That name comes from “béton brut,” French for “pure concrete.” To detractors, though, the name is all too apt: Brutalist buildings, with their imposing, inscrutable facades, can appear, well, brutish. The style is often associated with authoritarian movements, but incorrectly; it is a fundamentally humanist enterprise, one informed by, and suspicious of, the atrocities committed in the name of higher ideals throughout the 20th century. 

There is no accounting for taste, they say, but much of the dislike for Brutalism — which is hardly confined to Trump and his supporters — seems reflexive. You’re supposed to dislike it way you’re supposed to dislike anchovies. It doesn’t matter if you ever actually eat them.

Brutalism is “today associated with exactly the opposite values in which it was envisioned,” Mark Pasnik, who teaches architecture at the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, told me. That may explain why, as Trump lashes out at Brutalism, few are speaking up in its defense.

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Brutalist buildings line downtown Washington, DC, in particular the southwestern waterfront. Many of those buildings are functionally empty, as Trump has been cutting and relocating segments of the federal bureaucracy, and some could be torn down. Doing so would be an aesthetic mistake and an affront to history. Trump has the right to shape construction of new federal buildings while he remains in office, but any tinkering with the nation’s architectural treasures should elicit bipartisan outrage. 

There’s not much time left. In an executive order issued last month, the White House stipulated that “Federal public buildings, such as courthouses and government office buildings,” need to “embrace classical architecture to honor tradition, foster civic pride, and inspire the citizenry.” Public buildings are to be “constructed in a style that uplifts and beautifies public spaces, ennobles our Nation, and commands respect from the general public.”

That likely translates to a return to neoclassical forms: white marble columns, sweeping staircases, Greco-Roman statuary. The move is supposed to compensate for the influence of modern architecture, which was particularly strong during the federal government’s expansion under the administrations of  John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, and happened to coincide with Brutalism’s peak.

“The drive toward monumentality was seen as being appropriate to a civic building that would represent the people,” Pasnik told me. “It dialed into the era of big, growing government — government that was doing things in a positive light.”

Now that government is evil — according to the people who run it — so is every building that symbolizes its power, or at least, does so without reference to Ancient Rome. “In the 1960s, the Federal government largely replaced traditional designs with modernist and Brutalist ones — a move that was deeply unpopular,” the executive order says, arguing that “a majority of American taxpayers want classical, regionally inspired public buildings that beautify public spaces.”

The order could imperil Brutalist classics around Washington: Marcel Breuer’s towering Robert C. Weaver Federal Building, the James V. Forrestal Building on Independence Avenue, the opaque donut that is the Hirschhorn Museum on the National Mall. This is the closest DC comes to the grandness of one of the world’s great capitals. But these and other Brutalist exemplars have unfairly been rebranded as “lumbering” representatives of a bloated government bureaucracy, Pasnik says.

If you need statues and colonnades, you can see those in London and Paris — and, for that matter, all over Washington. But the bold, angular structures of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau headquarters, across from the White House? That is pure midcentury cool, America at the height of its aesthetic and geopolitical influence. As the recent film The Brutalist pointed out, Brutalism was partly the style of European immigrants who had seen the horrors of World War II. The film stars Adrien Brody as a Jewish émigré from Hungary, who is seemingly based on Breuer. The members of this architectural cohort found comfort in concrete and simplicity, and they left Washington a grander and, yes, more beautiful than it had been in its staid, prewar days, when it was a small, Southern town.  

It is true that these buildings have been allowed to deteriorate, but that is a problem across the entirety of the federal government. And while federal workers have complained about working in them, I doubt that Trump is especially concerned with the comfort of his bureaucrats. Rather, in a complexly perverse move, any architecture that isn’t strictly neoclassical now seems to be identified as “woke.” Yet wokeness, whatever that is, was the last thing the Brutalists had in mind.

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“As classical architecture is the physical expression of the American regime, modern architecture is the physical expression of the woke regime,” one conservative intellectual wrote in 2023. He identified Madison Square Garden, built in 1980, as an example of woke-ism run amok. In fact, MSG is neither Brutalist nor woke. It’s just bad architecture, a sop to corporate interests.

