Call it Progress, Inc.: a machine for advancing full-spectrum progressivism, using working-class aesthetics as a sort of skinsuit, if need be. What the party — and the nation — end up with are politicians who certainly look the part — sometimes connected to the traditional labor movement, comfortable in plaid, tossing a football or drinking beer — but whose substantive views are indistinguishable from those that prevail in places like Brooklyn and San Francisco. 

Consider Dan Osborn. Last week, Osborn, the former industrial mechanic and union leader running as an independent for the Senate from Nebraska, was caught on tape calling President Trump’s border wall “a symbol of racism,” and admitting that he only claimed to support it to woo Republican voters. This, needless to say, will likely hinder his ability to lure back the working class and create a path to victory. 

Osborn has been promoting himself as antiwar, pro-union, and for breaking up health care monopolies. At the same time, he has sought to portray himself as not woke and aligned with the working class on immigration (which is to say, in favor of restrictionism). He thus fits right into the sweet spot of politics these days: Left on economics, but moderate or conservative on culture and immigration. But if an independent running in Nebraska holds the same views on the border as the mainstream Democratic Party — can he really call himself an independent?

Suggested reading

Inside the Democratic identity crisis

By Ryan Zickgraf

It turns out, those behind Osborn are the same people behind Graham Platner, Abdul El-Sayed, Zohran Mamdani, and many other Lefty and socialist candidates this cycle. All of these candidates are products of Progress, Inc. I once worked inside Progress, Inc. as a leading fundraiser for it before taking the measure of its disconnect with what working- and lower-middle-class Americans actually want. 

These behind-the-scenes operatives want to find people with “working-class costumes,” and “masculine images” — not leaders with actual working-class views. Graham Platner was the most obvious example. Before he was #MeToo’d out of the Maine Senate race, the scion of a prominent family checked all the right “image” boxes: bearded, tattooed, with a stint in the Marines under his belt. Another is El-Sayed, whose “bro energy,” his backers believe, is enough to attract disaffected men who’ve left the Democratic Party, with no need to change position on the actual issues that alienate men. Both, however, hold standard-issue ultra-progressive views when it comes to divisive identity politics, among other hot-button issues.

Working-class voters can see through the act. In Maine, Trumpy areas with factory economies tended to support his moderate Democratic opponent, Gov. Janet Mills, while Platner mainly won over the gentry Left. Likewise, El-Sayed has struggled with working-class black Americans, delivering his best performances in places like Ann Arbor, home to the University of Michigan.

These candidates’ views on the economy, to be sure, recall those of the old labor Left and the New Deal coalition. But they come laden with the cultural excesses of the modern Left. So far, they’ve mostly been unable to moderate Leftist positions on trans athletes in girls’ sports, immigration, and law and order, turning off working-class voters of all races. 

New York’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani is the rare exception. He reversed his previous #defund position on policing, retaining Gotham’s tough incumbent police commissioner and giving the NYPD a relatively wide berth to do its job. Most progressive candidates aren’t nearly as nimble. El-Sayed appeared on Fox News in August and stood firm on his unpopular cultural stances — trans sports, gender-affirming care for minors, slavery reparations. It was a missed opportunity to highlight his subtly socially conservative positions on widespread weed legalization, online porn, and gambling. 

Those who do dissent, like Amy Acton, a Democrat running for Ohio governor, face backlash from the Left. In any case, the dissenters tend to be Democrats in reddish or swing states who are establishment figures, wedded to the economic status quo, and thus facing their own flavor of electability crisis: they are unwilling to run on the bold populist economics that progressives embrace and that appeal to the working class, like universal health care.

Both wings of the party desperately need to compromise, but on different points. The progressives need to rein in cultural excesses, whereas the establishment needs to stop representing the wealthy donors who prevent it from holding populist positions.

Progress, Inc.’s mentality is not to compromise, but to push ideas into the mainstream until “they become popular.” This is what I was told firsthand by some colleagues while working inside progressive politics. The playbook, as I learned, is to go hard in midterm elections, then use that energy to get every presidential candidate in 2028 to run on Leftist causes. The strategy was learned from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018, when she used her popularity and the energy behind her victory to push the Green New Deal, leading a whopping 10 democratic presidential candidates to embrace the idea in 2020.  

What groups make up Progress, Inc.? The Democratic Socialists of America have received the most attention, because they have the scary word “socialist” in their organization’s name. But there are many more players at work. For instance, there’s the Justice Democrats, a political group whose main focus over the past decade has been backing insurgent primary challengers. The group endorsed 13 candidates this cycle — and eight of them won their primaries. Former Justice Democrats operatives worked on the victorious campaign to elect Darializa Avila Chevalier as the Democratic nominee for New York’s 13th Congressional District. The organization’s executive director, Alex Rojas, described how she recruited Chevalier to run for Congress during a podcast episode hosted by another Progress, Inc. group called Way to Win, a donor collective that boosts progressive candidates. Outside money unquestionably propels these candidates. 

Then there’s the group that advised Platner’s campaign: Daniel Moraff (who recruited both Platner and Osborn to run for US Senate) and Rebecca Katz and Morris Katz, co-founders of Fight Agency, all of whom are emblematic of Progress, Inc. Moraff is the grandson of the founder of Toys ’R’ Us, and Morris Katz, raised in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood, is the son of a screenwriter father and children’s-book-author mother. When I was inside Progress, Inc., I worked with Rebecca Katz on a New York City district-attorney race. A fundraising firm where I served as a director worked with Morris Katz on a race in North Carolina in 2022. There’s also Left Rising, a fundraising firm, where I worked as a director, and Middle Seat, a huge small-dollar fundraising firm that has worked with nearly every Progress, Inc. candidate this cycle, among many others. What I saw was a total disconnect between those now steering the direction of the Democratic Party and the people it once stood for.

Suggested reading

How ‘Progress, Inc.’ neuters the working class

By James Billot

Before Platner’s campaign imploded in July, Morris Katz was documented speaking to donors at the home of Tory Burch, where he was “holding court with roughly two dozen prominent guests about what he cast as a repeatable solution for Democrats,” according to Politico. He told the crowd, “We found a model here to win over working-class voters … a guy that looks like he’s a union working-class guy.”

This line of thinking was one of the main reasons I became exasperated with many of the people I knew when I worked inside Progress, Inc. 

Since 2019, I’ve witnessed this as the prevailing strategy, which I believe was born out of AOC’s upset win in 2018 and the creation of The Squad. Identity politics is such a deep, pathological undercurrent in the way they see themselves and the world; it would never occur to them to find candidates with actual working-class views. 

To be fair, I probably did the same thing when I was working in progressive politics. When you are inside of Progress, Inc., it is hard to see outside of it. You begin to parrot the people around you, thinking that it is you and your friends against the world. At times, I still sympathize with them. I have always supported people willing to challenge power structures, which, to the progressives’ credit, they do often.

Still, the movement’s thinking is fundamentally flawed. As I wrote in my recent book, Nothing Left, I first realized it over lunch at the “Dems Club” in DC, a private restaurant for Democratic politicians and their staff, where I was dining with two new co-workers. I believed we were there to represent working-class voters like my own mother and grandmother in Missouri. My co-workers wore Tory Burch dresses and talked about vacationing in Europe and Hawaii, while giggling about fighting for student-loan forgiveness on Capitol Hill. I felt profoundly alienated.

Many of the consultants inside Progress, Inc. are highly competent and talented people, including Morris Katz. They are a big part of the reason the Left is now so strong. But they are also part of the reason the Democratic Party won’t reconnect with working-class voters. The establishment has its own problems and is equally out of touch, but shouldn’t the anti-establishment be the solution to this problem, not adding to it?

Which brings us back to Osborn’s border crisis: I thought he represented the unique mix that could become the Democratic Party’s North Star — a bold outsider who leads on populist economics, while eschewing woke themes. While leading a union strike at Kellogg’s in 2022, Osborn even allegedly helped alert ICE when undocumented workers were being used as scabs. But winning back the working class, like Osborn’s candidacy seeks to do, can only be done by offering ideas that appeal to them — and that means championing their views on issues like immigration.

Neither wing of the Democratic Party is giving working-class voters what they really want. That leaves a huge constituency without a political home. Trump’s current doldrums may suffice to clinch the midterms for the Democrats. But that won’t resolve the party’s deeper contradictions. 

A few years later, Pratt found himself in front of the cameras again, this time for MTV’s docu-soap, The Hills. He eloped to Cabo San Lucas with his inamorata, the rat-tail and scorpion ingesting Heidi Montag, she of the 10 cosmetic surgeries, who was soon to grace the cover of Playboy magazine. In 2009, Pratt shifted gears to music, cutting an album and proclaiming he was the “White Jay-Z”. The following year he was arrested in Costa Rica for boarding an airplane with weapons. In Los Angeles, this is the resume — sordid sex-tape scandals and all — that qualifies Spencer Pratt to run for mayor.

The comedians aren’t amused. Late-night Trumpo-phobe Jimmy Kimmel derided him as a crystal-hawking huckster. Drew Carey, the man-of-the-people game-show host, condemned him as a “serial scammer”. Chelsea Handler took a moment off from smutty anecdotes to ask on Instagram: “Have we learned anything yet?” They were among the Hollywood liberals who have ridiculed and demonized Pratt as a showboat, a loudmouth, a clown, and a troll. And yet — to reduce the overriding frustrations of our piteous political moment to three words — no one cares.

The latest UC Berkeley-Los Angeles Times poll has Pratt at 22%, only four percentage points behind incumbent Karen Bass and three behind activist city council member Nithya Raman. The latest from the California Post placed Pratt at 30.1% and the incumbent at 29.5% — a statistical tie. Of course, it doesn’t really matter who wins today’s non-partisan primary (Pratt is a registered Republican), as it has become clear that Bass will not swing enough votes to gather a majority, thus guaranteeing a run-off in November.

The point here is not to decry the degraded state of American politics. Railing against reality television politics is so twenty-teen. These days, not a single eyebrow raises when plaid-flanneled Luke Gulbranson — known for his clueless romantic pursuits on Bravo’s Summer House — runs for a Congressional seat in Minnesota, or when “Teen Mom” Farrah Abraham seeks a spot on Austin’s City Council. Just look at the guy with the nuclear codes. 

It’s hardly a revelation that politics has gone Hollywood. The interesting point here is that the liberal Hollywood elite, the longstanding behemoth of left-coast, Left-wing electioneering, has been powerless to stop it. The rattling last gasp of LA’s political establishment came in 2024, when Oprah and Julia Louis-Dreyfus led the cavalry for Kamala Harris, whooping and waving proverbial swords over their heads so that George Clooney, Julia Roberts, and Jamie Lee Curtis would know which way to charge — to no avail.

More from this author

The orthodox Jews tripping on toad toxins

By Frederick Kaufman

Pratt delivers a new brand of politics — call it alt-Hollywood, as his coalition includes none of the previous power brokers of Tinseltown’s establishment. Of course he has his billionaire, the hedge-fund tycoon Daniel Loeb, who once purchased a massive stake in Sony Pictures. And he can boast a bona-fide Academy-Award winner in Brian Grazer, a longstanding backer of California Democrats (including Kamala). Then come the West Coast MAGAs one might expect: Dennis Quaid and James Woods. But from there on out, his industry backers look different from anything we have seen in the past. He has energized hordes of Hollywood himbos and bimbos, awakening the political consciousness of actresses/models like Amber Rose and Paris Hilton, fellow reality stars Brody Jenner and Kristin Cavallari, Real Housewife of Miami‘s Joanna Krupa, and Dancing with the Stars’ Audrina Patridge. Pratt’s long tail reaches far into the D-List, from Billy Bush to Bachelorette runner-up Nick Viall to the perpetually online blabberati of comedians, DJs and former UFC fighters.

In a viral video of the fundraiser held at the Brentwood home of Pratt’s erstwhile foil on Princes of Malibu, David Foster’s wife Katharine McPhee belted out a version of “Simply the Best” — with new (and cringe) lyrics featuring Pratt. “La la land is ready for a plot twist,” concluded Access Hollywood. 

In Hollywood, as in Aristotle’s Poetics, a plot twist is generally accompanied by what is technically known as a “recognition” — a perception that what was once is no more, a new awareness that changes everything. The recognition that may well define Pratt’s political future is the Hollywood liberal’s reversal of fortune. This became evident on Fox News‘s hard-Right comedy hour Gutfeld!. “He’s on a mission to defeat the coastal elite,” declared the arch-conservative stalwart and eponymous host, Greg Gutfeld. “You’re on a roll. You’re surging in the polls.”

Pratt ignored the statement and repeated his campaign promise to be the “look around” candidate — apparently the only mayoral candidate in Los Angeles who will “look around” and see the “naked drug addict zombies with machetes” who plague his native city, leaving a trail of steaming excrement on sidewalks from Sherman Oaks to Silver Lake.

“You have celebrities that are now coming out in support of you,” Gutfeld pressed on. He named two of them: Leonardo DiCaprio and Jamie Foxx.

“I actually don’t want celebrities to come out and endorse me,” countered Pratt. (This, from the man who won “Snapchatter of the Year” at the 2018 Shorty Awards.) “I love when the celebrities attack me.” All of which makes it clear that Pratt fully comprehends the moment he is so thoroughly exploiting: the twilight of Hollywood’s liberal elite.

Pratt himself provides a perfect example of the Hollywood liberal’s reversal of fortune. He grew up in the tony enclave of the Pacific Palisades, part of California’s 32nd congressional district where Hillary Clinton notched 70% of the vote in the 2016 presidential election. He attended the Crossroads School in Santa Monica, where he imbibed a socially mindful “Human Development” curriculum in which math and science were subordinated to social justice, environmental issues, and “Modern Gender Studies”. At Crossroads, Pratt’s classmates included numerous progeny of the entertainment aristocracy, among them Dave Chernin (scion of old-school Hollywood liberal Peter Chernin) and Max Winkler (scion of old-school Hollywood liberal Henry Winkler). Pratt thus had the privilege of witnessing first-hand the great tradition of Left-wing Hollywood groupthink, and learned its lessons well. Perhaps too well, as he has co-opted its ethos and language for himself, incessantly emphasizing personal victimhood, namely, his post-Palisades homelessness and subsequent neglect at the hands of the political establishment. Of course, Pratt isn’t suffering too terribly, holed up for the duration in the Bel Air Hotel. That said, he has tapped into vast veins of resentment among LA’s Democratic base — the poor, the non-celebrity, and the Porsche Cayenne moms.

Pratt can get away with a campaign ironically fueled by discourse long-ago perfected by Hollywood liberals: because he knows that the species is going extinct, and thus cannot wield much in the way of meaningful response. He knows that the power and glory that once defined the Hollywood liberal establishment is a thing of the past.

There may be room for some pathos here. I recognize the loss, as my own father was an OG champion of the rights of the poor, suffering, ink-stained proletariat toiling in the writers’ rooms of Paramount and MGM. He plotted one Writers Guild of America West strike after another as he tooled from his Neutra house in the hills to studio commissaries in his white Lincoln convertible — followed, in chronological order, by a silver gull-winged Mercedes, a black Porsche, a bronze Bentley, a biscuit Jaguar, and in a fitting finale for an octogenarian Marxist, a black Cadillac.

Throughout his half-century career as a director and screenwriter, the project closest to my father’s heart was a film Spencer Pratt would surely hold up as an example of the most absurd of all bleeding-heart fantasies. This was the 1962 release of Convicts 4, a biopic loosely based on the story of John Resko, an impoverished and unemployed unfortunate who robbed a convenience store on Christmas Eve and inadvertently shot and killed the shopkeeper. The rest of the show concerns Resko’s life in prison, where among a madcap crew of ne’er-do-wells he learns how to paint, and as a result is at long last reprieved — redeemed by the power of art. At that point in Hollywood’s ancient history, such a scenario could attract a rat pack’s worth of stars, among them Ben Gazzara, Sammy Davis Jr., Vincent Price, and Rod Steiger. Yet today, almost everyone in the industry would rather get the bums off the street than waste taxpayer dollars on paint and canvas to rehabilitate them. 

Almost everyone, that is, except the “Communist and Socialist” — who are, in the world according to Pratt, “the only people that don’t love me”.

From his earliest days in reality TV, Pratt has understood that the fast track to success was to wage war against a fake foe like David Foster. In politics, he has created a similar kind of illusory enemy out of Hollywood’s liberal establishment. No matter that it’s dead and gone. Its ghost will do. As every executive producer knows, there’s nothing quite as terrifying as a ghost. 

Deep in rural Maine, more than 100 miles away from the state’s verdant coastline, Graham Platner is holding court. In a state with one of the largest per-capita veteran populations, the Democratic Senate contender’s antiwar message carries a particular potency — and it shows. As of this writing, the 41-year-old Platner has raked in nearly $10 million in campaign money, mostly from small donors; signed up some 15,000 volunteers; and clinched endorsements from Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Ruben Gallego, and Martin Heinrich — all progressive stalwarts. Even a steady drip of negative stories in recent months about his spicy Reddit history and a since-covered Nazi tattoo has barely dented him. Polls now show Platner ahead of Democratic primary rival, Gov. Janet Mills, and narrowly edging Susan Collins, the Republican incumbent, in a general election matchup.

It would be tempting, then, to cast Platner as the face of a renewed Democratic Party — a working-class tribune with crossover appeal. But the more revealing question is how deep, and how broad, his support really is. For all the campaign’s talk of winning over Trump voters and bringing back the popular classes, his coalition is composed mostly of #Resistance liberals, college students, and crunchy retirees. That may be enough to win the primary, and perhaps even the general. But it shouldn’t be mistaken for a durable re-realignment, or evidence that Democrats have rediscovered a winning formula for 2028.

“A lot of folks I know who voted for Donald Trump wanted an end to overseas wars,” Platner tells me in a husky voice. “But those people are beginning to realize that this was all nonsense, that they were lied to, and they were swindled. We have had tons and tons of Republicans come to these events to say just that.” 

Here in Trump-supporting Greenville, though, I couldn’t find any Republicans in our midst. Everyone I spoke to was a lifelong Democrat, their first rally likely predating Jimmy Carter. They were less worried about finding common cause with the other side than about Trump putting them in concentration camps. Others even asked Platner, hopefully, if the army might consider mutinying. “The military is not going to save you,” Platner responded. “We are the only ones who are going to save ourselves.” (A strong answer.)

More from this author

The trouble with Tucker Carlson

By James Billot

Platner likes to present himself as a gruff, no-nonsense prole who, like Cincinnatus abandoning his plow, felt compelled to enter the race by the sheer weight of national misery. After bouncing between several schools in Maine, he enlisted in the Marines in 2004 and served in Iraq and Afghanistan. A brief spell at George Washington University, a stint tending bar, and another War on Terror tour (this time with the private military company formerly known as Blackwater) followed before he returned home to become an oyster farmer. It was only after Democratic consultants “discovered” him — in a video for a local group opposing a Norwegian company’s plan to build a large salmon farm off his hometown of Sullivan — that he entered the political arena. 

What tends to be omitted from this narrative is that his upbringing wasn’t quite so hardscrabble. Platner’s grandfather was a renowned architect, known for his work in modernist interior design; his father, Bronson, is an Ivy-educated lawyer and Democratic donor; his mother, Leslie Harlow, is a local activist and entrepreneur runs a restaurant in Bar Harbor, which happens to be the main client for Platner’s oysters. Thanks to the family largess, he enrolled at the elite Hotchkiss School before moving to another private school six months later — a fact he tries to play down. 

Still, even some Republican operatives concede that Platner has a good story. “His introduction is quite powerful,” Steve Bannon, the podcast firebrand and ex-Trump consigliere, tells me. “He’s got an opening pitch about being in the Marine Corps. And then he’s got a punch line: ‘what was it worth?’ before getting into his populist takedown of the American ruling class.” But, Bannon adds, Platner “still carries the same cultural baggage as the rest of the Democratic Party.”

The baggage in question includes Platner’s calls for abolishing ICE and support for gender care for kids, and his dismissal of the trans-athlete debate as a “billionaire-funded distraction.” While such positions play well with the base, they remain unpopular with the state at large, which may explain why Platner is struggling to make inroads with Maine’s rural and working classes.

According to a survey of likely voters by Pan-Atlantic Research, Platner leads Janet Mills 56% to 32% among those earning more than $100,000, while the race is essentially even among those below that income threshold. The regional split mirrors that pattern: he is ahead in the more urban and affluent First District, while Mills leads in the rural, working-class Second District, which has backed Trump in the past three presidential elections. 

“I do not really trust polling in Maine, even when it says nice things about me,” says Platner. “We have a ton of just regular working folks showing up to my speeches. But I also think there is an access problem. The only way to actually go talk to working-class folks is to go talk to them in their communities, which is what we’re doing.”

To see how Platner’s message was landing in these communities, I drove an hour west to Jackman, a town 15 miles from the Canadian border. Once a hub of the cross-border timber trade, Jackman’s economy was hollowed out by global competition, accelerated by NAFTA and subsequent trade agreements. A former Democratic stronghold, the town abandoned the party during President Barack Obama’s second term and heavily backed Trump in the past three elections. If Platner wanted to make inroads with the state’s working class, this was a good place to start.

At Jackman’s town hall, Platner came with the same message he delivered in Greenville: the system is rigged, working people are being robbed, and the billionaire class is running roughshod over the social contract. It was the sort of populist messaging Trump himself might have shared 10 years ago. The trouble was that only about 10 people were in attendance. And of those, only a few were from the area (one attendee told me that she’d driven four hours to see him). By contrast, thousands had shown up to listen to Platner and Sanders in Portland, a much bluer (and admittedly more populous) city three hours’ drive to the south.

Suggested reading

Inside the Democratic identity crisis

By Ryan Zickgraf

I ask Platner to explain this disparity. “Look, it takes time,” he says. “This is a long-term project. We have to connect with these folks directly, or else you’re just this amorphous thing. And I think as the war in Iran gets worse, and as the incompetent authoritarianism of the Trump administration gets worse — because it will — that’s going to continue alienating more folks.”

This may turn out to be true. With 13 American soldiers confirmed dead and the prospect of boots on the ground growing by the day, even the most die-hard MAGA supporters could begin to waver if the conflict spirals. But that day has not arrived. The MAGA base is still standing by its man, and there is very little to suggest that that might be changing.

It might not matter. The political landscape in Maine strongly favors Democrats, making a win likely regardless of who is on the ballot. Susan Collins is the last Republican senator in a blue state that Kamala Harris carried comfortably in 2024, and she is now facing her toughest battle yet to hold on to her seat. After five terms totaling nearly three decades, the appetite for something new is strong among the Democratic grassroots, which may be enough to push the state into the blue column. As a political neophyte, Platner will likely benefit from this enthusiasm; his primary opponent, 78-year-old Mills, challenged reporters to check her “lipid profile.”

It would be easy, then, to read too much into a Platner win. But even if the oysterman looks, sounds, and campaigns like a working-class reset, his coalition suggests otherwise. I saw as much when I visited the Four Seasons diner in Jackman, one block from the town hall, where a Platner ad flickered on the TV. “I know what it feels like to give everything to this country,” one veteran says, “and come home to feel like it’s giving nothing back,” adds another, before the shot cuts to Platner in fatigues. “Graham Platner knows that feeling, too,” the voiceover concludes.

I turn to the man beside me, who works at the logging-mill down the road, and ask what he thought. “Who’s that?” he grunted.

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

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

More from this author

The Zohran Mamdani I know

By Ross Barkan

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

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

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

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

Suggested reading

The Democrats got stuck in the Seventies

By Sam Kahn

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

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

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

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

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

Under Trump, however, Schumer has little to offer.

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

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

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

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

Freedom of movement, multiculturalism, global economic openness, and affirmation of the historically marginalized: these are the core principles that have become synonymous with the Brahmin Left’s vision of progressive capitalism, and which California’s particular fusion of elite and activist driven politics has done so much to shape.

The problem for Democrats pining for a Golden State hero to slay Trumpism is that the strength of these convictions is indelibly tied up with a record of aloof misrule and beguiling hypocrisy.  While some state Democrats have been in an uproar this week over Newsom’s proposed budget cuts, the state’s deep-seated economic challenges extend far beyond decisions over any single social program. Since Arnold Schwarzenegger left the Governor’s office in 2011, Democrats have overwhelmingly dominated California’s state politics, enjoying a “supermajority” in the state legislature free of Republican influence for over twelve years. With 43 of California’s 52 congressional districts in their hands, they have also shifted the poles of Democratic politics from the Northeast and Midwest to the West Coast.

Some progressives might assume this performance is a tribute to uncompromising values and smart party-building. Yet in this period, California’s image as a beacon for those seeking reinvention and the American Dream has been gradually but unmistakably sullied, a challenge Newsom’s second term in office is unlikely to reverse despite his sudden interest in slashing red tape around development.

For the world’s fourth largest economy, the state’s major indicators of development don’t inspire much confidence. Nearly a third of Californians live in or near the threshold of poverty, and nearly a quarter of the U.S. homeless population lives in California. The future isn’t bright for the state’s youth, either. One 2023 report on educational attainment placed California in the bottom half, far below most other states dominated by Democrats.

More from this author

Democrats are wasting a populist moment

By Justin H. Vassallo

And the “California Exodus,” first identified in the early 1990s, shows few signs of abating. The UnHerd contributor Joel Kotkin, a former Bill Clinton supporter, has blamed California’s woes on a green, liberal “gentry” motivated by a suspicion of development and expensive energy policies. Thronged, purportedly, by self-serving public sector unions, NIMBY lobbies, and zealous climate activists, California’s Democratic Party has succumbed to its worst instincts around managing its existing coalition. With a monopoly on state power, it has rewarded inertia while amplifying a caricature-prone conception of social justice divorced from the very real material hardships of the working-class.

Kotkin’s unsparing portrait is undoubtedly meant to provoke progressives who sincerely believe California is a policy leader and agenda-setter for the Democratic party. Many would proudly contend that, with an assist from the party’s delegation in the Pacific Northwest, California Democrats have the set bar for regulating carbon emissions and extending protections to minorities, and that they are focused on improving wages in California’s all important hospitality sector. If the state’s affordable housing crisis is less than excusable, they would add, at least Newsom and his allies are waking up to the issue.

This apologia fails to appreciate that when national voters think of the merits of one-party rule under Democrats, they now turn to California’s underwhelming performance. And the disenchantment cuts across the ideological spectrum. Cultural moderates and blue-collar conservatives believe the party’s priorities are elitist and dogmatic, while Left-wing populists see the state as ground zero for government capture by Big Tech.

The air of elitism cannot be overstated. Too often, support for California’s progressivism, both within the state and from afar, betrays the exact dynamic Kotkin and like-minded critics take issue with: the entitled sense of “stewardship” that drives the modern Democratic Party’s approach to governance. Rather than focus on broadening the pathways to middle-class prosperity and setting bold targets for poverty reduction, California Democrats appear to be in the business of merely managing economic insecurity through means-tested programs like food assistance. Judging by the numbers, they haven’t succeeded, despite plenty of legislation attesting to their support for active government.

