The Clare Boothe Luce Center’s annual leadership conference for young women promises to nurture “strong, conservative leaders” and help “young women flourish… while strengthening their families, communities, and country”. With more than 120 there, this was its biggest gathering yet.

Clad in what I thought was my smartest outfit — white shirt, black trousers, ballet flats — I realized my miscalculation the moment the elevator doors opened. Before me stood Mia, 21, from North Carolina, in a long white dress and stilettos, her curls immaculate. It was a sea of voluminous blowdries and meticulous makeup. Nearly every girl was dressed as if she was about to meet a senator, or marry one, while I looked like the Senate librarian.

Over breakfast, I met some of them, as they daintily picked at their syrupy pancakes with scarlet nails: Maddy, a sparky 20-year-old in baby blue, was working as a Comms intern for her “hero”, her state’s first female senator; Cecelia, the youngest and sternest, was interning for the conservative and religious First Things magazine. Paige, another congressional intern, grinned at me: “Today is so fun!”

They were fresh-faced and ambitious. Most were under 21, and were in DC forging the beginnings of their political career, only a few among the swarm of interns that descends upon the city each summer. They came from colleges all over the country, often from campuses that were allergic to their political persuasions, and they hoped that the people they met here would one day be their colleagues in congress or on the senate floor.

Kimberly Begg, the center’s president, is a Catholic attorney, who has five children, and has worked for various conservative causes throughout her life. She took this job last year, feeling a desire to teach the values she’s living to the next generation. “I want them to know what it means to be a good woman,” she said. “Not just how to excel at work, but how to live. ”

Her summer interns are taking note. One of them, Anastasia, told me she’d learned “how to look good on camera and spread the message”. When I asked her about this message, she responded brightly: “That you can be a mom and be ambitious.” I would hear this repeatedly: you shouldn’t disvalue mothering alongside your greater career goals; ; you can most definitely have it all. The practicalities of this were never addressed — can you stay home while running for senate? Instead, we were told that womanhood isn’t possible without babies.

The first speaker was the 30-year-old Mary Margaret Olohan, a redheaded White House correspondent for The Daily Wire. She’d grown up in an Irish Catholic family, “proudly” one of 11 children, and had been homeschooled. She began her career as a publicist during the 2018 Kavanaugh hearings, where several women accused the now Supreme Court justice of sexual misconduct during his confirmation hearing. “I don’t know if you were politically cognizant then,” she told her fresh-faced audience, “but that’s when I was radicalized.” Olohan quit her job to become a journalist, a “truth-seeking one”, convinced that the “Pro-Abortion” media were trying to stop Kavanaugh’s appointment, and now she covers abortion as a beat.

Today, she’s a regular visitor to the Oval Office: “There’s things you have to do to get noticed, I wear bright colors, have a peppy smile, I make sure I look good, really good.” Recently, she’s been reporting on the doxxing of ICE agents. Yet she told us that she’ll always make space for Mass during her work day, even if it means missing a scoop.

Like every other speaker that day, Olohan offered career advice with the caveat that there are “more important things to remember. You should never prioritize your career over finding your spouse… You should try and put yourself in the position that you can be at home. Like me, if God willing, I have a family, I can be at home writing.”

As girls queued for selfies, Maddy, who writes for her student newspaper, told me she was excited that such a young woman could be breaking such big stories. “She was just so cool. I mean, how old is she? And she’s everywhere.”

But not everyone felt so inspired. Courtney, a dazzling blonde from Utah who is currently interning in Congress, sighed. “We’re all girls here, so I may as well just tell you, I’m 17 weeks pregnant. And it’s really hard. I’m the only girl in my office, and I’m just totally exhausted. No one gets it.” She looked around the room. “This is what I hoped DC would be like.” She clearly admired Olohan: “I really want to do that too. To fight abortion, trans stuff, to fight for America. I want to make a difference. But I’m so tired now, and I haven’t even had the kid yet.” And yet for all her talk about balancing work and homemaking, Olohan had offered little practical advice: “I mean, she’s not even married yet. How can she tell me what I’m supposed to do?” Courtney asked me.

The other girls, whose youthful naivete no amount of makeup could conceal, had no answer. “I mean, in an ideal world, you’d have your family around. Someone to look after the baby, right?” Maddy ventured, as the rest of us nodded enthusiastically. “I don’t know how to trust someone else with my kid,” Courtney replied. “And don’t even get me started on daycares.”

There was a fracture at the table now: tiny, but visible. None of the other girls was married. None had boyfriends. Maddy said she’d gladly date someone “if he’s not intimidated by a strong woman”. She was here to network, but Courtney was here to find out how to live.

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Courtney had become pregnant by “accident”, and married her boyfriend earlier this year, “because what else can you do?” All the girls I spoke to were vehemently pro-life, except Maddy, who thought there “should be some exception for rape”. Paige and Courtney weren’t so sure; they grimaced at Maddy’s mention of rape. “Two wrongs just don’t make a right,” Paige told me.

Besides, Courtney was grateful for her unexpected pregnancy. “Now we have to become real grown-ups, we have to step it up,” she said. Her husband is 23 and still has two years of college left. He is spending the summer delivering Amazon packages. “He’s a good man, for that. He wants me to stay home.” She showed us wedding photos taken at the Utah State courthouse.

What really struck me, though, was that in a room of worshipping conservatives, who were excited by what the new administration had been doing, there was no mention of Donald Trump until after lunch. The values of being a “conservative woman” — being polite in your power, being nurturing with your strength — didn’t seem to align with Trumpian chaos. He was the unmentionable representative of a more turbulent revolution.

When I asked about Trump, Paige perked up: “He’s not perfect. But he loves America.” “I just wish he’d get off Twitter!” Courtney sighed. The girls liked Melania Trump and admired her reticence. “People are so mean to her, it’s so disrespectful,” Courtney said. “Feminists especially.” But their real heroine was Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s feisty 27-year-old press secretary. “They say [Trump] doesn’t like strong women, I mean just look at the women surrounding him. Look at her, she’s amazing,” Courtney said. Leavitt, who had a baby on the campaign trail, went back to work just four days after giving birth. To these girls, she’s the ultimate embodiment of conservative womanhood. She grinned through it all with her hair freshly blow-dried.

“Everyone knows conservative women are the happiest in America,” McFarland told the cheering crowd. Like many others that day, McFarland offered happiness like a revolutionary compact: work harder and look better, don’t waste energy on girls who “suck the energy from you”. Don’t out-man the men but outshine them.

We heard from Harmeet Dhillon, Trump’s lawyer, and Paula Scanlan, who spoke with steely hurt about her time on a swim team with Lia Thomas, the transgender athlete. “Women are naturally kind and caring,” Scanlan said. “It’s really challenging to break through that.” Courtney nodded beside me.

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In line for the bathroom afterwards, a group of girls discussed Scanlan’s courage. “She can’t be more than 20,” one said, admiringly. An 18-year-old from California sighed, “That’s the problem with being young. Guys just can’t match our maturity. I have to date, like, a 25-year-old.” The line dragged. Despite the day’s lengthy applause for single-sex spaces, the girls broke into the men’s bathroom. “This is so funny,” a 20-year-old from Maryland told me. One girl dry-shampooed while another fixed her lashes. Another took a mirror selfie to send to her mum.