At the same time as Trump is waging war on Brutalism, the newly minted Department of War (formerly the Department of Defense) is preparing to reinstall a Confederate statue in Arlington National Cemetery, under the guise of wanting to showcase all of history, the bad along with the good. I personally oppose displays of Confederate iconography, but many members of the Trump administration feel differently. Consistency demands that they protect our Brutalist history, as well. 

Hope comes from an unlikely source: Mike Solana, editor of the influential and MAGA-adjacent website Pirate Wires, recently called Brutalism an abomination in a social-media post. But in a twist, that same post contained images of Brutalist buildings that have been rehabilitated with trees and plants — a new movement known as “eco-Brutalism.”

“This is acceptable,” Solana said of those images.

I may be grasping at straws here. Trump is no more a fan of environmentalism than he is of Brutalism. But maybe two (perceived) wrongs make a right? Trump wants to make Washington beautiful again. If he can resist his impulse towards the ersatz, he has a real chance of doing so by preserving and polishing the capital city’s Brutalist gems — and if that means a few trees sprouting from the concrete, so be it.

The unspeakable atrocity of innocent people being shot to death by a deranged mass killer continued last week. Two children were murdered and 18 other people wounded in an attack at a Catholic church in Minneapolis. The media coverage gradually devolved, as it always does, from conscientious reporting and outraged commentary to the usual money-driven spectacle. The Left called, as it always does, for gun control; the Right seized on the fact that the shooter was, apparently, a trans person. In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan memorably said that he was returning his “entrance ticket” to God because he could not accept that He would allow the suffering of a single child. In America, the abomination of murdered children is quickly absorbed into helpless routines of commerce and cultural conflict.

And yet no one made the connection between the killing in Minnesota and Trump’s dispatch of the US military to Washington DC for the sake of preserving, he declared, law and order. Trump made it clear that he wasn’t stopping at DC, announcing plans to send the military into other cities, all liberal, as it happened, like Chicago and New York. But aside from sending condolences to the people stricken by the violence in Minnesota, Trump said not a word about mass shootings in America. The street crime Trump claims he wants to extinguish, as he has extinguished illegal border crossings, has been a feature of organized humanity since people began to congregate in numbers larger than two. The mass slaughter of innocent people for no other reason than that someone wanted to slaughter them — that is something new. Isolated detachments of soldiers are not sufficient to stop it. You would need soldiers everywhere.

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If Freud was right, and depression is anger turned inward, then the statistics showing that a majority of Americans are clinically depressed might mean that, for some, homicidal rage takes the form of depression turned outward. The simple fact is that the origins of a mass shooting are buried in an individual psyche; they are impossible to prevent. That is perhaps why Trump is deploying American troops to American cities has not met the sort of resistance one might have expected. Rather, there is a feeling, among even the most liberal of us, that in a society where the mass killing of children, of innocents, has become a common occurrence, safety has to come from somewhere. I don’t know a single liberal not horrified by Trump’s profligate use of the American military to do the job of American police. But I don’t know many liberals who are either over the age of 50, or not the product of wealth’s elevations and exceptions (or both), who don’t, on some deep instinctual level, welcome the sight of a soldier in the context of a civil society that has become increasingly unstable.

That doesn’t mean that America has become increasingly violent. As the liberal media is at great pains to point out, and justifiably so, crime rates have declined over the past few years. It just so happens that the regions where they remain elevated are in the West and the rural South. Crime is far higher in MAGA states like Tennessee, or Alabama or Mississippi, than in even the most violent blue cities.

But the reality of crime matters far less than cultural attitudes toward crime. For if violent crime is higher in the South than in the North, the way people think about crime in the two regions is radically different. In the South, antisocial behavior is habitually contrasted with the values of law and order, values rooted in the moral frameworks of family, religion and patriotism. The North, where the causes of crime matter more in terms of policy than crime per se, is regarded by the South as downright libertine. Telling the Right that their own regions experience more crime than the places in the country Trump is portraying as being under siege by criminals is irrelevant. In the eyes of many Republicans, those liberal places are under siege more by their “permissive” attitudes toward crime than crime itself.