It wasn’t always this way. Between the original Progressive Era and the early postwar boom, California had a competitive two party-system inflected by agrarian populism, anti-monopoly politics, and a growing trade union movement. The Second World War and federal New Deal policies rapidly industrialized the state, consolidating California’s status as a cultural, economic, and political counterweight to the East Coast and a place with expanding potential. Despite some hotbeds of hardline conservatism, California overall seemed to testify to the efficacy and popularity of strong government and public investment. Indeed, its extraordinary growth and the population’s sense of upward mobility seemed largely driven by the New Deal order.

But the former governor Jerry Brown transformed West Coast progressivism. Big developmentalist projects and courtship of the working-class gave way to a watered-down version of “New Left” autonomy, wellness culture, and (often superficial) ecological consciousness. While the Golden State’s notorious smog eventually improved as a result of stronger environmental standards, prospects for the working-class were less encouraging.

Since then, California’s stark economic inequality has, for all intents and purposes, become a Democratic problem. Economic progressives point with good reason to anti-government, budget-slashing Republicans in Congress as a major reason for America’s pockmarked welfare state and wealth inequality. But the fact is that in deep-blue California there is no obstructionist opposition party to blame for its limited horizons. Indeed, although Trump noticeably improved his margins there in the 2024 election, the state GOP is essentially a rump party (ostracized for its aggressive stance on restricting immigrants, yes, but also a victim of its own chosen irrelevance).

This inconvenient fact of one-party rule is beginning to bear down on other California Democrats hoping to lead their party out of the wilderness. While Newsom still enjoys the highest name recognition at the national level, the evolving situation might be best described as the Ro Khanna dilemma, in which aspiring party insurgents are tethered to the very upscale, Brahmin Left constituencies they must distance themselves from. Since winning his first House term in 2016, Khanna has built a profile as both an “economic patriot” who advocates for industrial policy and a sometime-adversary of monopoly power, particularly in regard to the tech industry. He co-chaired Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, and has become a prominent interlocutor between the party establishment and progressive activists. His near ubiquitous media presence during Trump’s first six months back in office suggests he is either planning to run for president or play progressive kingmaker in the hopes of catapulting himself to the VP slot.

Suggested reading

LA's dreams went up in flames

By Joel Kotkin

Yet Khanna also represents the richest congressional district in the United States — a symbol of just how comfortable the once-Republican dominated upper-class are with Democrats, and how much the once-populist Democratic Party has ingratiated itself among America’s 21st century oligarchs and cultural elites.

That image of following the preferences of society’s richest will be hard to shake. Many progressive Democrats still like to think of themselves as New Deal-style social democrats focused on workers’ interests. Yet as Trump’s “triple-trending counties” prove, many parts of the country don’t see them that way. Fair or not, overcoming that perception is the main task for the Democrats. The question is whether the party’s would-be leaders have the stamina and authenticity to do so.

As Khanna illustrates, however, it will take Trumpian levels of chutzpah for elite progressives to convincingly run against their ossified establishment. Whatever his true convictions, Khanna seems unlikely to transform into a veritable tribune of the left behind, whether they reside in California or Western Pennsylvania. Needless to say, the odds of the same happening to Newsom are even more remote.

That’s not to say a healthy intraparty rebellion couldn’t ignite further in California. But given the state’s reputation for dysfunction and drift, Democrats desperate for new blood and new ideas might reconsider the faith they once put in their California delegation. Jejune fantasies of a “Left coast” paradise can no longer distract from the hard truth: In the age of Trump, Progressive California has been a drag on building real working-class power.

There is much to lament about Trump’s reckless approach, not least his unsound and punitive formula for calculating tariff rates. But there is a reason we are here: the old trade order plunged millions of working-class Americans into misery and precarity, impelling a decisive share of them to elect Trump twice. As far as they’re concerned, there is no going back to a system that, in the words of United Auto Workers leader Shawn Fain, turned once-proud industrial centers into “blast zones”.

Influential pundits such as Matthew Yglesias and prominent Democrats such as Colorado Gov. Jared Polis are bent on getting Democrats to reaffirm the superiority of “free trade”. But they are misguided about what this moment calls for. Instead of simply denouncing Trump’s agenda, progressives must stand for a holistic trade policy that reimagines development at home and abroad.

More from this author

Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ will fail

By Justin H. Vassallo

Not long ago, progressives were clear-eyed about the fictions and concealed costs of liberalized trade and global economic integration. In the Nineties, labor unions, environmentalists, and anti-sweatshop activists warned against the “race to the bottom” of globalization without basic guardrails to limit pollution and prevent human-rights abuses. Distant, multi-stage supply chains portended ecological damage and the severe coercion of vulnerable foreign workers, including children, while unfettered import competition in an era of shrinking public investment threatened the foundations of working-class security at home.

These concerns usually met with indifference in Washington, despite growing evidence that new trade agreements disproportionately benefited powerful multinationals and were riddled with opportunities for exploitation. Echoing President John F. Kennedy, who believed deeper trade would bolster America’s Cold War alliances, mainstream economists assured that global growth would bring prosperity for all.

It was a utopian promise, backed by technocratic models and clever political stagecraft.

Suggested reading

The power of the Kennedy Myth

By David Mamet

The benefits, even to the developing world, were overstated. Remove China’s share of the global middle class, and poverty reduction over the last 25 years looks far less encouraging. While there are fewer “least developed countries” today than there were in the year 2000, the World Bank reports that middle-income countries, which include over 60% of the world’s total poor, are struggling to diversify their economies and improve their developmental outcomes.

The main obstacles are becoming more, not less, insurmountable. Although Covid restrictions, a strong US dollar, and higher interest rates have sunk expectations for global growth this decade, the People’s Republic’s massive export dominance is a central factor in this story. The “China Shock” — once thought to be an unfortunate byproduct of US-China trade limited to the American Rust Belt — has spread to other parts of the world, in some cases undermining the transition to advanced manufacturing. Particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, this has led to what the economist Dani Rodrik calls “premature deindustrialization”. (Notably, this trend has no discernible upside in terms of lower greenhouse-gas emissions, biodiversity, soil health, and potable water.)

On the domestic front, meanwhile, Trump has shrewdly exploited the failure to create good new jobs to replace the ones lost to free trade. Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama championed tech-driven global commerce. But the promised jobs boom in tech, professional services, and advanced manufacturing never materialized. Each recession since 1990 has resulted in a so-called jobless recovery, whereby lost skilled work is not made up for through new opportunities in emerging industries. Americans without college degrees, still over 60% of the electorate, are now predominantly underemployed or hold multiple low-wage jobs.

These developments markedly changed the country’s economic geography. While inequality in the United States has always had a distinctly regional dimension in addition to race and gender, globalization has amplified the concentration of economic power by class and zip code, rather than dispersing it. Small industrial cities and rural areas across the Greater Midwest and South have suffered the most, fueling populist resentment.

Conditions aren’t much better for America’s middle class, even within the perimeter of prosperous liberal-leaning metros. A college education — an increasingly unproven ticket to upward mobility — now costs a fortune, and debt-laden graduates have swelled the ranks of precarious service and gig workers since the Great Recession. Rent inflation and the housing shortage have all but transformed major coastal cities — the main engines of growth prior to Covid — into upper-income enclaves.

Deindustrialization and the country’s worsening trade deficit aren’t, in every instance, the direct cause of these crises. Deregulation and weak antitrust enforcement have played their part. But economic hardships stemming from trade policy are interwoven with most of the other factors driving inequality, including shareholder buybacks, short-term profit-seeking, needless tax breaks for the wealthy, and the clout of venture capitalists who increasingly determine when, where, and how business investment happens.

More from this author

Democrats are wasting a populist moment

By Justin H. Vassallo

A progressive trade policy would dramatically overhaul a system that has privileged non-productive investment and upward redistribution. It would rebuild the country’s industrial base and create opportunities in places starved of them. But in sharp contrast to the current administration, such a vision would aim to eliminate financial loopholes, stop the use of tax havens, and enforce the labor, health, environmental, and safety regulations whose absence would revert America to the harsh industrial conditions of the Gilded Age.

Apologists for the new trade war claim that the “one-time price adjustment” Trump is imposing will be soon offset by a rollback of business and environmental regulations, thereby creating more favorable conditions for new factory construction. Their argument rests on this basic equation: excessive regulations have made it even harder for domestic industry to compete with cheap imports, and the regulatory obstacles to new investment outweigh the impact of dramatically raising the cost of foreign inputs and semi-finished goods via tariffs.

Ironically, the “abundance liberals” most vehemently opposed to industrial protectionism tacitly agree with the Trump administration that the permitting process is in desperate need of reform if America is to build more housing, bolster energy independence, and make it easier to grow small and mid-size businesses. To be sure, there are cases of regulatory bottlenecks needlessly delaying or preventing large-scale projects that benefit working-class Americans. Yet it is the broader pattern of outsourcing, short-termism, financialization, and regional disinvestment in worker training — not, say, clean air and safety standards — that are most to blame for the fact that it is impossible to produce an array of tradable goods in America.

Suggested reading

The closing of the Democratic mind

By Lee Seigel

In contrast to a plan which would sacrifice US labor and environmental standards, progressive trade policies would have real teeth when it comes to international standards. Fair-trade advocate Lori Wallach, now director of Rethink Trade, a new think tank, has long maintained that many Left-of-center global policies — carbon restrictions, barriers to trade dumping, and laws against forced labor — amount to targeted tariffs.

This is neither extreme nor a measure of last resort. Sensible tariffs can directly and indirectly buttress a host of standards and norms that Western societies take for granted, and that trade unions over several generations fought for. The goal of trade policy should be to accommodate the right of poorer countries to develop, without undercutting modern taboos against forced labor, servitude, and reckless extraction.

Here, though, would be another opportunity to draw a distinction with Trump’s short-sighted and isolationist tendencies. As opposed to a massive tariff wall, progressives could deploy a mix of carrots and sticks similar to those used to stoke domestic reinvestment. Routine bad actors on child labor, for example, would be excluded from favorable trade relations, and antitrust law could be conceivably wielded against companies that try to circumvent “social” or environmental tariffs. But the US government would also recommit to supporting state capacity, the rule of law, and humane working conditions in countries that aspire to surpass the “millennium development goals” enunciated by the United Nations at the turn of the century.

Suggested reading

Can ‘abundance liberalism’ save the Dems?

By Sohale Mortazaci

That would entail reversing DOGE’s life-threatening cuts to international aid. Yet it would also ideally involve other measures to restore US credibility on the world stage. If America is to repair the damage this administration has already caused, a future progressive government needs to demonstrate unequivocal support for renewable energy abundance (very much including nuclear power), food security, and workers’ rights in developing regions.

In spirit and name, this would be a chance to repudiate the country’s past support for policies which constrained and sometimes crushed movements for economic democracy in the Global South. At the same time, a new progressive trade paradigm must readily eschew the elitism and policy incoherence that have tainted the environmental movement in the eyes of ordinary Americans and working and lower-middle classes across the Atlantic. Following years of austerity, workers need to be assured that a different trade regime combining national economic priorities and global standards will markedly improve their livelihoods and communities, not lower their sights further.

Harmonizing these domestic and international goals has often eluded the US government in the past. The accelerating fallout from Trump’s abysmal international posture promises to make it more difficult still. Progressives, however, have little choice but to recognize the full complexity of trade policy — and to develop solutions to the disappointments and betrayals that have led to this stunning rupture of the postwar order.

Nothing less than global peace, prosperity, and democracy depend on it.

This week’s special election defeat in Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court race for the Trump-backed candidate, Brad Schimel, is not cause for immediate worry. Democrats have turned out in greater numbers in special elections throughout the Trump era, rendering them poor guides to partisan general elections, and Wisconsin’s results mirror that long-term trend.

Plus, Trump’s job approval rating remains historically high for him at about 48 percent, only half a point lower than in early February. The share of Americans who believe the country is on the right track is also at its highest for decades, save for a brief period in early 2021 after the Covid vaccine became broadly available. Given America’s high level of political polarization and the degree of vitriol regularly spewed at Trump and his team, these figures indicate that Trump has mostly maintained his support and remains politically strong.

More from this author

What if Trump played nice with the Democrats?

By Henry Olsen

There is nonetheless a growing trend that suggests this might change. Trump is increasingly pushing a raft of policies that appeal mostly to his already-committed base. Tariffs on allies, annexing Canada, and a slash-and-burn approach to the federal budget: such measures excite MAGA World but raise serious concerns among the moderate middle, whose votes sent Trump back to the Oval Office.

If Trump continues down this road, he runs the risk of doing exactly what each of his predecessors have done for the past 30-plus years. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden: each leader won by ostentatiously appealing to the center, only to tack hard to the Left or Right once safely in office or, in Bush’s case, re-elected. The presidents’ parties always suffered as a result, either relinquishing control of Congress in horrific midterm losses, or failing to keep hold of the White House.

This is Trump’s potentially fatal temptation. If he can resist playing to the partisan base, he could go into the 2026 midterms in position to expand GOP control and dominance. If he succumbs, however, 2026 could be a year that will live in Republican infamy.

Suggested reading

Test article

By Yanis Varoufakis

Trump’s rise and resurrection are largely due to the continued failures of more mainstream politicians. America entered the post-Cold War era on top of the world as the only global superpower. It has yet inexorably declined, losing wars it chose to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq. Its trade policies created the rival power, Communist China, that Washington now fears. Those same policies led to the deindustrialization that fueled the working class’s shift to the Right. Progressive social policy has shattered America’s social consensus, and mass immigration has both pushed Americans even further apart and heightened the economic pressure on the native-born working class.

Those failures, common across the democratic West, have been magnified by a peculiar American failure. Every president since Clinton’s 1992 victory has campaigned as someone who represented the forgotten center of public opinion. Each in power has instead turned their backs on those promises and the voters who placed their trust in them.

Suggested reading

Trump’s fantasyland America

By David Masciotra

The likes of George W. Bush and Barack Obama instead used their political capital to prioritize issues and stances favored by their party bases. Instead of bringing Americans together, these unexplained about-faces pushed them apart and contributed to the steady rise of distrust in institutions and mainstream politicians.

Clinton set the pattern. He campaigned against incumbent President George H.W. Bush as a “new Democrat”, someone who could reform welfare, reduce crime, and stand up to his party’s Left. Clinton took office with large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress as the country endorsed his interpretation of the Reagan legacy.

He instead moved sharply to the Left once inaugurated. His initial budget included a tax on energy that would have punished ordinary Americans. He sought to allow gays and lesbians to openly serve in the military at a time when homosexuality was still largely disfavored. Most important, he tried to create a universal health system that would have dramatically upended care for everyone.

This was not what Americans thought they were voting for when they backed the charismatic young Arkansas governor. They gave him a historically sharp rebuke in the 1994 midterms, returning the GOP to Senate control and giving Republicans a majority in the House for the first time in half a century.

George W. Bush ultimately followed the same course. He campaigned in 2000 as a “uniter, not a divider”, and originally followed on that course. The 9/11 attack shifted his and the country’s focus from domestic to foreign policy, and the seeming victory in the war versus Iraq allowed him to clinch re-election. Republicans held both houses in Congress and started Bush’s second term in their strongest position since 1928.

Bush immediately sought to use this majority for something he had never hinted at: so-called Social Security reform. It had long been a goal of conservatives to move the government-pension program from a uniform entitlement to one based on individual investment, and Bush began his second term trying to make this dream a reality.

Suggested reading

The War on Terror returns home

By Will Lloyd

His problem was that he had no mandate to do this, having never made it a key part of his platform. Congressional Republicans wanted no part of such a poorly planned scheme, and Bush abandoned it without it ever even receiving a congressional hearing.

The damage was done, though. Moderates who thought they were getting one thing got another, one they neither liked nor understood. The deteriorating situation in Iraq also contributed to the public shifting towards Democrats. The GOP lost control of both houses in a disastrous 2006 midterm election.

Barack Obama took office in 2008 with the potential to remake his party’s fortunes. Democrats rode dissatisfaction with Bush and the economic collapse to give the party its largest majorities in the House and Senate since 1978. Democrats began talking about undoing the Reagan years and returning the party to the decades-long dominance they had held before the Gipper upset their apple cart.

Suggested reading

Bill Clinton won't go away

By Kat Rosenfield

Obama instead led his party to a midterm disaster even worse than Clinton’s. Democrats lost 63 seats in the House, the most any party had lost since 1938. Republicans gained six Senate seats and would have picked up more but for some ultra-conservative “Tea Party” nominees who lost otherwise winnable races.

Obama “accomplished” this by making a Leftward shift more dramatic than Clinton’s. Having pledged to unite Red America and Blue America, he pushed for a cap-and-trade policy to fight climate change that would have dramatically hiked energy prices for everyone. Like Clinton, he made revamping health care his priority, pushing through the unpopular ObamaCare reform that extended government subsidy and control over the nation’s massive health sector. Democratic dreams of a new era of big government were buried in the 2010 midterm graveyard.

Joe Biden was simply the latest in this long line of losers. Americans thought they were voting for a return to normalcy after Trump’s tumultuous first term. They instead got proposals for multitrillion-dollar government spending programs, with inflation adding salt to the wound, and a renewed progressive culture war. Trump’s continued unpopularity limited Democratic losses in the midterms, but the party still lost House control and Biden’s own re-election dreams were doomed by his unpopularity.

Suggested reading

Trump and Biden shouldn't fear death

By Terry Eagleton

Trump, like his predecessors, was elected to end this ideological warfare. Control the border, get the economy moving again, protect entitlements, and end the woke war on common sense: these were the primary themes Trump campaigned on and which voters accepted. His path forward should be clear.

He certainly is moving quickly on two of these. Trump has effectively ended illegal border crossings and is moving to deport as many illegal aliens as rapidly as possible. His executive orders to remove federal funding from institutions that promote DEI and permit transgender women born as men to compete in women’s sports remain widely popular.

Yet Trump seems to be making his predecessors’ mistakes at the same time. Polls show Americans do not want to annex Greenland or make Canada the 51^st state, yet Trump keeps talking about it. People are divided on imposing tariffs, but they largely oppose levying them on longtime allies and only clearly favor them when levied on imports from China. Trump nonetheless seems determined to dramatically upend 35 years of globalization without the slightest effort to explain the rationale behind this sweeping change.

Trump’s foreign policy also threatens to upend decades of policy in the face of public opinion. About 60 percent of registered voters, and about half of Trump voters, have a favorable opinion of NATO. Yet his relentless criticism of the Western Alliance has convinced most other NATO members that he would not fulfill America’s treaty obligations for mutual defense if they were attacked.

The same is true with Russia and Ukraine. Seventy-two percent of Trump voters see Russia as an enemy or as unfriendly, and only 5 percent of Trump voters sympathize with Russia in its war with Ukraine. They may want military aid to be reduced or eliminated, but they do not want the plucky country to fall under the Kremlin’s sway, much less be humiliated by Washington. Yet the administration is bent on going further than the public.

The signs also point to further shifts that excite the base and frighten the middle. Many Trump backers are urging him to defy court orders blocking some of his executive orders, but 82 percent of Americans think a president should obey court orders even if he disagrees with them. Republicans may agree with his continued deportation of migrants in defiance of a court order for him to stop, but independents disagree by a 20-plus-point margin.

Suggested reading

Who is preventing peace in Ukraine?

By David Patrikarakos

Trump’s order to dismantle the Department of Education as much as practicable under law also risks public condemnation. Republicans want him to do that, but independents largely do not. Even a quarter of 2024 Trump voters do not want him to eliminate the department. His tiny margin of victory, and the GOP’s midterm hopes, would dissolve if even a small group of those people switched sides.

It’s easy to understand why Trump is doing this. His most loyal and fervent backers like all of these actions, and Trump likes to reward people who are loyal. The problem is that his majority rests on many people who are not MAGA loyalists or GOP donors.

Especially among nonwhites, that majority includes millions of people who had never voted for him before. They backed him because four years of Biden Leftist incompetence persuaded them that he could solve their problems. Focusing on these new things engenders the same “bait-and-switch” feeling that have led swing voters to become disillusioned for decades.

Suggested reading

The great American exodus

By Gerard DeGroot

There’s still plenty of time for Trump to get back on track. Stop talking about annexing Greenland or Canada. Explain why tariffs will cause short-term pain but produce long-term gain so that voters are willing to ride out any downturn. Show that what you want in the world is allies who can pull their own weight, not making America isolated in a world we can no longer dominate.

Trump should especially focus on showing positive results on his key platform planks by next November. Ramping up deportations while reducing the number of people wrongfully expelled will satisfy his base and swing voters. He should also keep culture-war fights to battles that unite rather than divide Americans.

Above all, he should rally Americans around shared ideals. Next year is also the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Trump should launch a big initiative to promote it and give many speeches that explain how and why that document provides the foundation for everything he wants to accomplish. That would wrong-foot his progressive enemies, who would be unable to resist the temptation to take issue with his words and thus make “what is America’s promise” the defining question for the midterm.

Suggested reading

An elegy for the American Dream

By J.D. Vance

Ronald Reagan was fond of quoting Thomas Paine’s famous line in his 1776 pamphlet, Common Sense: “we have it in our power to make the world over again”. That’s a utopian sentiment, but even Reagan knew that couldn’t happen all at once.

Trump can remake America, but he can’t do it by dividing his coalition and continuing a generational pattern of presidents saying one thing and doing another. Slow and steady wins the race. A little more focus and less scattershot razzle-dazzle could break the destructive pattern and cement America’s willingness to break with the past and move toward Trump’s view of American greatness.

This shift away from liberal orthodoxy has shocked Newsom’s long-time progressive allies, who see it as an act of treachery. Yet if they had been paying attention to Newsom’s career — above all, his willingness to morph into whatever identity best serves his quest for power — this wouldn’t be so surprising.

Conservatives, too, will discover that Newsom isn’t a tool of the progressive Left, or a typical California progressive with “communistic” policies, as one conservative outlet described them. On the contrary, Newsom, unlike his predecessor, Jerry Brown, has been a committed, shameless sniffer of political winds throughout his career.

More from this author

The return of American class politics

By Joel Kotkin

That’s not to say that Newsom doesn’t have a lodestar. He does: namely, the monied elite of the Bay Area, particularly the Getty family. It explains his ease in discarding Left-of-center dogmas on law and order, and likewise why he has emerged as an unofficial political spokesman for the “abundance” agenda, which is how neoliberal Democrats are rebranding themselves these days. (In a display of virtuoso flexibility, however, Newsom in his conversation with Bannon called out Trump for his closeness with the tech oligarchs — talk about the pot calling the kettle black.)

His oligarchic allegiance has funded, and shaped, Newsom’s career. He projected himself as a relative moderate as mayor of San Francisco. Later in 2011, as lieutenant governor, he challenged the rigid Brown, suggesting pro-business reforms. That year, amid a weakening Golden State economy, he traveled to arch-rival Texas to discover the secrets of the Lone Star State’s boom — much to the consternation of progressives.

Then, as the winds shifted to the Left, Newsom decided to re-center his appeal to progressives in California and nationwide. He became a fervent advocate of such things as early transgender treatments and banning schools from informing parents about their own kids’ sexual identity issues. His heiress wife, Jennifer Siebel, made a documentary film embracing the transgender cause.

More from this author

LA's dreams went up in flames

By Joel Kotkin

As governor, he could dispense the blessings of full-spectrum progressivism thanks to a massive accumulation of capital-gains revenue during the tech boom. The economy, about which he repeatedly bragged, may have hurt the middle and working classes, but it allowed Newsom and his legislative allies to build a vote-catching “blue welfare state”, as The Nation magazine enthused.

During the tech boom, Newsom ladled out subsidies to poorer Californians; indeed, the Golden State spends more of its budget on welfare than virtually any state, twice as much as Texas, while it generally neglects basic infrastructure like roads and water supply. This sort of liberal welfarism recalls what Marx recognised in the Communist Manifesto as “the proletarian alms bag”.

Today, California’s economy is struggling, and progressive ideology increasingly clashes with reality and voter preferences. Newsom is clever enough to see the writing on the wall — in contrast to Kamala Harris, his possible gubernatorial successor and potential 2028 rival.

Bottom line: rather than frame Newsom as an ideologue, it is better to see him as a representative of the Bay Area tech oligarchy. To the titans of Silicon Valley, issues matter less than power and influence, as evinced in their recent genuflecting to Trump. If tactics need to be changed, if it’s necessary (for now) to learn the lessons of the 2024 MAGA triumph, so be it.

Suggested reading

Democrats are wasting a populist moment

By Justin H. Vassallo

This shift began to emerge even before the 2024 election. As it became clear that wind and solar couldn’t easily replace fossil fuels or nuclear power, particularly in light of the state’s draconian electric-vehicle mandate, Newsom signaled a growing flexibility. He reversed the proposed decommissioning of the state’s last nuclear power plant at Diablo Canyon near San Luis Obispo, as a means to prevent embarrassing blackouts.

This, along with natural-gas plants that account for close to half the state’s electricity, prevented politically damaging blackouts. He has even considered amending the state’s landmark environmental law. The green lobby’s ever harsher energy policies were recently dissed by a Newsom spokesperson as akin to “fantasy and fairy dust”.

Similar fault lines have pitted him against progressives when it comes to race. Newsom was an ostentatious promulgator of Leftist racial cant and racial policies, like reparations and quotas. Yet when reparations legislation suggested cash payments upwards of $640 billion dollars for the descendants of slaves, Newsom recoiled, upsetting the state’s hyperactive race hustlers. He now also expresses concerns about the injustice of transgender men competing in female sports programs, perhaps aware of the damage done to Harris by this issue.

Newsom has even backed away from his welfarist inclinations, recasting himself as a fiscally conscious moderate. He fended off proposals from Sacramento progressives, including their calls for a 32-hour workweek; raising the state’s income tax (already the nation’s highest); and adding new payroll taxes to cover universal health care.

Suggested reading

Can ‘abundance liberalism’ save the Dems?

By Sohale Mortazavi

After the 2024 election, Newsom’s centrist shift has accelerated. This may still not be necessary in a state that went nearly 60% for Kamala Harris. But state politics are beside the point for the termed-out governor. For him, the prize is no longer in Sacramento — but at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Newsom senses, correctly, that the best chance lies with embracing moderates reacting against the inevitable Trumpian excess. But the Democrats can only win the national vote if they shift away from progressive stances on climate, diversity, and gender — all widely unpopular east of the Sierra.

Ultimately Newsom’s biggest problem, particularly in a general election campaign, will be his miserable record. In a national campaign, he will be made to defend the state’s lousy education system: California’s students perform at among the lowest rates in the country, with nearly three of five Golden State high-schoolers unprepared for either college or a career; in most categories, the state scores below lower-spending places like Texas and Florida.

Nor can he boast of the state’s still massive economy. Once deemed to be the world’s fourth largest, the California economy is now among the weakest in the country and seems destined to fall to sixth place in the near future. His frequent pro-worker pronouncements don’t hold water in a state where unimaginable wealth coexists with the nation’s highest cost-of-living-adjusted poverty rate. Nearly one in five Californians — many working — lives in poverty (using a cost-of-living adjusted poverty rate); the Public Policy Institute of California estimates another fifth live in near-poverty — roughly 15 million people in total.

