But we parted on good company and I withdrew, with suitable obsequiousness, through what I thought was the door. Straight into his walk-in closet. When I sheepishly emerged, he was asleep.

Back then there was certainly a somnolence about the mainstream US media, a resting-on-laurels patrician grandeur — walk-in closets for the anchors, self-regarding “journalism studies” courses for the youngsters. It all suggested that, in the internet age, they didn’t know what was about to hit them.

Well, it’s hit them now. Right between the eyes. Both the Fox and CNN news channels are about to be displaced by Newsmax (to the right) and MSNBC (to the left). Not that it matters too much. Today, the traditional networks are largely watched by people whose hands shake too much to change the channel when the adverts come on for Viagra or dentures.

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In fact, according to Pew research, more than half of Americans get some or most of their news from social media, mainly Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. And as Pew points out, this new-age media isn’t particularly helpful: Americans who turn to social media for political news are not only “less aware and knowledgeable about a wide range of events and issues”, but they are also “more likely than other Americans to have heard about a number of false or unproven claims”.

Perhaps the biggest of those claims is that Donald Trump won the election. Certainly large numbers of Americans believe it: around 32% according to a recent CNN poll. Meanwhile, YouGov reports that one in five voters — and 45% of Republicans — supported the storming of the Capitol.

What are we supposed to do with them? In the new age of Biden, the call goes out, let the values of pluralism that he would have recognised as a young man — the values of Walter Cronkite in his pomp — be the lodestone for the healing nation.  Blitz the dotty folk with real news, regulate social media, tell the truth in White House press briefings and, most importantly, respect facts. Breathe in. Respect truth. Breathe out.

It’s a seductive suggestion. But the philosopher kings and queens are wary. They wonder if the answer to ignorance is something other than knowledge, something even more difficult to pin down. In a recent column for the Atlantic, Anne Applebaum wondered what we should do with the “seditionists” who stormed the capital. Her conclusion: “Drop the argument and change the subject.”

Don’t bother with fact-checking. Don’t harangue people about Democracy and Freedom and the American Way. In fact, stay right off these subjects.

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There is a growing body of academic research that supports this view — a body added to recently by the Cambridge philosophy research fellow, Daniel Williams. In a blog published by the LSE, Williams introduces us to the idea of “rational motivated ignorance”.

“For a typical citizen,” Williams says, “political knowledge is just as often a liability as a source of power. Ignorance protects us from painful truths, insulates us from responsibility for our actions, and sustains the relationships that we depend upon for meaning and belonging. To understand and address societal ignorance, we must come to terms with such benefits.”

Here we return to Applebaum’s solution of simply changing the subject. As Williams puts it: “When societal ignorance is rational motivated ignorance, the solution cannot be ordinary forms of knowledge dissemination, persuasion, and fact checkers. Instead, our solutions must be much more targeted towards the interests and incentives that make knowledge costly for individuals.”

To which Joe Biden might reply: Huh? What does this actually mean? What should I do?

“Make the problem narrow, specific, even boring, not existential or exciting,” is Anne Applebaum’s suggestion. “’Who won the 2020 election?’ is, for these purposes, a bad topic. ‘How do we fix the potholes in our roads?’ is, in contrast, superb.” What this suggests — both for those who want to reclaim the Republican party and for those who want to press ahead with the Democratic agenda — is a move that is neither left nor right, but down.

It may not take the Democrats in the comfortable direction of the middle way. In fact, Biden’s unity agenda — some kind of bipartisan fudge that brings the nation together — might be a mirage best avoided. Instead, say a number of Democrats, what America needs is something far more radical.

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They agree with Applebaum that the only way to forward is to simply get on and fix things. No doubt they’ll point to Obama’s first term, which was stuffed with serious misjudgements: they fruitlessly waited in vain for Republican support before spending money on infrastructure; they abandoned radical plans to create something like the NHS for all Americans, when in fact even the watered-down Obamacare was fought against tooth and nail by the Congressional GOP and still is.

David Sirota, an advisor to Bernie Sanders, wrote recently that the healthcare woes of the Obama administration “should be a harrowing cautionary tale for Biden on both the policy and the politics.” But Biden should know better: “He had a front-row seat in watching a bad-faith Republican opposition kill a much-needed initiative, and then use Democrats’ failure to deliver to win at the polls. He of all people should know that this story never ends well.”

And so America’s new President faces a paradox. In order to win back the middle ground, perhaps Biden needs to be radical. Certainly, he needs to reorder America — to actually provide solutions in a way that Donald Trump mainly failed to do.

As for where Biden should start, he could do worse than return to the musings of Donald Trump’s strategist Steve Bannon. Following the 2016 election, he called for a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill and tax increases on the rich, boasting that “if we deliver, we’ll get 60% of the white vote and 40% of the black and Hispanic vote and we’ll govern for 50 years”.

Well, that doesn’t sound too bad for the Biden team; the philosophers and the party radicals leading the way. Perhaps, as Walter Cronkite used to say, “that’s the way it is”.

Rarely has the process of state formation been observable to such a wide audience in real time. But will the CHAZ vindicate Rousseau’s utopian and cooperative vision of human nature, or that of Hobbes, who traces the origin of the state in the acquiescence of the mass to authority, for its own protection from anarchy and extortion?

The reality, as always, contains elements of both. But perhaps the most fascinating element in Seattle’s ongoing experiment is the adoption of many of the trappings of the Autonomous Administration of Northeast Syria, formerly known as Rojava. This is another quasi-anarchist statelet which has been carved out from the chaos and bloodshed of the nearly decade-long civil war, becoming the country’s most competent and harmonious system of governance.

Governing between a third and half the country at its height, managing Syria’s most ethnically and religiously diverse region, and controlling its most productive wheat and oilfields, the AANES project has achieved a cult status among many young Western leftists. They view the region as a viable and appealing alternative to both liberal capitalism and state communism and have flocked to take part in the project.