If, however, the different parts of the country have different perceptions of their experience of crime, they all share the same condition. America’s rate of violent crime far exceed countries in Western Europe and East Asia. Taken as a whole, the United States is a violent place. All the while, the vast economic displacements of the past 30 years have introduced their own violence, as what remained of a manufacturing economy gave way to an information economy, which has now been subsumed by the digital world. In a situation of rapidly mutating norms, crime is not merely a fact, but the symbolic shadow of a wider malaise.

It is one of the peculiarities of being an American now that you don’t have to live in a city with a high rate of crime, like Washington or Chicago — or Memphis or Birmingham — to feel personally threatened. The presence of predation on the internet; the screen-abetted withdrawal of people into themselves; the dissolution of shared cultural experiences into countless, private streaming niches; the fractures produced by identitarianism; the blurring of fact and fiction, the personalizing and customization of the justice system; the displacements of human experience and human labor by AI — you could live miles away from anyone, yet still feel as as if you were living in an urban crime zone. It is no wonder that “weaponized” has become such a popular expression. When the most disparate experiences become turned into “weapons,” it means that mass murders — soul-murders, psyche-murders, feeling-murders, status-murders, murders by money, trauma, gaslighting, “subtle acts of exclusion” — are happening all around us.

In this sense, Trump’s war on the liberal cultural of negativity toward America might well turn against him if it is successful. Once negativity as a dominant cultural attitude subsides, his appeal starts to fade. The media’s relentless apocalypticism, its “weaponization” of everything under the sun, is what has people cheering, across the political spectrum when Trump sends troops into American cities. When America’s cultural institutions, from the media, to high and popular art, to higher education, constantly cry that the sky is falling, people are going to turn to whatever figure or force promises protection. Imagine that proverbial visitor from another planet, but one who comes with their family, and has a human biology. Within two hours of experiencing the news, our extraterrestrial immigrants would hear that climate change is bringing total destruction, the next terrifying pandemic is right around the corner, the races hate each other, men and women hate each other, something called artificial intelligence is wiping out the quality of being human, and your child’s genitalia are not as permanent as you thought they were back home. And because it is so hard to keep up with all these encroaching terrors, crime — the primordial human fear of being killed or violently assaulted by another human — embodies all of them.

If a few more car accidents than the average was enough for some people in Spain to wish for the return of Franco, violence in America is exponentially more consequential. As the perception of chaos rises, calls for safety, stability and protection will become naked and intense. A mighty state teetering atop a failing society, America cannot exist much longer without the imposition of order; from one side or another. As a parent leads a child across a busy road, American democracy will soon be guided by the firmest hand.

It is easy for those watching DC’s gratuitous street violence from a safe distance to kibitz that the city’s residents have voted for this. They elected leaders whose policies have led to high crime, short-staffed police, bad schools, and a housing crisis. But such smug dismissal misses a larger problem.

DC is home to nearly 700,000 residents who, since Congress passed the District of Columbia Home Rule Act in 1973, have elected their city council, mayor and public officials in the way Americans do across our nation. But DC is also the seat of our federal system. Since its founding in 1790, the same year as the ratification of the US Constitution, its main purpose has not been residential or commercial, but governmental. It is home to our President and most of the executive agencies, our congressional representatives, and our Supreme Court. Its city government — unlike that of any other state or city — serves at the pleasure of Congress.

DC’s residents, while vital stakeholders in their city government, aren’t its only stakeholders. The widely-reported urban decay in, say, San Francisco, reflects only on San Franciscans. But mismanagement of Washington DC reflects on all Americans. A federal government seeking to project power and moral authority worldwide cannot headquarter itself in a failed city. The fact that our government is currently based in a city where, by the admission of its own City Council Chair, “you can get away with murder”, is not only embarrassing, but threatens our national security. It’s time for Congress to do something about it.

Let’s start with the raw data. As of July 2023, Washington’s homicide rate was the sixth highest of any US city, and the highest rate in a city of its population or greater. DC logged 203 homicides in 2022, and that number is on tack to grow by 20% in 2023. Violent crime more broadly is up 30% this year. A resident’s probability of being the victim of a violent crime in a given year is around 1 in 75, and if property crime is included, that rises to 1 in 17 — among the highest in the nation. There is a stereotype outside of Washington (and even among some in it) that crime in the District is confined to certain “bad neighbourhoods” — particularly the city’s South-East. The implication being that the wealthier residents of the leafy North-West and increasingly fashionable North-East are insulated from it all. This contention, apart from its callous dismissal of much of the city’s population, is flat-out wrong.