Then there’s crime. In a recent referendum, Californians overwhelmingly ditched liberalized sentencing laws enacted by Democratic lawmakers and defended by Newsom. Sensing danger, he has moderated on some law-and-order issues. Newsom last year vetoed a bill that would have legalized “shooting alleys” — so-called safe drug-injection sites — in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Oakland. Many of his progressive allies, who favor such programs, denounced his veto. But a GOP presidential nominee could slam him for his Johnny-come-lately rethink on social order and cohesion.

Suggested reading

California leaves its poor to burn

By Samuel McIlhagga

Newsom also is vulnerable for the utter failure of the state’s climate-focused housing policies. By curtailing new suburban construction, state policies have hiked housing costs to the highest levels in the country, sparking a powerful out-migration trend. And that’s not to mention the state’s dismal performance in response to the horrific LA fires this year, a result of progressives ditching basic infrastructure in favor of boutique climate and “justice” causes.

Overall, whatever his media savvy, Newsom will have to run as former chief executive of a state repeatedly rated by Wallet Hub as among the least efficient in delivering services relative to tax burden. Newsom might be tempted to curtail regulations so he can appeal to business-oriented Democrats and independents. As a white male, Newsom seems ill-suited to compete for the diversity vote, particularly if Harris or some other “person of color” decides to run.

Whether this lurch to the center works or not, it is now the most viable path to the nomination. Of course, things may change in response to Trumpian overreach. The 45th and 47th president might just make progressivism great again. If that comes to pass, the Governor’s moderate rhetoric will no doubt change. In being willing to bend to any prevailing trend, at least, Newsom is almost perfectly consistent.

I ask because the pair’s parents would have an invaluable perspective about the combination of personal discipline and social support needed to make it in America. Instead, their children offer a light and frothy piece of aesthetics, like the kinds of luxury goods that surround the rich.

Michelle and Craig were raised in a working-class milieu in Chicago’s South Shore area. Their childhood home was tiny, as they emphasize at length in the first episode, and the close relationship the siblings forged was in part a function of proximity; the two shared a room growing up. It’s a moving account, and Michelle, especially, radiates the grace that endeared her to Americans before the sharp polarization of recent years.

More from this author

The media's betrayal of the poor

By Batya Ungar-Sargon

Their mother, Marian Shields Robinson, was a secretary-turned-homemaker. Their father, Fraser Robinson III, was a civil servant with multiple sclerosis who never missed a day of work. From these humble beginnings, the children went on to earn three Ivy League degrees between them. Craig reveals in the podcast that he made millions as a bond trader before retiring to become a coach, while Michelle Obama’s estimated net worth with her husband, former President Barack Obama, is $70 million.

The two embody the American Dream at a time when many Americans who grow up as they did — especially black Americans — never make it out of poverty. Even black men from affluent families are much more likely to end up poor than to maintain the lifestyle they grew up with.

Michelle’s and Craig’s parents were possessed of immense personal virtues, but they made their way in a very different economy and society from the ones we have now.  Young men, especially those without college degrees, have a much harder time finding material stability and spiritual dignity owing to the decimation of the real economy by financialization and globalization — processes that Michelle’s husband did precious little to stop and in many ways accelerated while he led the nation. It has led to the breakdown of broader family support networks. The two-parent family, defined by the irreplaceable mixture of “discipline and love”, as Christopher Lasch put it, is no longer the norm, and middle-class values are thus much more difficult to transmit across generations.

Suggested reading

The many ghosts of Michelle Obama

By Kat Rosenfield

Alas, the younger Robinson siblings aren’t interested in addressing such pressing concerns. Instead, on IMO (internet slang for “in my opinion”), Michelle and Craig invite other fabulously wealthy people to sit in a rented Airbnb and wax philosophical about such pressing issues as when to decide you’ve given enough to someone else and it’s time to focus on yourself, when to break off friendships, how to be vulnerable, and how young women can get better at asking for what they want.

Their “experts” are mainly celebrities such as Issa Rae, Seth Rogan, Tracee Ellis Ross, Dwayne Wade, and Gabrielle Union. Put another way, the podcast’s heavy-hitting strength is also a perfect example of what ails the Democratic Party: it’s by and for the rich — specifically, rich women.

In the first episode, Michelle and Craig begin with an account of their upbringing. “We weren’t wealthy”, Michelle recalls. “And Dad was working class. We lived in the same apartment our whole lives. It was essentially two bedrooms”.

“No, it was one bedroom”, Craig corrects her.

“Well, that little offshoot bedroom that Mom and Dad stayed in, you would consider that a bedroom, right?”

“But that was the only bedroom”, Craig insists. “The room we were in was actually the living room, and the living room, what we called the living room, was actually the dining room.”

Suggested reading

The return of American class politics

By Joel Kotkin

But the kitchen was the gathering place. “And in our house, you know, we as young people with our parents, what they did for us was they invited us to sit with them at the table and talk”, Michelle recalls. “They wanted to hear our ideas. They wanted to hear our opinions. I think that our parents offered us both the first table where we gained confidence in our voices, where we felt like who we were, what we thought, how we felt was important. And not because it was important to the rest of the world, but it was important to them”.

It’s a lovely anecdote that situates you in the Robinson’s warm home. But it is also revealing: the siblings were raised in a family that stressed what sociologists have identified as the habits that inform a middle-class upbringing. Middle-class parents ask their children a lot of questions. They raise kids in two-parent households. They put a premium on education and extracurricular activities. They convey to their children that their autonomy matters, but also that they have to take responsibility for their actions.

The middle-class culture of the Robinson home was made possible in a wider economy that stressed stability, full employment, and good wages and benefits. The loss of these common goods — as a result of a bipartisan push to liberalize trade, immigration, and social mores — is now fueling populist uprisings on both sides of the Atlantic. These trends have also driven a sharp wedge between the Democratic Party, founded in the early 19th century as a vehicle for workers and farmers, and its traditional constituencies.

This is perhaps the most compelling issue of our time. Yet such issues — whether from the standpoint of individual advice or social critique — are of little interest to Obama, Robinson, and their guests. After looking back on the Robinson home, the first episode is mostly devoted to a conversation with the Issa Rae (net worth estimated at $20 million), and the subject is friendship. The three address a “question” they “got from a listener” about how to react to a friend cutting off contact.

Throughout the conversation, the pure opulence of the trio’s lifestyle is a recurring theme. Rae, it turns out, is a newly minted restaurateur, because she couldn’t find a restaurant she liked enough to patronize on her last birthday — so she opened her own. Later in the episode, when complaining about imbalances in friendships, the first example that comes to Michelle is a friend who never invites her on trips.

At another point, Michelle recalls checking in with a friend and asking if her friend had fired that HR person she was having problems with: “Remember that HR person you were going to let go? What happened with that girl?” The rest of us commiserate over getting fired — these ladies commiserate over firing unsatisfactory employees. At another point, Michelle recalls picking up her nephews from school in a motorcade (relatable!).

Suggested reading

The vapid world of America's top book influencer

By Matthew Gasda

The real problem with IMO, then, is that Michelle thinks her success would make her a reasonable person from whom to seek advice. Yet the part of her that achieved that success, and the social structures that made this possible, are utterly uninteresting to her. Meanwhile, it’s the part that’s completely unrelatable — the opulent lifestyle, the celebrity friends, the lack of real problems that leaves time to endlessly complain about her husband’s lateness and lack of curiosity — that takes center stage. The implication is that it’s interesting because, well, she’s Michelle Obama. It’s not interesting. It’s actually quite boring.

There is a lot of talk about “vulnerability” and “opening up”, yet there’s precious little that reveals anything deep. Certainly, there’s nothing discomforting (one imagines Michelle Obama is seldom uncomfortable). Obama insists that emotional vulnerability is crucial in a friendship for her, but she doesn’t expose any weaknesses at all.

The one break in the facade of perfection is when Michelle complains about her husband, which she does more than you would have imagined. There’s a clear bias against men in general with their silent, masculine ways, their refusal to engage in small talk, or ask how people’s kids are doing. “That’s why y’all broken”, she tells her brother. “Y’all don’t talk about nothing”. At a time when the Democrats have a serious problem with two main groups — men and the working class — this podcast is a symptom of why that is. IMO.

Last week the Biden era’s devotion to reality-as-fiat climaxed not with a bang, but an internet whimper: an apparent effort to meme an amendment to the US Constitution into force, by posting about it online. This bizarre moment saw Joe Biden (or, more likely, someone else writing on his official account) announce that the Equal Rights Amendment is “the law of the land” — even though the National Archive declared in December that it was not.

It was the perfect finale to a regime characterized from its inception by eerie fakeness: what Nathan Pinkoski recently called “a simulacrum of a functioning progressive presidency”. This order treated as stage-managed and artificial even meetings normally understood as living, relational politics. Donors, for example, were given scripted questions to read out at supposedly private meet-and-greet events.

Between Biden’s increasingly obviously scripted appearances and the accumulating visual evidence for his frailty, conspiracies proliferated. He was characterized as fake, played by actors, or even computer-generated. Such claims were easy enough to “fact check”, but they conveyed a fundamentally true intuition: Biden was a cipher, and no one knew who was really in charge. Consensus just seemed to coalesce, as if by otherworldly telepathy, often followed by policies everyone was assumed to agree with, and which you’d then be ostracized for questioning.

More from this author

Elon Musk: neo-feudal prince

By Mary Harrington

This sense of rule by a headless, faceless and monolithically ideologically aligned swarm was characterized by writer Curtis Yarvin as “the Cathedral”: an architecture of political coordination that comprises journalism plus academia, NGOs, foundations, the permanent bureaucracy and other institutional actors. In Britain we might just call this “the Establishment” and shrug; but as David Samuels showed recently, the digital revolution turbocharged a specifically modern, progressive American version of this “Cathedral” to such potency, that its partisans seemingly came to believe they really could re-write reality just by posting.

The phenomenon gained momentum through the early 20th century with the Obama-era discovery that digital communications could be wielded to transform public opinion in progressive directions, using an activist technique known as “permission structures”. This method of persuasion, developed by consultant David Axelrod, induces people to vote against their own prior convictions, by convincing them they’ll gain moral standing among their peers by adopting the approved viewpoint.

To those who grasped the method, social media provided a powerful new tool for engineering political permission structures. The resulting consensus-manufacture machine then swiftly ate the legacy press, reaching a peak of ideological dominance during the Covid years. At its ascendancy, the moral outlook that came bundled with this approach was perhaps best encapsulated by the famous “In This House, We Believe…” lawn sign: a utopian creed associated with the progressive knowledge class, mainly because it’s largely those rich enough to delegate the material side of life to underlings who cannot see its obvious shortcomings. Its moment of peak hubris (and, arguably, a crucial nemesis) was encapsulated in its adherents’ adoption of the belief that someone could become the opposite sex simply by verbal declaration: as though words really were magic spells.

And if there’s a lesson from the pitiful end of the Biden simulation, in a wholly ineffectual attempt to make lawn-sign type updates to the US Constitution via blog post, it’s that this mechanism always had hard limits. Around this time four years ago, I glimpsed a harbinger of these limits, in the strange story of Hilaria Baldwin. Hilaria, wife of the actor Alec Baldwin, was accused of having spent a decade pretending to be Spanish — even though she grew up in Massachusetts. Even four years ago, this read as a cautionary tale for the reality-engineers: no matter what you say, if the gap between “Hilarity” and reality is too large, eventually someone will point this out and the whole thing will implode.

And so it has transpired with the civilization-scale Hilarity that was the Biden simulation. The first and most significant crack in its architecture came the year after Hilaria-gate and the (simulated) Biden inauguration: the sale of Twitter to Elon Musk. Musk then promptly fired most of the website’s Trust and Safety team, released documents revealing the website’s routine government-requested censorship, and unbanned Right-wing accounts including Donald Trump himself. And this triggered a cascade which culminated in Trump‘s re-election.

It’s not quite right to say that the information-repression mechanism broke, and allowed reality to shine through. The alteration in tone and content since Twitter was rebranded as X has not been principally in the service of “facts”, as such. But Elon bought the Cathedral’s Rolls-Royce permission-structure machine, retuned the engine, and took the silencer off the exhaust. Now a vehicle meticulously assembled under Obama, and driven with reckless hubris by Biden’s carers, is full of tipsy anons and doing doughnuts in the public square.

What will reality look like, once the dust settles on their antics? There is reason to expect at least a correction toward pragmatic engagement with the world as it is and away from Hilarity’s progressive dream of the world as it should be. Signals include Trump’s skepticism toward Net Zero, already prompting a cascade of corporate indifference to its once sacrosanct green edicts. American foreign policy shows indications of an analogous turn away from liberal internationalism; a shift with uncertain geopolitical implications, but that would at least mean an end to the “peacekeeping” bellicosity characteristic of the “global policeman” stance.

And, importantly, from almost the moment he became President, Trump signaled an explicit re-orientation away from utopian gender politics, declaring in his inauguration speech itself that “as of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female”. He also signed a Day One executive order legislating against the notion that sex is a matter of verbal fiat rather than physiological reality.

In this context, the effort to meme the ERA into the constitution is a powerfully symbolic damp squib. For while Trump surely owes his new mandate prosaically to reality — notably prices, Ukraine, and the southern US border — it was Hilarity’s gender politics that came to stand totemically for that regime’s faltering grip on the facts.

In this context the ERA was also totemic, as a longstanding flagship cause for the liberal-feminist Valkyries of progressivism — America’s “Affluent White Female Liberals” or AWFLs — since it was first proposed in 1923. And it stood for reality-as-fiat in that the ERA’s wording would have enshrined in the US constitution an assertion that the sexes are always interchangeable: the OG effort to re-engineer reality using language. Thus, as transgenderism followed logically from the ERA’s liberal-feminist claim that men and women are always interchangeable, AWFLs slid into their Hilarity-era position as the noisiest and most self-righteous caucus in its favor.

And now the whole thing is in ruins. Even the efforts to revive a Women’s March (now renamed, and I’m not making this up, the “People’s March” because the organizers refused to define “woman”) drew barely a tenth of the 2016 numbers. “Vibeshift” doesn’t really do justice to the seeming completeness of Hilarity’s rout. But it would be naïve to imagine we can escape unreality altogether — or that the incoming administration would want to. Handing a different group the keys to the Current Thing machine is not at all the same as dismantling it.

Consider: media titans who until recently operated in lockstep with progressive consensus are hurriedly updating their bylines in line with the new normal. The house journal of Yarvin’s “Cathedral”, the New York Times, signalled its change of stance recently by interviewing Yarvin himself; the Grey Lady has also parted company with several longstanding columnists and brought on board new voices such as James Pogue, long a well-connected observer of the New Right and its paradoxes.

Similarly, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has opted to PR-blitz himself a new backstory as — if not exactly Right-wing — at least Right-curious. More substantially, Facebook has replaced the erstwhile Lib Dem leader, Nick Clegg, as head of global affairs with the former Bush staffer Joel Kaplan. What we are witnessing is, in other words, less a dismantling of the reality-formation apparatus than an imperial-scale reshuffling of its moral sensibility. Likewise, the long-running TikTok saga is less about banning the platform, than ensuring American control of its propaganda power. We shouldn’t necessarily expect any of this to result in more reality.

Suggested reading

Trump reclaims the Jacksonian spirit

By Sohrab Ahmari

But we might, perhaps, benefit from a change of utopia. What scotched Hilarity was how disappointing its utopianism was in practice: a blend of idealism and leveling-down that grew increasingly unpalatable in the atmosphere of scarcity and suspicion that succeeded the Global Financial Crash. By contrast, the Trumpian caucus has no shortage of grandiose visions — at least off the record, after a few beers.

There’s a lot about those visions that trigger my skepticism. And the real reality of Trump 2.0 is likely to disappoint many of his true believers: expect ambivalent dealmaking on actually realist hard-policy questions such as NATO, mass migration, and how best to manage America’s oligarchs to be richly gilded with “real” Trumpian Ws on gender and DEI.

This aside, though, having a vision at all surely beats the pod and the bugs. And the incoming regime has one characteristic we should all welcome: personalism. When the progressives tried to save democracy and bring about their vision of utopia on earth, what we got was Hilarity: democracy-like simulacra as a skinsuit for managerial tyranny, all enforced by a distributed digital propaganda machine. Against this, the new Trumpian order may have many flaws but Trump is obviously and irreducibly real and human. That is the point of him.

So with his coronation, we leave behind Hilarity, hopefully for good, along with its dogma, its shrillness, and its glass-eyed Presidential golem. In its place I expect politics to remain mostly as technocratic, de-materialized, unequal, and fractious as ever, and perhaps in some ways just as unreal — but now, at least, with a chance of re-centering human thought and needs in human politics. There is a great deal of mopping up to do, but the 21st century is upon us. Bring it on.

Neil Basu, the former head of counter-terrorism policing, was particularly critical of Farage, who he accused of giving “succor” to the far-Right, as well as “undermining the police” and “creating conspiracy theories”. Public figures such as Farage, Basu advised, should “keep their mouth shut”. This, by the way, is the same Neil Basu who earlier this month accused Elon Musk of trading in “dangerous rhetoric” about Britain’s grooming gangs; Basu clearly thinks that Musk should keep his mouth shut, too.

Well, Farage couldn’t keep his mouth shut and the more his Left-leaning critics pushed back against him and tried to turn the Southport attack into a story about the far-Right, the more he felt that a cover-up was underway. This is typical now of how Britain treats these crimes, with each political faction talking past the other, asserting a claim to victimhood.

When some three months later the Crown Prosecution Service announced two further charges against Rudakubana, including one under the terrorism act, Farage was positively vociferous. “Perhaps I was right all along,” he said in another video. On Monday, after Rudakubana pleaded guilty to all 16 charges against him and it transpired that he had been referred three times to Prevent, the UK’s counter-radicalization scheme, Farage was unequivocal: “I was right all along.” He again referred to a “cover-up” and suggested that had the authorities disclosed “the truth” at the outset the riots of last summer might not have happened. “This is two-tier policing…it is an outrage,” he added with cold indignation.

More from this author

The dangerous martyrdom of Tommy Robinson

By Simon Cottee

But was he right all along? And what really is “the truth” that the authorities were withholding? On the question of whether Rudakubana was being monitored by the security services, which was Farage’s original suspicion back in July, he is categorically wrong: he wasn’t being monitored by the security services. Indeed, he wasn’t being monitored by anyone, although he became known to a range of services in 2019 as his mental health declined and he engaged in increasingly erratic and threatening behavior. This is what prompted the referrals to Prevent.

It is probably important to clarify that Prevent doesn’t collect intelligence on terrorism suspects nor monitor their activities. Instead, it’s a program intended to foster change in the mindset and behavior of those who have come to embrace an extremist ideology but not yet committed any offenses. And because the Prevent officers who dealt with the Rudakubana referrals were not convinced that he’d been radicalized into an extremist ideology, those referrals went nowhere. Had it been otherwise, and had Rudakubana exhibited support for, say, the Islamic State or some other terrorist group, he would almost certainly have been invited to attend a “Channel” program, where a mentor would have attempted to challenge his extremist convictions. Even so, it would have been well within Rudakubana’s rights to have refused any such invitation, since Prevent has no statutory powers to compel a referred person to cooperate.

But if there was a cover-up, as Farage claims, he might be disappointed. Because it isn’t the one he thinks it is: Rudakubana was not a terrorist. Which is to say that his motive in carrying out the atrocity in Southport was not political. He had no ideology, no injustices he wanted to avenge or draw to public attention, no burning cause that radicalized him and turned his mind to murder. What he had instead was a deep fascination with murder itself and the dark pornographic culture surrounding it.

Rudakubana, who was 17 at the time of the Southport attack, was first referred to Prevent in 2019 when he was 13: he had been searching for material on US school shootings at his school. A further two referrals were made in 2021, after he had sought out material on Libya and past terrorist attacks, including the 2017 London Bridge atrocity carried out by an Islamic State-inspired cell. According to official sources, this material was not terrorist propaganda, but consisted of news articles. On each occasion Prevent officers were satisfied that Rudakubana’s behavior, though concerning, did not meet the threshold for intervention by Prevent.

In a statement on Monday evening, Merseyside police described Rudakubana as “a man with [an] unhealthy obsession with extreme violence”, elaborating that “no one ideology” could be deduced from his online interests and behavior. “And that is why this was not treated as terrorism,” the statement clarified. It also made clear that the police had failed to locate a motive behind the Southport massacre.

Among the 164,394 documents that Merseyside police sifted through on the digital devices Rudakubana had access to, there was an item solemnly titled “Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants: The Al Qaeda Training Manual”. It is a crime under Section 58 of the 2000 Terrorism Act to possess such a document, since it’s deemed “likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism”. But this doesn’t necessarily demonstrate, much less prove, sympathy for jihadist ideology and the authorities clearly believe that Rudakubana’s possession of the document was a function of his acute and abiding interest in violence. Many on the Right, though, leapt on this as evidence of Islamist hatred.

The authorities, for their part, insist that there has been no cover-up and the statement by Merseyside Police directly challenges this accusation. “We have been accused of purposely withholding information, this is absolutely not the case,” it said. “From day one,” it went on, “we have constantly been in touch with the CPS who have advised us on what information could be released. We have wanted to say much more to show we were being open and transparent, but we have been advised throughout that we couldn’t do so as it would risk justice being delivered.”

It is on this last score, then, that Farage is on stronger ground, for it isn’t entirely clear why the authorities were so slow in disclosing details about who Rudakubana was and whether he was being monitored by the security services, especially given the fervent public interest in the case and the unlikelihood of this information jeopardizing the prosecution of Rudakubana. These actions only inflamed suspicions on the Right and consequent righteous anger on the Left.

Farage is also onto something when he invokes the spectre of two-tier policing, for let’s imagine, as I did when I first wrote about the Southport massacre in August, that Rudakubana was not the son of Rwandan immigrants to Britain, but a white teen who had targeted a Beyoncé-themed event where the victims were predominantly black children. Would the police have exercised the same degree of caution in releasing information about the suspect and would they have been so quick to rule out declaring the atrocity a terrorist incident? It seems unlikely, given its fierce commitment to anti-racism and its keenness to publicly demonstrate that commitment.

Suggested reading

The New Orleans killer was an all-American loser

By Alexander Nazaryan

Let’s also imagine that rumours were rife about the white teen and how his parents were known racists with links to a white-supremacist group. Riots ensue, with black youths at the forefront. Would Starmer and his government rush to condemn the rioters as mindless “thugs”, as they had done in the case of those who rioted after Southport — or would they instead have empathized with their “legitimate anger”, which is how Neil Basu spoke about the grievances of BLM protesters in 2020.

And let’s imagine further that the police subsequently discover a copy of Brenton Tarrant’s manifesto on the teen’s computer, a document that sounds the alarm about the ethnic replacement of white Europeans through mass immigration and calls for terrorist violence to put a stop to it. Would the authorities, in announcing the new charge, have the patience to explain that that possession of this document, though contrary to UK terrorism legislation, does not by itself indicate a commitment to far-Right ideology, as they had done when announcing the same charge against Rudakubana? This also seems unlikely, especially given the inevitable accusation of racism that would follow.

Farage is right to point out — and to keep pointing out — the double standard in operation here. But the facts of the Southport massacre are not just inconvenient for the Government, they are for all those who want to believe in a sinister cover-up over jihadist terrorism.

The bigger and more urgent question is how or whether the authorities can stop the next mass-casualty atrocity from happening. Clearly, Prevent, in its current form, is singularly ill-equipped to discharge that task, primarily because its remit is to prevent political radicalization and not manage the personal miseries of deeply disturbed people. Moreover, even if its scope were widened to include the risk of mentally unwell people who are morbidly fascinated by violence, it’s unclear how this would work in practice, what coercive powers it would be given and how it could work in an effective way.

Of all the inconvenient truths that Southport exposes, perhaps the most troubling one is our powerlessness to stop the recalcitrant few whose violence is as senseless as it is unpredictable. But it is within our power to respond to any horrors that might befall us by refusing to play politics in their aftermath.

And in much the same way as the Western Left seized on Venezuela under Chávez as a totemic worked example of this vision, so too the radical Right today has its template for the future: El Salvador under Nayib Bukele. Most recently, we can see this in the adulatory response from the online Right to Bukele’s offer of 5,000 free visas to “highly skilled scientists, engineers, doctors, artists, and philosophers”.

These visas, accompanied by tax breaks and help-with-moving costs, aim to tempt the cream of what the modern world likes to call “human capital” to make their homes in El Salvador. But if you build it, will they come? In recent years, El Salvador has made headlines for adopting an approach to law and order that, while effective, is viewed with alarm by Western liberals as encroaching unacceptably on human rights. Since coming to power in 2019, Bukele has declared a still-to-be-rescinded state of exception, suspended the Salvadorean constitution, and locked up some 70,000 alleged gang members without due process.

These moves have drastically reduced the murder rate in a previously notoriously dangerous country. Western critics, though, point to allegations that he has corrupted institutions by packing them with allies, not to mention, according to Amnesty International, “concealed and distorted public information, backed actions to undermine civic space, militarised public security, and used mass arrests and imprisonment as the sole strategies for counteracting violence in the country”.

And yet, Bukele’s strongman tactics have made him wildly popular with Salvadoreans, who doubtless enjoy a reported 70% reduction in the country’s previously extremely high murder rate. They have also made Bukele a rock star for the online Right. This group, fond of complaining about spineless leaders, fraying Western law and order, and the bleeding-away of political agency into international institutions and NGOs, regards the spectacle of a strongman leader with good social media game as something like a fantasy made flesh.

Arguably, it’s as much his embrace of technology that accords Bukele the mantle of poster-boy for a futuristic Right. Whether in his extremely online presence, his (admittedly not completely successful) embrace of Bitcoin as legal tender, or the high-tech, recently rebuilt National Library, funded by Beijing and serving more as showcase for futuristic technologies than as reading-room, Bukele’s offer to the people of El Salvador seems as energetically futurist as it does authoritarian on public safety. As Geoff Schullenberger recently reported, this is part of his appeal to Salvadorean voters: a sense of going somewhere, of there being a future to feel hopeful about.

This trait also makes him a touchstone for the Right-wing movement that I predict will replace “conservatism” in the 21st century. This outlook owes more to the Italian Futurist Filippo Marinetti than conservatives of the G.K. Chesterton variety, let alone any current mainstream Tory. It has as yet no party-political or institutional representation in Britain, and is perhaps most visibly embodied in American technologists such as Elon Musk, Mark Andreessen or Peter Thiel. As a worldview, it is broadly pro-capitalist, enthusiastically pro-technology and unabashedly hierarchical, as well as sometimes also scornful of Christian-inflected concern for the weak.