As I was leaving the conference, I exchanged numbers with Maddy. “It’s funny,” she said when I complimented her outfit, “it was actually my mom’s wedding dress.” “She gave it to me.”

Was that it? Did this maternal gesture in some way sum up the entire movement? In this room, femininity wasn’t something to rebel against or escape from, but something to inherit and slightly refashion, like your mom’s old wedding suit. The girls identified as “first-wave feminists”, because they weren’t looking for equality, but a way to make peace with everything they’d been told to seek. Here, the pursuit of love didn’t conflict with ambition, nor was faith at odds with intelligence.

Yet, as Courtney seemed to realize, there were holes in the story of conservative womanhood these girls were being sold. “Tradwife or Girlboss, maybe you don’t have to choose,” read one of the conference’s ads; and in many ways, the movement on offer here felt like a soft-lit inversion of the girlboss era, with self-empowerment refashioned as political purpose. Where the girlboss promised liberation through self-branding, the conservative woman here was encouraged to become her fullest self by serving others, her God, her country, her family. Yet both models offered the same tired bargain: perform perfectly, and you’ll be rewarded.

Courtney was waiting for that reward. She left hopeful that she would “figure it all out”, become a mother in a few months and then become something else too. And the day’s agenda only offered a more orderly container for those things, one with clear expectations and attractive packaging. But Courtney’s tired eyes and unasked questions still hover over the whole thing: a reminder that no amount of lipstick or prayer can gloss over what this brand of femininity can’t sustain.

We were told all day that boys have it harder now, and the women nodded along, because nodding is easier than asking what hard really means. They’d been “going dancing”, having “movie nights”, cooking each other “cute little dinners”. But they were also getting on in the world. And at some point, the fervor they built up trying to change America would have to be sacrificed for their truer calling: motherhood. Then, it would be the boys left standing in the Oval Office, the Senate floor, or even in their own homes, making decisions.

That siren call of conservative womanhood is not shouted but whispered. A murmur that tells you your instincts are sacred, your sacrifice noble, your submission a kind of strength. It makes giving things up feel like choosing them. Even while Courtney abandoned her political dreams (at least for now) she felt her greater purpose would arrive with her baby. I could easily feel the allure of such a promise. But that’s what I left shaken by: how quietly a life could be rerouted, not by force, but by suggestion. This way they could have it all, supposedly, but the rooms of real power were still off limits, reserved for the boys who never had to choose.

On both occasions, the federal city was filled to capacity. “Beds! beds! beds!” was the general cry in 1837. Many visitors had spent the previous night sleeping rough, in barns and markets and even barbers’ chairs. And so it was in 2025, with even mid-market hotels charging upwards of $1,500 per room. Both inaugurations were similarly marked by the irreverence and boozy rowdiness typical of populist movements, Jacksonian democracy in Van Buren’s case, Trumpism yesterday.

Watching the swearing-in remotely, from the Capital One Arena, I chuckled at the partisan fandom. Prominent Democrats drew boos from the crowd, while Republicans got applause. But when Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a Democrat, and House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican, appeared side-by-side, the crowd booed. “Wait, what did poor Mike Johnson do?”, I asked my companion. Then, as if collectively regretting their drive-by booing of the innocent Johnson, most of the arena audience refrained from booing or cheering when members of both parties showed up together on the jumbotrons.

Trump, inevitably, received roars of approval and standing ovations. Not much at first, when he was strangely subdued and his delivery halting. But as he gathered steam, so too did the audience. The greatest clamour of approval came when he pledged to make it the “official policy of the United States government” to recognize only two genders: male and female. Other crowd favorites included “Drill, baby, drill”; his vow to “take back” the Panama Canal; and, of course, his crackdown at the border.

It turns out that doing popular things can make for good politics. Democrats today don’t seem to grasp this banal truism, but their own party’s Jacksonian founders did, whether it was dismantling the Second Bank of the United States, an institution that had come to be hated by much of the public for the imperious role it played in the early republic’s politics (even as it fulfilled important economic functions); or imposing the first legal limitation on the length of the workday; or expanding the democratic franchise to white men without property.

Trump’s instincts hew much closer to those of Jacksonian Democrats than his own party’s intellectual class, and he has no problem proclaiming the popular. Precisely because progressivism has come to be associated with paper straws, congestion fees, and diminished expectations, Trump gains the upper hand simply by promising good things to come, even as some of his brain-storms veer into the preposterous — such as a military invasion to bring Greenland under American control.

Yet the deepest historical echo yesterday had to do with political coalitions. To wit, “Jacksonism” — the worldview associated with Van Buren’s predecessor and ex-boss, Andrew Jackson — raged against “the money power” that oppressed workers and farmers. But his coalition also included grasping entrepreneurs, local bankers, slave-owning planters, along with other interests who were by no means opposed to capitalism, but saw in Jackson a chance to make the system work better for them.

And so it was with Trump. On the one hand, Trump in his Inaugural Address attacked the “corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens while the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair”. On the other, he invited to the dais business leaders such as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, whose firms took once the lead in promoting the corporate “wokeness” reviled by Trump’s base.

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More than a mere dais seat, Elon Musk has been presented with his own government department, to which the Tesla and SpaceX boss hopes to recruit a team of “small-government crusaders”. He says he aims to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget —surely impossible without cutting those entitlement programs that Trump and the Republican platform have promised never to touch. So we are left wondering which Trumpism will prevail: the one that explicitly appeals to trade unionists (as the President also did in his address), or the one that (for now) adores Musk as a (Roman) demigod?

But for one day, at least, the American Right’s various factions pressed pause on their bickering to celebrate Trump’s remarkable comeback saga: from January 6 through the barrage of indictments and convictions of the past four years, he has made it back to the summit of earthly power. But the tensions will erupt soon enough. Already, Congress’s TikTok ban and visa program disputes have divided the movement’s populist base and Silicon Valley funders.

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Judging by the inauguration, the latter are everywhere in the new Washington. They were at every fringe event, dinner, and party that I attended. Trumpism now contains within itself a downscale base that sings “glory, glory, hallelujah!” and yearns for restoring industrial jobs, and an affluent element that promotes longevity through plasma transfusions and who would automate most jobs out of existence.

Can these two competing impulses be synthesized?

Here, the Jacksonian example isn’t so helpful. While Jackson, Van Buren and their ilk did indeed smash the Second Bank of the United States, this redounded mostly to the benefit of their business allies; the workers and smallholders in turn were handed a brief depression and a surge in inflation caused by a surfeit of wildcat bankers, followed by decades during which the United States suffered from a much higher rate of banking crises than comparable industrial powers with more centralized financial systems. But for all its flaws, the hated administrative institution did help discipline the flow of credit.