They are reforesting the region’s arid plains and fighting as part of the local YPG militia to preserve the statelet’s autonomy. Indeed, many of these young activists who abhor the very notion of borders in their own countries have died to defend the borders of the Autonomous Administration from both ISIS and Turkish attacks.

Back in Seattle, one groupuscule, “Demand Utopia Seattle”, has renamed itself as the Democratic Confederalists of the Puget Sound in homage to the AANES experiment, and further afield the “Black Socialists of America” movement explicitly cites the Rojava administration’s model of policing by community militias as a model for the US to emulate.

Indeed, much of the Left-wing American discourse around police abolition derives directly from an idealised misapprehension of the nature of policing in northeastern Syria. While it is true that the region’s HPC militia functions as an armed neighbourhood watch— some 40,000 HPC militiamen and women are currently deployed guarding the growing wheat harvest from ISIS sabotage— they are not central to maintaining social order.

Over the seven years that I have been visiting northeastern Syria as a journalist, policing has become increasingly professionalised. There are separate and well-armed militias for the purposes of general crime prevention, traffic police, highly-trained and well-equipped special forces teams for counterterrorism operations and military police to find and detain draft-dodgers and return them to their units. It is not a slight on the region’s genuine achievements to observe that, for all its ideological basis in anarchist thought, it is a highly bureaucratic security state, and far from the policing abolitionist demands of American protestors.

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Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of the AANES experiment is that it is a testing ground for anarchist thought, where ideology is adapted to the demands of real-world governance. Where the theory fails, it is abandoned. Those aspects of the traditional Westphalian state found to be useful or necessary are adopted, forming a hybrid system of governance, part-anarchist, part-statist, part autonomous statelet, part traditional state.

As for the theory itself, much of AANES’s system of governance derives from the work of the little-known American political theorist Murray Bookchin, whose post-anarchist thought, filtered through the idiosyncratic readings of the jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, have become the region’s governing philosophy.

On the Left then, as much as on the illiberal Islamist Right, the Syrian war has filtered back to the politics of the West. Rojava’s success, and the romantic drama of a multi-ethnic and gender-equal libertarian socialist statelet fighting and beating ISIS in the middle of the most brutal civil conflict for a generation has led to a revival of Bookchin’s ideas in western discourse.

Bookchin’s political philosophy, centred on “a network of administrative councils whose members or delegates are elected from popular face-to-face democratic assemblies, in the various villages, towns, and even neighbourhoods of large cities”, are attractive as an alternative to the crisis of liberalism. Versions have been adopted, in one form or another, by European administrations from Barcelona’s city council to, on a more parochial level, Frome’s experiment in governance by popular assembly.

It is with good reason that one of Rojava’s most prominent advocates in the UK is Blue Labour’s Lord Glasman, a frequent visitor to northeastern Syria, who has discerned in the region’s fledgling political order a potential model for post-liberals here at home.

To cite a provincial region of war-torn Syria as a model example of good governance generally, I can confidently attest, provokes mirth and disbelief from British post-liberals. Yet the ability of its systems of local councils and radical direct democracy to maintain social harmony and functioning political order in the most ethnically- and religiously-mixed region of a country torn apart by civil war suggests it may have lessons to offer our own country, currently struggling with far less brutal but growing political divisions.

Glasman’s idea of the self-governing church and village hall-centred ’parish commune’, derived from the Rojava experiment, is an attempt to reshape anarchist-inflected thought for a socially conservative but politically radical British context. Indeed it has shared philosophical roots in Britain’s Red Tory and Blue Labour traditions of radical working class politics and robust and ecologically-minded localism, all rooted in a pre-capitalist social order.

This is not a case of convergent evolution but rather of common philosophical descent. The intellectual basis of anarchism, which must be understood as a serious political tradition distinct from the black-clad, window-smashing stormtroopers of liberalism derisively dismissed by Bookchin as “lifestyle anarchists”, originates in the same romantic appreciation of the pre-liberal order as the medievalising tendency in British conservative socialism. It is not by accident that the major anarchist theorists Peter Kropotkin and Errico Malatesta descend from decayed aristocratic families whose pre-modern utopia was shattered by base and vulgar bourgeois capitalism.

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For Kropotkin, the medieval guild presented a vision of the anarchist future, where each “had its own self-jurisdiction, its own military force, its own general assemblies, its own traditions of struggles, glory, and independence, its own relations with other guilds of the same trade in other cities: it had, in a word, a full organic life which could only result from the integrality of the vital functions.”

For Malatesta, similarly, anarchism in practice would sound more like Burke’s famous “little platoons” than the oppressive structures of state communism he regarded as a certain route to totalitarianism, centred around the “organisation of social life by means of free association and federations of producers and consumers”.

The medievalising tendency in radical politics has its basis in the premodern system of widespread local autonomy through guilds, wards, moots and parish self-governance, a system eroded when the Early Modern state began its long process of centralisation. As noted by historians like Peter H. Wilson in his sprawling chronicle of the Holy Roman Empire, medieval politics can be understood as a series of brakes on the power of the central state, where kings found it difficult to assert their power and local autonomy was stubbornly defended by the people.

Evolved versions of medieval direct democracy are seen in the political systems of Switzerland and Iceland, yet while only a few relics of this lost system of self-governance still exist in Britain, the romantic appeal of this lost social order has influenced thinkers of Left and Right for centuries.

Perhaps its time has come again. A current trend in academic political theory observes that globalisation, by weakening the power of the nation state in favour of transnational and sub-national entities from global corporations to NGOs and international terrorist groups, has plunged us into a “neo-medieval” world of overlapping authority, where ties of loyalty and power reside beyond and beneath the borders of the modern state.