We might call it, rudely, “space fascism”, though N.S. Lyons’s formulation “Right-wing progressivism” is probably more accurate. Among its adherents, high-tech authoritarianism is a feature, not a bug, and egalitarianism is for fools. Thinkers such as Curtis Yarvin propose an explicitly neo-monarchical model for governance; Thiel has declared that: “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible.” And it’s not hard to see the appeal of Bukele as a poster-boy for such movements: while China is arguably a far larger and more successful instance of high-tech authoritarianism, it’s both (by Western standards) off-puttingly collectivist, and also a little too powerful for comfort. By contrast, El Salvador offers a worked example of what it might look like to roll out Right-wing progressivism in a previously dysfunctional polity: a project that both has underdog appeal, and also poses no direct material threat to American geopolitical interests.

For Anglophone Rightists, then, El Salvador is thus the most legible real-world instance of something like a Right-wing progressive programme in practice. And along with the tech enthusiasm and public-order toughness, the third distinctive feature of this programme can be gleaned: a desire not to end international migration, but to restrict it to elites.

For Right-wing progressives, polities are not necessarily premised on ethnic or cultural homogeneity — at least not for elites. Rather, this is a vision of statehood less based on affinity, history or even ethnicity, and more on a kind of opt-in, utility-maximisation model. It’s a far cry from the kind of can’t-we-all-just-get-along liberalism that characterises our current crop of hapless Tories. As for those still wedded to the 20th-century idea that being Right-wing necessarily means ethnicity-based nationalism, they are likely to find this outlook bewildering.

But Right-wing progressives generally accord greater political value to gifted, high-productivity foreigners than any slow-witted, unproductive coethnic: those within Right-wing progressive circles propose, and in some cases are already working on, opt-in startup cities and “network states” that would be, by definition, highly selective about membership. As a worldview, it’s jarring to cultural conservatives, who generally value thick ties of shared history and affinity. Yet it’s still more heretical to egalitarian progressives, for whom making migration and belonging an elite privilege offends every premise of inclusion and social justice.

It’s clear in Bukele’s visa announcement that he sees global mobility in these terms, as desirable only at small scale and for elites. El Salvador’s population is smaller than that of London; these 5,000 visas represent, he declares, “less than 0.1% of our population, so granting them full citizen status, including voting rights, poses no issue”. Though he doesn’t elaborate on what kind of “issue” large-scale immigration might “pose”, we might perhaps point to the undertone of ethnic lobbying that increasingly characterises politics in very “diverse” parts of the UK, as minority voting blocs grow large enough to sway the political process.

Right-wing progressives, by contrast, propose to learn from the immigration policies of polities such as Singapore and the Gulf states, and avert the political challenges posed by ethnic voting blocs by imposing tiered citizenship for low-skilled migrants, while courting the wealth and productivity of international elites. It’s a far cry from 20th-century conservatism, which until relatively recently assumed a measure of cultural continuity between national elites and the masses. Instead, Bukele’s proposal suggests a pragmatic two-tier Right-wing progressive migration policy that courts rich, productive, geographically rootless international “Anywheres” of the kind long understood to have more affinity with one another than with less wealthy and more rooted “Somewheres” — but to do so while explicitly protecting cultural homogeneity on behalf of the less-mobile masses.

More from this author

Why we demand Kate's sacrifice

By Mary Harrington

There are larger structural reasons for such pragmatism, not least that population growth is slowing or going into reverse across most of the planet. At the same time, impelled by easier transportation, climate change, social-media promises of better lives elsewhere, and countless other reasons, people everywhere are on the move. As such, like a global game of musical chairs, a battle is now on for who ends up where, once the music stops — and on what terms.

How do you choose who is invited? And how do you keep unwanted demographics out? Within an egalitarian progressive framework, these are simply not questions that one may ask. Within the older, cultural conservative framework, meanwhile, all or most migration is viewed with suspicion. The Right-wing progressive framework, by contrast, is upbeat about migration — provided it’s as discerning as possible, ideally granting rights only to elite incomers and filtering others aggressively by demographics, for example an assessment of the statistical likelihood of committing crime or making a net economic contribution.

Of course, this depends on elite incomers wanting to settle in your country. And it remains to be seen whether this will be the case for El Salvador. But however this initiative goes, Bukele’s second term will be the point where both Salvadoreans and international watchers get to evaluate his progressive experiment. And those future-oriented Right-wingers currently plotting in the shadows in other countries will doubtless learn from it.

In Britain, meanwhile, whatever happens to the Tories, I suspect we’ll see more of the Right-wing progressives. I find many of their policies unnerving, especially on the biotech side; but theirs is a political subculture with optimism and a story about the future, two traits that go a long way in politics. And after a few years of the Starmy Army, who knows where Britain will be? Perhaps we’ll be tired of progress. But I think it more likely that we’ll be tired of egalitarianism, and eager for some progress — any progress — towards a future that feels more hopeful.

“People are thoughtless all the time,” writes Alexandra Hudson in her new book, The Soul of Civility, while arguing that the best way to depolarise our society is to recognise that good people can have bad ideas. This idea is classically Christian, but also fundamentally American: even after the Civil War, a central tenet of Reconstruction was that those who fought for the Confederacy should be given grace for having chosen the wrong side. But that’s a principle it’s easier to hold to in the wake of victory than in the fog of war — or, as this past week’s events have reminded us, War Discourse.

The response from certain corners of the progressive Left to the stories coming out of Israel has been extraordinary. The silhouette of a paragliding Hamas militant has been adopted by groups ranging from Black Lives Matter to the Democratic Socialists of America — a graphic successor to that Che Guevara block print that used to hang on every dorm room wall. A crowd on the steps of the Sydney Opera House in Australia chanted “gas the Jews”. A cheer went up in Times Square at the news that 700 Israelis had been killed. And among the academic and media classes, a series of statements ran the gamut from half-hearted condemnations of the terrorist attacks to triumphant and bloodthirsty snarling.

“What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers,” wrote Najma Sharif, a writer for Soho House magazine and Teen Vogue. “Today should be a day of celebration for supporters of democracy and human rights worldwide,” tweeted Rivkah Brown of Novara Media. The language varied, but the sentiment was the same: this is good, actually, and seeing it should fill you with the same cathartic glee as any underdog story. Don’t you see? This isn’t terrorism; it is justice.

Who has time to care about civility when the world is burning down? Three nights ago, I was part of an audience on East 46th Street listening to Hudson explain the relationship between civility and “the norms of the practice of war” — norms which, of course, Hamas has explicitly chosen to subvert in its targeting and killing of civilians. The next day, on the phone, I asked her what civility looks like in an age of extreme polarisation.

Suggested reading

Why should I love Hamas?

By Giles Fraser

“Human nature hasn’t changed,” she said. (Her references include many ancient texts.) “But the ubiquity of our interconnectedness… that is different, that is new, and it presents new challenges to civility. It can coarsen us and desensitise us to the suffering of others when we’re imbibing it all the time.”

The war in Israel, and the one in Ukraine: it’s not hard to see how our distance from these events, combined with the immediacy of so much coverage and conversation about them, lends itself to the most grotesque kind of rubbernecking. It’s war as spectator sport; people haggle over the reports of Hamas beheading babies with the same energy as a group of armchair referees debating an off-side call.

Some people, anyway. The term “luxury beliefs” was coined to describe how privileged progressives like to traffic in this sort of unhinged extremist rhetoric. Partly, it’s a hazard of their utter insulation from ever having to experience the practical impact of the policies they advocate. Violence and chaos have a way of breaking through the barriers that separate the ivory tower-dwellers from the masses they condescend; one imagines the occupants of Versailles looked out their windows at the guillotine being constructed in the public square and, not understanding what lay in store, pronouncing the structure adorable.

But it’s also what happens when you succumb to the Manichean worldview that every conflict, every issue, boils down to a simple question of who is the more oppressed party. Whichever guy has more privilege, more power: this is your villain. In trying to topple him from his unearned position of influence, his victim can do no wrong. Hamas, composed as it is of Muslim people of colour, is merely punching (and raping, and kidnapping) up.

While the attacks on Israel have given rise to a particularly stomach-turning iteration of this rhetoric, we have seen it before. In 2020, as the US protests against police violence spiralled out of control, members of the laptop class could reliably be found posting that Martin Luther King Jr quote about riots being “the voice of the unheard” — always from the safety of their homes, in nice neighbourhoods, in coastal cities, where things were conspicuously not on fire. The people looting, rioting, and wreaking havoc were members of an oppressed class, and hence above reproach.

But the most absurd example of how true-life horrors become grist for the mill of perverse progressive fantasy popped up downstream of the “decolonisation” discourse. Every now and then, someone announces on the internet that they would begrudgingly allow themselves to be murdered if Native Americans decided to violently re-exert ownership over their ancestral lands. The authenticity of such sentiments is obviously belied by the fact that these same people could, if they wanted to, voluntarily renounce their power instead of waiting for some noble savage to take it by force. If you truly believed yourself to be a colonist, illegitimately squatting on someone else’s property, why would you waste time tweeting about it? Wouldn’t you just leave?

But surely it’s hardly worth pointing this out. The offensiveness of such a line of speculation is exceeded only by its impossibility; we could just leave its proponents alone to play in their ghoulish little sandbox, with their terrible little toys. And yet this, too, would be uncivil.

“Civility doesn’t require forgetting, it doesn’t require sweeping grievances under the rug,” says Hudson. “It requires confronting people with their mistakes, misjudgements, misdeeds. To do anything else is to see them as a child, as lesser.”

Suggested reading

Harvard is a national disgrace

By Jacob Howland

If civility demands that we hold people to account for the hatred they spew, it also rejects the notion that a person of an “oppressed” identity category should get a free pass to spew hatred. The bar for human decency, surely, does not shift depending on the colour of your skin or the arrangement of your genitals — and to insist on this, on one standard for all people, creates a clear path forward, which may be the best thing about civility as an ethos. It works on the assumption that, as bleak as things are now, there will be an “after” in which we forgive, even if we don’t forget.

A day after her “celebration” post, Rivkah Brown deleted it, and wrote the following: “I responded too quickly and in a moment of heightened emotion. Witnessing Palestinians defy decades of oppression hardened me to the suffering of Israeli civilians, including my friends and family, and I regret that. I’m sorry.”

Of course the human instinct, as demonstrated in the replies to her post, is to not accept the apology. The hazard of finding oneself on the moral high ground is that it becomes difficult not to revel in being up there, and not to kick at least a little dirt down onto the person grovelling below you. “Self-sacrifice is not our natural way of thinking or taking action,” Hudson writes in The Soul of Civility. “The Book of Proverbs from the Hebrew Bible goes so far as to charge us to ‘bind [these teachings] around our neck,’ as we are prone to forget them.”

As I left Hudson’s event on Tuesday night, I found the street closed off. Instead of cars, the pavement was occupied by hundreds of people holding signs and banners and flags: the remnants of what had been a massive rally in support of Israel. I would later learn that some people present were captured on camera wishing for the annihilation of Palestine; no one side, as it turns out, has a monopoly on hatred.

As I weaved through the crowd, Leonard Cohen’s “You Want it Darker” was playing through my headphones, a fitting meditation on war, death, and the cruelty we inflict on each other in the name of a just cause.

They’re lining up the prisoners
And the guards are taking aim
I struggle with some demons
They were middle-class and tame
I didn’t know I had permission
To murder and to maim

The chorus to this song is a Hebrew word, a line from the Torah. It’s what Abraham says, in response to God’s request that he sacrifice his son; it is also what we might say to each other, eventually, when civility or decency or whatever deity you believe in asks us to confront and forgive each other’s failings in this moment, the better to thrive in the moments we have left.

Hineni, hineni. I’m ready, I’m ready.

And this rising tide of liberal apostasy, coupled with a growing pushback from grassroots businesses and consumers, represents a far more profound challenge to the established order than the one routinely mounted by conservatives. In the Renaissance, the impetus for change did not come from Jews, Muslims, devil-worshippers or pagans, but devout Christians such as Erasmus, Luther and Calvin.

In our era, the most powerful critics of progressive theology once again tilt to the Left: Andrew Sullivan, Matt Taibbi, Ruy Teixeira, to name but three. Their apostasy rises to uphold the basic principles once central to liberalism — equality of opportunity, free speech, and open inquiry. This battle is also reminiscent of the struggle waged by the Renaissance critics of the all-powerful Catholic Church. Today, it’s not bishops or popes who seek control, but the oligarchs and their media platforms which, with the sometimes exception of Twitter, favour a censorship regime that brands dissidents largely as purveyors of “misinformation”.

Like earlier apostates, religious or scientific, ours face an uphill struggle. They must contend with forces within the C-suite and, particularly, academia, where even the sciences are now constrained by ideological edicts. This is where the money flows, often to a host of non-profits, some secretly funded, that spread the gospels of censorship, police reduction, indoctrination in schools and an apocalyptic environmental agenda. One problem the apostates face is therefore an obvious one: despite often impressive media resumes, their research rarely makes it into the mainstream, their voices being carried no further than Twitter, Substack and the more broad-minded corners of the media.

This pushback comes at a propitious time, extending beyond a few dissident intellectuals to the grassroots and business moguls such as Elon Musk, Ken Griffin and Bernie Marcus. The latter, in particular, understand that the new progressive orthodoxy undermines the entire system by embracing anti-capitalist memes and reducing the role of merit in a system built around it. And so a critical front has been the rebellion against ESG (environmental, social, governance) standards. Many US states have moved to take their pension funds out of firms that embrace this ideology; some investment houses, notably Vanguard and upstart Thrive Asset Management, are eschewing corporate policies that stress climate change and other issues over fiduciary obligation to investors.. The fact that returns to ESG firms have been poor, when compared with those tied to fossil fuels and basic industries, could presage a further awakening among financial and business leaders that the balance sheet, rather than ideological back-slapping, constitutes the primary mission of business.

More important still, apostasy is also rising among the general population. The pressure for reparations, for example, is opposed by upwards of two-thirds of Americans. All major ethnic groups, notes Pew, reject race quotas, including African-Americans; overall, almost three in four oppose this, as do a majority of both Democrats and Republicans.

In the race debate, the role of black apostates is particularly critical. As John McWhorter has long argued, preferential policies encourage “therapeutic alienation” among black people and other minorities — leading some to adopt a mentality of “anger and scapegoating”, instead of doing “the work needed for success”. In the bizarre world of modern progressivism, any opposition to this agenda is “racist”, even if it comes from people who support equal rights and access to opportunity. Critics of race-based discrimination such as McWhorter and Glenn Loury are far from Klansmen incarnate.

Similarly, assaults on European culture have proven unlikely to win over the masses in these countries, the bulk of whom still express some pride in their heritage. The notion that Western societies are eternally oppressive and racist seems a bit of a stretch given that millions of Africans, Middle Easterners, and south Asians continue to flock to these countries, largely to experience higher levels of economic and cultural freedom. The progressive assault on heritage also is likely to stir up far-Right sentiment, as we can see in France, Denmark, and, perhaps most dangerously, Germany.

The ever-more edgy cultural agenda of the Left, particularly its obsession with transgenderism, provides additional fuel for apostasy. People generally believe in the existence of two genders, and are hostile to efforts to impose either sexual or explicitly political curricula on young people. The idea of parental rights, for example — making sure parents are informed if their child decides to transition — has broad support, including nearly four-fifths of Californians, reflecting what appear to be national trends. In defiance of the transgender advocacy from the White House down, the opposition to sporting categories based on gender, rather than sex, has actually grown over the last two years, with even more Democrats now opposed to the practice than in favour.

Critically — and, no doubt, shocking for some — many opposing the progressive agenda are themselves minorities. In Britain and Europe, for example, Muslims tend to be more religious and socially conservative than whites, and Indians, particularly Hindus, have been drifting Right-wards for a generation. In America, surveys show that foreign-born Americans are also more culturally conservative than the native-born.

Perhaps the most economically significant apostasy relates to climate-change policy. Despite growing moves to censor contrary opinions, here the liberal apostates are not classic deniers or oil company executives, but respected scientists such as former Obama advisor Steve Koonin, and climate scientists Roger Pielke and Judith Curry. Even some environmentalists — including Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore — openly denounce “Net Zero” and “de-growth” policies as both impractical and deeply flawed. They recognise that these policies are already leading to the immiseration of poorer people, particularly in California and Germany. They are not calling for an end to climate change mitigation, but for policies that are more realistic and less economically damaging for the working and middle classes.

And then there are grassroots protests at European governments’ attempts to impose emission reductions on farmers and ban chemical fertilisers — regulatory moves at a time when food prices are rising throughout the West. Efforts to reduce agricultural output, now being suggested in the United States and Canada, also could have dire consequences for billions in the developing world. It’s hardly surprising, then, that there is growing scepticism about climate policies globally; in surveys, it barely registers as a priority for people either in Africa or the US where, according to Gallup, climate is stated as a primary concern for barely 2% of the population.

Other troubles, notably the loss of industry amid soaring energy costs, are already creating a popular backlash, which has been a boon for the far-Right in Germany and Italy, among others. Some centrist regimes have taken fright, with France’s Emmanuel Macron stepping back from climate extremism. Less than a year ago, Germany signed an EU target to ban the sale of cars with internal combustion engines by 2035, but quickly backtracked.

Overall, for all the talk of ideological polarisation, public opinion may well be tilting more towards the apostates than those of the progressive zealots. Despite the media profile of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow “Squad” members, the majority of Democrat members consider themselves moderate or conservative, while barely one in four sees themselves as “very liberal”.

Of course, even with public support, supporters of traditional liberal values face a number of challenges when it comes to enacting meaningful political change. But there is some good news. Many companies are now rethinking their marketing strategies in the face of negative consumer reaction. There are even glimmers of hope for liberal apostasy in some big cities, as demonstrated by the election of New York’s pro-police Eric Adams and San Francisco’s recall of progressive school board members.

As was the case during the Reformation, the apostate’s course is still not an easy one. But their critique remains critical to undermining the current progressive theology — a far more effective weapon than the reactionary antics of DeSantis, which are focused primarily on Right-leaning GOP voters. In contrast, the apostates speak the same language and share many of the values that once constituted progressive ideals. They are, in other words, both the key to restoring rationality — and to keeping liberalism alive for future generations.

Yet while Mill’s text was written as a defence of the requisite conditions for a liberal society, today it is self-described conservatives who are most likely to invoke its arguments. If it was the free-thinkers in the Victorian era who were likely to be “canceled” by religious traditionalists — the source of most immediate concern for Mill — today the situation is the opposite. Conservatives and “classical liberals” of various stripes today regularly invoke Mill as a refutation against the oppressiveness of the progressives. One of America’s more prominent religious conservatives, the Catholic legal theorist Robert George of Princeton University, has become among the most prominent of Millian free speech defenders. “[We should] go back to John Stuart Mill,” he characteristically suggested last year. “Having legal protection for free, robust discourse in place is one thing, and it’s a very important thing, and it’s, as I say, a necessary thing, but it’s not sufficient. In addition to those legal norms protecting free speech, we need to build a culture of free speech.”

However, it is far from clear that Mill would be pleased by these new admirers of his work. Indeed, there’s good reason to believe Mill would be deeply gratified by the new progressive hegemony his arguments have produced. Mill’s case on behalf of liberty was not, as today’s conservatives and libertarians mistakenly believe, an argument for freedom of expression as an end in itself, but rather, a means toward a further end: regime change. The regime he hoped to overturn was the custom-bound society of Victorian England, as well as the traditional civilisation of the West more broadly, particularly its classical and Christian inheritance. The regime he hoped to usher in was none other than the progressivism that now dominates the major institutions of the West.

Throughout his text, Mill is clear that liberty is a means of displacing what he called “the despotism of custom”. Robert George is correct that Mill’s concern was less the narrowly legal defence of free speech, expression and action, and more a worry about the spectre of social conformity. Mill begins his text by arguing that an earlier generation of philosophers and political actors had secured formal liberalism — limited government and political representation of the demos. He observed that formal liberty was ultimately useless in a society that remained bound by traditional opinion — the social “tyranny of the majority”. His aim, then, was to secure the social conditions of liberty, aligning an increasingly liberal political order with what were less liberal civic, social and private domains.

Social conformity for Mill took a particular form: the untoward social dominance of the many over a small minority of people who were marked by distinctive features of “individuality”. The oppression he decried percolated from the bottom-up, an informal but nevertheless pervasive way of life that was reflected in society’s customary practices. In Mill’s Victorian era, such customs included what might still be categorised as “manners and morals”, regulating informally but powerfully everything from dress to forms of address, table manners to social comportment, expectations of church attendance to avoidance of visible vices. Of course, it also involved social conformity to traditional sexual roles and behaviour, distinguishing between men and women, exerting strong pressure toward marriage, and dispersing the norm that marriage was the necessary institution in which children were born and sheltered, provided for by the man and typically raised primarily by the mother. This web of social expectations constituted a form of “despotism”, and for Mill, its source and most powerful enforcer was everyday people. His philosophy was an argument of how to liberate the unique, inventive, free-thinking few from the oppression of the herd-like, tradition-bound, narrow and unadventurous many. Liberty was the means of moving the social order from one that was conservative to one that was liberationist.

Indeed, Mill is clear that what he seeks is a society that is progressive. Customary societies — the “greater part of the world,” in fact — have “no history”. Here, Mill meant not that nothing happens in such societies, but that in tradition-bound settings, the future extensively resembles the past. By “history”, Mill means progress: a society of constant change, disruption, and transformation. For Mill, humans do not have a fixed nature, but rather are defined for the capacity to change and transform in unexpected and unpredictable ways. Humans are, he states, “progressive beings”, but their capacity to realise their potential for transformation can only be developed in progressive — and not customary — societies.

For Mill, progress only occurs when the distinctive genius, originality and adventurousness — the “individuality” — of rare individuals is liberated from the oppressiveness of the masses. In traditional societies, such unique individuals are thwarted from engaging in “experiments in living”. It is not sufficient to have formal rights to liberty, including free speech and freedom of expression: because of the “despotism of custom”, and the growing political influence of ordinary people, such individuals will need both active political protection from the masses, and, better yet, eventually enjoy political control.

So he wrote: “There needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them” [emphasis mine]. Mill recognised that ever-more democratic societies would likely be not just socially dominated, but politically dominated, by the backward views of ordinary people. The main project of On Liberty, as well as his work Considerations of Representative Government, is how to secure, in the first instance, the political dominance of the progressive element of society, and thus ensure that the traditionalism of the social order first be restrained, subsequently sequestered, and ultimately transformed in a more progressive direction.

The great obstacle to the emergence of a progressive elite was the pervasiveness of ordinary opinion — the “conservatives” for which Mill had such withering disdain. Mill had nothing but contempt for the backwardness of ordinary people, a view that to this day remains a hallmark of self-described “progressives”. Society, he bemoaned, was governed by the “mediocrity” and “low state of the human mind” of the “masses”. He hoped that a small group of “eccentrics” would arise and, perhaps by persuasion of the “more highly gifted and instructed One or Few”, would exercise authority over the masses.

Yet, as a potential backstop to the difficulty of persuading such a mediocre mass, he also commended a system of plural voting in which those with higher attainments of education would be given more votes. Of less importance than the mechanism of progressive dominance was that there be some means of avoiding their being politically swamped by the masses — what can be done today, for instance, by media control and dominance of the education, suffices for what Mill hoped plural voting might achieve. Above all, the demos must be prevented from thwarting progress.

In place of the despotism of custom, Mill proposed the despotism of progress. Only when we understand that, for Mill, liberty is a means to progress, and not a good in itself, can we grasp some of the more seemingly jarring arguments contained in On Liberty. At the very opening of his text, Mill acknowledges that his argument for extensive liberty is meant only for societies that are already shifting in a progressive direction, such as England or the United States. Most nations, as he later acknowledges, “have no history” — in other words, they are not yet on a path of progress, and thus are not yet suited for liberty.

Suggested reading

Should America be more like Ukraine?

By Mark Lilla

In such cases, he writes on the sixth page of a text titled On Liberty, “despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided their end be improvement, and the means justified by effecting that end”. These words are often excused by Mill’s partisans as the time-bound prejudices of a man shaped by his years working for the East India Company — and doubtless, they reflect a widespread sentiment. But they were, and remain today, a view endemic to a progressive mindset, particularly among those who believe themselves to be more progressed, and therefore entitled, to govern despotically over those who are deemed deplorable.

On Liberty, then, is shrewdly mistitled. Had Mill wanted to highlight its more fundamental theme, it would rather have been titled On Progress. Liberty was never its main object; rather, liberty was the mechanism that would transform a traditional, bottom-up social order into a top-down progressive liberal regime. His text sought to align the extant liberal political order, based in theories of radical individual autonomy, with a yet-unrealised progressive social order dominated by those at liberty to engage in ever-more radical “experiments in living”.

Mill stated that the liberty of a progressive society constitutes a temporary, intermediary condition. “As mankind improve[s]” — that is, as we progress, and become more “progressive” — “the number of doctrines which are no longer disputed or doubted will be constantly on the increase: and the well-being of mankind may almost be measured by the number and gravity of truths which have reached the point of being uncontested.” Those who believe that the homogeneity of viewpoint in modern institutions such as universities constitutes a betrayal of Millian principles have not been reading their Mill.

For he is no ally of today’s so-called “conservatives”, who look to him for assistance in securing minuscule platforms in an otherwise dominant progressive academy or wider progressive social and political order. What they fail to understand is that the academy, as well as society as a whole, has been transformed in perfect conformity to Millian ambitions: institutions dominated by progressive elites who impose their social radicalism upon the rest of society. The charges that such “liberals” are hypocrites for failing to live up to the ideals of the university, or that they are “illiberal”, are therefore non-starters — progressive dominance is, in fact, the realisation of exactly the vision for society first articulated by Mill. Today’s “conservatives” pick up On Liberty and believe they are holding a shield against progressive despotism, but what they have found is a sword that progressives no longer need and now have readily discarded.

Rather than look to Mill, those seeking to resist today’s progressive totalitarianism should, as Orwell recommended, “look to the proles”. Just as Mill effected a “regime change”, we should look to do the same by aligning ourselves with the instinctive traditionalism of the demos that Mill deplored. In either regime, some theoretical condition of “true liberty” is purely fictional and not an aim requisite for a flourishing society. We will either have today’s “despotism of progress” or the “restoration of good custom”. In the hopes of encouraging the latter, it is time for a revolution against the revolution.

Yet for all its claims to represent the future, this ephemeral economy is starting to unravel, as the world begins to wake up to the fundamental realities underlying daily life. It turns out that, while they may seem old-fashioned in today’s digital world, material goods actually matter when they are hard to procure. Over the past year, traditional industries such as manufacturing, agriculture and energy have thrived, while media companies have lost $500 billion in value and tech firms have suffered a reversal of an astounding $4 trillion. Today, it’s not steel companies or gas plants that are experiencing mass layoffs, but firms such as Goldman Sachs, Meta, Amazon and Google.