There are, however, more successful reform models in the American political tradition. Particularly germane is what the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr dubbed “Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends”: a willingness to ally with and use big institutions and wealth, whether public or private, in service of the Jeffersonian vision of a competent, modestly propertied citizenry — the American Dream, if you like. Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, FDR, Eisenhower, and JFK all echoed this to varying degrees, with varying degrees of success.

But such an approach would require a willingness to discipline Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk, including by mobilizing public opinion against them. The state must lead business, even if business leaders are allowed great closeness to state power and invited to participate in politics. FDR, for example, warned firms against defying his labor and competition reforms: “There is no group in America that can withstand the force of an aroused public opinion.”

At the Commander-in-Chief Ball on Monday night, where the majority of guests were members of the armed forces and their families, the cheering, whooping, and military-style “Hooahs!” for Trump and his team were deafening. “Welcome back, President Trump, your warriors had missed you,” declared a Medal of Honor recipient from the podium. “He’s just with us,” an Air Force man told me. “I don’t care about this or that policy. He has our backs.”

At least for now, Trump has that dangerous “force” of public opinion on his side to an extent that wasn’t the case the first time he was elected — and that hasn’t been the case for a Republican president in a generation. As one official who had served in the first Trump administration told me, “Every 40 years or so, the Jackson spirit comes back to stir things up in this country. The question is what you do with it.”

Democrats, by and large, were welcomed. Republicans were not. When Ronald Reagan visited in 1980, he was heckled to such an extent that he cut his visit short. Indeed, his experience was so scarring for the party that few followed in his footsteps for the next 50 years. Some 44 years later, however, no such treatment was visited upon his successor. Just a stone’s throw from Charlotte Street (now a tree-lined road populated by bungalows and 4×4 trucks) lies Crotona Park, where the former president is due to speak.

Thousands are queuing, impatiently, to squeeze through the five makeshift security gates to make it into the main area. Notwithstanding a few secret service personnel attempting to part the red sea of MAGA hats, the crowd is already boisterous. In typical New York fashion, local salesmen are haggling with supporters over the cost of various pieces of Trump merchandise; one offers to sell his Trump-on-the-cross shirt for $50 before slyly upping the price to $60 for his next customer. Another hawks a t-shirt reading “If u still hate Trump after this shitshow your commitment to stupidity is impressive” to a gleeful teenager.

This is Trump’s first rally in his hometown of New York in eight years. But Joe Biden’s lead in the state has slipped from 23% to single digits (9%) this year and there is little sign he is clawing any of that support back. Although the state — and the Bronx — remains solidly blue, it may only take a few seats in the House to give Republicans control of the lower chamber of Congress. Evidently, Trump smells blood.

“I’ve been a lifelong Democrat, but I’ve had enough,” Emilio says. “I stayed at home during the last election, but food prices are so bad now there is just no way I’m voting for Biden. I feel betrayed.” Emilio is here with his wife and three young children, who all hold their own “Never Surrender” placard featuring Trump’s mugshot. They’ve managed to secure a prime viewing spot for Trump, who takes to the stage after his day in court in Manhattan.

He is greeted by hordes of supporters, soaking in the adulation with his familiar half-pout. “I’m a New Yorker,” he proudly booms. “Out here, you had to have smarts, grit, and energy — and you had to have heart.” “This is where you came to make it big,” he continues, “but now it is a city in decline.”

It is a point not without merit. Crime may be falling in some areas, but major felony charges which include murder, rape, robbery are on the rise. New York also has the highest per capita government debt in the country, with the state projecting a budget gap of $4.3 billion in fiscal year 2025. This has been turbocharged by the influx of migrants into the city, which is estimated to cost $12 billion over three years, more than the city spends on fire and sanitation services combined. It’s no wonder, then, that the state has the highest emigration rate in the country.

But is Trump the man to fix it? “Name me another politician that would come to deep Bronx like this” Wayne, who is holding a “New York is TRUMP country” sign, says. “It shows that he actually gives a damn — unlike AOC and Biden.” I ask how Trump can fix the city if it is run by Democrats. “Because he’s a goddamn businessman and he knows how to get things done” — a point Trump repeats himself on stage.

Like Wayne, the Bronx crowd is loud, profane and assertive. They are, after all, New Yorkers. They may not look like Trump, but they certainly sound like him. His is the kind of voice that these locals would tune into on a drive home from the Yankees game on a Sunday afternoon, bemoaning the team’s lacklustre performance. Which is why, as Jamie Kirchick of the Brookings Institution accurately observed, everything makes a lot more sense when Trump’s comments are prefaced with “‘Donny from Queens, you’re on the air.” Giving his hot takes on everything from men in women’s sports to New York’s “third-world” subway system at the podium, Donny sees himself as New York’s everyman. He’s the guy who’s going to fix everything. “If a New Yorker can’t save this country, no one can,” he says. “Obviously, only I can save it”.

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Although Trump lost the Bronx by more than 300,000 votes in 2020, the swelling crowd suggests many more are now willing to hear what he has to say. He is speaking in the poorest congressional district in the country, and residents here seem tired of decades-long Democratic rule. Juan Ramirez, who works at a nearby bodega, says that his living situation became so serious last year that there were days where he had to choose between paying for fuel or food. “If I wasn’t able to get some food from my bodega, I’m not sure how I would have fed my family.”

Amid Trump’s growing support among ethnic minority groups, Ramirez is one of many Latinos abandoning the Democratic flock. “They took our votes for granted for too long,” he says. “They deserve to be punished for all the pain they’ve put us through.” And if the latest polls are anything to go by, he’s not alone. Some now show the former president edging out Joe Biden among Hispanic voters, with 46% supporting Trump versus 40% in favour of Biden — another reason why Trump may find favour here: the Bronx is 57% Hispanic, 28% black and just 8% white.

Ramirez has more to share, but he is distracted by a ruckus nearby; a group has caught wind of a roving New York Times reporter, who is trying to slink back into the press pack. One of the men confronting the reporter — a friend of Juan’s — is accusing her of furtively filming his exchange with friends. “I said I DID NOT WANT TO TALK to crooked media,” he screams at her. The message is received.

The crowd might have once been the Democrats’ rainbow coalition: in addition to Latinos, African-Americans and white voters, there are native Americans, Orthodox Jews, and even Albanians dressed in traditional clothing. All punctuate Trump’s speech with “let’s go Brandon!” and “USA, USA!” as he detours into an extended tangent about the importance of brine in ice rinks or starts reading lyrics from Al Wilson’s ‘The Snake’. And just as he feels that he might be losing them, Trump dials up the enthusiasm. “What a crowd!” He says. “This is like a love fest — I love you! Who said we’re not gonna win New York? We’re gonna win New York and win the whole thing!”

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It is highly unlikely that Trump will, in fact, win New York. It has been 44 years since a Republican won the state and Biden won it handily in 2020. But green shoots for the GOP are starting to emerge: for the first time in 40 years, a Republican was elected to a city council seat in the Bronx. In Queens, the incumbent Republican Vickie Paladino was overwhelmingly re-elected against a Democratic challenger whom she beat by only a few hundred votes in 2021. Trump may not be the ultimate beneficiary of these changes, but he is certainly an accelerant.