According to this framework, “the political and social order following the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 – resulting ultimately in the nation-state system as we have come to know it in the modern world – is an anomaly, and… the world is reverting back to conditions of fluid borders (now including those found in cyberspace), complex and overlapping sovereignty, a return of religion to the political sphere, and the blurring of peace and war which pre-dated it in the medieval period.” The centralised, statist world of modernity is perhaps already past, then, whether we wish it or not, and what seemed a long-forgotten past has become our future. 

Given this neo-medieval drift within postmodernity, is a High Tory anarchism of autonomous town and village councils, a radical localism of “every field and hedgerow,” a viable political system? No less a reactionary than Tolkien believed so. In a 1943 letter to his son Christopher, the romantic visionary of Deep England remarked that: “My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning the abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs)—or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate real of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate!”

Similarly George Orwell, another idiosyncratic political visionary of a type only England can produce, stated his politics were those of the “Tory anarchist,” a political category defined by the political theorist Peter Wilkin as “a form of cultural dissident, out of step with and in opposition to many features of the modern world” displaying “respect for privacy and the liberty of individuals, a fear of the state and its expanding power over social life; a nostalgic and melancholy temper that laments the passing of an ‘Old England’; criticism of social conformism; and a pervasive sense of pessimism about the fate of the modern world.”

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Many British conservatives will recognise themselves in this description. The sad truth is that the Westminster system, despised by the majority of voters, has done little to defend the common good and much to accelerate the economic and social harms that have fractured British society. It is an unfortunate political reality for British conservatives that the space for Burkean little platoons has been filled not by organic local guilds and associations but by a state-funded quangocracy of NGOs and deliberative bodies, almost exclusively staffed by liberals, which stifle any opportunity for meaningful political change and accelerate the total political victory of liberalism even where conservatives win elections. The total capture of the civil sphere by liberal ideologues of Left and Right has left British conservatism with a hollowed-out intellectual tradition and a beaten-down sense of failure and loss. How can you be a conservative when there’s nothing left to conserve?

Perhaps the only solution is a radical conservatism, following the meditative dictum of the Prince of Salinas in Lampedusa’s Italian novel The Leopard that, “for things to stay as they are, everything must change.” There are two possible paths for conservatism, now that the centre ground has been destroyed by fundamentalist liberalism: the first is the conversion of conservatives to vengeful reactionaries, seeking to dramatically overturn unwanted change rather than slow it; the second is to reset the arena of political conflict entirely, abandoning a battlefield so heavily stacked against conservative victory, and creating a new one where democratic victories can be fairly implemented by the very people who themselves demand them.

The anti-modernist roots England’s unique and idiosyncratic utopian High Tory tradition shares, counterintuitively, with anarchism hint that British conservatism could, like northeast Syria, adapt the few aspects of radical left thought that actually work to its own cultural and political context.

With one stroke, the dead hand of the managerial para-state would be severed, freeing conservative politics from the stultifying grasp of quangos, lobby hacks and politicised civil servants. The pitfalls of populist anger directed at a distant and dysfunctional Westminster could be avoided by removing Westminster from the equation almost entirely, continuing the unfinished business of devolution and its unresolved English Question, and reintegrating the long-neglected regions into a functioning political whole.

Though he would no doubt recoil from the term anarchism, the Conservative MP Matt Warman suggested just such a scheme for radical localism in a little-noticed 2017 policy paper urging the “relentless devolution of powers and responsibilities down the democratic food chain to the lowest possible level,” emphasising “that’s not about shifting power from Whitehall to county councils and unitary authorities; it’s about asking what can parishes take from districts, and making clear to devolved administrations that devolution doesn’t end when power moves from Whitehall or Brussels to Holyrood.”

A radical reordering of British politics along these lines might work as follows: only the great issues of state like defence, foreign policy and finance would be overseen by Whitehall, with responsibility for health care, taxation, education, policing devolved to genuinely popular assemblies at county, town, district and parish level. This might do much to assuage the growing and dangerous disconnect British voters feel between their needs and the state’s response. In northeastern Syria, a far more divided society than the UK, a fragile political harmony has been achieved by the proliferation of local assemblies with genuine capabilities for self-governance, winning popular support by incorporating hitherto marginal communities in the business of politics.

Similarly, Covid-19 has shown that smaller political units, from the German länder to American states and tiny Baltic and central European countries, have consistently performed better dealing with the crisis than flailing central governments in the UK and US. “Small is beautiful,” as the economist E.F. Schumaker noted in his call for a return to the local scale, and as the fragility of the global system shown by Covid-19 as well as the sudden resurgence of local food and mutual aid networks as a result both demonstrate, perhaps a more robust and sustainable future politics can be found in the radical localism of our past.

Imagine a list of ‘Do’s and Don’ts’ being published which included the instruction “Put white people’s feelings ahead of your own”. In what world might such an instruction be possible? In apartheid South Africa perhaps. Or plantation-era America, possibly. But in the 21st century?

The answer is nowhere, and obviously. Certainly it is impossible to imagine any document including such a demand of black people being passed around social media today by otherwise responsible and decent citizens. Yet throughout recent days — most especially Tuesday this week when users on Instagram had a ‘blackout’ day — instructions like this have been rife.

Lists on how to behave, what to think and what to say have been sent around. But of course the instructions are intended not for black people but for white people — instructions like ‘Check yourself’ and “Don’t expect black people to educate you. If you learn from a black educator, compensate them financially.”

All across the social media platforms these and many other not-so-passive lists of passive-aggressive demands have been issued. All rely on material that has been gestating for years. But this time — in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota — there seems to be an added push, with far greater pressure on people to accept and sign up to them.

This time, perfectly normal people seem to feel that they have to get in lock-step with the movement. To post what everyone is meant to post. To make sure they do nothing that will make them stand out from the herd. It is understandable. At this moment many people will be noticing there are actual as well as virtual mobs — of admirably diverse composition — stalking around looking for people who they can complain have looked at them funny. But personally I would resist the urge to prostrate myself at this point in time.