Indeed, after its decade-long bender, the progressive economy is about to wake up to a massive hangover. And its minions are getting restless. Companies such as Amazon and Starbucks — like their industrial predecessors during the Depression — face increased union militancy, an uncomfortable reality for long-time virtue-signallers such as Starbucks’s Howard Schultz, who has long portrayed himself as an enlightened model aristocrat. Discontent is even brewing in the media, with the New York Times now experiencing labour unrest. Across the board, a bitter truth is slowly coming into focus: skilful public relations no longer can make up for widening class distinctions.

Equally unsettling has been the incessant labour unrest at America’s universities. Amid mounting declines in enrolment, these lordly institutions have been exposed as exploitative, favouring a tenured faculty with rich pensions but offering little to severely underpaid adjuncts and teaching assistants, who now constitute the vast majority of the academic workforce. These are the folk now staging walkouts. The professoriate may see themselves as enlightened tools of right-on thinking, but to many others they seem like Stalin’s much maligned Kulaks, rich peasants thriving on the work of the poor.

Even the preferred geographic heart of the progressive economy — big, dense, expensive cities — is clearly fading. Today, most of those places dominated by progressives face mounting financial pressures, which are leading activists to demand higher taxes on the rich. With high-tech start-ups and high-wage jobs stagnating, in California, for example, a $100 billion state surplus is now widely expected to turn into a $25 billion deficit next year. Ultra-blue New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts also face potentially large, and expanding, shortfalls.

As these progressive economies unravel, we are likely to see greater conflict between their two bulwarks: the Leftist activists and ultra-rich oligarchs who have embraced causes as a part of their identity. This profoundly contradictory romance could soon explode, as calls for an expanding and intrusive welfare state — the prime goal of the modern Left — becomes increasingly unpalatable for the wealthy. In flush years, these oligarchs could afford elaborate welfare and climate policies to flourish, even at their considerable expense. But increasingly, particularly since the pandemic, wealthy individuals are bailing to low-cost places such as Florida. Elsewhere, governors such as New York’s Kathy Hochul and California’s Gavin Newsom may express worries about new tax-the-rich schemes, but they will soon have to face off with determined, increasingly radical elements in the Democratic Party more interested in promoting class warfare and “climate justice” than sustaining the local economy.

Of course, the root of this conflict is bipartisan. The rapid decline of Trumpism, and its transformation into a kind of weird cult, has ripped off the adhesive that united the ultra-rich, the militant activists and the party machine. Silicon Valley still retains its close ties to Democrats but the big money is shifting somewhat towards the GOP. Even long-time progressive funders such as Nike’s Phil Knight have had enough, and put $1 million behind the Republican candidate for Governor in Oregon.

More from this author

How New York can survive

By Joel Kotkin

The pandemic has also played a critical role in this evolution, first boosting tech, real estate, and stock prices to historic highs — and then forcing interest rates to increase, as the pandemic eased and the cost of massive bailouts, supply chain issues and inflation became clear. Real estate prices, particularly in elite office districts, plummeted, while stocks lost their appeal. The market for digital products began to sag and, in the case of cryptocurrency, collapsed.

Crucially, inflation on food, energy and home prices hits traditional Democratic constituencies the hardest. It’s unsurprising that those most affected by shortages in the labour market are not graduates of Oberlin or other elite liberal colleges. Instead, the big demand, notes former California labour commissioner Michael Bernick, is for people who can drive a truck, construct a house, change beds, or perform nursing duties. Venture capitalist and AI entrepreneur Rony Abovitz suggests the future may be brighter for people who can install plumbing systems than those who perform tasks easily done by machine. “It’s the end of the white-collar knowledge work,” Abovitz told me. Instead, he predicts the coming years will be shaped more by the rise of the “sophisticated, technically capable blue-collar worker”.

A political programme that focused on increasing training in these fields might, therefore, seem reasonable. And yet today the usual progressive solution is to conjure solutions from above, such as rapid rises in minimum wages and extending welfare benefits, rent control and regulatory oversight of companies. All of which sounds nice on paper; the problem is that many blue states may soon no longer have the money to pay these freebies.

Suggested reading

The year the West erased women

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

After all, it is not just blue-collar industries that are moving away from the bluest states. Over the past five years, finance, business services, business management and even tech companies are shifting from New York, LA, Chicago and San Francisco to places such Austin, Dallas, Salt Lake and Raleigh-Durham. Worse, many of these businesses are joining the general population and much of the middle class in ditching progressive states for more conservative places such as Texas, Tennessee and Florida, which offer better opportunities and lower housing costs.

Whether the Democrats can stem this exodus will be decided by who dominates the progressive world over the next year. The moderate Democrats, some assert, did well in the midterms and certainly represent a larger group than the progressives. But ultimately, the party’s heart belongs to the favourites of the Left — Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, as well as beloved losers such Stacey Abrams and Beto O’Rourke.

Yet perhaps the main problem the party faces is how to expand the welfare state without killing off its key sources of income. The prioritisation of progressive issues such as transgender bathrooms and reparations may swiftly seem outdated as the economy unravels, more people suffer, and widespread pessimism about the future grows. Elsewhere, too, other issues look set to further fracture this fragile progressive alliance — such as the relentless drive for an increasing number of draconian climate policies. Activists push for “climate justice” but are rightly discomforted by the reality that, for many of the ultra-wealthy, climate policies provide just another opportunity to enrich themselves by exploiting government subsidies for the “energy transition”. Meanwhile, working-class people, such as those in the automobile industry, face cuts in a China-dominated electric car industry, higher energy prices and the likely loss of jobs.

If this happens, it’s hard not to see how conflict won’t erupt. The long period of progressive success has relied on an alliance that is turning sour — and the upstairs/downstairs coalition, nurtured by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and amplified by a complacent media, now seems destined to endure an almost inevitable period of internecine conflict.

Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that certain folks want to see her run for president — or are terrified that she will. One article by former GOP creative strategist Myra Adams called Mrs Obama the Democrats’ “break-glass-in-case-of-emergency-candidate”, noting that her “limitless” fundraising ability and “winner’s aura” would make her not just a frontrunner in the primary but an uncontested one whom no other Dem would dare challenge. Meanwhile, presented with the prospect of a 2024 Michelle Obama candidacy, one anonymous Right-wing activist gasps: “God help us.”

Luckily for Republicans, God need not be involved; Michelle Obama has been unequivocal about her total lack of desire to run for office, recently saying that it’s the one question she detests above all others.

But, then, the eagerness surrounding the idea has little to do with Obama herself and lots to do with an overall sense that the wives of presidents, at least the Democratic ones, are not just political spouses but political spouses. This is partly to do with Hillary Clinton being the first FLOTUS-turned-aspiring-POTUS, but perhaps more to do with the prevalent (and not necessarily incorrect) sense that women can and should be doing more in the world than standing behind a man, even if that man is the leader of the free world. Gone are your grandmother’s first ladies, baking cookies and hosting social events and carefully choosing their pet projects from a pre-selected list of distinctly feminine causes. Dissolved is the unofficial role of America’s Homemaker-in-Chief.

More from this author

Is Obama sabotaging Biden?

By Kat Rosenfield

Michelle Obama is, indeed, like no other First Lady before her — but this includes the ones who came right before her. Her new book, The Light We Carry, is less a political memoir, than an inspirational guide; certainly it could not be farther in tone or subject matter from Hillary Clinton’s What Happened, a grim post-mortem on her failed 2016 run for President. Over the course of 10 chapters, Obama emphasises communication, connection, and common humanity; she reflects on her role as a wife, a mother, a daughter, and a friend. The whole thing is unmistakably and unabashedly classy, to the point where if Obama recalls any of her predecessors, it’s more Jackie Kennedy than Hillary Clinton: a person without leadership aspirations who nevertheless ends up leading by example.

Michelle Obama’s values and principles are classically liberal, which is to say they’re out of style on the Left — dismissed as respectability politics by people whose preferred political setting is level-11 rage. Publicity seems to nod to current progressive pieties: the blurb promises a look at “issues of race, gender, and visibility”. In it, Obama does occasionally use language that feels borrowed from more polarising authors (the term “black bodies” appears here and there, as if it accidentally wandered into the text from an adjacent book by Ibram X. Kendi), but these elements are far less prominent than one might imagine — or than the media’s insatiable hunger for stories of racialised conflict might make it seem.

The most striking thing about the book is how consciously she veers away from the divisive framing that’s such a hallmark of Left-wing political discourse in 2022. “Most of my earliest memories of being different have nothing to do with being Black,” Obama writes early on in the chapter, “Am I Seen?” Being black did eventually make Obama different, and she does eventually get to this part. But as a child in a largely-black Chicago school, she stood out not for the colour of her skin but her height.

Obama was a tall child. It made her at once hyper-visible and easily dismissed — always in the back row or last in line, owing to the obsession among elementary school teachers with lining up students from shortest to tallest. She describes the moment of dismay she experienced as a high school student watching the cheerleaders tumble across the basketball court and realising that “some of those girls were approximately the size of one of my legs”. (Obama, like her husband, unlike her predecessor, can be very funny.) What’s remarkable here is the relatability. Who among us didn’t experience a moment like this in the throes of puberty: a self-consciousness so heightened that your very existence seemed like an embarrassment too awful to bear?

Suggested reading

Barack Obama was a false hope

By Justin Webb

It’s to Obama’s credit that she gives this credit to her audience: she knows they’ll nod along, recognising their own experiences in hers. This shouldn’t be a significant thing for the memoir of a high-profile Democrat to do — but it is. Operating in a sea of awareness-raising tomes, whose readership is meant to include many if not mostly white women, she is a rare thing: an author who treats those readers charitably rather than with scathing contempt. She gives them the benefit of the doubt, not just that they are capable of empathy, but also that her own experiences are universal enough to empathise with.

If not for the fact that the term has already been coopted to describe a very different sort of ideology, you might even say that Obama’s attitude is inclusivity made manifest: an insistence that humanity recognises humanity, across boundaries, in spite of our differences. “I think the most we can ever do, really, is to walk partway across the bridge toward another person and feel humbled that we get to be there at all,” she writes.

And so this book, against the backdrop of contemporary American politics, does begin to seem like a political legacy of sorts, in spite of itself. It’s impossible not to notice echoes in The Light We Carry of the same pragmatism — and sometimes exasperation — that Barack Obama has exhibited in recent years when critiquing the excesses of the progressive Left. In 2019, the former president made headlines for noting “a sense among certain young people on social media that the way of making change is to be as judgemental as possible about other people”, before telling them to cut it out.

Suggested reading

The problem with power couples

By Adrian Wooldridge

“This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re politically woke, and all that stuff — you should get over that quickly,” he said. “The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws.”

In her final chapter, titled “Going High”, Michelle Obama echoes these sentiments: “We’ve become adept at making noise and congratulating each other for it, but sometimes we forget to do the work,” she writes. “With a three-second investment, you may be creating an impression, but you are not creating change.” The subtext is clear, if unflattering to today’s keyboard warriors: You’re not helping. Calm down. Grow up.

The former president has come in for a not-insignificant amount of criticism over comments like these, denounced by one writer as “yet another needless prescription of acquiescence to a bloc of Americans on the wrong side of history”. It’s a fair bet that his wife, with this book, will invite a similar backlash from people who believe that going high, especially amid the looming threat of another Trump presidency, is a fool’s errand. Some people will even go so far as to create a new projection, a new ghost-self to join the others: Republicans will point to the book’s discussion of race, gender, and obnoxious Fox News commentators as evidence that the former first lady is far woker than she cares to admit, even as progressives who feel called out by the book accuse her of being a crypto-conservative.

But if Michelle Obama believed in going high even amid the outrage and agita of Donald Trump’s first bid for the White House, surely she won’t allow the more radical elements of her own side to drag her down into the mire now.

By the time Sacco landed at her destination and regained access to the Internet, her life had been turned upside-down. She had been branded a certified Bad Person by almost the entire Anglo-Twittersphere, including a reality TV star named Donald Trump. She was ultimately dismissed from her job.

Looking back, Sacco’s tweet may be seen as a world-historical pivot, Ground Zero for the cultural developments that characterised the 2010s: the return of Nineties-style “political correctness”; the swift destruction of lives by online mobs; the instantaneous capitulation of employers ; above all, the obscuration of important sociopolitical and material crises by a pathological obsession with language and offence-taking. Sacco, in short, inadvertently called forth the Woke Moment.

Now, nearly a decade later, the Post-Woke Moment is here. It’s a tenuous achievement, to be sure, and the woke still wield enormous political, economic and cultural power. Still, there are unmistakable signs of “a vibe shift”. In Britain, gender ideologues have suffered major setbacks, as authorities crack down on the malpractices of gender clinics. In the United States, the teaching of ahistorical nonsense in schools has run up against a wall of parental outrage. Even Netflix has told its censorious culture-managers to shut up or find another job.

The question is where we go from here. The two most plausible paths are restorationism and radicalism. (Many of the potential “third ways” ultimately collapse back into one of the two.) By restorationism, I mean an effort to turn the cultural clock back to roughly where things stood before Sacco self-destructed her life and career in 52 carelessly typed characters. The fundamental instinct of this path is that the matrix of social, economic, and cultural policy and practice that prevailed roughly a decade ago was sound. Into that happy arcadia of free speech and free markets was suddenly and for no reason injected the virus of Left-identitarianism, which conjured as a reaction the even more dangerous virus of Right-wing populism. The battle, then, is between individualists and “collectivists” of various stripes. Now that wokeism is faltering, restorationists feel, individualism must reign again.

The restorationists are essentially cautious conservatives. They believe that the sex-liberationism and gender-nominalism that have characterised the last 20 years were fine — a healthy and organic development of classical-liberal doctrine — but then suddenly things went too far with the “gender stuff”. Likewise, the liberal censoriousness of that era was fine, but then the far-Left adopted the same methods and went too far with “cancel culture”.

The dividing line between the authentic fruits of modern society and its freakish excesses was always blurry, and remains so to this day. The bigger problem for the restorationists is that, to paraphrase Mitterrand on 1968, the pre-Woke Moment contained in it many of the elements that gave rise to the Woke Moment. Restoring 2013, even if it were possible, would mean restoring the same internal contradictions — not least an obscenely unequal society, in material terms, that desperately needed the fake egalitarianism of wokeness as a legitimating ideology.

More from this author

The problem with anti-woke liberals

By Sohrab Ahmari

The second path is radicalism. By this, I don’t mean extremism, but a cold appreciation for the fact that the Woke Moment was rooted in, rather than a departure from, the class rivalries and material conditions of modern society. The contradictions that gave rise to wokeness, in other words, won’t be resolved unless we work for a decent and more materially equal society — a process that will require political confrontation and compromise between the three major classes: the asset-rich few, the managers who service their affairs, and the asset-less many.

Both of the post-woke camps — the restorationists and the far less numerous radicals — must contend with a powerful woke remnant. Even more so than the restorationists, the woke are fundamentally conservative. As I have argued before, by changing how we talk about society, and altering its managerial hierarchies, they seek to preserve the existing power structure. Only now, with a backlash brewing, they must change tack.

Anand Giridharadas’s new book, The Persuaders, is representative of this subtle shift in the woke camp. In it, he aims to “reinvigorate the idea of persuasion” at a time when too many Americans view each other as “alien, menacing, and, therefore, unchangeable”. He says he wants to reverse these trends — but mostly ends up replicating their logic, in page after interminable page of saccharine prose that recalls nothing so much as a piece of corporate diversity messaging. Giridharadas is a wokester trying to strike a restorationist-liberal pose.

Suggested reading

How Turbo-Wokism broke America

By David Samuels

The book starts out promising enough, with a discussion of the Russian troll farms that many liberals to this day blame for catapulting Donald Trump to the Oval Office. For Western elites struggling to explain rising populism, it couldn’t be that Trumpers, Brexiteers, and Gilets Jaunes revolted over legitimate grievances with progressive rule. No, it must have been Kremlin mind-control that propelled them. Where once it was chiefly the politically uneducated prole on the street who unreasonably suspected elites of conniving with nefarious foreigners, today it’s as often elites who imagine the common people are foreign agents or automatons.

Observing the workings of the troll farms up-close, Giridharadas draws a different conclusion: that the Kremlin’s influence operations merely exploited existing social discord. “As tempting as it may be to view the Russian operatives as instigators,” he writes, “to witness these moves is to witness a mission of amplification.” Even in 2016, this should have been apparent to anyone with enough faith in Americans to question their susceptibility to St. Petersburg-hatched memes depicting the Lord Jesus hugging Trump. Still, that a former New York Times columnist is now prepared to voice the obvious signifies something.

That something is, in a word, weakness: the yawning sense that despite their conquest of major institutions, progressives are alienated from broad swaths of the public. Big Tech and Hollywood, the HR department and the Central Intelligence Agency — all now speak in their vernacular. Yet comedians have begun to mock their inanities with impunity, the GOP is making electoral hay of the 1619 Project, and suburban moms are mobilising to defend the right of their sons to become merely gay men, rather than eunuchs.

Suggested reading

How far will the eco-fascists go?

By Mary Harrington

That’s where Giridharadas comes in, bearing both a warning and a hopeful omen for progressives. The warning is that unless the Left changes rhetorical course, its language and purity-policing will leave it isolated from the masses, its political causes moribund. The good news is that the Left can overcome this obstacle by making accommodations for those less enlightened than themselves. “Persuasion,” in other words, is just a matter of cultural progressives being a little nicer to the benighted many.

That, supposedly, is the great achievement of Linda Sarsour, the Palestinian-American feminist who in the aftermath of Trump’s election helped organise the Women’s March. Viewed through the lens of social class, the Great Pussy-Hat Uprising of 2017 was a movement of gentry wokeism, by gentry wokesters, for gentry wokesters. I would venture to say that it “persuaded” not a single true-believing Trumpian. So why does Giridharadas single her out as an exemplary “persuader”? Well, you see, Sarsour and her Women’s March co-founder Tamika Mallory made “a bet that a lot of their fellow activists and movement allies might not have made”: namely, working with ignorant, all-too-privileged, liberal white women.

Sarsour & Co. had to contend with the fact that it’s “difficult to deal with these white women”. But they did it all the same — a great sacrifice. Trump’s rise had thrust “white supremacy” into the spotlight but, nevertheless, the magnanimous, committed Sarsour was prepared to work with white women. In doing so, says Giridharadas with unspeakable earnestness, she defied Audre Lorde, who had insisted that women of colour shouldn’t seek to “educate white women… as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival”. Doing so, the great intersectional sage taught, “is a diversion of our energies and a tragic repetition of racist, patriarchal thought”. Nevertheless, Sarsour & Co. persisted.

Suggested reading

Are women more Left-wing?

By Mary Harrington

Likewise, we are supposed to cheer Sarsour for mildly questioning her fellow activists’ ruthless enforcement of gender pronouns. She told them:

“Everyone’s pronouns should be respected. But [for some of the activists] who are here, English is not their first language, and this is a very new concept for them. So I would ask for forgiveness, and I would ask if that would be something that maybe we’ll do next time when we’re together as we get these women through this process.”

Note that the pronouns themselves aren’t up for debate — or even a matter of persuasion. Everyone should adhere to the linguistic demands of gender ideology. It’s just that some people are new to these norms, and Sarsour’s great persuasive act lies in asking “for forgiveness” as she helps the ignorant “through this process” of mastering them.

Everyone is on a “journey” — a word that appears so frequently in Giridharadas’s text, it made me never want to leave home again. The destination is the same for all, but the author and his cast of characters are generous enough to allow that, for some, the “journey” might take longer or more circuitous paths. Giridharadas’s great persuaders are those brave few prepared to guide lesser beings to the higher gnosis of current Left commitments. Yet the rightness of the gnosis itself is never up for questioning. Thus, we meet another Left-wing activist who declares that masks are about keeping “my neighbours safe” (Giridharadas implicitly agrees, since he never introduces the slightest critical distance from his subjects). The activist’s “persuasiveness”, we are made to understand, lies in trying to find common ground with even those who don’t share this (unscientific) view of masking.

Another activist, a proponent of police abolition, encounters a woman of colour who wants more policing in her neighbourhood. She is not unusual: wider polling data shows that very few black and brown Americans want less policing in their neighbourhoods. Our activist, however, is held up as a model of persuasion because, rather than writing off the woman, she badgers her relentlessly, until she comes around to the view that maybe policing is bad.

Suggested reading

In defence of wokeness

By Tomiwa Owolade

Again, persuasiveness lies in “educating” the benighted, rather than genuinely listening to what they might have to say. Setting out to persuade progressives to be more persuasive, Giridharadas merely ends up ratifying the movement’s unbearable smugness. So much of what the author characterises as “persuasiveness” involves Left-liberals offering something like political-cum-psychological therapy to other Left-liberals. There is a camp, for instance — called Transracial Journeys, naturally — which offers guilt-ridden white parents a way to navigate their hang-ups over adopting black children (“I like to tell people that I’m a recovering racist,” confesses one mom).

Giridharadas’s account of persuasiveness reinforces the progressive tendency towards depoliticisation: contests over material conditions give way to therapeutic journeys for those at the top, with working-class people cast as the oafs and bigots in need of being coerced — if gently, as the author would have it — into enlightenment. It all ends up benefitting the culture-war Right and the restorationists, who are equally uninterested in improving the oiks’ material conditions, but at least don’t condescend to the many and call it persuasion.

This leaves it to the radicals to pursue a different politics, one that pays due attention to material reality and breaks through the culture-war deadlock. As one of the proponents of this approach, I admit that it is by far the more arduous alternative to merely restoring the status quo of 2013. Tech bros who think chief restorationist Bari Weiss talks good sense might be alienated and angry, but they’re not going to agitate against their own material interests. The suburban moms who are lacerating their woke school boards will never sign up for economic populism.

At best, the Post-Woke moment will be defined by a messy and unstable admixture of restorationism and radicalism, now countervailed by the regnant woke, now able to return the pressure with the help of pseudo-populist politicians — who would discipline Disney for pushing gender ideology, but not for underpaying its workers. As Justine Sacco no doubt did before her fateful flight, we would all be wise to buckle up.

Thirty-two years later, with the 2022 midterm elections looming, these attempts to promote civic engagement have changed their medium but not their message. Youth voter turnout is still seen as a matter of national urgency — only half of people under 30 voted in the most recent presidential election — and multiple organisations are now attempting to follow the Rock the Vote model to lure them to the polls. This brings us to a slick music video entitled “No Voting, No Vucking”, which was released last week. In it, rappers Trina and Saucy Santana narrate the story of a young black woman who matches with a promising-looking man on the dating app BLK. There’s just one, critical red flag: he doesn’t vote!

This relationship, per the video, is a non-starter: like the song says, no voting, no vucking. (At the risk of stating the obvious, the word “vucking” is phonetically indistinguishable from another, naughtier word.) This withholding — combined with plenty of no-holds-barred dancing — is enough to get the gentleman in question to change his ways. The song ends with an exchange of looks at the ballot box, then cuts to a shot of the awestruck man falling back on a bed, naked from the waist up.

Even by the standards of American raunch culture, this video is extraordinarily racy given the subject matter. (Consider the lyrics: “Don’t stop now, stuff my ballot box again.”) There is erotic cackling, lascivious lip-licking, gyrating bodies and sexual innuendo — but also whatever the opposite of innuendo is, as in the moment when Trina commands the listener to “gerrymander this coochie”, a turn of phrase that manages the remarkable twin achievements of being massively unsubtle while also making no sense. The fact that the audience cannot fail to get the message does not change the fact that the message is embarrassingly reductive.

More from this author

The American media's racism fantasy

By Kat Rosenfield

Predictably, both the marketing of the video and the initial reaction to it focused on its racial (or, perhaps, racist) valences. On the Left, writer Thomas Chatterton Williams lamented the “outrageously insulting sense that this kind of childishness is the authentic way to reach black audiences with political messages”. He has a point: there seems to be an assumption within the awareness-raising machine about what drives black Americans to vote. In 2020, there was a “Get Your Booty to the Polls” campaign featuring scantily-clad strippers and a cringe play on words (polls = poles, get it?). Much has also been made by critics of an apparent partnership between the makers of “No Voting No Fucking” and When We All Vote, a get-out-the-vote organisation founded by Michelle Obama, although the nature of the relationship is unclear. (Within the BLK app, engaging with the video will take users to the When We All Vote registration portal, but the organisation released a statement denying that they were at all involved in its production.)

On the Right, meanwhile, Rod Dreher denounced the video as “filthy”: “There are no depths of depravity too low for progressives.” The video’s evident partisan leanings — implicit in the message is that the target audience will not just vote, but vote blue — also led to much griping about the impossibility of a Right-wing group ever creating a similar advertisement. It’s true that GOP attempts to reach young voters tend to be savaged by Dems for being clueless and, in any assortment of ways, bigoted; a Republican ad implying that black men need to be lured to the polls with promises of sex would almost certainly be met with outrage.

Ah, but wait: this is not depravity, the Left countered, but culture! In response to Dreher’s tweet, actor Wendell Pierce (one of President Obama’s top fundraisers in 2012) replied: “You must know that this message comes directly from the Greek comedy of Lysistrata by Aristophanes, where the woman of Greece refuse sexual intercourse with their husbands until they end their wars. No depravity here. Ancient story.”

With respect to Pierce, “depraved” actually seems like a good word to describe a society in which women could neither vote nor own property; this “ancient story” would have almost certainly worked out differently if the women of ancient Greece weren’t treated like second-class citizens by their government. And defending this trope on the grounds that it’s a classic elides the weirdness of its ubiquity in a society built on equal rights, where “No Voting, No Vucking” is not just an ancient construction but one in perpetual use by contemporary culture warriors. Lysistrata took place in a milieu in which sexual withholding was the last resort of women who would have killed for the kind of power today’s Western women enjoy, yet sex strikes remain an ever-present spectre in the American feminist political discourse, in a way that makes our British counterparts in their “Never Kissed a Tory” T-shirts seem almost quaint.

The notion of sex as a political weapon for Left-wing women has been prevalent for at least as long as the notion that Republicans, with their hostility to gender equality and reproductive freedom, are engaged in a War on Women. By this logic, women must necessarily be Democrats — and must also necessarily have the power (or perhaps the responsibility) to extort the votes of less-enlightened men by any means possible.

Suggested reading

Do men love bitches?

By Louise Perry

The call for political change via sexual blackmail had its most recent resurgence after the fall of Roe v. Wade. Outraged women vowing sex strikes caused “abstinence” to trend on Twitter (the irony of this was not lost on conservatives). But this was only the latest iteration of a conversation that has been a fixture of the landscape since at least 2010, when it took the form of earnest questions as to whether cross-political pairings were even possible — questions which have since been answered with increasingly shrill iterations of the word “no”. The message is abundantly clear: a good feminist does not sleep with Republicans, or date them. Is your boyfriend a Trump voter? Dump him. Your husband? Divorce him. This is a war, ladies: which side are you on?

For a group of people who ostensibly believe in female agency and empowerment, the feminists preaching political sex strikes seem to miss several key points. For one thing, sexually blackmailing men into the voting booth does not guarantee that they’ll pull the lever for your preferred party, a problem to which the “no vucking” video seems particularly oblivious. One of the most closely-watched midterm elections is the Georgia governor’s race, in which Democratic hopeful Stacey Abrams is beginning to flail due to a marked lack of support from black men, who prefer the (white, male) incumbent. And the longtime Left-wing belief that racial and ethnic minorities can be relied upon to vote blue by default is beginning to look like dangerous overconfidence: the party has been haemorrhaging Hispanic voters in states like Florida and Texas.