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Neighbourhood Scout identifies the campus of Catholic University of America, just north of Union Station, as the safest neighbourhood in the city. But just last week, a 25-year-old Kentuckian teacher visiting for a conference was shot and killed there. The same day, Alison Cienfuegos, a 21-year-old college student who wanted to become an anaesthesiologist, was murdered in South-East DC. The day before that, Nasrat Ahmad Yar, a former interpreter for the US Army in Afghanistan who then worked as a Lyft driver, was murdered by a group of passengers in North-East. In May, a 12-year-old girl in South-East was hit in the leg by a stray bullet from a shootout outside as she lay in bed. In February, a man shot several random passengers on a city bus and slaughtered a Metro transit worker near the city’s popular Eastern Market neighbourhood. And last month, we marked one-year since the mass shooting of four people at a Juneteenth party in Northwest.

This crimewave extends beyond gun violence. Since early 2023, North-West DC has increasingly fallen victim to organised shoplifting; nowadays it’s hard to find a tube of toothpaste for sale that isn’t under lock and key. On 30 April, two CVS Pharmacies in North-West were targeted within half hour of each other by the same group of five suspects, who stuffed large trash bags with goods before fleeing in a stolen car. And stolen cars themselves are increasingly easy to come by. In 2022, there were 485 carjackings in DC, up from only 140 four years earlier — an increase The Washington Post described as leaving authorities “baffled”.

And then there are the unclassifiable crimes of civil disorder, chaos and squalor. Three North-East businesses were targeted with explosives last week. There have been eight documented arson attacks in the past six months. And there are the mobs of illegal ATV and dirt bike riders roaring down DC’s main arteries while endangering and verbally abusing pedestrians, who cannot be apprehended due to the city’s “no chase” police laws. Washington also has the biggest per-capita homelessness problem on the East Coast (over 1% of its population), and the third-highest opioid drug mortality rate in the nation. I could go on.

It is unfair, of course, to blame crime and disorder solely on city government. But it is more than fair to expect a crisis of such magnitude to be met with a vigorous, unified and effective government response (particularly since these problems, while currently on the upswing, are far from new). The District’s response has been none of those things.

Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) is currently understaffed by almost 20% (around 800 officers) and is nearing the lowest number of active officers in its history. According to Police Chief Robert Contee, it is DC’s policy climate that has made the city such an unattractive place to be an officer. Unlike in almost any other city, Contee explains, MPD officers must be able to prove a reasonable belief that no one will be injured as a result of a vehicle pursuit before initiating it — an impossible demand. Other laws, such as a prohibition on officers reviewing their own bodycam footage before writing an incident report, and the removal of time limits on internal conduct investigations — have made it more difficult for officers to defend themselves when accused of misconduct. With a hollowed-out MPD, Contee predicts that the department will be unable to reach necessary staffing levels for “at least a decade”.

But DC’s maladministration of criminal justice does not end with the police. Its mismanagement of corrections bears equal responsibility. A 2022 city report found that out of all homicides committed in the District in 2019 and 2020, 46% were committed by people who had been previously incarcerated, with an additional 29% by people who had spent time on probation or parole. The report also found that a mere 500 individuals already known to the criminal justice system (0.1% of the city’s population) perpetrate 70% of the city’s gun violence.

How did the City Council react to this sobering data? Infamously, they responded by passing a crime bill earlier this year (despite Mayor Muriel Bowser’s opposition), seeking to eliminate mandatory minimum sentences and reduce maximum sentences for violent crimes such as robbery and carjacking. In response, the US Senate was forced to exercise its right to veto the Council’s bill.