Many years ago I was introduced to one of the most helpful rules of logic: to never say or write anything the opposite of which would only be uttered by a madman. So for instance, if you are an aspiring politician do not say “We must go forwards into a new bright future” because no sane person would publicly declare “We must go backwards into a dark past”.

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Likewise, among the lists of online demands and assertions of recent days there is only one test which can tell us whether they are diminishing racism or encouraging it — that is to try replacing the word ‘white’ with the word ‘black’ and vice-versa.

Doing so reveals the fact that most, if not all of these vogue-ish lists of instructions are profoundly racist. We would recognise this if they consisted of lists of assertions about black people, or instructions to black people on how to think or speak, or referred to ‘all black people’ as if they were a homogenous group.

This opens up a couple of possibilities about what is going on in this fractious moment. For some people it will be impossible to concede that instructions lists aimed at white people telling them how to behave is racist. They will reject the possibility at its roots, not least by asserting that racism is something that white people express but do not experience. Prejudice without power does not count. If anti-white racism exists these people will assert that it is not meaningful, or does not result in deaths, and for this or other reasons may be discounted.

More important is another category; the people of all races who recognise that there is something uncomfortable, perhaps even racist, in making such sweeping claims about people of any racial group, but who believe that at this moment white people in some way deserve it.

These people are fans of what I have previously identified as the temptation in rights issues towards ‘overcorrection’. This has been an exacerbating temptation in recent years. For instance, wrapped up in parts of the #MeToo movement were people who did not mind, or much care to know, what the specific details of any particular allegation were. They felt that the pendulum was swinging against sexism and that if that happened to take out a few innocent people in its path, well then too bad.

This view was expressed as such by one news anchor on CNN who said that our societies were due an over-correction. It has a logic of a kind, that there isn’t time to faff around with the whole tricky business of precise equality; that nobody has time for that, and that the swifter route for getting to equal is to overcorrect and then at some point later allow the pendulum to swing back naturally towards true equal.

For many people, that works right up to the point where somebody you know or care about happens to become a casualty of overcorrection. At that stage the realisation that perhaps you should have held on to some other priority (truth perhaps, or the process of the law, boring things like that) will kick in, albeit too late.

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So it is in America — and now in Britain — with the response to the Floyd killing. The policeman responsible for Mr Floyd’s death has been arrested, charged and currently sits in jail — as do several of his colleagues. But for the activist on the streets in America’s cities and those online this is clearly not action enough: they have decided that the incident is revealing of some deeper issue and that to stop at the culprits is to stop too early.

They may well be right on some aspects of this. Because of the number of unarmed black people killed by American police in recent years it seems fair to ask where some wider culpability might lie. As with the argument on terrorism, we might well ask where the ‘mood music’ is that creates the environment in which a policeman feels able to squeeze the life out of a man lying on the ground.

But working out where the sphere of culpability might lie is an exacting and finely balanced thing. Making sure that America, or any country, achieves actual equality in racial issues is an exacting and time-consuming process. We know that because of the number of people who have given their time and energies to making that outcome as likely as possible.

But in the heat of the moment there will be those who will say “to hell with that” and “Who has the time?” and more. We are in the midst of such a moment — and it has produced some very odd sights.

I would imagine that very few people will look back at this week and think that we witnessed was in any way normal: crowds of white people kneeling in front of their black compatriots, or feeling the need to go through other acts of public self-abasement. Perhaps the photograph which has been going around online, of a little girl made by her parents to hold a piece of paper with an arrow pointing towards her saying ‘privileged’, might become emblematic of a moment which is very far from normal.

The current moment of over-correction appears to consist of an attempt to make all white people confess to some culpability in racist murder. Many people looking for a quiet life — or just to be allowed to continue in their jobs without being hassled — will go along with this. But they are making a mistake.

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Because the problem of overcorrection is that it leaves several pregnant questions in its wake, not least among them “Who will tell you when you have over-corrected for long enough?” and “How would you know that you have?” Perhaps most pertinently for the present moment is the question “How would you be sure that this overswing of the pendulum in one direction does not lead to its overswing in the other direction when it starts to head back?”

The instructions going around online in recent days may have done a number of things. But one of them is to normalise the idea that ordinary, decent people can make sweeping claims about people based along racial lines. In recent years such behaviour was widely recognised to be abhorrent, and even where it was not illegal had become utterly socially unacceptable. That taboo seems to have lasted for a surprisingly short period of time.

As I write this, footage is coming in of young white people in London and Washington DC being upbraided for having the temerity to try to remove BLM graffiti from historical national monuments in their capital cities. People who are certain that after this episode the pendulum swings comfortably into the equal position may have many things on their side. But in among them are a good amount of guesswork and a disturbing amount of unwarranted optimism.

Instead of knuckling down in a Big Four consulting firm like much of my graduating year, I spent most of my twenties flip-flopping between temp work and jobs I hated in industries that filled me with cynical despair, living in sketchy house-shares while pursuing trendy but unremunerative activities such as avant-garde writing, conceptual art and political activism.

In the course of this I met many anti-capitalists, the forerunners of today’s Antifa militants, the far-left radicals behind much of the violence in the United States.

But then of course, because of America’s extreme polarisation, many believe it’s not Antifa fanning the flames of riot in the US, but neofascist accelerationists. Rumours are swirling about provocateur involvement in the rioting by hard-left groups, as well as white supremacists.

Depending on your filter bubble, it could be white nationalists seeking, as Gavin Haynes put it in these pages last week, to give the system “just one final heave-ho before it crumbles” in favour of a new racist utopia. Or if you follow different blue-ticks on Twitter, it’s Antifa creating mayhem in order to bring down Donald Trump.

To muddle things further, far-right activists may be posing as Antifa in order to heighten both these narratives. Trump himself has come down firmly on one side of the partisan divide by designating Antifa a terrorist group.