But more broadly, the women willing to abstain from sex on political grounds are vastly outnumbered by women who feel no compunction about schtupping Republicans — because they want to, because they don’t care about politics, or even because they’re Republicans themselves. And with Democrats now facing the consequences of their pandemic policies, which included closing schools and forcibly masking toddlers — policies which were deeply and disproportionately disruptive to the lives of women in Left-leaning areas — it’s hardly guaranteed that the majority of women will support Dems this year.

Suggested reading

Liberals have a fetish problem

By Kathleen Stock

Meanwhile, despite the apparently widespread conviction that men can be led to the voting booth by the promise of sex, there are plenty of men for whom this sort of sexual manipulation is in itself a red flag. For every woman who has a personal policy of trying to sexually blackmail her partners into voting for her preferred candidate, there’s a guy whose personal policy is to avoid sleeping with self-advertised partisan lunatics — and the fragmentation of the dating landscape along party lines means that it’s only getting easier for people to match exclusively with those who share their political views. It’s not unusual for liberal users to filter matches by not just party affiliation but Covid vaccination status; meanwhile, Right-wing singles are gravitating to new apps designed just for conservatives. At some point, the question arises as to whether women passionately progressive enough to barter their bodies for their politics would even encounter Right-wing (or politically agnostic) men at all, let alone have the opportunity to sexually extort their votes.

But completely separate from being illogical, the calls for sex strikes — gendered as they are — are deeply and despicably sexist. This is something more than a gag T-shirt that says “WILL SUCK DICK FOR SOCIALISM”; it’s a slickly-produced political message that dresses up sexual quid pro quo as a form of feminist civic engagement. Here is a portrait of a world in which women are at once utterly Machiavellian yet completely neutered, in which sex is something they use but never desire, in which the physical act of love exists purely as a means to an end, and in which sexual availability is the ultimate (if not only) power a woman has in her arsenal. It’s a new riff on the old (and inane) notion that men have sex because they want sex, while women have sex because it helps them get something else: social status, a romantic commitment, a reassuring sense of their own desirability.

In this view, women are too something — smart, or cool, or elevated, or sophisticated — to feel anything so embarrassing as sexual desire, especially for that basest of creatures, the human male. In this view, in other words, women are not exactly people. That is, yes, an ancient story. But as a model for women’s lives in the year 2022, it’s not an especially good one.

Surely moral progress has stamped out such vicious, childish status games? Alas, no. “Contagion” provides the best explanation for why Italy’s new Prime Minister, a figure generally described by her own country’s press as “centre-Right”, has been widely described as “far-Right”. Never mind reporting accuracy, the aim is disciplinary: entire moral territories can be designated as low-status or unclean. If you touch them, you will incur Contagion.

The same dynamic also underpinned a rash of disputes last week, over the moral hygiene status of women who assert that humans can’t change sex. Such women were denied a stall at the Labour Party conference, prompting a furious salvo on Monday from Labour-supporting writer Joan Smith. Elsewhere, Arianne Shahvisi imputed recently in the London Review of Books that even otherwise impeccable Left-wingers are “in league with the far-Right” if they cling to the notion that humans are born either male or female.

And Shahvisi’s response to a letter protesting this framing recounts how a teacher shamed her by comparing her views to those of Margaret Thatcher. Shahvisi approvingly describes internalising the following lesson in political groupthink: “if you don’t like the fact that you share a view with someone objectionable, consider revising that view”.

Suggested reading

Why has Starmer banished feminists?

By Joan Smith

Contagion, you see, is a radically movable feast. There is no person, principle or — as evidenced by the expulsion of basic biology from acceptable Labour Party discourse — objective fact that can’t be rendered beyond the pale, if someone with enough social clout makes it the butt of a Contagion game. And those (such as, by her own account, Arianne Shahvisi) who are both socially attuned and morally ductile will fall uncomplainingly into line.

This poses a conundrum for those women who find themselves unable to follow Shahvisi across the line of principle-free tribalism into fairy-tales about the total malleability of our sexed bodies. These “gender critical” feminists are often otherwise fiercely, passionately Left-wing — or at least were, until the Contagion game abruptly re-designated them as fash.

Some bridle at having been thus infected, and seek to clear their own names — not least by launching drives to expel any taint of “the far-Right” from among their own ranks. The latest such skirmish, in a long-running battle, concerns a recent Brighton rally for women concerned about trans activism, organised by “Posie Parker”. Real name Kellie-Jay Keen, Posie is a punchy and highly recognisable activist, whose approach to campaigning against gender ideology has had considerable viral impact. The difficulty arises in her — for some — inexcusable willingness to share airtime with the Right.

But despite all the furious debate Posie Parker’s approach has occasioned over the years, efforts to insulate gender-critical activism from accusations of being anti-progressive may be futile. For a step back from the accusation and counter-accusation reveals that for those who still know biology exists, the enemy really is progress.

Suggested reading

What Giorgia Meloni is hiding

By Giles Fraser

Of course when adults play Contagion, its impact goes far beyond classroom jockeying for status at the expense of a low-status scapegoat. Real, material decisions, alliances and consequences arise depending on who is considered part of the in-group, and who can be scapegoated and excluded. In terms of how it’s played by the now-dominant progressive class that controls access to so many of those resources, defending yourself from contagion means accepting the implicit premise that there exists a substantive positive set of values, towards which Progress is, well, progressing. Aligning yourself with these purported positive values makes you one of the Good People.

What, then, does this look like where women are concerned? The women’s movement is of course rich and fractious, but when we look at the big-picture changes generally trotted out as the story of feminist progress — from gaining the vote, through leaving domesticity for the workplace to controlling fertility — it’s difficult to infer any governing theme except “freedom”.

Is this just a story about values, though? You can trace much the same narrative in terms of economic transitions and technological advances: changing work patterns, labour-saving devices and — crucially — control over reproduction. All of these, too, constitute “progress”, more convincingly from some perspectives than others: on closer inspection, most of the tech-driven changes that powered women’s march toward freedom are not unambiguously beneficial, but rather produce their own winners and losers. And often, the only party for whom “more freedom” has no trade-offs turns out to be commerce: the sexual revolution, for example, delivered pros and cons for both sexes, but only benefits for the sex industry.

More from this author

Peter Thiel on the dangers of progress

By Mary Harrington

“Progress”, then, is the name we give a replacement of natural limits by technological control, to the benefit chiefly of commerce. And for some time now it’s been plausible (at least for a bourgeois woman in the developed world) to act as though feminism, freedom and technology are in perpetual lockstep, as facets of “progress”. But cracks are beginning to appear.

For having freed women from a number of biophysical limits, science has rolled right on. Now, following the same broad trajectory of freedom and progress, many believe we should apply the same liberatory logic to all sexed limits. And why, indeed, should only women have the right to tinker with our endocrine systems, and only in the context of fertility? If we have the technological means, and you accept the basic premises that we’re entitled to free ourselves from sexed physiology and that liberation is generally good, why not extend radical bodily autonomy to everyone, so we can remodel ourselves as we see fit?

But it’s increasingly obvious to anyone who is paying attention that this tech transformation will — just like previous ostensibly feminist tech transformations — also come with winners and losers. And feminists were the first to notice, not least because a great many of those casualties are female, while many beneficiaries are male. The difficulty, for feminists, lies in challenging any of this without taking aim at the wider hydra of technology and progress — the very hydra that gifted us feminism in the first place. For today that hydra has an iron grip on the terms of the progressive Contagion game.

And if you look, after all, at the growing list of things recently dubbed “far-Right”, most of them are in fact assertions that we should place some limits on the forward march of commerce and technology. When you adopt the “far-Right” argument that national identity should be protected against globalisation, you’re saying there are limits to how far we can — or should — remodel the polity in the interests of growth. When you oppose natural food and health to Big Ag and the vaccine-industrial complex (two discourses which over my lifetime have migrated from Left to “far-Right”), you’re saying there are limits to how far the junk food and pharma industries should meddle in our food chains or bodies. And when you defend sex dimorphism, you’re saying there are limits to how far we can allow the biotech industry to offer (for-profit, highly lucrative) self-customisation options for our meat avatars, and to extend those options even to our kids.

Suggested reading

How the Left fell for capitalism

By Paul Kingsnorth

In this context, feminists find themselves in an awkward position. Because it doesn’t matter if you’re revolted by actual racism, or hardline misogyny, or radical hatred of Islam, or any of the other (actually pretty fringe) opinions held by tattooed thugs in big boots. Most people dubbed with the “far-Right” contagion don’t, in fact, hold those views. But if you’re even vestigially uncomfortable with the ongoing, tech-powered liquefaction of everything, in the name of commerce — if you show the slightest sign of questioning its self-evident moral goodness — then you’re already “aligned with the far-Right”. It’s just a question of degree.

The function of the great game of Progressive Contagion is making every possible counter-argument to the onward march of tech-enabled commerce intolerably low-status and radioactive. As such, the whole argument about whether or not gender-critical feminists are “aligned with the far-Right” is happening within a space that is already defined, by Progressive Contagion, as “the far-Right”.

No wonder, then, that Giorgia Meloni has been tarred with this brush, even if her substantive politics will, as several commentators have suggested, turn out to be quite moderate. For Meloni has positioned herself explicitly against the tech-powered liquefaction of everything in the name of commerce, thundering in her acceptance speech that “everything that defines us” — a list that for her includes faith, nationality, sex and motherhood — is now “an enemy” to “those who would like us to be perfect consumer slaves”. On a smaller scale, too, we might argue that Posie Parker’s principal crime has been refusing to disavow the possibility that there may be other limits to the liquefaction of everything, alongside sex dimorphism.

It’s of course true that people of good faith can disagree about what those other limits may be. But the other side will just call it nitpicking. No amount of protesting that you’re revolted by actual racists and the like affords any defence against this. It doesn’t matter how hygienically anyone sticks to defending sex and motherhood against Progress, or how strictly those who stray outside this narrow territory are disciplined. It’s all resistance to the juggernaut — and that, by the ever-moving goalposts of Progressive Contagion, is already “far-Right”. Those still trying to avoid infection by rushing to expel what they perceive as the real “far-Right” are, in practice, serving only to enforce a frame of reference controlled by their political enemies — and that will, in due course, be used against them.

There is no longer anywhere to stand that’s safe from Contagion. Nowhere, that is, except in accepting (like the world’s Shahvisis) that your principles, your body, and even your basic grasp of reality may be subject to dissolution and remodelling at a moment’s notice, in the name of Progress.

Now, what was once an abstract idea in philosophy has become disturbingly real. Where we used to maintain that reality provided us with certain givens, many now argue that we can uncouple ourselves from those givens, and construct ourselves with reference to our will alone. The obvious example is the debate around sex and gender. We used to think that biological sex was a kind of given; now, increasingly, some think of it as something that has been merely “assigned”. And that our gender, our self-image, is to be taken as metaphysically primary. It used to be the case that a transexual would live out their life as if they were of another sex; now, the claim is that they are that other sex, a change brought about not by biology but by will, by wanting it. Reality — truth — used to be something we had to adjust ourselves to, to deal with. These days, reality is second fiddle to will, just as Nietzsche predicted.

Nietzsche believed in self-ID of the most radical kind, long before it was fashionable. Indeed, the extreme version of this is not transexualism but transhumanism. Nietzsche predicted the rise of the Ubermensch, the super-human whose capacity exceeded the limitations of the merely human. “Dear Mother Nature,” wrote the transhumanist Max More in 1999, “we humans — your offspring — come to you with something to say. No doubt you did the best you could. However, with all due respect, we must say that you have in many ways done a poor job with the human constitution.” Human nature is not fixed but needs to be improved, even overcome, with science, technology and an ethics that is built around individual freedom.

Just as we have thrown off the tyranny of the Father God, so too we must throw off the tyranny of Mother Nature. We will be the masters of our biology, not the other way round. Nietzsche’s Ubermensch is like an artist making himself up as though he were a work of art. Nothing can interfere with his or her unfettered creativity, not even biology or reality itself. “Man is something that shall be overcome”. Thus spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s prophet of the Ubermensch. The only thing Nietzsche didn’t predict is that technology would be the agent of this revolution in what it is to be human.

More from this author

How pasta made me a Terf

By Giles Fraser

In the early years of Nietzsche studies, it was assumed that because the Nazis were drawn to his ideas, then Nietzsche himself must have been some sort of fellow traveller. He wasn’t. But part of the reason that fascists found his views so congenial is that he emphasised the concept of will and power over truth. If truth is simply a mobile army of metaphors — rather than something out there, fixed, waiting to be discovered — then what counts as truth is established through power and assertion, not dispassionate observation or careful listening. We used to call it lying. But for Nietzsche, the truth is what I assert it to be. Here, then, is where Donald Trump or Boris Johnson intersect with the woke Left. For all their superficial antipathy, they share a very similar metaphysical space.

And this philosophy similarity should alert us to the fact that the trans movement — broadly understood as the overcoming of Mother Nature — is not necessarily a Left-wing or progressive idea. It could just as easily be purloined by the Right. Wearing black balaclavas, angry men shout hateful obscenities at women, silence those whose words are deemed unacceptable, and whip up a mob. On the new Left there’s an ambivalence towards free speech, even a fierce antipathy towards Israel. Everyone is calling everyone else a fascist these days, but the new Left looks more and more like what we used to think of as fascists. Both admire Nietzsche.

Suggested reading

You can't be born in the wrong body

By Ellen Pasternack

Of course, there is one big difference between Nietzsche and woke culture: Nietzsche despised victims. He insisted that the resentful powerless — typically Christians — had used their imaginations as a weapon against the strong by upending what we normally think of as good. This is what the victim mentality maintains:

“Only those who suffer are good, only the poor, the powerless, the lowly are good; the suffering, the deprived, the sick, the ugly, are the only pious people, the only ones saved, salvation is for them alone, whereas you rich, the noble and powerful, you eternally wicked cruel, lustful, insatiate, godless, you will be eternally wretched, cursed and damned.”

That this passage could be taken as a manifesto of new Left politics shows how Nietzsche’s mobile army of metaphors can destabilise our current understanding of the political spectrum. If truth is a contest of wills, a feature of the culture war so to speak, and political assertiveness is what public will looks like, then there is no reason why the Left cannot out-shout, out-manoeuvre, out-intimidate and out-march the old “aristocratic” values that Nietzsche so admired.

When Nietzsche declared the death of God, he wasn’t just declaring religion to be over; he was also burying the very idea that truth is something fixed. Following Nietzsche, generations of progressive activists have come to believe that truth is something made not found. Something to be created in the cauldron of technological ingenuity and political assertiveness.

At the present moment, this philosophical position is supporting a kind of Left-wing run. But it won’t always do so. And when Nietzsche renews his conjugation with the Right, we may well descend even further into antipathy and madness. When truth with a capital T dies, all we have left is the struggle for dominance.

Might is right. Which is why, as the culture wars deepen, you will find me in church, on my knees, before my dead God. A dead God who, Nietzsche would be disappointed to hear, refuses to die.

But even where the po-faced stop short of lamping the smart-arsed, it’s widely noted that there’s a growing societal intolerance towards offensive comedy. Discussion of this in the media tends to assume a predictable form. First, someone well-known for being funny — Maureen Lipman, or John Cleese, or Dawn French — will say that wokeism is stifling comedic impulses by making comedians (and managers, and booking agents) afraid of backlash. Editors will then scramble to find someone authoritative to say there’s no evidence of this.

If anything, though, the resulting defensive responses tend only to increase the sense that there’s a problem here. Take, for instance, comedian Russell Kane’s response to Maureen Lipman: “I don’t think anyone is saying you can’t be offended, nobody is saying that, what we’re saying is you can’t use hate speech that would prompt a gender-related crime, a sex-related crime or a race-related crime.” Phew — that’s a relief! What this answer obviously ignores is that in the feverish imaginations of many, the bar for what’s considered likely to prompt a crime is getting lower every day.

Or take this Guardian op-ed from last year by comedy commentator Rachel Aroesti. With perhaps telling overkill, Aroesti writes off each and every concern about comedy cancel culture as “scaremongering about progressive politics”, “nonsense”, and (of course) “an absurdist joke”. In prosecuting her argument, she points out, accurately, that the careers of some high-profile comedians — Jimmy Carr, say, or Chappelle again — have been boosted from scandals surrounding their routines. Differently rendered, the very same evidence might have been used to provide comfort and reassurance to would-be shock merchants, along the lines of: Dear comedians, there’s no evidence your career will suffer if you are disgustingly obnoxious on stage. So relax, get back out there, and start making no-holds-barred jokes about transmen and Roma people once more!

More from this author

How philosophy sacrificed the truth

By Kathleen Stock

Probably unsurprisingly, though, that’s not how the piece reads. Even as Aroesti insists that cancel culture doesn’t affect people’s ability to make jokes that refer to minorities, her evident disapproval for the sort of person that would do this undermines her point. An accompanying eyeroll seems to say: no, of course you haven’t been cancelled, idiots — but you probably should be. This eyeroll can be sensed, too, in an exceptionally moralistic review of Catherine Tate’s body of work, written by Aroesti last month, which stops just short of calling Tate’s material “racist and homophobic” — but only just.

The real reason that the careers of comics like Carr, Rock, and Chappelle continue to flourish in spite of, or even because of, their deliberate minority-baiting, is that, in going as far as they gleefully do, they signal that there is little real point in coming after them. Unlike cancellers on the Right, who are mostly interested in targeting the opposition, cancellers on the Left tend to go for those they think are likely to be psychologically susceptible to their criticism.

For the purposes of speech control, a good target is someone who is likely to care about being called a “misogynist”, “racist” or “transphobe” by fellow tribe-members. And it’s even better if the transgression in question has the air of an inadvertent slip-up — because in that case you’re more likely to be able to extract an abject apology from the perpetrator, simply by pointing out that offence has been caused. Comedians who stoke outrage in front of millions don’t exactly scream potential in this respect. There’s nothing that says resilience to progressive guilt trips like deliberately savage jokes on stage about vulnerable groups.

What this suggests is that the comedians most at risk of the effects of cancellation are not the big names building their brands by pushing the limits of taste and decency. Rather, it’s the more strait-laced and less confrontational ones, sticking mainly to whimsical observation but with occasional tentative forays into edginess, who are most in danger — those from whom routines that inadvertently hit a cultural nerve would stand out far more vividly.

Suggested reading

Louis CK won't be cancelled

By Kat Rosenfield

It’s a strange world where Catherine Tate is more likely to be criticised for the supposed immorality of her comic choices than, say, Jerry Sadowitz — described with admiration by the Guardian in 2017 as the “twisted granddaddy of abusive comedy”. But I think it’s probably the world we live in. (To be clear — as far as I’m concerned, the answer here is not to level things out by going after Sadowitz, too.)

In effect, the progressive Left has moralised huge swathes of communication, both within comedy and beyond it. Any utterance that involves a reference to a minority tends to be sliced from its surrounding context. The intentions or character of its owner are ignored. The implication is reduced to the version that the most sensitive representative of that particular minority might choose to hear, and then connected in full, psychic technicolour with hideous potential repercussions for that often completely imaginary person.

You can see this in Kane’s response to Maureen Lipman, and you can also see it in Aroesti’s review of Catherine Tate, in which the supposedly “racist and homophobic” material she mentions turns out to have come from the mouth of Tate’s Nan character — surely an important difference. Perversely, the best way for a comedian to circumvent these censorious effects seems to be to boldly march up to statements that might genuinely stoke up bad feeling against a group and then spit them out in your own voice, smirking knowingly as you do it.

Like many other parts of culture then, comedy is polarised. If you’re a comedian, you now have one of two choices: either avoid controversy like the plague or run happily towards it. There’s not much in between, and comedy has lost some of its richness because of it.

Suggested reading

Why comedians stopped being funny

By Dorian Lynskey

But there is another loss here too, and it’s a loss to the political culture of the Left. For as the progressive wing has embraced the ever-evolving permutations of identity politics so enthusiastically, it has also — and probably non-coincidentally — made it impossible for anyone on its own side to laugh at these permutations, or at identity politics generally. In the reductive algebra of progressive offence-seekers, mocking identity politics is equated with mocking minorities. Of course, all politics is tribal, and no political party or movement, Right or Left, can easily tolerate mockery, especially from within its own ranks. But this is not just an understandable dislike of being laughed at by those on the same side as oneself. It is a positive taboo against it, with all the enforcing of speech codes, wilfully reductive misunderstandings, and attempted humiliation of miscreants that this implies.

And yet there is so much to laugh at! Last week alone gave us the Head of Trans Inclusion at Stonewall, on a hefty salary to oversee Stonewall’s many trans-related programmes, asking to be accompanied by a support worker, his mother, and a support dog during cross-questioning at Allison Bailey’s employment tribunal. (The judge instructed him not to discuss the case with his mother during a break; whether he was allowed to discuss it with the dog wasn’t mentioned).

We also were treated to the spectacle of 61 mainly Labour MPs, holding placards at the behest of nameless LGBTQ+ campaigners, and passing on the bonkers message to the general public that confused adolescents shouldn’t be given any therapy in their hasty rush to get rid of various body parts. Brass Eye’s Chris Morris — famous for getting celebrities to unwittingly humiliate themselves on camera in the name of various confected moral panics — couldn’t have done any better if he’d tried.

Lots of people on the Left want to mock events like these — they are, after all, preposterous. But they also know that the pinched-mouthed censors on their own side would reduce any attempts at humour to, at best, unkindness, and, at worst, hatred towards trans people. The same goes with relevant adjustments for any mockery of BLM, or indeed of any activist movement claiming to speak on behalf of a minority. And this needlessly forces those uncomfortable with the simplistic logic of identity politics to pick a side.

Those with enough rebellious spirit will eventually seek to break free from their suffocatingly humourless companions, making the Left less diverse and less robust. Worse than that, freed from exposure to that particularly bracing form of critique that is trenchant piss-taking from people whose opinions you care about, the Left’s representatives are likely to carry on doing ridiculous things in public, to the befuddlement of the voter. Until progressives are better able to take a joke — or even to understand one — I predict that Labour will give us lots more to laugh at in the next few years. And the amusement will all be that of the Tories.

The UK is a world leader in veganism, the first country to have a Vegan Society. Here, more than a million people will stop eating animal products this month as part of Veganuary, of which Monbiot is an “Ambassador”. After that, who knows? You may want — and the Ambassadors certainly desire — that you embrace the whole vegan testament, and deny yourself not just meat, fish, eggs and dairy, but all animal products. The wool jumper on your back. The leather shoes on your feet.

Of course, the success of veganism is no mystery at all. Vegans are absolutely correct in maintaining that plant-based food can be healthy, and that the welfare conditions of much of the globe’s livestock are pitiful. (On ethical grounds alone, I wouldn’t touch an intensively-reared pig with a bargepole, let alone with a knife and fork. And I’ve farmed for 20 years.) True too: Daisy the cow is implicated in climate-change. No sane or caring human could disagree.

Such is lower case veganism. Sensible, and sensitive. The problem comes with majuscule Veganism, which rages beyond animal ethics, diet and environmental concerns into a fundamentalist crusade untroubled by science, untouched by rationality. When humans killed God, they needed a replacement for religion. Upper-case Veganism is the latest faith for the lost middle classes.

A certain proof is offered by THIS IS VEGAN PROPAGANDA (& OTHER LIES THE MEAT INDUSTRY TELLS YOU) by animal rights activist Ed Winters, published by Vermillion this salutary month. A cursory glance down the contents list is sufficient taster of Veganism’s salvationism: “Veganism is the Moral Baseline,” “Our Past Shows Us Why Veganism Must Be Our Future,” “There’s No Such Thing as a Happy Farm Animal” (if you go to the website of Veganuary, there is a photograph of a woman petting a cute cow; if the cow is not contented, then Veganuary is exploiting the cow. ) “Veganism Could Save Your Life,” “A Vegan World Would Be Better for Everyone.”

More from this author

Factory farming will kill us all

By John Lewis-Stempel

Where does one begin? With The Fall, I suppose. For Vegans the omnivorism of early humans is an inconvenient truth, to be negated by counterfactuals (such as PETA’s memorable “We Don’t Have Carnivorous Teeth”), or avoided by the “That was history” excuse, as with the author’s, “Whatever happened tens of thousands of years ago… should have no bearing on determining whether or not what we do to animals is justified now.” Actually, human anatomy has changed remarkably little in the last million years. We still have canine teeth, and a stomach more resembling that of a dog than a sheep. Meat-eating is natural. It’s why you salivate over a plate of bacon.

Veganism, in rejecting our animal essential, elevates us above the creatures of the earth. It is speciesism disguised as correct-thinking. Ironically, we would not be the verbal, intelligent humans of Vegan perfectibility without meat. Harvard University evolutionary biologists Katherine Zink and Daniel Lieberman, nailed that truth in their paper “Impact of meat and Lower Paleolithic food processing techniques on chewing in humans,” Nature, 2016: “Whatever selection pressures favored these shifts [the bigging of the brain, development of speech], they would not have been possible without increased meat consumption combined with food processing technology.”

Suggested reading

There's no such thing as a green vegan

By Mary Harrington

As with any half-decent religion, Veganism has an end-of-Eden story. “Huge amounts of the forests of the UK have,” Winters writes, “over time, been cleared and replaced with grass pastures to feed artificially produced, selectively bred animals, all so we can produce what is an absurdly damaging product.” (He means meat.) But are grass pastures intrinsically ecologically evil? Hardly. A traditional hay meadow can boast 40 different plant species per square metre — one of the most botanically rich habitats you are ever likely to find. Grazing by livestock is essential to their biodiversity; without grazing, the trees and the most vigorous grasses take over.

Just don’t expect a Vegan to tell you this. On the altar of Veganism, the meadow pipit, the meadow brown butterfly, and meadowsweet will be sacrificed. For all of their fine talk against exploitation, vegans are no friend to the animal. Because, if we all go Vegan, there will be no farm beasts outside specimens in unsustainable populations in zoos. Ermintrude, Chicken Little, and Shaun the Sheep will have to be mass culled.

And this extermination would have a calamitous effect on ecology. I have no wish to be a nerd about turd, but a cow produces, via its poo, a fifth of its own body weight in insects annually. In the British countryside an upwards chain of wild creatures feed on said insects, culminating in the apex predator, the fox (a determined scavenger of beetles in dung.) There are dung beetles which actually specialise in types of farmyard manure, such as Onthophagus joannae, which favours sheep poo. Get rid of the poo, and you get rid of the dung beetles. Why the decline in swallows in arable East Anglia where bovines are a rare sight? Not enough cow shit, in all likelihood.