Back in 2020, Biden ran a successful campaign by promising a return to normality. Most of the country, Democrats included, would concede that, on this score, he failed. Stubbornly high food and gas prices, two costly wars, and a crisis on the border, it is now Trump who claims to be the “common sense” candidate. As the only candidate to face 92 felony charges in an election year, this is a tall claim. But given that Biden, who has record low job approval polling, is trailing in nearly all of the swing states, Trump fever now appears to be spreading to the Democrats’ innermost strongholds. Even if New York doesn’t turn red, this rally was the surest signal yet that Republicans are feeling increasingly confident about parking their tanks on the Democrats’ lawn.

Just last month, academic Thomas Schaller, co-author of the erroneous book, White Rural Rage, stoked this prejudice on MSNBC: “[Rural voters] are the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay geo-demographic group in the country… They are the most likely to excuse or justify violence as an acceptable alternative to peaceful public discourse.” He was trending on X in no time. But his ideas aren’t exactly new: after the 2016 election, Frank Rich published an essay titled “No sympathy for the Hillbilly” in New York magazine, while the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman regularly churns out op-eds on rural rage.

As two scholars of rural politics, who have spent the past three years pouring over thousands of survey interviews with rural Americans, this caricature of the rural rabble-rouser is deeply puzzling. Instead of threats to democracy, or rebellious politics, or reflexive anger, we keep finding something different: pride in rural living, a sense of communal belonging, a shared fate that intertwines the economic well-being of rich and poor in rural communities. Yes, there are resentments, especially towards government officials and experts. But resentment is not a stereotype. It’s a motivation, a story.

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Still, rageful stereotypes sell better than complex backstories. And they’re easier for our political and media ecosystems to make sense of. Reference some data point about QAnon conspiracies in the heartlands, and you’ll raise more money from nervous liberals in the city (who just so happen to live next to three times as many conspiracy believers). Lash out against the xenophobia in small towns, and you’ll mobilise your city voters to the polls. Rage draws clicks. It makes a splash.

However, unlike rage, which is explosive and directed towards immediate targets, scholars have shown that resentment in rural areas emanates from a sense of enduring injustice and marginalisation. It is not primarily about anger towards specific groups such as black Americans, immigrants, or LGBT individuals. Instead, resentment or grievance is a deeper, more persistent feeling that arises from real and perceived slights against rural communities. These include economic policies that have devastated local industries, a lack of investment in rural infrastructure and education, and a sense of cultural dismissal from urban-centric media and politics.

Such failures help to explain the deep-rooted scepticism in many rural areas towards government policy solutions. Just consider the aftermath of the North American Free Trade Agreement, implemented in 1994. Nafta’s champions, including both Democrats and Republicans, promised that the deal would bring prosperity to small farmers, but between 1998 and 2018, one out of every 10 small US farms disappeared. Not long after the trade barriers were removed, Canadian cattle ranchers flooded the American market with beef and prices plummeted, forcing small farms out of business. Meanwhile, large-scale agribusinesses capitalised on the open borders. If government neglect drove your grandpa off his farm back then, why would you trust it now?

Yet the stereotype of the raging rural American misrepresents these complexities of the rural experience. It is why Hollywood fell for J.D. Vance’s story of Appalachian poverty, while failing to recognise that he was running a political campaign that spoke to the resilience, values and pride of rural residents. And it is why most progressives don’t have much empathy left for rural voters — despite feeling deeply for nearly every other marginalised group in American society.

In some circles, this lack of empathy stems from the fact that these so-called “deplorables” are blamed for having brought Trump to power. As Paul Waldman, the second co-author of White Rural Rage, said on his book tour: “If Donald Trump gets back to the Oval Office, it will be because — once again — rural Whites put him there.” But rural America is not responsible for Trump. If simply voting for Trump makes you “enraged”, then the residents of cities and suburbs, from which Trump derived 80% of his total votes in 2020, are downright furious. Pinning Trump’s gains on decades of rural America’s losses is just another form of confirmation bias — reinforcing existing beliefs without critical examination. Rarely do you hear mentions of figures such as Bill Clinton, who championed Nafta, or Hillary, who seemed to openly celebrate the fact that she lost the places that were economically suffering the most.

With stereotypes of rage come stereotypes of irrationality. But rural folk have good reason to partly blame Democrats, experts and college professors for their misfortunes. They know full well that federal agriculture and trade policies pushed by both Democrats and Republicans did destroy rural economies. And that liberal elites stood by as rural students became one of the least likely groups to attend college, and one of the most likely to drop out. Surely, the drive for diversity and inclusion should include rural kids, too?

We’ve also noticed that city dwellers have a tendency to use stereotypes as a crutch to disguise the fact that they know very little about how different people live their lives. Both rural and urban people see the “other” as having different values. Many of these differences are overblown, but some of them are, undoubtedly, true. We see it in our own lives: as college professors who choose to live in the countryside, our colleagues playfully say we’ve “gone native”, and our neighbours think we’re squirrelly. We love both worlds and the people within them, even when they value different things. But stereotypes, generalisations, tropes and unchecked hyperbole foreclose the possibility of closing this divide.

In order to genuinely heal societal rifts and to find common ground, we have to dispel the myths of blind rage, and see instead a common desire for recognition. And yet, it appears that progressive commitments to multiculturalism and pluralism only extend to groups that vote the “right” way. It’s almost as if they haven’t learnt their lesson: as long as rural America is treated with disdain, should we really be surprised when, once again, it reluctantly turns to Trump?

Almost 20 years later, the first Global Compact Leadership Summit is considered the birthplace of the ESG movement, a kind of constitutional convention for global “governance”. Annan had been championing this new approach since at least 1999, when, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he announced the creation of “a global compact of shared values and principles, which will give a human face to the global market”. The aim would be to create a “compact” of agreements that could keep up with the radical change being wrought by globalising markets. It would, of course, do much more than that.

Since Annan’s proclamation, ESG has morphed into a social and corporate inevitability. Its manifestations are evident everywhere — from academia’s heady embrace of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives to the corporate world’s collective gush over protecting the environment, preventing racism and advancing whatever else might be the “current thing” of international righthink.

Its rise appeared unstoppable — until 2023 arrived. Only this month, Republicans in Congress announced they would subpoena BlackRock, the asset management firm most closely aligned with ESG, and State Street, another Fortune 500 financial heavyweight, to investigate whether their ESG policies violate anti-trust law. Days after that news broke, the state of Tennessee announced it was suing BlackRock for making what it called “misleading” statements about ESG.

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By John Masko

For its part, BlackRock — undoubtedly the greatest champion of ESG — is retreating, backing “just 7% of environmental and social proposals at companies’ annual meetings in 2023 proxy season, down from 47% two years earlier,” according to the Financial Times. In the UK, signs of a brewing backlash are just as evident. The Confederation of British Industry (CBI), a major lobbying group, has hired Rupert Soames, a critic of ethical investing, as its next president.