Between hyper-partisan reporting and confused messages from the front lines, perhaps there is no making sense of US events — certainly not from this side of the pond. But if we step back from trying to pinpoint one ‘side’ as ‘goodies’ and the other as ‘baddies’, and see both Antifa and the alt-right as two sides of the same phenomenon — alt-right and alt-left in fact — there are plenty of warnings here for British politics.

Both alt-left and alt-right have a presence in Britain, though their antagonism doesn’t (yet) approach the running battles that now regularly occur in the United States. Plenty has been written about the constellation of beliefs on both alt-right and alt-left. But — demographically speaking — who are they?

The fact that the radical fringes are often less than keen to have their real identities known makes it difficult to find reliable data on the demographics of these groups today. But a look at past studies offers some clues. First, Ukip: though many ‘Kippers would be offended to be described as ‘alt-right’, the 2018  three notorious alt-right social media figures joining the party in 2018 does little to dispel the sense of at least some relationship. And 2017 YouGov data shows Ukip members be typically less educated and heavily concentrated in the lowest income brackets.

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Over the pond, 2018 research from the US-based Institute of Family Studies supports the contention that adherents of the kind of white identitarian politics common on the ‘alt-right’ is associated with lower education levels, lower earnings and higher unemployment.

This is complicated somewhat by recent reports suggesting that far-right groups such as Generation Identity are focusing their recruitment efforts on young graduates. But the longer-term picture suggests the stereotypical alt-righter is male, working- or lower-middle-class, without a degree, frustrated by stagnation in economic opportunities and liable to blame his problems on immigrants and the ‘globalist elite’.

In contrast, the alt-left are seen as being far higher up the social scale, and in the war of words between Left and Right, figures such as Carl Benjamin and Brendan O’Neill accuse Antifa of being pampered middle-class leftists playing at activism. But from my own recollections, I don’t think it’s that simple. Rather, I think the new alt-left is deadly serious — just pointing the wrong way.

My overwhelming recollection of the movement was a mixture of middle-class culture with economic precarity: people with serious smarts and groaning bookshelves working jobs in bars to fund activism, while complaining about The System that excluded them. (I include myself in this description, in case you think I’m sneering.)

I argued recently that the massive expansion of higher education is creating a new ‘Everywhere precariat’. This group comprises graduates who’ve absorbed a worldview that trains them for ‘metropolitan elite’ job types that turn out to be far scarcer than the graduates competing for them.

The result is a frustrated would-be middle class, treading water in what the writer Venkatesh Rao has called ‘premium mediocre’ lifestyles, a rented simulacrum of a genuinely prosperous existence designed to signal preparedness for the day when, by luck or application, they make it into the dwindling numbers of the real bourgeoisie.

These graduate left-behinds are then stuck in a holding pattern, in precarious housing and employment, as opportunities to take the big steps into adult life — traditionally home ownership, coupledom and kids – recede ever further into the distance. A recent Pew report showed 30% of millennials living with a spouse and child, a fall of 10% on Generation X and a whopping 40% drop on the 1968 generation. That’s America, but ONS datashows the age of first child climbing relentlessly in Britain too — while the birth rate is falling in all cohorts save the over-40s.

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Ed West argued back in 2016 that the disappointed also-rans in the graduate-job Ponzi scheme were increasingly turning to far-left political figures. Both Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, who proved popular especially with 18-30 voters (if not to anyone else) have made heavy use of words such as ‘rigged’. A 2017 NBC interview with an American Antifa student at an elite Bay Area university expresses this sense of a receding dream:

“These false promises we’ve been told throughout our lives that we just have to follow the American dream of working hard and things will be all right. We’ll get a middle class existence with house, lawn and the picket fence,” Daniel said. “This promise, this future has never materialised, and we kind of realized that the system’s rigged against us and we need to do something about it.”

Seen from this angle, the principal distinction between supporters of the alt-right and alt-left is not, contra Carl Benjamin and his ilk, social class. Rather, it’s between different types of ‘left-behind’. Many on the alt-left aren’t really privileged young people playing at radicalism before settling into steady jobs.

Perhaps that’s how they planned it; but the steady jobs they were banking on settling into after a stretch moonlighting as an activist have evaporated, leaving a bleak economic future distinguished from the alt-right version chiefly by different taste in music, coffee and radical aesthetics.

This is supported by a 2017 European Union Politics paper that studied support for radical-right and radical-left parties. While ‘alt’ and ‘radical’ versions of Left and Right may not be quite the same, the paper’s conclusions are suggestive. It showed that in bare economic terms, radical-left and radical-right supporters don’t differ a great deal but where they do — significantly — is on education. That is, both are heavily drawn from economically precarious groups, but for radical leftists these economic grievances are overlaid with cosmopolitan values inculcated via higher education.

Both radical Left and Right are, the authors suggest, “different segments of the same pool of losers of globalization”. The left-behind bottom rungs of the new graduate precariat mix cosmopolitan style identity politics with a simmering anger at a system that feels rigged against them, and a demand for economic redistribution — in other words, the Corbyn/Sanders formula.

Meanwhile, adherents of the alt-right face similarly left-behind economic prospects, just without the graduate worldview. So the main mode is the same anger at a rigged system, just overlaid with the mirror-image of the cosmopolitan worldview: nativist identity politics. We might call this the Tommy Robinson formula.

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Will there be a second Covid wave?

By Tom Chivers

The urbanist Joel Kotkin has argued recently that developed economies are heading for a form of neo-feudalism. A tiny class of oligarchs, he warns, is emerging in conjunction with a ‘clerisy’ comprising universities, media and culture that propagates its values. These two classes are in the process of stripping wealth, property and influence from pretty much every other sector of society.