Suggested reading

Why I am fleeing to the hills

By Aris Roussinos

What you can expect from a Vegan is the catechism that meat and dairy take up 83% of global agricultural land and provide only 18% of global calories. But there is good reason for the planetary extent of livestock. About two thirds of farmland is “marginal,” meaning little apart from grass and scrub will grow there because it is too dry, too steep, too rocky, too wet, too wind-blown. As a Masai cattle-herder and a Shetland shepherd will delight in explaining, livestock are extremely efficient when it comes to transforming stuff humans cannot eat into tasty stuff they can.

Veganism knows the cost of livestock farming, but not its value; it knows the value of plant-based food, but not its cost. Not all the soya for which Brazilian rainforest is felled goes into cattle feed, it goes into “meat free” burgers too. The intensively farmed arable lands of East Anglia — which grow the Vegan’s daily bread — suffer soil erosion to the tune of tonnes per acre annually. A recent study in the Environmental Science & Policy journal calculated that about 3.07 tonnes of soil are lost per hectare of agricultural land per annum in Europe, with the vast bulk coming off crop-land. At that rate Vegans will die of hunger before they drown in the rising sea of climate change.

Ah, climate change. Will Veganism save the planet by killing off methane-emitting farm animals? Ruminants do indeed produce methane, but then so does rice; methane from rice farming causes 3% of anthropogenic global warming. Ruminant methane from grazing cows, however, is virtuously recycled into the soil by being broken down into CO2 and absorbed by new grass. Unlike the methane produced by water-logged paddies. If the Vegan dire prophecies scare you, it’s worth mentioning that seaweed additives for cattle may reduce emissions by 82%.

Suggested reading

The great climate change fallacy

By Tom Chivers

We cannot eat our way out of climate change by going Vegan. Professor Frank Mitloehner of the University of California, a world expert on air quality, calculates that if the entirety of the US were to go vegan for one year, the overall reduction of greenhouse gas emissions would amount to 2%. Something. But not the salvation of the planet.

And again, will no one consider the costs? Consider this: when did the West start getting ill? In the Seventies, when Western governments issued nutritional advice that demonised the saturated fats in meat, dairy and eggs and promoted carbohydrates as healthy food. The consequence is an epidemic of obesity. Winters talks about the “meat industry” as a monolith that puts profits before people, but what about the Vegan industry? Investors are pouring billions into alt-meat and dairy brands. Nestlé UK & Ireland supports Veganuary. Harrods and Volkswagen are taking part in Veganuary’s “workplace challenge.” Veganism has the fingerprints of Big Food all over its robes.

According to Mintel, Gen Z consumers are Veganism’s great hope, with over half (54%) of under 25s seeing the reduction of animal products as a good way to lessen humans’ impact on the environment. Big Vegan has done a job on them, and got them “flocking to the smell of ‘progress’”.  But Gen Z should be wary of the false prophets of Veganism.

If they really do care about the environment, they should  celebrate January by ditching the trainers in favour of a pair of leather shoes; synthetic trainers cause 1.4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Then cancel the flight to Amsterdam; two years of Veganism would be required to offset the trip. Hell, buy a woollen jumper too, instead of a nylon one; nylon manufacture creates nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 310 times more potent than carbon dioxide. And then put back the supermarket’s Jasmine rice from Thailand, and tuck into a slice of local organic beef. Farm bullocks are not the problem. Fundamentalist Veganite bollocks are.

Sometimes, the derision is deserved; in the English-speaking world, the new “liberal” mania for political and ideological purity is causing ancient liberties to be sacrificed in the name of new “rights”. And the pursuit of liberal individualism is thought to be in conflict with ideas of community. These apparent failings of the liberal idea are leading some to gather together under the banner of “post-liberal”.

But the problem is not that liberalism has passed its sell-by date; rather, it has lost its moorings.

These can be traced back to the emergence of British Liberalism with the Glorious Revolution and the 1689 Bill of Rights — which enshrined many of the liberties that Parliament and the people had fought for during the previous century.

The Liberalism of 1689 was grounded, in particular, in the Christian (and more specifically) Protestant faith, born of the fight to produce an English translation of the Bible and to defend freedom of conscience.  There was much intolerance and more than a few beheadings along the way — William Tyndale died for the cause of publishing his translation — but the settlement of 1689 required and established a new understanding of tolerance and freedom.

In all the great struggles of the 17th century, the calls for freedom were inseparable from the deep Christian faith of the protagonists, whether we are talking about the Parliamentarians, the Levellers or Oliver Cromwell himself. John Milton, driven and defined by his faith, wrote what is probably the foundational text in defence of free speech Areopagitica at the peak of the Civil War. It contained an impassioned argument against the introduction of the new Licensing Order (1643), which required government approval for any published work. All these calls were anchored in a shared understanding of meaning, knowledge and virtue. Meaning came from God, knowledge from the Bible and virtue from following the teachings of the Old and New Testaments.

The importance of liberalism’s moorings were not lost on the American Founding Fathers, who shared the same inheritance. In First Principles, Thomas Ricks describes how dedicated they were to assessing the problem of “virtue” — of determining that their new Republic would be anchored in a shared understanding of morality so that civil society and freedom would be able to flourish. Adams and Jefferson looked as much to Ancient Rome for these virtues as they did to the Christian faith, but in practice American society was grounded overwhelmingly in the shared values of Christianity.

De Tocqueville understood this better than most. In Democracy in America, he plants the character of “Anglo-American civilisation” firmly in two elements: “the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty”. For him, religion and liberty were kindred spirits. In America, they were indeed kindred, arriving together with the pilgrims. But in England, religion was the parent of liberty rather than sibling. And in both cases, the flourishing of liberty would depend on the stability and strength of her Christian moorings.

In 19th-century Britain, Classical Liberalism carried all before it in the pursuit of great causes — widening the democratic franchise, opening the economy to free trade, educational reform, laying the foundations of the welfare state, eradicating the global slave trade. But just as it seemed to be all-conquering, its roots were being poisoned.

That poison stemmed from the Enlightenment itself. A new, anthropocentric way of thinking arrived in the 18th century, bringing with it an alternative understanding of human nature, a new theory of human knowledge and a new calculus of virtue. While Enlightenment Liberalism was aligned with the Christian worldview on certain principles of freedom, the two traditions diverge in key ways – and it is this divergence that is now proving toxic to liberalism as we know it.

Suggested reading

The Tories can save Blue Labour

By Aris Roussinos

Traditional British liberalism rests on the Judaeo-Christian understanding that we are all, in moral terms, fallen creatures. The writings and speeches of the great heroes of liberty in the 16th and 17th centuries came with a deep sense of humility, of mankind’s brokenness and of the Fall.

Somewhere amid the arrogance of the Enlightenment, we lost this sense of fallenness. Ayn Rand embodies the new way of thinking with her theories of rational egoism and “the virtue of selfishness”. Encouraged, no doubt, by evidence of technological progress, she assumed moral progress would move in lockstep with technology. She has many modern disciples, wittingly or unwittingly, especially in California, with its strapline of “move fast and break things”. Her Libertarianism is very different from traditional British Liberalism, despite the tendency of many to confuse the two, because of her different assumptions about human fallibility (or lack of, in her case), and about virtue.

Allied to the Enlightenment sense of human perfectibility and rationality is the belief in Progress. The origins of this go all the way back to Thomas Macaulay and the Whig interpretation of history. But Macaulay saw progress essentially in political terms – in the extension of the franchise and other associated political freedoms such as freedom of conscience and freedom of the press. Sadly, the creed of Progress has now been pushed into every walk of life, ignoring the lessons of history and defying any biblical understanding of human nature. For Progressives, humankind’s moral progress is on a perpetual upward curve in parallel with technological progress. The history of the 20th century does not give much support to this conceit — it would be fairer to say that technology simply amplifies the expression of our moral fallibility.

Enlightenment liberals also built their own theories of morality, independent of a god, starting with Benthamite Utilitarianism, and extending all the way to John Rawls. Morality became a mathematical calculus, shorn of compassion or community, let alone repentance and forgiveness. According to Jeremy Bentham, “nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do as well as to determine what we shall do.” No reference to morality here, just pain and pleasure. One of Bentham’s disciples, William Jevons, even went as far as to develop a “felicific calculus” whereby all pain and pleasure could be quantified.

Suggested reading

The surprising legacy of the neocons

By Oliver Wiseman

Enlightenment thinkers also developed their own theories of knowledge. One built on the empiricism of Hume and Adam Smith, the other built on the Rationalism of Descartes and Rousseau. The former, with its inherent modesty, is compatible with the Christian understanding of human fallibility, the latter is not.

Hayek describes the two schools of epistemology in The Constitution of Liberty. He warned that the latter, which he called the French tradition of liberty, with its “flattering assumptions about the unlimited powers of human reason” could lead to “totalitarian democracy”. His warnings were all too well-founded and it is the Rationalist version of epistemology which has taken particular hold with today’s cult of science.

Belief in the power of science has never been stronger. It has climaxed amid Covid, with politicians increasingly wrapping themselves in “the science” to justify ever more stringent intrusions on our freedom. Scientism, in the wrong hands, can become dangerous. And the worst hands are those of politicians and civil servants too easily tempted to use the authority of “experts” to infringe on our liberties.

This type of politician, Matt Hancock being the best example, fails to understand the limitations of science, fails to understand the nature of risk and uncertainty and fails to understand the difference between observable historical evidence and predictions of an uncertain and hypothetical future.

These different understandings of the theory of knowledge, of meaning and of virtue have led  to a corruption of liberalism at its source.

What we are seeing today being enacted in the name of liberalism is not liberal at all. Instead, let’s call it by the name which its proponents are prepared to use — progressivism. This is the creed which unites Tony Blair, Nick Clegg, most of the US Democratic Party, most of the British Labour Party and the New York Times. These are not traditional Liberals in any understanding of the term. They are Progressives. They believe humankind is on a permanent upward path of progress. They believe in the rule of experts and in the authority of “the science”.

So where do genuine classical liberals go, faced with the corruption of the creed? Ironically, the attacks on our most ancient freedoms such as freedom of speech, conscience and assembly, make it more important than ever to assert the foundational understanding of liberty. “Classical liberals” need to unite and stand up for their tradition. It has never been so relevant.

Meanwhile, to those who do embrace the term “post-liberal”, and believe it applies to our new era, I would just say this: be careful what you wish for.

In complexity theory, the term ‘emergence’ is used to describe a complex, higher order that arises out of the seemingly uncoordinated behaviour of individuals. The principal threat to liberalism today is an emergent authoritarianism, not a top-down form of the kind we find in China or Turkey.

Consider the case of Kathleen Stock, a philosopher and feminist who defends the right of women to restrict access to some women-only spaces to those who are biologically female. Stock was last week forced to resign her position at the University of Sussex after being subjected to a campaign of harassment from trans activists and their fellow travellers. Her decision to quit was not preceded by a demand by her bosses to step aside. Instead, a number of her colleagues at Sussex, as well as students and administrators at the university, created the toxic environment that forced her out.

Having experienced a milder form of the same treatment for criticising the excesses of ‘anti-racist’ activism, I completely understand why she left. Even though the university belatedly stood up for Stock’s right to free speech, pressure from her peers — especially when combined with an activist-led disciplinary process — creates a repressive climate for those who dare to dissent.

This is, of course, not confined to the UK. Across the Anglosphere, cancellation campaigns are soaring: the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)’s ‘Scholars under Fire’ database records a fivefold increase in attempts to terminate American academics between 2015 and 2020, with students often leading the charge. But what makes the news is just the tip of a vast iceberg when it comes to hostility and self-censorship.

Suggested reading

Nobody wins the gender wars

By Mary Harrington

My own work shows that in North America and Britain, around three quarters of academics in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) are on the Left. Three-quarters of SSH faculty in Britain endorse political correctness because it protects minorities, while just a fifth oppose it for stifling free speech. In the struggle between what Teresa Bejan calls ‘equal speech’ and free speech, many come down in favour of the former.

Even though it’s likely that most academics have been horrified by Dr Stock’s treatment, they still have an instinctive sympathy for disadvantaged identity groups — including those she is alleged to have hurt. So when activists smear Dr Stock as a transphobe, they make her radioactive to an important share of colleagues and students, who pull away out of a combination of moral disapproval and fear of guilt-by-association. Even in anonymous surveys, I have found that barely 1 in 3 North American and British academics are comfortable sitting down to lunch with a female academic who supports banning trans women from women’s shelters.

Cass Sunstein writes that the more one’s workplace doubles as a social community, the stronger its ability to force dissenters to conform to sacred values. And it is this which partly explains why Dr Stock was so vulnerable in the first place. Collegiate interaction and collaboration are a staple of academia. ‘Being a good colleague’ is not just an informal norm; it is often part of an academic’s formal appraisal. Peers review our presentations and papers, as well as the applications for grants and promotion that can make or break our career. Fellow academics also populate most levels of university governance, from a departmental teaching coordinator to the faculty Senate.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that biases and taboos pervade the system. Since over 40% of American academics wouldn’t hire a Trump supporter and a third of their British counterparts wouldn’t hire someone who voted to leave the European Union, the unorthodox keep their views to themselves. 70% of American conservative SSH academics say they self-censor, as do a third of British academics overall. The situation is similar in other ideologically-slanted industries such as journalism or the arts  — if anything, academics, once you control for their ideology, are more pro-free speech than others.

Suggested reading

The hounding of Kathleen Stock

By Timandra Harkness

That, however, is not saying much. There can be little doubt the campuses remain ruled by what Sunstein terms ‘outrage entrepreneurs’, the secular preachers of today’s cultural socialism — an ideology which holds that cultural narratives and signifiers reproduce group inequality. These outrage entrepreneurs compete to spot signs of the devil (i.e. racism, transphobia, sexism) all around them. Often this takes the form of redefining innocuous words, such as ‘master bedroom’ or ‘spooky’, as racist, while competing to erase the memory of ‘problematic’ historical figures.

In this sense, it is far from a new phenomenon. Just like the fundamentalist preachers who drove the Great Awakenings of American Protestantism or the Azusa Street Revival in the early 20^th century, a new priesthood is powering cultural socialism’s Third Great Awokening.

And they are succeeding beyond the wildest imagination of illiberal leftists such as Herbert Marcuse or the censorious student radicals of the Sixties. FIRE’s huge survey of 37,000 American university students shows that 75% of those in Liberal Arts colleges believe that shouting down a speaker with whom they disagree is sometimes acceptable; 70% of all students think a professor who says something that offends them should be reported to the administration.

Given censorious attitudes like these are so pervasive, it seems unlikely that they will grow out of their illiberalism. Indeed, this seems almost certain given the findings of a recent academic paper on white liberal Americans and their approach to toleration. The General Social Survey has been asking the same questions since 1972 about who should have the right to publicly speak. While American ‘liberals’ remain more tolerant than conservatives overall, the trend toward rising toleration — in relation to platforming racist speakers — began to go into reverse around 2000. Since the turn of the millennium, toleration has been steadily dropping. As Sean Stevens notes, Smith College students in 2000 and 2016, filling out the same survey, became 20-30% less favourable to free speech.

Suggested reading

Trans activism's war on solidarity

By Julie Bindel

It is somewhat baffling, then, that classical liberals are optimistic about the future; they have taken to congratulating themselves lately because much of the mainstream media is largely onside, while new organisations such as the Academic Freedom Alliance or Free Speech Union are doing excellent work defending victims of cancel culture.

But these are more a palliative than a cure. The demographic momentum of decades of cultural socialist control over education shows no sign of waning. The treatment of Dr Stock surely demonstrates that things will get worse before they get better.

In order to turn the tide of emergent authoritarianism, the Government must step in when institutions violate the laws and values forged during the West’s period of expanding liberty. Legislation such as the UK’s Academic Freedom Bill is required to proactively uphold civil liberties and guard against political discrimination. Beyond this, governments must restructure school curricula to ensure that students learn as much about the struggle for liberty and the evils of utopianism as they do about the fight against prejudice.

But even this is not sufficient. Ultimately, emergent authoritarianism will continue to spawn new outgrowths until we recalibrate the taboos around race, sexuality and gender that have been widening for decades. Taboos activate our disgust reflex, leading to a black-and-white approach that is anti-intellectual, and must give way to a more nuanced and proportional form of social sanction of the kind we apply to those who mistreat people on the basis of other characteristics.

This means applying the principle of charity in interpreting people’s intentions, allowing for second chances before doling out the maximum penalty, and creating space for forgiveness. Until we achieve this, there will be plenty more Kathleen Stocks in the coming years.

Rilke’s poem “Die Aschanti,” about his visit to the exhibition, is characterised by sadness. In the exhibition, he writes, there are “no brown girls who stretched out / velvety in tropical exhaustion,” “no eyes which blaze like weapons” and no mouths “broad with laughter”. What a bummer. Rilke has to settle for ordinary, human and fundamentally inauthentic Africans: “O how much truer are the animals / that pace up and down in steel grids”.

The Nigerian-American novelist Teju Cole studies Rilke’s attitude to human zoos in his essay “The Blackness of Panther.” Its title is partly annexed from a more famous Rilke poem, “The Panther”, about big cats behind bars in Paris. Cole draws a parallel between the panther, or the captured African in a human zoo, and the way the African is perceived more generally amongst a segment of Western society. Like the new collection it is part of, Black Paper (released last week), it examines what it means to be an African person in a world shaped by white people’s cultural norms.

Cole finds the codes associated with it to be restrictive. “Was I African?” he asks in one passage, about growing up in Nigeria, because “I didn’t feel it. What I felt was that I was a Lagos boy, a speaker of Yoruba, a citizen of Nigeria”.

“The Africans were those other people,” he writes, “some of whom I read about in books, or had seen wearing tribal costumes in magazines, or encountered in weird fictional form in movies”. He does not see his reflection in them. The label, then, is a fiction imposed on him by western culture.

Cole is more sympathetic to the general term “Black”, but even here he acknowledges how rooted it is in one singular definition. The label “Black” was not “about every Black person in the world”, he writes, but “it was localized to the American situation. To be Black in America, that localized tenor of ‘Black’ had to be learned”. Having a “Black skin (sometimes just a shade or two off-white) was the admission to the classroom, but Black American cultural codes were the lesson”. Cole writes that he has learned to love the codes, since moving to America over twenty years ago, while acknowledging that “it wasn’t the only Black” that he knew.

Suggested reading

Racial categories are reactionary

By Ralph Leonard

These are quandaries that have recently been explored by another, perhaps less well-known, novelist who grew up in Nigeria and later studied in America. Timothy Ogene’s new novel Seesaw (out next week), set in the very recent past, is a playful and lacerating satire on the codes the black immigrant needs to satisfy in order to curry favour with a self-styled progressive institution in America.

Frank Jasper, the protagonist and narrator, is a failed novelist from the fictional southern Nigerian city of Port Jumbo, based on Ogene’s home town Port Harcourt. Ogene’s first novel, The Day Ends Like Any Day, has a similar title with Jasper’s first novel The Day They Came for Dan. But unlike Ogene’s novel, which won the Book of the Year award with the African Literary Association, Jasper’s novel does so badly that he decides to write a review of it under a pseudonym for an obscure website entitled The Ganges Review of Books. Very soon after this appreciative review goes up, the website completely disappears in favour of a screen selling viagra.

Jasper’s big break comes in the form of the William Blake Program for Emerging Writers, which allows him to travel to a New England college town and get mentored by other writers. When he arrives, he is bemused by protests he encounters on campus. They don’t fit with his conception of American radicalism. “My idea of an American radical protest,” he writes, “was ossified and romantic, involving pictures of people in long hair smoking marijuanna, playing drums and banjos”. What he witnesses instead are protestors that “might as well have been business executives, clear-eyed with state-of-the-art digital equipment”. In other words, the self-styled revolutionary vanguard of progressive institutions have become much like the old-school establishment of old.

On campus, Jasper also meets a fellow African writer Barongo Akello Kabumba, who is from Uganda. And a British-Indian academic called Sara Chakraborty, who grew “up in Surrey as the grandchild of Afro-Asian immigrants”. He takes a strong dislike to the pair:

“partly because I didn’t understand the depth of their moral authority, the immutable authority with which they said things about the world and people and identity and the ‘post-colonial world’ in a few days than in all the years I lived in it”.

Their conception of the “post-colonial” world, and the position of Africans within it, is sterile and monolithic: Jasper’s post-colonial world “was nothing like the fully formed and footnoted gunfire sentences I heard from Sara Chakraborty, nothing like the costumed performers of the Ugandan writer”. Instead, it “was just another tired world of complicated people trudging along, like anywhere else, mostly oblivious of life beyond their neighbourhood, full of pain or courting happiness, vile or honest”.

Suggested reading

What liberals get wrong about race

By Eric Kaufmann

Underpinning that passage is a plea for moral universalism: for seeing that, despite their differences, the post-colonial world is fundamentally as emotionally rich and also as boring as the Western world. And Ogene demonstrates this very combination in the novel itself. Apart from the zestful humour in the narrative, there is also tedium. In the passages set in Nigeria, for instance, Jasper is a slacker par excellence, who spends much of his recreational time taking drugs and watching pornography. The novel reminds me not only of post-colonial novels, or campus novels, but also of the decadent novels of Michel Houellebecq, in which a buoyantly satirical attitude to twentieth-century Western society is combined with hardened cynicism.   

And Jasper is a thoroughly cynical character. While acknowledging the silliness of race experts, those who tell guilt-ridden white people what they want to hear, he occupies the position of black expert to his advantage. He was “still in the US when” his agent

“sold me to the Montana-based group as an ‘understanding expert on all matters black and ethnic’. He had played up my background as a ‘son of the black Atlantic whose maternal ancestors were descendants of slaves who came back to West Africa’”.

He adds with acidic scorn: “if Americans were going to devour themselves, he said to me afterwards, someone might as well hide under the table for crumbs”. This cheerfully parasitic attitude is not one that Cole explicitly argues for in his essays, which are scrupulously analytical. But it does demonstrate that the analogy of the human zoo, while powerful, fails to capture the symbiotic relationship between the patronising white person and the African. To put it bluntly: it’s a grift that seems to satisfy both parties. The Africans at the zoo were forcibly captured; the African novelist freely moves to the West.

More from this author

Thank God for liberalism

By Tomiwa Owolade

Jasper’s relationship to his status as a race expert is, however, ambivalent: while it materially enriches him, it also deforms his humanity. “I wasn’t advancing any single ideology,” he considers, “or worldview or notion of progress, and wasn’t trying to attack anyone”. Rather,

“I just wanted to exist and cry and laugh and fuck and live and die without prefixing or suffixing my actions with any universal idea of blackness or Africaness or whatever thing out there I was supposedly tied to as a POC or BAME or warped extension of someone else’s imagination”.

This warped tendency doesn’t just apply to black people. Other ethnicities feel it too. In an interview with Lauren Oyler, the Argentinian novelist Pola Oloixarac talks about the inspiration for her latest novel, Mona, which is out in the UK next year. “I was a person of colour when I was in the US,” she says, but “if I took a plane and went anywhere else, or if I crossed the border I wasn’t a person of colour anymore. So it wasn’t an essential trait. It was more of a particular fiction that was imposed on me”.

The titular protagonist of the novel is Peruvian and, like Jasper, is already the author of one novel and living in an American college campus:

“Mona had arrived at Stanford not long after the waves she made with her debut novel tossed her onto the beach of a certain impetuous prestige — and at a time when being a ‘woman of colour’” began to “confer a chic sort of cultural capital”.

The narrator of Oloixarac’s deliciously acerbic novel adds that, again invoking our opening analogy, “American universities shared certain essential values with historic zoos, where diversity was a mark of attraction and distinction”.

When Mona is nominated for a prestigious literary prize in Europe, she travels to Sweden, where she meets a diverse range of writers, whose background she anatomises like a modern-day Carl Linnaeus (the pioneering Swedish taxonomist). There is the obnoxious French male writer, the pious Israeli female author, the sexy Scandinavian writers. There is a sense that she is trapped by the instinct to perceive these characters solely through the prism of their identity. And a part of the narrative tension is this tendency against a countervailing emphasis on a person’s particular experiences. She chafes at being seen as the “Latin writer”: “The phony solidarity of having a ‘Latin’ culture in common with other writers was something that always repulsed her”.

She recognises, like Jasper and Cole, that such labels do not reflect the humanity of an individual. While they can breed important forms of solidarity, and can be useful in analysing prejudice and discrimination, we shouldn’t cling to them too tightly. It is ironic that many self-styled progressives, many of them well-intentioned, do so. It illustrates the comfort, under a progressive guise, that comes with being attached to racial essentialism: the comfort of expecting people from other racial or ethnic backgrounds to fulfil a role.

Labels should be used, if they are to be used, as the start of someone’s identity, not the full definition of it. They should be used to open the doors to a deeper understanding of who that person is, rather than perceived as the only thing that matters. The alternative is race representatives, people who are exhibited, or exhibit themselves, to a white audience, to be gawked at and cuddled, and are expected to possess a morality befitting a child.

Even if, as it now looks likely, Newsom is not recalled, or Trudeau wins re-election, that we’re even discussing their downfalls indicates that both the “Golden State” and Canada, a country long known as the Scandinavia of the Western Hemisphere, are no longer political exemplars for the rest of the world. Instead, their governments now represent more of the same kind of political disappointments that have characterised Western liberal democracies for the past 40 years.

In Canada, polls suggest the Conservatives and Liberals are locked in a tight race, as many voters turn to the opposition Conservative Party, whose “blue-collar” policies under leader Erin O’Toole closely resemble those of Boris Johnson’s British Tories. Meanwhile, California, long considered one of America’s most progressive Democratic states, was almost confronted with the spectacle of a Republican governor, in the form of black Right-wing libertarian radio host, Larry Elder. The very fact that the recall vote got this far indicates that the “Golden State” no longer glitters with opportunity for all.

This month’s elections in Canada and California — preceded by 18 months of rolling lockdowns, job losses and Covid-related chaos — can roughly be described as a collective “Howard Beale” moment. Echoing Network, Paddy Chayefsky’s classic satirical black comedy-drama film, voters in both places are “mad as hell and not going to take it anymore”.

More from this author

The West can learn from China

By Marshall Auerback

Even though vaccine mandates have been broadly accepted by the majority of Canadians and Californians, this compliance is increasingly transcended by contempt for their respective governments, which have failed to address a range of non-pandemic-related issues: from rising economic precarity (concurrent with the growth of the so-called “gig economy” and all of the attendant insecurities that come with it) to the fact that both places are being ruled by hypocritical, out-of-touch technocratic elites who are clueless about the everyday life for ordinary Californians and Canadians.

As far as Covid itself goes, despite some missteps, Canada and California have done relatively well in introducing measures to restrict the speed of the pandemic. Both have also secured relatively high rates of vaccinations; Canada now has a greater proportion of its population fully vaccinated than either the US or UK, while California ranks among the highest vaccinated among American states.

Despite their relative success stories, this month’s elections have unleashed longstanding grievances, spurred on by disgust with the perceived hypocrisy of the two administrations. In the case of California, Governor Newsom’s ill-timed visit to a Michelin-starred restaurant amid a Covid-19 surge last year sparked outrage, as did his admission that he was sending his own children to classes at a private school while most public schools remained closed.