For some, the pivot away from ESG may come as a shock. But the reality is that the equilibrium has been shifting for more than a year. One of the strongest indicators that all was not well with ESG came from the most unlikely of places: the annual letter from ESG’s most high-profile supporter. Larry Fink, chairman and CEO of BlackRock, began publishing his letters to shareholders and CEO in 2012 in which he introduced ESG-speak into the halls of capitalism. But this year, Fink told the Aspen Ideas Festival that he’s no longer using the term since it’s been “weaponised” by critics. And ESG was notably absent from his 2023 letter in March. This might be no more than a symbol of the influence of ESG. But in the context of a decade during which the acronym was proclaimed as a shibboleth of a new kind of global corporate power, one whose proponents construe profit-seeking as a means to an end, that end being nothing less than improving the lot of mankind, it is nevertheless significant.

It’s not hard to see why ESG won broad, even fervent, appeal in its early days. By the mid-2000s, American capitalism had begun to resemble its own caricature. The global economy of the late Nineties and early 2000s was defined not just by excess, but by excessive scandal: the ruinous “privatisation” of Russia; the triple header of Enron, Long Term Capital Management, and Bernie Madoff; and in the background, an Iraq War architected by the former CEO of a major oil industry services company. And then came the mother of all scandals: the 2008 Financial Crisis.

Today, with the media tightly aligned with ESG-embracing Big Business, it’s easy to forget how antagonistic the press was to large companies in the early and mid-2000s. “Transnational corporations” became a go-to epithet insinuating a cartel-like form of legalised corruption; financiers became objects of derision; films such as The Big Short, Arbitrage, Erin Brockovich and Thank You For Smoking highlighted corporate malfeasance.

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The emergence of ESG may have been rooted in a genuine desire to do better. It’s hard to argue with calls, such as that of Brazilian president Lula da Silva at Annan’s 2004 Global Compact Leadership Summit, to see global leaders “engaged in a campaign to free all human beings from hunger”. The same holds true for preserving the natural environment and sharing the benefits — not the externalities — of corporate progress. After all, who doesn’t want a better world?

The problem with ESG, however, is that the practice didn’t match the theory. While ESG set out to make a difference, it ended up becoming a way for Big Business to flip the mass of negative attention into a positive, highly appealing ethos. ESG was all about upholding human rights and ensuring the planet didn’t get incinerated at the altar of ruthless capitalism. This meant that if you were against ESG, you were against ethics itself. And if you opposed the prerogatives of the Big Business espousing ESG, you were a heartless devotee of shareholder capitalism. This binary attitude suited firms such as BlackRock, which depend on, and compete fiercely for, a continuous inflow of fresh capital to invest. If BlackRock could successfully make the case that (a) your firm is the standard for ethical investment and (b) every other approach is so inefficient in the long term that it’s functionally corrupt, then the conclusion regarding which firms get the money is foregone. In other words, BlackRock found a way to win.

In the decade since Larry Fink began writing his letter to shareholders, in which he championed ideas such as “corporate governance and responsible investment”, BlackRock’s market cap quadrupled. The company now has $9 trillion under management, a testament not only to Fink’s financial genius but also to his unparalleled access to global leaders who make decisions at the billion-dollar level.

Fink, as a result, became a darling of the Davos set — and it was there that, in January, he chose to make another ESG confession, this one vastly more significant. At the WEF, he admitted that his firm’s close association with the ESG movement had cost BlackRock an estimated $4 billion in managed assets. While for many (if not most) asset management firms, this would be a fatal blow, it’s in fact a mere trickle lost in BlackRock’s financial ocean. But it’s also a headline. And, no matter how you spin it, it’s a loss — one that could spell the start of a devastating longer-term trend.

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But there was another, more overlooked signal that all was not well with ESG. When Fink released this year’s ESG-free letter, it contained a second omission: in previous years, Fink wrote one letter to CEOs and a separate one to investors. This neatly reflected the concept of “stakeholder capitalism” at the heart of ESG, which calls for equal consideration of all the people involved in a company’s ecosystems, including employees, customers, and the public, not just its shareholders. But this year Fink wrote only a single letter — to investors. Was Fink signalling a retrenchment, a return to the unglamorous, nuts-and-bolts endeavour of shareholder capitalism?

The idea of stakeholder capitalism is attributed largely to Klaus Schwab, creator and chairman of the World Economic Forum, who began spreading the idea in a 1971 study he co-authored called “Modern Company Management in Mechanical Engineering”. This top-down approach to shaping how wealth is created, and in whose hands it ends up, played well to a media educated in America’s Marxism-infused liberal arts colleges. And the business crowd loved it too. Suddenly, bland business conferences felt less like trade conventions and more like geopolitical summits. You weren’t merely investing in funds, selling widgets, or cooking up ever more optimised ads. You were saving the world.

By 2021, ESG had reached its peak not just of influence but power. The pandemic seemed proof of the urgency of its policies. Endlessly, we heard that Covid was a result of mankind “encroaching” on nature, squeezing it until this abstract entity struck back. We were informed that cooperation was essential and non-compliance not an option.

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But ESG’s recent victories are now starting to look pyrrhic. In 2022, Texas led a red-state boycott of BlackRock, announcing plans to pull more than $3 billion out of BlackRock funds. Since then, Republican state legislatures, including those in Florida, Kansas and Idaho, have passed laws that ban or limit the consideration of ESG.

In an even more existential blow to the ESG vision, money has become expensive. During the era of Zero Interest Rate Policy, there was enough cheap money, and enough margin, to sacrifice some of it for the sake of a good cause. But when money is tight, consumers are jittery, and investors running scared, companies take what they can get.

The cultural backlash underway is even bigger. In April, it only took a single misfired influencer outreach effort by Bud Light, which sent cans of beer to Dylan Mulvaney as part of a DEI-guided, trans-friendly campaign, to knock the brand from its top spot in American beer sales, carving 13% off its revenue. Even the Magic Kingdom has not escaped unscathed. After its battle with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, among the most vocal opponents of ESG in American politics, Disney is now at its most vulnerable in decades, having seen billions in shareholder value wiped away and its once-pristine brand tainted by political controversy. There is no reason to think the trend will slow.

If there is one thing businesses and markets hate, it’s uncertainty. And ESG is starting to look like another unnecessary risk — more so given that ESG has become a valuable political leverage point for politicians looking to ride the surge of populism. This doesn’t mean ESG is done: one of the major problems identified by its critics is the extent to which it has embedded in vital institutions. But we may be at a turning point, and if the risk rises higher, and there is no substantial reward to follow, ESG might find itself on the corporate chopping block.

Halfway through, our commander paused to ask why a bunch of Americans had come to Israel to shoot things — after all, we can go shooting any time we like. Everybody laughed. For the tourists, the fantasy of the camp had nothing to do with firing a weapon or even taking down a “terrorist”; it was about imagining being a part of a state permanently engaged in a cosmic struggle. My brothers-in-cardboard-arms were not American Jews, but a group of Christian Zionists, who saw themselves as being on a spiritual march towards victory that at some point would end in Israel.