Interestingly, these self-sabotaging crime policies have been enacted by a City Council that pledges its utmost dedication to the cause of racial equity. It created an equity office in 2020 whose homepage reads: “Everything is a matter of racial equity.” But from the Council’s behaviour, it would seem that “everything” does not include crime. For while the pettier subcategories of DC’s crimewave have become increasingly equitable in their impact over recent years, gun crime has not. In a city with a 45% black population, 95% of the victims of gun violence in DC are black. And somehow, the Council’s instinct is to ask: what about the criminals?

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Public safety is the most basic mission of a municipal government, but it is far from the only one. Unfortunately, DC’s performance in other important areas is little better. Its public education system is one of the worst in the nation, with the city’s students scoring in the bottom five of American states and territories in both reading and mathematics. This has not budged in decades. Considering DC’s high poverty rate and the fact that it is one city being compared with entire states, it might be unreasonable to expect these test results to exceed the national average. But nor should residents expect or tolerate zero progress over three decades.

And then there is the housing crisis. DC has a huge home affordability problem and a high homelessness rate, with 20,000 low-income city residents on a waiting list for low-rent or zero-rent public housing from the city Housing Authority (DCHA). And yet, 25% of the DCHA’s 8,000 units lie unoccupied at any given time, and they remain so for an average of two years before the DCHA gets around to renting them to a new tenant (nationally, the average public housing vacancy rate is 5%). According to The Washington Post, vacant housing units not only attract crime, but cost the city $10 million in rent and federal aid per year.

Reading this, one might wonder whether DC is cash-strapped. Far from it. DC’s effective individual tax rate is 12%: the 11th-highest combined state and local tax rate in America. And its tax base is large. Over the past two decades, the city has experienced a huge wave of wealthy immigration for lucrative government, contractor, consulting and lobbying jobs, resulting in a much-bemoaned wave of neighbourhood gentrification. Add to this a healthy 27% of city revenue supported by federal aid (on the high end for combined federal and state aid in other US cities), and DC frequently runs a budget surplus. But what does that federal largesse buy residents? Far less than they would get living somewhere else, which is why Wallethub awarded DC first place in its “worst-run cities in America” in 2022.

Admittedly DC had stiff competition from such formidable foes as New York, Cleveland, and San Francisco, all of which consistently struggle with their own crime, liveability and maladministration problems. But Washington DC, unlike those other cities, is the capital city of a world superpower. By virtue of this, it ought to provide a positive model of how government can serve its citizens, not a negative one. It should provide safe streets for visitors and residents alike, and a police force sufficiently staffed and trained to keep the peace. It should provide public schools to which a struggling single mother and a visiting diplomat alike would be proud to send their children.

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And then there are the national security implications of DC’s disorder. In the event of war or national disaster, the federal government must be able to secure the city of Washington and lock it down for the protection of our government officials. Considering this need, the fact that the streets only a mile away from the Capitol Building and White House are essentially uncontrollable, even during peacetime, is unacceptable.

There is, though, a potentially swift solution. Under the 1973 Home Rule law, the Senate has the power to review and veto laws of the DC City Council (as it did with the Crime Bill). But it also has the right under the Constitution to take bigger steps, such as abolishing or suspending Home Rule itself. Article 1 of the Constitution gives Congress the right to “exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever” over the federal district — a provision that, according to Georgetown University constitutional law professor Louis Michael Seidman, clearly means that “Congress could abolish the city government and establish whatever governmental system it chose, including direct rule by Congress”. (Indeed, this was how DC was governed before Home Rule.)

Today, Congress should strongly consider exercising that right once again. It should place Washington DC under a temporary federal conservatorship. This would mean suspending the City Council and Mayor and replacing them with federally-appointed city managers, perhaps drawn from more successful municipal governments around the US, until standards for public safety, administration, and education rise to an acceptable level.

Washington DC’s struggles are not unique among American cities. But the solution I propose here is necessarily specific to DC. It would be fundamentally undemocratic and un-American, not to mention unconstitutional, for the federal or state governments to go around disbanding or suspending municipal governments simply for giving their people what they have voted for. But our federal district, as our founders knew, is not a normal city. It represents all of us, which is why the Constitution gives Congress the final say over its affairs.