But Newsom, despite his recall victory, has failed on a host of other issues — a number of which he shares with Trudeau. For instance, California is often heralded as a model US state in terms of decarbonising its economy. But the truth is that the governor’s push for renewables has degraded the reliability of the state’s electrical grid, resulting in multiple blackouts this year. These have occurred against a backdrop in which some of California’s Latino leaders have filed lawsuits to halt several climate-focused regulations due to their negative effect on low and middle-income Californians. Yet for many families it is too late: the ostensibly progressive state has the highest poverty rate in America and a level of income inequality that exceeds of all but five states.

Similar charges of sanctimony have had increasing resonance in Canada, home to a Liberal government that has consistently trumpeted its desire to move to net zero carbon emissions. Yet recently, this same administration has also taken the extraordinary step of promoting oil sands exports to global markets after it nationalised the Trans Mountain pipeline for CAD$4.5-billion — even though its former owner had cancelled the pipeline expansion because of fierce opposition from environmentalists, indigenous groups and the provincial British Columbian government.

More from this author

Why the Canadian Left is burning down churches

By Meghan Murphy

By the same token, Justin Trudeau, a leader who has long trumpeted his progressive credentials, has steadily seen that image erode, notably in the wake of the SNC-Lavalin scandal which provoked the resignation of two female cabinet ministers. Both ministers accused the Prime Minister of inappropriately interfering in a prosecution effort against the engineering company, which had been charged with fraud in connection with a series of Libyan business dealings. That one of the resigning ministers, Jody Wilson-Raybould, served as Canada’s first indigenous justice minister was a particular blow to the Prime Minister’s diversity agenda.

Yet Trudeau may have had plausible grounds for his actions: in the case of the controversial pipeline, Canada is still a heavily resource-based economy, and the fossil fuel industry continues to be a source of high-paying skilled jobs for the working and middle classes, especially in western Canada. And as far as SNC-Lavalin goes, it is a large, Quebec-based company employing thousands of Canadians in a province that is a key stronghold for the Liberals.

But while Trudeau at least has plausible grounds to explain his perceived hypocrisy, the same cannot be said for Newsom. The California governor may have survived his recall vote — but now there is no hiding from the very serious structural problems that have long afflicted his state. Indeed, as author Michael Shellenberger has persuasively argued, Newsom’s policies have actually made them worse: “Rather than put forest management on war-time footing, Newsom in 2019 actually cut the budget for forest fire prevention, which resulted in a full halving of the forest area treated for fire in 2020, all while accusing his political opponents of climate denial, and suggesting that the deployment of weather-dependent renewable energy will somehow address the state’s high-intensity forest fires.” Extensive fires have also played a significant role in the state’s rolling blackouts.

Likewise, California’s housing affordability ranks last among the 50 states with the result — as Shellenberger notes — that the number of homeless people in the Golden State “rose 31% over the last 10 years even as the number of homeless in the rest of the U.S. declined 18 percent. Where New York City shelters 95% of its homeless, California cities shelter one-third.” Meanwhile, Newsom acts like a helpless bystander, even though he has a Democratic super-majority in the State Assembly. Remarkably, new housing construction actually fell 10% last year, with just 100,550 new building permits issued, one-fifth of what Newsom promised when he was elected back in 2018.

More from this author

Conservatives need multiculturalism

By Blake Smith

That might explain why a solidly blue state started to contemplate a radical alternative to the incumbent governor. Larry Elder, a Black radio talk-show host in the state, a is pro-life cultural conservative who has explicitly opposed any minimum wage (let alone increase it). He has also come out against vaccine mandates, and has railed against critical race theory and transgender politics.

In Canada, however, conservative politics north of the border are somewhat more prosaic. The Conservative Party’s capable new leader, Erin O’Toole, has run a smart campaign and given voters a positive reason to vote Tory (in contrast to his hapless predecessor, Andrew Scheer). Evoking Boris Johnson’s successful 2019 election strategy, its manifesto features a new kind of pro-worker conservatism, at a time when most centre-left parties have increasingly abandoned working class interests in favour of launching progressive campaigns. Among its notable features are benefits for gig workers (who are largely exempt from adequate social coverage in the US), German-style worker representation on corporate boards and protections for pensions from corporate bankruptcy.

These are policies far more likely to engender support among middle and working-class Canadians than, say, proposals to support an LGBTQ agenda or linguistic “reforms” to abolish gendered pronouns. All of which has helped O’Toole’s Tories make headway in the election. While the most recent polls show an incremental movement back to the Liberals, they still point to a hung Parliament.

And so both Newsom and Trudeau have, in recent weeks, cast their political futures in increasingly melodramatic “life and death” terms. But such rhetoric — even if they win, as Newsom has — fails to address the central issue: namely, the shredding of a once sacrosanct social contract between the elites and the rest of us. No matter who wins these elections, the corresponding anger and social fallout that has resulted is unlikely to dissipate. From Canada to California, the people are “mad as hell” — and neither Trudeau nor Newsom seem capable of remedying that.

This is strange if we claim to care about people everywhere rather than just those in particular places, as liberals especially claim to do. It is also paradoxical to hold today’s progressive position that it is racist for Western societies to think themselves more “advanced” while simultaneously holding them to higher standards of justice than others. Such contradictions abound because in our debates over justice, we are reluctant to admit the truth: that while Western societies are not fair, they are pretty much the fairest humanity has built so far. And fairness is the best measure of justice we have.

Societal fairness itself is difficult but not impossible to measure. When it comes to economic fairness, Europe is the most equal of all regions with the top 10% pocketing 35% of income in 2019, according to the World Inequality Database. In contrast, those figures in the Middle East, Latin America and Africa are 56%, 54% and 50% respectively; the US, at 45%, is a negative outlier in terms of income equality in the Western world.

For social mobility, OECD analysis suggest that if you’re born into a poor family in Sweden, it would take you three generations to reach the average national income; in Canada it would take four generations, in Britain five. In China, South Africa and Colombia, it would take seven, nine and 11 generations respectively. So, while you don’t want to be born poor anywhere, your chances of escaping poverty in the West are significantly higher than in most other places, bar a few notable exceptions, mostly in East Asia.

Where are you likely to be treated most fairly if you’re a woman? Sadly, you may face unfair treatment in every part of the world, but you’re least likely to experience it in the West, according to the UN’s Gender Inequality Index, which measures factors ranging from female access to political power and jobs to education levels and forced child marriages. You are also less likely to have your abilities doubted in the West, according to the latest World Values Survey. In my fatherland of Nigeria, for instance, 75% of the population believe “men make better political leaders than women”, a similar figure found in Pakistan. Over half of Russians, Turks, Indonesians and South Koreans agree. Just 8% of Germans and 12% of Australians share this bias.

There are exceptions, and countries like Rwanda vastly outperform Western nations in female political participation, women constituting 62% of Rwanda’s national legislature, compared to 34% in the UK. However, while it is not easy to be a woman anywhere, it is probably safe to say it is generally less difficult in the West.

What if you’re a sexual minority? In 2019, UCLA’s Williams Institute compiled a Global Acceptance Index, ranking countries from least to most accepting of LGBT people, and Western countries were by far the fairest. Small wonder that they dominate the list of countries deemed “safe” on the LGBTQ+ Travel Index.

Race appears to be the West’s Achilles heel when it comes to justice. While some societies like Britain are fairer than others, there’s no use dancing around the fact that there persists an informal racial hierarchy positing white people at the top, black people at the bottom and everyone else somewhere in between. While only three European nations gather data on race — Ireland, Finland and Britain — widespread discrimination against blacks and other minorities in Europe is well-documented. I think most fair-minded Brits would agree there is a significant justice gap when it comes to race in the West.

More from this author

Not all the facts fit the anti-colonialist narrative

By Remi Adekoya

This gap, however, has increasingly less to do with personal attitudes than with the massive wealth and resultant power disparities that have emerged between racial groups over the past 500 years, including as a result of slavery and colonialism. As I’ve written before, median white British household wealth stands at £314,000, compared to £66,000 for the median British-Bangladeshi family and £34,000 for the black African family. Similarly, a typical white American family owns eight times the wealth of a typical black American family and five times that of a Hispanic family. These disparities position the average person of colour weakly in a capitalist world where money is the key to autonomy. It is also worth mentioning that there are vast wealth differences between Britain’s ethnic minority groups, with median Indian households on average being as wealthy as their white British counterparts, for instance. In both the US and Britain, those of Indian descent now have higher incomes than their white counterparts, if not overall wealth.

And while this is far from perfect, there is ethnic economic inequality outside of the West, too, arguably more so; a study by academics at Harvard, Brown University and London Business School, concluded that “Sub-Saharan Africa and East and South Asia host the most ethnically unequal countries. In contrast, Western Europe is the region with the lowest level of ethnic inequality.”

When it comes to personal attitudes towards people of other races, Westerners are often among the most open-minded. When asked in the World Values Survey who they would not like to have as neighbours, 3% of Americans and Germans, and 4% of Australians mentioned “people of a different race”. In China it’s 18%, in Pakistan 25% and Turkey 41%. Two-in-three Vietnamese said they would object.

When it comes to respecting human rights, nowhere is this taken as seriously as in the West, as we can see from the UN’s Universal Human Rights Index. Growing up in Nigeria, I was from a young age depressingly aware that “human rights” were just words on a piece of paper to those in charge – and not much has changed since then. Since current president Muhammadu Buhari came to power in 2015, the country’s security forces have killed hundreds of Nigerian civilians, including unarmed youths protesting police brutality last year.

Whether it is Nigeria’s government brutalising its citizens, China herding Uighur Muslims into “re-education camps” or Libyan slave markets actually auctioning black people like cattle in the 21st-century, injustices elsewhere often provoke muted responses from Western progressives — certainly, nowhere near the outrage that accompanies even much lesser injustices in the West. This from the same people who profess to care about all of humanity, not just those living within their borders.

Suggested reading

The future is mixed-race

By David Goodhart

Are there logical reasons to hold the West to higher standards of justice? Its wealth is certainly one, since it is easier to enforce the rule of law, respect human rights and create a generally more equitable society when you have the resources to do so. This year, the NHS alone has a working budget seven times the size of the entire national budget of Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country. Even if Nigeria’s government had angel intentions, it simply lacks the resources to build an equitable society for its 200 million citizens. And there are many countries in the world much poorer than Nigeria. To expect the same standards of justice from them that we expect of the West is completely unrealistic.

However, there are quite a few very wealthy non-Western nations, among them countries like Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, or the likes of Singapore, Japan or South Korea. Yet while these rich non-Western nations tend to provide high standards of living and are attractive in many ways, they rarely offer the level of individual freedom and societal tolerance often found in the West.

One justification for holding the West to higher standards that I often hear from my non-Western friends is that Westerners claim to be more just than others. They love hailing “Western values” and proclaiming their societies as fair and tolerant, and this warrants subjecting them to more critical scrutiny than others. There’s a logic here and it is difficult to reconcile, say, America’s claim to be the “shining city on a hill” with its criminal invasion of Iraq (supported by Britain) which ended up causing immeasurable suffering for millions. And yet we know those who invaded will never be held to account, for who can hold powerful countries to account?

However, while such actions understandably foster cynicism towards Western moral declarations, would we rather that Western nations declare, Trumpesquely, that from now on: “No more morals or values. We will simply use our military and economic power to ruthlessly pursue our interests. We no longer care what others think of us.” Would we then happily lower our assessment standards for the West because it is no longer hypocritical? In practice, a West that shed all moral pretence would deprive others of the ability to deploy the argument of hypocrisy against it, leaving the weakest nations pretty much helpless in the face of brute power. That would hardly make for a fairer world.

Suggested reading

Why the West isn't racist

By Ralph Leonard

While many white progressives are ashamed of their societies for its past sins, and feel it responsible for today’s global problems, many of my non-white friends acknowledge the West’s relative fairness in private, especially those who have experience of life elsewhere. However, they believe that as people of colour, we should refrain from acknowledging this publicly, because that could only weaken our position in the quest for racial justice. Wouldn’t that encourage white whataboutism? And wouldn’t we be emboldening the white supremacists who claim that Western civilization is superior to others? How is any of this in our self-interest?

These are valid fears I share, but if we want to have an honest debate about race and the West, then it cannot be built on pretending we don’t see or know certain things. Our assessment of how fair Western societies are should itself be fair, to give credit where it is due as well as criticism. It should factor in what is going on elsewhere in human civilisation. Not because of a desire to give Westerners a pat on the back so they can feel good about themselves, but because any other type of assessment is conveniently arbitrary, and arbitrary justice is no justice at all.

People might not understand why Israelis and Palestinians are firing rockets at each other, but that doesn’t stop them choosing a team. “Mark likes Israel, I’m Palestine” — as Jeremy in Peep Show pointed out, it’s much more interesting if you pick sides, and the western world is not short of People With Opinions About The Middle East.

The modern stereotype of western partisanship is, on the one hand, someone with a US flag and/or a crucifix in their Twitter avatar protesting that Israel is the only Middle Eastern country where gay pride is allowed. And on the other, you’d have someone like gender studies professor Judith Butler, who once described Hamas and Hezbollah as being “social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left”.

Yet it wasn’t always like this. As Jeet Heer wrote a while back, American conservatives were once sympathetic to the Palestinians. Right-wing publisher Regnery, for instance, “published a steady stream of books championing Arab culture and sympathetically describing the plight of the Palestinians”. In 1956 the National Review called Israel “the first racist state in modern history” while “James Burnham, the most important and influential foreign policy analyst at National Review, was very critical of Israel, constantly berating the state for inflaming Arab passions by mistreating Palestinian refugees and its internal Arab population.” The conservative science fiction writer Poul Anderson mocked the Left for ignoring the Palestinians — something you couldn’t accuse them of now.

Among certain English conservatives was a strong affinity and natural sympathy with the aristocratic Arab world, while most of the Zionists were radicals, socialists and feminists of various kinds.

Suggested reading

How Hamas became so deadly

By David Patrakirakos

So why did Left and Right swap places? After 1967, the two sides did become more aligned along Cold War lines and so to be pro-Israeli was to be pro-American, and vice versa. But Heer argued that conservatives like power, and that their perception of a weak Jewish state changed following their heroic, spectacular victory in 1967: “After that, conservatives, like nerds attracted to a strongman, decided to sidle up to Israel.” That generalisation of conservatives is not entirely untrue, of course; Right-wing views in men tend to correlate with higher upper-body-mass and after the Six Day War Israel became a gym-bro’s dreams. Its military victories, as well as its famous special forces and intelligence agencies, are genuinely impressive in a Boy’s Own sort of way. That Israel operates as a sort of modern-day Sparta while also being ultra-libertarian does push all the right buttons for conservatives.

Then there is religion. In the Seventies, Israeli politicians built relationships with Evangelical leaders, who increasingly referred to “Judeo-Christian” values and gave Israel a solid support base in the US far larger than its Jewish minority; the one tiny downside was that Israel’s victory would ultimately bring about the end of the world, but this was a mere detail.

Israel, most recently, has also become much more religious, and therefore conservative, due to its Orthodox population having higher birth rates; indeed, it has become more religious at a time when religion is in freefall not just in the United States, but in the Arab world too.

The western Left, in contrast, carries with it an overriding interest in the power of victimhood, a legacy of some obscure sect that flourished in that part of the world 2,000 years ago. They also strongly identify with what Jonathan Haidt called the Care/Harm Foundation — the desire to protect the weak — but this is often only really triggered when they can in some way identify with the person doing the harming; that is why Syrian atrocities against Palestinians get as much attention as police shootings in Jamaica or Brazil.

Suggested reading

Why Israel erupted

By Shany Mor

But another, better suggestion for the Right’s identification with Israel might simply be anti-liberalism, so that when the Left adopted the Palestinian cause after 1967, conservatives supported Israel just to oppose them. Much of the modern Right is really only defined in opposition to the Left; if progressives went back to supporting Israel tomorrow, the Right would probably all add little Palestinian flags to their Twitter profiles. As the Balfour Declaration famously put it: “a home for the Jewish people, to own the libs”.

That won’t happen, but there are lots of instances where partisan groups switch sides en masse for purely tribal reasons. Before 2016, Republicans tended to be much more free trade than Democrats, and more hostile to Russia. Post-2016 that has reversed, to such an extent you might assume it was just the natural state of things.

The Left’s fondness for the underdog has often led intellectuals to side with “social movements that are progressive” who were also bloodthirsty maniacs. During the Cold War, many went off to support Leftist guerrillas in Cuba, Vietnam and various parts of Africa, but as Communism faded they found other underdog-murderers to support, and stumbled on Islamic radicals and revolutionaries. Michel Foucault famously had a weird infatuation with the Ayatollah Khomeini, calling him an “old saint” and referring to the Iranian revolution as “the most modern and the most insane” event. He meant “insane” in a good sense because Khomeinism transgressed western notions of rationality, which indeed hanging gay people from cranes certainly does.

Islamic fundamentalists, unlike communists, have little in common with western progressives, but that didn’t necessarily matter. While there are lots of different factors that determine a person’s political stance — personality type, moral flavour, our view of gender roles — the real primary motive is: who hates whom. Who is on your side?

Butler’s argument was that, since the likes of Hamas define themselves as anti-imperialist, and are opposed to US dominance, then they are on the Left. Of course, many on the Left get furious at this argument, since if Hamas were white, they would be defined as so right-wing as to be off the spectrum. Indeed the Right-Wing Authoritarian test has been done on Palestinian subjects and, unsurprisingly, Hamas supporters turned out to be pretty Right-wing and authoritarian.

Suggested reading

Political posturing won't save Israel

By Giles Fraser

And yet if they were white reactionaries, they would not be anti-western, nor therefore “anti-imperialistic”, so it is not an illogical rationale. If the Left defines itself as being against the United States’ global hegemony, then Hamas are indeed on the Left.

This is also the logic of the Right on Israel — that not only is it a liberal democracy, but it is somehow on their side in a civilisational sense. In some ways that’s true; visiting Israel, it does feel western in many respects. But neither is that wholly true, and it is certainly not helpful for a country which needs the acceptance of its neighbours for long-term survival. Indeed, it only vouches for the narrative that Israel is a colonial state.

In From Fatwa to Jihad, Kenan Malik interviewed some British-born Muslims fuming at the Zionist entity, and observed that none of them could point to Palestine on a map or mention a single fact about it. But the same is true of most culture warriors on the issue, who all see it as a proxy for a debate closer to home.

The Right is just as bad: during the 2016 presidential race, Ted Cruz was addressing a group of Arab Christians when he proceeded to tell them that they have no greater ally than Israel. Perhaps as a great surprise to him, they didn’t agree and he was booed off stage. But then Arab Christians don’t tend to be especially Zionist, funnily enough. And why should they be? It’s not a civilisational battle between West and East.

A century ago, up to a third of Palestinians were Christian, a group whose existence was famously summed up by the story of an Anglican visitor who asked a local which missionary had converted his family: “Paul”. Many of the leading PLO activists in the 1970s were Christians, as were the founders of Ba’athism. Indeed, rather than Israel being part of the West, the majority of Israelis don’t come from a European Ashkenazi background; over three million are Mizrahim and have always lived in the Middle East; to Europeans many if not most Israelis appear indistinguishable from other Middle Easterners.

But then many people who take an interest in the conflict see it as representative of something bigger. For conservatives, Zionism long ago became a way of signalling civilisational patriotism, opposition to Islam and Muslim immigration in the West, as well as a way of isolating the anti-Semites who have often dogged the Right and toxified the brand. On the other side, Palestinianism is part of a broader struggle; today America’s young progressives are as pro-Palestinian as their European equivalents, conflating it with America’s racial dynamic in a way that displays almost world-beating levels of solipsism.

More from this author

Political posturing won't save Israel

By Ed West

Yet I wonder how this will last. The region will always have explosive potential, but it might not hold the same symbolic importance it once did. The Religious Right is in serious decline in the US, and the conservatism replacing it is more secular and more nationalist; it is less keen on foreign adventures and less invested in Israel or the Middle East. Americans as a whole have largely given up on the idea that they are in some existential, civilisational clash with radical Islam because they’ve realised that, whatever their issues with the Muslim world, they hate each other more.

Most of all, the whole narrative around the Holy Land was in many ways a proxy for our view on the United States in a brief unipolar moment — and the rise of China will once again flip political alliances in ways we can’t entirely predict. The one thing we can be sure of is that, whatever horrors the Beijing regime inflicts on the world, some western intellectuals will be on hand to justify it as part of the global struggle against western oppression and colonialism. Some things are even more timeless and unending than war in the Middle East.

The stories were propaganda, in the most benevolent sense — designed to promote a system of values that should be imparted onto children. The Jesuit saying, “give me a child until seven and I will give you the man”, reflects the importance of shaping values at an early age.

I haven’t been so diligent in bringing my own children to church, and I’m pretty sure they couldn’t tell their St Catherine of Alexandria from their St Catherine of Sienna, but that’s not to say they aren’t being indoctrinated in the values of the ruling class’s faith.

When my daughters were around six and seven, they started French classes at a children’s library in our borough; I had been to our local library countless times but had mainly confined myself to the infant section, and older children’s books were something of a revelation. The entire front desk area was made up of hagiographies of Barack Obama and Nelson Mandela.

And hagiography is the most accurate term: these books were just like the ones I used to read in church. Here Blessed Nelson forgave his jailors, here St Barack healed America of its racial sins – and these are just a couple of examples.

More from this series

Why are children's books so ugly?

By Mary Harrington

It was a bit of a surprise, learning just how much the tone of kids’ books had changed and how much progressive politics is now ever-present. Which is fine, if you’re a believer; but if you’re a conservative, you’re faced with raising your children in a culture which is filled with messages you disagree with — sometimes misleading, sometimes anecdotally true but not representative, often just anti-wisdom, giving children the worst possible advice in life. And it’s becoming worse: since about 2016, children’s books have grown way more explicitly political.

The children’s literature section at Tate Modern

Last month, a friend went to Tate Modern and took a picture of the young children’s section. Among the books on display are biographies of Greta Thunberg, something called Queer Heroes, another work called The Rainbow Flag, books about refugees, the bestselling Good Night Book for Rebel Girls — and its countless imitators. Whether you support it or not, this is propaganda; the aim is to raise a generation of progressives just as those Lives of the Saints were designed to bring forth young Christians.

And it works. Conservative ideas are very much in retreat, the subject of a brilliant new book I recently read (which, admittedly, I also wrote).

From a very young age, children are read books and shown films that teach them the core progressive messages: that we are all basically good and only behave badly because of circumstances; that borders and barriers are bad, stereotypes are wrong and girls ought to adopt traditional male gender roles if they want to be respected.

Stereotype inaccuracy is a popular idea — and a false one; in so many kids’ stories the unusual stranger or alien or wild animal who turns up in the neighbourhood will defy the small-minded pessimist who expects the worst. When it comes to gender politics, no self-respecting children’s book in the 21^st century has girls aspiring towards being a princess and living happily ever after; to the post-ironic upper-middle-class parents who are the publishers’ main audience, that would just be lame.

More from this author

Why child labour beats school

By Ed West

There’s nothing wrong with all this, of course — and as a parent, it’s a relief when daughters move on from the pinky-princess-fairy stage of cartoons and onto the more thoughtful stuff that questions gender stereotypes. That questioning is a natural part of growing up and books open their minds to potentially endless possibilities — before they reach maturity and realise that gender identity matches biological sex in the vast majority of cases. Unfortunately, our culture has become stuck in this adolescent stage of late.

My in-laws kept dozens of books from the 1970s and early ’80s, which we read to our kids along with more recent ones. The general difference in tone was noticeable, progressive themes being almost totally absent in the older books. My Naughty Little Sister is naughty simply because she’s a bloody nuisance, and it’s not really celebrated either as some non-conforming, high-status trait; she’s not a ‘rebel girl’, she’s just annoying.

Of course, the Talmud of progressive children’s literature is the Harry Potter series, preaching of a boy born to freedom-fighter parents who has the bad luck to be brought up in a stultifying, conservative Surrey suburb by his dully conventional uncle and aunt.After the geeky, open-minded protagonist is allowed to go to wizard school, what follows is a battle between two worldviews: that of the snake-like Slytherin house, which favours the pure-blooded and aristocratic, and the inclusive Gryffindor house, kind-hearted and welcoming to people of all backgrounds.

Suggested reading

Our modern parenting is making monsters

By Giles Fraser

The values in children’s books have changed over the past few decades because society has undergone a revolution in values. But as with previous revolutions, in France and Russia — and with the earlier Protestant Reformation, too — the process has sped up with its own momentum. The revolutions of 1789 and February 1917 are followed by more extreme jolts; Luther is followed by Calvin and Munster.

So after decades of accelerating social change, during the 2010s there was a marked and radical shift, especially among the English-speaking upper-middle-class, christened “the Great Awokening”. The term is a play on the Great Awakening, the 18^th century religious revival in the United States — and the name is apt, since the movement has an obviously religious feel, sacralising victim groups and inspiring extreme hostility towards non-believers, heretics and apostates. Indeed poor old J.K. Rowling has herself been partly eaten by the revolution, after revealing herself to be a gender-critical feminist.

And so, with this great movement, there has been a proliferation of books for young children that aim to install progressive politics — and promote those most sacred of issues, women’s empowerment and racial equality, and to a lesser extent gay and trans rights.

There are now children’s books in the States with such names as A Is for Activists, D Is for Dreamers and W Is for Welcome: A Celebration of America’s Diversity, as well as large numbers pushing the gender-is-a-social-construct narrative, such as One of a Kind, Like Me/Unico Como Yo, about a boy who wants to dress up as a princess.

Britain is embroiled in the revolution, too. I remember two Christmas’s ago, almost every girl between 8 and 13 in my part of north London received a copy of that bestselling Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls from some well-meaning relative (my elder daughter received two). The publishing industry has since cashed in on telling stories of heroic (often overlooked) females.

More from this series

Children's literature has lost the plot

By Polly Mackenzie

Parents can feel good that they are raising their offspring to be firm believers, Woke Babies who will “raise their fists in the air… cry out for justice” and “grow up to change the world.” The book A is for Activist promises it is “written and illustrated for the next generation of progressives: families who want their kids to grow up in a space that is unapologetic about activism, environmental justice, civil rights, LGBTQ rights and everything else that activists believe in and fight for.”

There has also been a proliferation of political biographies for young children, including picture books about not only Obama or Mandela but Latino judge Sonia Sotomayor and even Elizabeth Warren. Likewise, over here there’s a book about Remainer pin-up Lady Hale, called Equal to Everything: Judge Brenda and the Supreme Court.

It’s not that I oppose children reading about Lady Hale or Elizabeth Warren; it’s more that I couldn’t even comprehend why anyone would wish for their children to do so. Unless they were true believers of a progressive new religion of kick-ass women, boys-who-want-to-be-girls and visionaries who heal people of their racism sickness.

I’m not, and seeing children’s books being turned into a sort of religion, I feel like a ten-year-old again, wishing I could be reading The X-Men rather than sat in church.

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History is published by Constable