In Kotkin’s terms, we could see both alt-right and alt-left as different subsets of the ‘Third Estate’ losers of this hollowing-out. They may be a militant subset right now, but as we exit lockdown into the teeth of a brutal recession, the precariat is going to get bigger. It’s also likely to get angrier: coronavirus is strengthening the hand of finance, big tech and the biggest corporations, even as it’s eviscerating the middle class. In other words, the pandemic has accelerated many of the trends contributing to the twin radicalisms of alt-right and alt-left.

From the point of view of effecting political change, then, the tragedy of the alts is that they should waste their energy quarrelling among themselves. Alt-left and alt-right represent different subsets of an ever-swelling precariat, watching in real time as the last of the twentieth century social contract goes up in smoke. Right now they largely see the enemy as one another. Should that change, though, we could see our faltering political settlement shaken to its core.

Within states and in the relations between them, as in individuals, the coronavirus searches out and exacerbates the underlying morbidities, exaggerating them until total system failure. When the international system collapses, it will be with Covid, and not of it.

The greatest morbidity the virus has latched onto in the global order is the rivalry between the United States and China. This contest is not new — International Relations scholars have long debated the ‘Thucydides Trap,’ named after the agonising and destructive struggle between Athens and Sparta chronicled by the Greek historian, wherein a rising power is inexorably drawn into conflict with the hegemon it displaces.

When Germany challenged British hegemony at the beginning of the last century, the first wave of globalisation ended in global conflict and then a pandemic; we must hope that this current pandemic, rapidly bringing about the end of the second wave of globalisation, will not similarly end in confrontation between the two great powers.

In this coming struggle, America is starting with a great and self-inflicted handicap. Obama’s attempts to reposition US foreign policy away from its destructive and self-defeating entanglement in the Islamic world and towards the coming confrontation with China failed, distracted by the bloody chaos brought about by the Arab Spring and by the Washington foreign policy “blob’s” unwillingness to wean itself off wars it cannot win.

Trump’s much-touted withdrawal from the Middle East has likewise seen the US bolster its forces in the region with tens of thousands more troops than his term began with, and allowed his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to pursue a burning fixation with regime change in Iran that is unlikely to end in America’s favour.

America has frittered away 5 trillion dollars on its Middle Eastern adventures, indebting itself to China in the process, and burned its domestic and international political capital to an unimaginable degree —with nothing at all to show for it. Now that the architects of this self-inflicted catastrophe wish us to join them in their next global adventure, we must think carefully.

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What Boris Johnson could learn from Emmanuel Macron

By Aris Roussinos

Let’s remember how we got here. Only a couple of months ago, warning about dependence on China and the fragility of our supply chains, and urging decoupling from the aspiring hegemon, was viewed as the preserve of cranks of Right and Left, considered romantic at best and xenophobic at worst.

When Trump urged the same thing for the United States, China’s autocrat Xi was treated to a standing ovation at Davos, and hailed as the new champion of the global liberal order. But now Larry Summers, the high priest of globalisation and of America’s offshoring to China, is warning us against fragile supply chains and the urgency of decoupling with no reference at all his long and glittering career midwifing this catastrophe. Here is the global system, finally stripped of all illusions.

The result is the total discrediting of the US-led order, an order of which China’s rise is as much a direct product as it is a challenge.

The truth is that globalisation, the central political dream of Clinton and Blair, Obama and Cameron, was never real. It was a process by which advanced Western economies unilaterally surrendered their manufacturing capacity to a rival, growing power, China, which instead of reciprocating according to the Panglossian calculations of the neoliberal theorists, practiced a traditional and ruthless mercantilism in pursuit of its own interests. As the American political theorist Michael Lind recently wrote in Tablet:

“Politicians pushing globalization like Clinton may have told the public that the purpose of NAFTA and of China’s admission to the World Trade Organization (WTO) was to open the closed markets of Mexico and China to ‘American products made on American soil, everything from corn to chemicals to computers.’ But U.S. multinationals and their lobbyists 20 years ago knew that was not true. Their goal from the beginning was to transfer the production of many products from American soil to Mexican soil or Chinese soil, to take advantage of foreign low-wage, nonunion labor, and in some cases foreign government subsidies and other favors.”

The idea that a global liberal order could, like an iPhone, be designed in America and made in China was the product, where it was sincerely held, of pure ideological delusion. In its entire 5,000 year history, China has not spent one single day as a liberal democracy. The belief that a repressive autocratic regime would suddenly transform into a liberal democracy by being handed more wealth and power was patently absurd. Yet it is the people who held and promoted this claim for decades who intend to lead the world into a great power confrontation — against the China for whose rise they are directly responsible.

Globalisation was always the grand illusion of naive liberalism, taken advantage of by illiberal and non-liberal actors to pursue their own ends. It is the liberals, the TINA bluechecks, who are the artless rubes in this story. Indeed, it is they who deserve much of the blame now being directed at China. In Lind’s words:

“The United States has not been the naive victim of cunning Chinese masterminds. On the contrary, in the last generation many members of America’s elite have sought to get rich personally by selling or renting out America’s crown jewels—intellectual property, manufacturing capacity, high-end real estate, even university resources—to the elite of another country. When asked whether the rapid dismantling, in a few decades, of much of an industrial base built up painstakingly over two centuries has been bad for the United States, the typical reply by members of the U.S. establishment is an incoherent word salad of messianic liberal ideology and neoclassical economics. We are fighting global poverty by employing Chinese factory workers for a pittance! Don’t you understand Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage?”

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Get ready for Fortress Europe

By Aris Roussinos

For a brief few decades, the shift in production to China made a handful of Western individuals unimaginably rich, while lowering the living standards of the middle and working class. It began to turn the First World into a Third World society of stratified, vastly uneven wealth even as it raised China into a First World superpower. For the benefit of a few billionaires, Western societies have immiserated their voter base, dramatically weakened themselves, and helped shorten the lives of hundreds of thousands of their own people.