Recent polling from the University of Maryland found that American evangelical Christians largely account for the positive GOP’s regard for Israel; without them, Republican attitudes on the subject look a lot like the rest of America’s. Following October 7, the Ethics and Religion Liberty Commission, an arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, represented those views in a statement signed by over 2,000 church leaders which declared that they “fully support Israel’s right and duty to defend itself against further attack”.

American evangelicals have a long and complicated history towards the Jewish people; one which changed significantly with the formation of the state of Israel in 1948. This was the fulfilment of a well-understood prophecy about the End of Days, which holds that the modern nation of Israel had to be created, and had to prosper, in order for Jesus to return.

This prophetic worldview explicitly meant taking over the Palestinian territories. Destroying the Dome of the Rock, where the Al-Aqsa mosque sits today, would allow Jews to rebuild the Temple Mount, which “the lawless one” — often understood as the Antichrist — would according to the prophecy, enter and proclaim himself God. This, in turn, will lead God to reveal himself and destroy the false prophet.

The prophecy of the End Times is variously interpreted and hotly debated, but essentially it says that that Jesus will return to take Christians into heaven by means of a rapture, before ruling over Earth in a seven-year tribulation. According to this belief system, only Christians will be saved.

So where does this leave the Jews? I asked Daniel G. Hummel, a historian of American religion and foreign relations. He points to the intervention of the evangelical Christian theologian G. Douglas Young, who in 1956 founded the American Institute of Holy Land Studies, now known as Jerusalem University College. For Young’s Jewish neighbours, the evangelical conception of the End Times was a “really horrible situation”, Hummel explains. To get around this, Young came up with the idea of a “second rapture”, which would occur exactly halfway through the seven years of tribulation, and would “let all the Jews escape what was coming, which is called the Great Tribulation — where the really, really bad stuff happens”.

Young was, at the time, a fairly marginal figure, both theologically and politically, but his early work in finding common cause with the fledgling Jewish state laid the foundation for the evolving theology of Christian Zionism — which has ultimately shaped US foreign policy towards Israel. The relatively new concept of a Judeo-Christian heritage became useful in the Cold War. Godless communists had already taken over Russia and China — and Arab nationalists seemed sympathetic to them. Israel came to be seen as a bulwark against an encroaching red wave. Prior to 1945, evangelicals had by and large not voted, seeing themselves as above worldly politics. As patriotic Americans, evangelical leaders began to take a keen interest in foreign policy in light of the communist threat.

But Christian Zionism and antisemitism were not mutually exclusive. In leaked tapes from a 1972 conversation between leading evangelist Billy Graham and Richard Nixon, Graham told the President: “Not all the Jews, but a lot of the Jews are great friends of mine, they swarm around me and are friendly to me because they know that I’m friendly with Israel. But they don’t know how I really feel about what they are doing to this country. And I have no power, no way to handle them, but I would stand up if under proper circumstances.”

A year after Graham aired his feelings about “swarming” Jews, and probably for political expediency, he made it clear that his followers needed to leave Jews out of their efforts to convert people. The move was hugely controversial among evangelicals at the time, but laid the groundwork for strong relations between them and Israel: by the Eighties, up-and-coming Israeli politicians, including Benjamin Netanyahu, were attending prayer breakfasts.

The rationale behind good Israeli-American relations evolved after the fall of the Berlin Wall. By the Nineties, where once the state had been a bulwark against communism, it was now seen as critical in countering radical Islam. Israel, with all of its walls and borders, knew all about fighting Jihad — a project that became all the more urgent in America after 9/11, with all its prophetic implications. And by this time, the evangelical “Moral Majority”, now firmly steeped in Christian Zionism, was a much-discussed part of the Republican voting coalition.

In 2006, Texas preacher John Hagee, who hails from the Pentecostal-Charismatic tradition, founded the powerful lobby group Christians United for Israel (CUFI), which today claims over 10 million members. Even prior to the current conflict, he delivered ecstatic sermons prophesying a “thrilling” apocalyptic future, where Christians are raptured before an attack on Israel by Iran and Russia, and the Apocalypse begins. It is a reference to a highly contested passage described in Ezekiel, where God will make his presence known against foreign invaders through a series of natural disasters, leading to the destruction of the Biblical lands. “What you do to Israel, god will do to you,” Christians United for Israel warned Hamas after October 7. “Joy will come because he who watches over Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps.”

It was these Christian Zionists who Donald Trump was courting when he moved the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 2018. In an official statement, he called it “a long-overdue step to advance the peace process and to work towards a lasting agreement”. But when speaking off the cuff, Trump revealed a more cunning political calculation. “That’s for the evangelicals,” he told a Wisconsin rally in 2020, before marvelling that “the evangelicals are more excited by that than Jewish people”. As one pastor explained at the time, the re-establishment of Israel’s political boundaries “kick-starts the end times into motion”.

But it’s important to understand that Christian Zionism is a spectrum, says Walker Robins, a scholar of the phenomenon; for most evangelicals, it means that “the priority is to stand with the Jewish people”. Others, however, “really do traffic in somewhat classical, antisemitic tropes”, which are not always easily detectable. Thinking back to my visit to the IDF fantasy camp, the intense philosemitism of the Christian Zionists there was unsettling. The American leader told us that “every Jew is a miracle”, and as such, that we were witnessing “miracles all over the nation of Israel”.

Historically, Jews have all too often been portrayed as less than human; today’s Christian Zionists superhumanise them, which may be an improvement on the past, but is still antisemitic. According to certain schools of evangelical thought, Jews must be protected as critical infrastructure on the road to fulfilling prophecy. As Robins has pointed out, in this conception, “Jewish people are around for a specific purpose”, but are in themselves expendable instruments: a literal means to the End.

What’s it all about? As ever when Northern Ireland catches fire, the match does not fully explain the kindling, although the two are closely related. The match, in this case, was the decision by the Public Prosecution Service not to charge any Sinn Féin politicians with breaking Covid restrictions during the funeral last June of Bobby Storey, a former IRA intelligence director.

Sinn Féin has never been a party to play down a funeral, apart from those the IRA brought about, and Storey’s was a notable event. Michelle O’Neill, the Sinn Féin Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, headed the procession along with Mary Lou McDonald, the party leader, and Gerry Adams, the former party leader. More than 2,000 people lined the route and followed the cortege, and a snap showed O’Neill with a fellow-mourner’s arm around her, displaying a cavalier disregard for social distancing.

After a public and political outcry, an independent investigation by the Cumbria Constabulary drew up a file relating to 24 Sinn Féin representatives. But the public prosecutor recently refused to take it further, on the basis that the Police Service of Northern Ireland had been substantially involved in agreeing the Storey funeral arrangements in the first place. The perception among Unionists, and some Nationalists, was that Sinn Féin politicians were blithely operating outside the rules, and that the PSNI leadership was helping them do it. Arlene Foster, the DUP leader and first minister, called for the resignation of Simon Byrne, the PSNI chief constable. So did every other Unionist party. He has thus far refused to resign. Against this extraordinary backdrop of authority in chaos, ordinary police officers are now going up nightly against crowds of youths wielding Molotov cocktails.

