world with Ukraine’s soft power right now. Even Elon Musk got involved after Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov urged him to support the country with his Starlink services, which not only provide higher internet speeds but, as internet delivered by satellite, would continue to provide coverage even were the Russians to cut off cables in Ukraine. “While you try to colonise Mars — Russia try to occupy Ukraine! While your rockets successfully land from space — Russian rockets attack Ukrainian civil people! We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations,” Fedorov tweeted at Musk. Ten hours later Musk replied. “Starlink service is now active in Ukraine… more terminals en route.”

In the background, the same narratives and counter-narratives that I have been studying for five years continue to dominate. Last week, when hostilities broke out, a video went viral. It carried a purported audio exchange as a Russian boat approached Snake Island on the Ukrainian coast and demanded the soldiers stationed there to surrender. “This is a Russian military warship. I suggest you lay down your weapons and surrender to avoid bloodshed and needless casualties. Otherwise, you will be bombed.” the Russian officer says. A Ukrainian soldier responds: “Russian warship, go fuck yourself.”

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Those were the final words heard from the island. Zelenskyy later announced that the warship had then killed all 13 Ukrainian defenders. The internet trilled with talk of the brave Ukrainian martyrs. Now, however, it appears the soldiers are in fact alive and being held prisoner by the Russians.

Honest mistake or Ukrainian influence operation? If it were the latter, it worked: Snake Island galvanised Ukraine’s online army and cowed Russia’s. Perhaps the truth will come out, but then again maybe it won’t. Either way, it reordered reality online for a while, which was the point. It was another Ukrainian victory.

This is the nature of modern conflict, and it’s the way that all wars will be fought now — on the ground and online. The revolution may not be televised, but it will be meme’d.