These events didn’t just happen. Factories didn’t just uproot themselves and migrate to China like flocks of concrete geese. These were conscious, willed acts presented to us as faits accomplis — which we must now consciously and painfully undo, in full historical awareness of how this all took place.

It was in winning the first Cold War that the United States set the stage for its own eclipse, though our own entanglement in this mess is the product of the Second World War. In 1945, the United States found itself the victor through its possession of a vast industrial base, sheltered by geography from the destruction we European powers had wrought upon ourselves. The Soviet Union could not keep up with America’s industrial power, able to churn out both weapons and consumer goods with dizzying speed and sophistication.

Yet when the rival superpower collapsed, exhausted, the United States took the wrong lessons from the fall of communism. American policymakers convinced themselves their global dominance was due to the success of their liberal ideology rather than of their industrial might, and that the sudden, unexpected disintegration of the Soviet Union was due to the vindication of liberalism rather than of the awakened nationalism of Russia’s subject peoples.

Drunk on victory, and searching for a new project, American policymakers decided to remake the world in their own image. In 1993, the National Security Strategy of US National Security Adviser Anthony Lake and Secretary of State Warren Christopher melded the doctrine of imperial hegemony with the free market orthodoxies that had taken root in the Reagan era. As the realist International Relations scholar Patrick Porter notes:

“Christopher’s version assumed that the United States ‘must maintain its military strength’, ‘stem the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction’, and ‘knock down barriers to global trade’. Lake’s premise was that ‘America’s power, authority, and example provide unparalleled opportunities to lead,’ that its security rested on the rise of market democracy abroad.”

Our present moment, in all its dangers, results from this fusion of the two strands of liberalism at the very apogee of American power: the belief that the unfettered free movement of goods, capital, services and people would raise global living standards to endless new heights, and that it was America’s manifest destiny to oversee a worldwide liberal order of free trade and unchallenged US hegemony.

Distractedly giving away the industrial base that won them the first Cold War to their rival in the second, American administrations of both parties plunged headfirst into the post-historical future. It took less than a decade for reality to crash into the World Trade Center, but by then it was too late. America’s policymakers had been captured by their grand delusion, and they refused to let it go even as the empire found itself over-extended in war after war, entered into with noble liberal aims utterly divorced from reality, and from which it was unable to extricate itself.

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How apocalyptic is now?

By John Gray

Just one decade after 9/11, despite America’s mauling in Iraq, pious liberals saw in the Arab Spring a chance to spread their creed to oppressed masses crying out for liberal democracy, and watched with confused horror as the armed factions of the Middle East turned instead to the older and more powerful forces of religious fervour, ethnic conflict and sectarian hatred. Lost in a fantasy world of their own imagining, Americans could not begin to understand the world they dreamed of changing.

America’s rapid rise to global hegemony and equally rapid decline is a grand historical tragedy of the highest order, and as in classical tragedy, the root cause is the protagonist’s central character flaw. Born of 18^th-century liberal ideals, and centred on a sacred set of texts, a constitution and declaration of independence debated with rabbinical exactitude and religious fervour, for the United States, that flaw is its civic religion of liberalism.

While we at least, like our neighbours in Europe, have older traditions on which to draw, and with which we can temper liberalism’s zealous certainties, America was liberal from the start and will remain so until the end; with no countervailing influence, in America liberalism mutated into a fundamentalist religion. It is only through this zealot’s devotion to liberalism that American policymakers sincerely believed they could bomb Afghan shepherds and bribe the Chinese politburo into becoming fellow acolytes.

Their certainty in liberalism’s manifest destiny to spread itself over every corner of the earth goes beyond reasonable analysis: it is a purely religious faith. Despite the failure of its devotees to achieve success wherever they have tried it, they will not stop, and cannot. It is a compulsion, a religious duty impossible for them to abandon, shared by both factions.

America’s crusading zeal is not just for export: through some magical process, all manner of political thought is in the United States transmuted into religion. Trump’s opponents on the liberal and radical left have mangled French postmodernist theory into a dour and millenarian Calvinism. On the populist right, the QAnon conspiracy theory is rapidly evolving into a widespread religious cult, a Manichaen heresy with Trump as its central vengeful deity.

Now the two opposing sects of American liberalism, conventionally characterised as political parties, are at war with each other, in a so far relatively bloodless battle for the nation’s soul. What the Reformation did tragically for Christianity in Europe, America’s political culture war is repeating farcically with liberalism.

If we observe the American war on Covid, we see it is America’s Chernobyl moment as much as China’s. The United States is by far the world’s worst-affected country in terms of total numbers, and its outbreak is still far from over. The symbolism of American states forming regional blocs to counteract the incompetence and total incapacity of its central government to save lives or arrest the virus’s progress lends weight to The Atlantic’s charge that the US now resembles a failed state.

The image of the Surgeon General of the richest and most powerful empire that has ever existed instructing Americans in a Twitter video how to improvise a mask out of a T-shirt — a T-shirt prominently advertising an opioid overdose antidote — is a potent symbol of deep and existential rot.

It is a country embroiled in political conflict over even the basic facts of science, from biology to medicine: because the American President promoted one potential Covid cure, half the country became devoted to its efficacy, and the other to its harmfulness. Had Trump condemned hydroxychloroquine, no doubt the same war would have taken place in reverse, with liberal commentators ostentatiously guzzling the drug on video to widespread approval.

Trump is a morbid symptom of this chaos, rather than its cause. The forthcoming election, which pits two gerontocrats of dubious mental acuity against each other, resembles the late Soviet era, before the regime collapsed under its own absurdities. America indeed represents a strange inversion of the Soviet collapse: the economy dwarfs that of any other nation, save China; its empire is still intact, and its military spans the globe more powerfully than any single challenger.