The scenes on the streets are depressing ones, reminiscent of the dark days of the Troubles. The young rioters themselves are, of course, directly responsible for their violent actions. But behind them, particularly in South East Antrim, one can sense the steering hand of older loyalist paramilitaries. It is no coincidence, perhaps, that the Loyalist Communities Council — an “umbrella group” for the UDA, UVF and Red Hand Commando — announced its withdrawal of support in early March for the 1998 Good Friday agreement. The reason was its anger at the post-Brexit Northern Ireland Protocol, which creates a sea border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom by keeping the former a part of the EU’s single market for goods.

Both loyalists and the wider Unionist population feel strongly that the Protocol fundamentally undermines Northern Ireland’s position in the UK, an analysis which most outside observers would surely find hard to counter. The question now is what anyone is going to do about it. Although the LCC was careful to say that opposition to the Protocol should remain “peaceful and democratic” the declaration sounded — and was fully intended to sound — an ominous note. And this Good Friday, in terms of peace, was a bad one.

I have reported on riots in Northern Ireland, and the unfortunate truth is that for the youths involved they are often wildly exciting occasions. The tacit permission conferred by “political anger” allows young people out on the streets, drinking lager and setting fire to things in a kind of carnival of rage: whoops and laughter are inevitably mixed in with the guttural yells.

There will be serious and sometimes irreparable costs, of course: injury to police officers and rioters themselves, damage to vehicles and property and the possibility of acquiring criminal records. Last week a loyalist rioter set his own clothes on fire. It was at a republican riot in Derry that the young journalist Lyra McKee was shot and killed in 2019. Such considerations might certainly weigh heavily with the more responsible local parents. But they will make little impression on a teenager clutching a petrol bomb, springy with adrenalin and pent-up frustration, particularly after a year in which Covid restrictions have rendered daily life more constricted and colourless than normal.

For most of these rioters, too, violence or the threat of it will be far from abnormal to them, despite the official “peace” in post-1998 Northern Ireland. They have grown up in largely Protestant working-class areas, dominated by the presence of former or current loyalist paramilitaries, many released early from prison under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.

Some of these ex-prisoners are now salaried “community workers”. Among their ranks, some are no doubt sincere about helping young people avoid the vicious sectarian brutality which warped and defined their own lives. Yet numerous others have energetically exploited the “peace” to celebrate sectarianism and expand criminal empires involving drugs and extortion. They entrench their fiefdoms by dispensing beatings and shootings, sometimes fatally, to any fellow-Protestant who crosses their path.

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In the years since 1998, little has been done to restrain them. The unspoken official bargain with both loyalist and republican paramilitaries has been that — so long as such organisations hold off on explicitly sectarian murders — they will be broadly untroubled by the authorities. The efforts of the PSNI to hold such criminality accountable have often been hampered by the lack of a wider political will, and reluctance of witnesses to give evidence. The British government imagined, perhaps, that with time and the steady flow of government grants operating as some kind of opiate, the loyalist paramilitaries would eventually grow tractable. If so, it was a miscalculation.

Since 1998, Sinn Féin — many of whose prominent members were in the IRA — has attained ever more political clout, making striking electoral gains in the north and more recently in the south. But parties representing the loyalist paramilitaries have been hampered in their political ambitions by the fact that the bulk of the Protestant community simply declined to vote for them. This has created a disparity of influence of which the loyalists are both keenly aware and resentful. The paramilitary murals in loyalist areas have become more explicitly menacing, deliberately evoking the murderous height of the Troubles.

One grouping in particular, the South East Antrim brigade of the Ulster Defence Association — thought to be most heavily involved in the drugs trade — has recently upped the ante, making open death threats against journalists and politicians who have exposed or criticised it. It was further enraged by the recent arrest of four of its members by the PSNI on drugs charges. It is perhaps not a surprise that names of areas in which this brigade dominates – including Newtownabbey, Carrickfergus and Ballymena — all featured in recent reports of rioting.

The young Protestant rioters we now see on the nightly news are the children of post-ceasefire Northern Ireland. They are in many ways its lost boys. In their streets — unlike more middle-class areas — the paramilitary threat never went away. A couple of years ago, I recall attending a community event for schoolchildren on the Protestant Shankill Road in West Belfast, in which a travelling theatre group put on a lively play meant to illustrate the dangers of getting sucked into the criminal orbit of the paramilitaries. Afterwards, there was a question-and-answer session that included a local policewoman. The teenage boys behind me — quick-witted, both cocky and vulnerable — had watched the play attentively, and later one of them spoke up to ask: “Are the cops scared of the paramilitaries?” The policewoman rather predictably assured him that they weren’t.

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Afterwards, I asked him why he had posed the question. It emerged that his father had been shot in the legs by paramilitaries for alleged “anti-social” behaviour years earlier. When he himself had got into an argument with another boy at school, one whose father was “connected,” his family had been warned to leave their house immediately or face the consequences. A local “mediation” service had managed to get the threat lifted, but I imagine its potential return never felt very far away. The entire landscape of his childhood had been laced with menace, in which the rest of society appeared largely uninterested. As such youths grow up, the local hard-men can appear as their tormentors, role models or, paradoxically, both things at once.

Working-class Protestant boys have the lowest educational achievement in Northern Ireland. The shipyards and mills that provided their ancestors with employment have melted away. A wealth of potential talent often lies untapped, as I am reminded every year when I see the annual Twelfth of July bonfires that so many toil long and hard to build, teetering miracles of engineering — bemusing to outsiders — which will do nothing more than blaze fiercely and briefly, emitting clouds of noxious smoke. Politically, there is a sense of embattled defensiveness, of belonging to a community inexorably on the slide away from a UK which is increasingly contemptuous of them, and towards a Republic of Ireland which is even more so.

The majority of Unionists — including many people in working-class communities — will regard the rioting with deep disapproval, and want it stopped. But that will not eradicate their abiding dislike of the Protocol, and the effect it is having on businesses, trade and their sense of Britishness. They have been cut adrift by Boris Johnson’s vision of Brexit, in a way that even those Unionists who backed Brexit did not foresee, and which Johnson himself had explicitly promised would not happen. Perhaps they should have predicted what Johnson would actually do, and not listened to what he said, but then it has been a recurrent tendency of Unionists to place excessive faith in the word of a British prime minister.

In appealing for peace on Northern Ireland’s streets, however, the British Government faces one great obstacle: the widespread perception in Belfast that violence — or the threat of it — works to secure political ends. That perception has flowed in part from the peace process, and not without reason. The SDLP politician Seamus Mallon once recalled asking Tony Blair why he spent so much more time in private talks with Sinn Féin, when the moderate SDLP was at that time the larger party. Blair replied, memorably: “The trouble with you fellows, Seamus, is that you have no guns.”

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An oft-repeated phrase in the peace process was “parity of esteem”. As Unionists see it, that is rapidly eroding. What loyalist paramilitaries seem now to be seeking is “parity of menace”. When considering where a customs border might be placed in the event of a hard Brexit, it was repeatedly emphasised — most passionately by the then Taoiseach Leo Varadkar — that a land border was unconscionable, lest it run the risk of reigniting republican violence. This argument was taken very seriously by the US and EU, and no land customs border was forthcoming.

The opposite possibility, however — that a sea border might do the same to loyalist violence — scarcely seemed to figure on the international radar. Johnson’s Government showed a blithe disregard for the danger, although Theresa May had previously taken steps to avoid it. But by showing that Unionist concerns will be downgraded rather than run any risk of republican violence, the British Government and the EU have now created an awful incentive for loyalist paramilitaries to demonstrate an equivalent level of threat.

That incentive is not just implied, but actually written into Article 16 of the Protocol itself. There, it states that UK or the EU can unilaterally suspend aspects of the Protocol’s operation if it is causing “serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties that are liable to persist”. That’s the political equivalent of a teacher telling a delinquent school pupil that they can only get out of a locked classroom by setting it alight. The loyalist paramilitaries — whether by instinct or conscious design — will now make it their business to create “serious societal difficulties” that are “liable to persist”. It’s a terrible script. And unless Britain and the EU can somehow rewrite it, fast, it’s going to make for a very long, hot summer.

“So much of the experience of watching returns,” remarked frustrated MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes to two leading pollsters, “was anchored by the polling going into it. And it was a bad night for polling—an enormous polling miss.”

Far from learning from the mistakes of 2016, the polling industry seemed to have got things worse. Whether conducted by private or public firms, at the national or local, presidential or senatorial, levels, polls were off by wide margins. The Five Thirty-Eight final poll of polls put Biden ahead by 8.4 points, but the actual difference in popular vote is likely to be closer to 3-4 points. In some close state races, the error was even greater.

Why did they get it so wrong? Pollsters typically receive low response rates to calls, which leads them to undercount key demographics. To get around this, they typically weight for key categories like race, education or gender. If they get too few Latinos or whites without degrees, they adjust their numbers to match the actual electorate.

But most attitudes vary far more within a group like university graduates, than between graduates and non-graduates. So even if you have the correct share of graduates and non-graduates, you might be selecting the more liberal-minded among them. For example, in the 2019 American National Election Study pilot survey, education level predicts less than 1% of the variation in whether a white person voted for Trump in 2016. By contrast, their feelings towards illegal immigrants on a 0-100 thermometer predicts over 30% of the variation. Moreover, immigration views pick out Trump from Clinton voters better within the university-educated white population than among high school-educated whites. Unless pollsters weight for attitudes and psychology – which is tricky because these positions can be caused by candidate support – they miss much of the action.

Looking at this election’s errors — which seems to have been concentrated among white college graduates — I wonder if political correctness lies at the heart of the problem.

Political correctness refers to the policing of speech so that it conforms to cultural taboos, especially the ones concerning race, gender and sexuality. Those who wield taboos gain rhetorical power, encouraging them to stretch the meaning of concepts such as racism to encompass non-racist actions such as voting for Donald Trump.

Across all racial groups, 80% of Americans say “political correctness is a problem in our country”. Only the small “Progressive Activist” 8% of the US population largely thinks it’s not. In practice, the burden of political correctness arguably falls most heavily on university-educated Republican supporters. Data from a recent Cato Institute survey shows that 88% of Trump-voting graduates compared to just 44% of Clinton-supporting graduates agreed that “The political climate these days prevents me from saying things I believe because others might find them offensive.”

Republican supporters with degrees tend to work in graduate-dominated environments, where organisations and peers are more likely to enforce norms of political correctness. As a result, it is highly-educated Republican supporters who are most shy about revealing their beliefs at work.

As figure 1 illustrates, 45% of Republicans with degrees, compared to 23% of Democrats with degrees, said they feared that their careers could be at risk if their views became known.

How does this affect polling? Republican pollster Frank Luntz told Emily Maitlis that Trump voters were over twice as likely as Biden voters — by a 19 to 9 margin — to conceal their intended vote from others. I would expect this ratio to be considerably higher among university graduates, which would, accordingly, skew predictions the most among graduates.

Pollsters claim to have overcome this problem by comparing telephone and online surveys and finding no difference. Since online surveys are anonymous, they reason, a ‘shy Trump’ effect should reveal itself by comparing these two methods, and they find none.

However, we also know that people who internalise social norms often conceal their views in online surveys. The psychologist George Herbert Mead referred to people’s ‘generalized other’, a kind of mental peer group we carry around in our heads that sits in judgement upon us is even if no one is actually watching. For instance, in a recent survey of North American academics, I found that just 23% of academics were willing to state they would discriminate against a Trump voter for a job, but the actual share when using a concealed technique called a ‘list experiment’ was 42%. Likewise, a 2010 study found that the share of white Americans willing to endorse zero immigration jumped from 39% to 60% when the question was concealed in a list, rather than asked openly.

There is also a problem of blowback among elite Republicans. Frank Luntz has also said that feedback from Trump-supporting respondents revealed considerable resentment towards pollsters, who were perceived as part of a media establishment out to misrepresent them. Indeed, studies show that using words like ‘racist’ to describe Trump or his policies tends to increase support for them among conservative respondents by provoking what is termed a ‘reactance’ effect. Knowing you are perceived as racist by elites for supporting Trump may make you less likely to answer a call from a survey firm you associate with that chastising elite.

Again, this perception is likely to be stronger among Trump-supporting graduates than Trump voters with lower education levels, who are less likely to circulate in politically-correct social environments. Research confirms that highly-educated white liberals have the most skewed perceptions of the actual views of Trump supporters, in part because their social circles tend to be politically homogeneous. The problem is worst among those most attentive to politics.

This may explain why the polls didn’t do badly in predicting the white non-graduate vote but failed miserably among white graduates. According to a Pew survey on October 9, Trump was leading Biden by 21 points among white non-graduates but trailing him by 26 points among white graduates. Likewise, a Politico/ABC poll on October 11 found that ‘Trump leads by 26 points among white voters without four-year college degrees, but Biden holds a 31-point lead with white college graduates.’

The exit polls, however, show that Trump ran even among white college graduates 49-49, and even had an edge among white female graduates of 50-49! This puts pre-election surveys out by a whopping 26-31 points among white graduates. By contrast, among whites without degrees, the actual tilt in the election was 64-35, a 29-point gap, which the polls basically got right.

Even with reasonable caveats about the accuracy of exit polls, the size of the polling error among white graduates is the 800-pound gorilla in the room, and is arguably linked to problems of concealment and reactance which loom largest among white graduate Trump voters. That’s why, in order to fix polling, we first need to fix political correctness.

The most important effects of speech policing are often indirect, shutting down important conversations across value divides that could improve policies and reach greater consensus on hot-button issues such as immigration, education or policing.

Like a referee in a football game, we need to call penalties when real racist or sexist infractions have been committed, but must stand firm against cries to those based on false accusations grounded in hair-trigger suspicion and conceptual stretching. Failing to do so silences voices that need to be heard, such as college-educated Trump voters, while breeding anti-elite resentment that demagogues exploit. If America cannot reform its regime of speech discipline, it has no hope of overcoming its yawning cultural divide.