Yet at its centre the US echoes post-Soviet Russia in its epidemics of death by drug overdose, in its collapsing middle class, its worsening health outcomes and declining life expectancies, the capture of the state and economy by rapacious oligarchs, and in the occasional bouts of interethnic violence leading to demonstrations, riots and broader political dysfunction.

As the veteran American diplomat Richard Haass sadly observes: “Long before COVID-19 ravaged the earth, there had already been a precipitous decline in the appeal of the American model. Thanks to persistent political gridlock, gun violence, the mismanagement that led to the 2008 global financial crisis, the opioid epidemic, and more, what America represented grew increasingly unattractive to many. The federal government’s slow, incoherent, and all too often ineffective response to the pandemic will reinforce the already widespread view that the United States has lost its way.”

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The roots of identitarian liberalism  

By John Gray

What, then, is the appeal of this model to wavering allies in a new Cold War? The idea it can be considered a viable model of governance to follow is now patently absurd. As I sit typing this, troops are deployed on the streets of cities across the country, their Humvees still painted desert tan, as looters smash and burn and ransack shops, and protestors march against rubber bullets and tear gas; the tools of imperial policing are now brought to bear on the metropole.

It is surely impossible to view the US at this point as anything other than a cautionary tale, a burning city on a hill, which evokes only the desire for our own society to avoid its fate. In his Tablet essay, Lind glumly muses about a near-future United States withering into a “deindustrialized, English-speaking version of a Latin American republic, specializing in commodities, real estate, tourism, and perhaps transnational tax evasion, with decayed factories scattered across the continent and a nepotistic rentier oligarchy clustered in a few big coastal cities”.

While an America in decline may throw up a more competent caudillo than Trump in time, it is difficult to reasonably conclude that it possesses the societal solidarity to wage a decades-long, global struggle against a near-competitor. It is hard to imagine an American governing class scandalised at calling Covid a Chinese virus waging an existential conflict against China to a successful conclusion.

The country’s politics were torn apart, for four years, by a handful of Russian Facebook posts promoting Trump; how then will it cope with China’s far greater penetration of social media, of American commerce and industry, of universities and politics, of all the institutions of 21^st century American life? We do not know, yet, who will win this year’s election, nor whether the losing party, will, as in the previous election, attempt to overturn the result and further delegitimise the entire political process.

Perhaps the era of losing parties accepting election results has gone for good in America, now both sides view their opponents as a Schmittian enemy to be vanquished for eternity. America is too lost in its own internal conflict to contemplate a grander, global struggle with any confidence.

In any case, America’s foreign policy is disastrous in its own terms, even before Covid started coursing through its system. As the International Relations scholar Philip Cunliffe observes, America is that curious paradox, a revisionist hegemon, restlessly driven by ideology to overturn the very global order it charges itself with maintaining, producing what he terms a “cosmopolitan dystopia” that undermines America’s own position.

American attempts to overturn regimes which offend its liberal values have produced overwhelmingly negative results for the global system, spreading chaos and enhancing the reach and power of its geopolitical rivals. America’s record in these endless wars has not been one of success. Defeated, outflanked by Iran in Iraq, and clutching defeat from the jaws of victory in eastern Syria, America’s hegemonic military power and tactical skill has been relentlessly undermined by the total detachment from reality displayed by the Washington blob which determines the goals and course of the nation’s wars.

In a manner we can safely assume is not replicated in China, the architects of America’s endless policy failures, like the Iraq War, are not punished by the system, but awarded further sinecures and promotions by an establishment which rewards failure and hobbles success. Defeat is baked in from the outset: the rot is now so widespread it will likely become terminal.

American decline is starkly measurable in outcomes, even as its ballooning defence budgets sap the country’s economy. The United States can no longer keep its client states from each other’s throats, causing wars to break out even within the US alliance system: Qatar and Turkey’s attempts to establish Muslim Brotherhood governance projects across the Middle East and North Africa are directly challenged by the UAE, Egypt and Saudi Arabia’s support for notionally secular strongmen, in a proxy conflict dragging in France and Russia and threatening Europe’s security.

Even a recent coup attempt in a bankrupt and unstable South American country failed despite Pompeo’s loudly-voiced support, which should have been America playing in easy mode. As in any horror movie, the threat’s coming from inside the building: all America’s rivals need do, like Russia in Syria, is exploit the contradictions and weaknesses of US policy, and turn the superpower’s weight and power against it at minimal cost and risk to themselves.

Unlike Iraq, or the Taliban emirate, however, there is fortunately little prospect of the United States engaging in open conflict with China. As Pentagon planners warn, it is unlikely that America will win even a limited naval engagement in China’s Pacific sphere of influence, let alone attempt a ground war against a billion-strong nuclear power.

Instead, we can expect a hybrid war that stops short of open confrontation, involving information warfare on social media, the hacking and sabotage of key infrastructure, the economic blackmail and extortion of allies through sanctions and tariffs and a dangerous jockeying for position as Covid accelerates the collapse of weak states across the ME and Africa, already teetering on the edge of failure.

The internet will surely emerge as a central battleground, and one which poses a far greater risk to America’s open, divided, and already-penetrated system than to China’s hermetically-sealed national internet: indeed, it is doubtful the worldwide web as we currently understand it will long survive a great power confrontation.

As hacked power grids and water treatment plants fail, and passenger planes mysteriously fall out of the sky, and top secret documents are released on social media, the rest of the world will find itself in the uncomfortable position of deciding which side presents the safest bet: and Covid has begun this process sooner than anyone expected.

Born in 1945, the American Empire was the global boomer, sitting astride the earth like it was a ride-on lawnmower, frittering away his children’s inheritance on cheap Chinese gewgaws and blaming everyone else for his poor decisions and for the decline of his powers. It is natural then, that it will be laid low by what is cruelly termed the Boomer plague, and we will do well to escape the hardship and bloodshed that attends the collapse of empires with as little harm to ourselves as possible.