DC’s officials seem to have forgotten this. Indeed, any effort Congress makes to exercise supervision over the District’s affairs typically elicits hysterical reactions from those city officials whose incompetence has necessitated those interventions. When Georgia Representative Andrew Clyde brought up the possibility of direct federal supervision during a Congressional debate over the idea of DC statehood last year, DC Congressional Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton accused him of seeking to turn the city into a “colony”. What Holmes Norton forgets is that, unlike any other city on the American continent, this one belongs to us all, just like the federal government that inhabits it.

Perhaps reading the writing on the wall, Mayor Bowser and Brooke Pinto of the City Council just this week passed an emergency crime bill that would make it easier to track and detain violent criminals. While I applaud the effort, it is too little too late. We have now seen enough to know that the current city government of DC is not capable of providing our nation the safe, orderly and dignified capital it deserves. Perhaps another democratically elected government a decade or two down the line will be — a conservatorship need not be permanent. But right now, Washington DC requires major emergency surgery, not a mere change in diet. Congress — while an imperfect surgeon — is the only one available.

When an interview with Antonov containing these laments  appeared in Politico this month it became the talk of the diplomatic circuit. At social gatherings, several ambassadors shared that his office had contacted their office, and on their instructions, been rebuffed. And seriously, they wondered, how could he expect anyone to agree to meet him for lunch? To be seen dining with the city’s principal pariah was out of the question. As for taking his calls, who wanted to hear him spout Moscow’s party line at a time like this?

Having spent a decade as a ‘diplomatic spouse’, I find myself strangely fascinated by Antonov’s situation. The average Russian citizen may be inundated with propaganda, but Antonov has access to international news and commentary. He knows exactly what his country is doing and is personally experiencing the revulsion this has engendered. Demonstrators regularly gather in front of his embassy. They beam the Ukrainian flag onto the walls. In a way, having people refuse to see him or take his calls is a kindness and reflection of their good manners, given what most of us would like to say to him.

I can’t claim intimate knowledge of his state of mind or moral compass, but Antonov always struck me as a decent man. I remember him telling me that one of his personal projects when he first came to the US had been the rehabilitation of the historic cemetery in Ft. Ross, a settlement of Russian immigrants in Northern California. It was a moral obligation, he explained, to ensure that the dead could rest with dignity. A few months after that conversation, his army would be torturing and murdering civilians, then shovelling them into mass graves, or just leaving the bodies on the roadside to rot. What do his morals say about that?

Overnight Russia, which was working to regain its position as the serious and sober world power that in so many ways it seemed qualified to be, revealed a different face. Instead of playing a role on the world stage, it has been excluded from multiple economic, diplomatic and institutional affiliations. Even once this ends — as eventually it must — no one will forget that Russia wrecked its neighbour without anything even distantly approaching a proportionate provocation. The consequences of this act of aggression — Sweden and Finland preparing to join Nato, Germany rearming — are far-reaching and will last.

Antonov’s main assignment was to improve relations with the United States. And I believe this was a mission he embraced with sincerity. During a small lunch in December in his elegant residence, he expanded persuasively on that goal. Our two countries had important interests and global concerns in common, he said. But there was mutual distrust to overcome. Perhaps one could organize some youth programs, he suggested. These could bring Russian young people together with their American counterparts, to start building mutual understanding and forge relationships. What he had in mind was organic, gradual and positive.

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And I think he was making headway. Serious voices in the Washington policy world were beginning to conclude that diminishing Russia was counterproductive, that Moscow’s feeling of being boxed in by Nato and treated like a second-rate power should be given consideration, that a Russia possessed of heft and respect could be a partner against an aggressive China, a volatile Central Asia and the resurgence of Islamist terrorism. Wasn’t it time to bury the hatchet, and besides, did Washington really want to shoulder the world’s burdens all by ourselves?

Over time, this view might have prevailed. But instead of playing the judicious long-game envisioned by Antonov, Putin decided to speed things along with tanks, missiles, and genocide, and now his envoy is left holding the fort as representative of a Mongol-era scorched earth barbarian, a country whose neighbour no one wants to be, a leader President Biden has termed a war criminal, and a state that has been ignominiously kicked off the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Ambassadors tend to be well educated, well-traveled and self-possessed. There is an esprit de corps among them, even when they represent hostile states. Everyone shares a lifestyle of transience and understands the obligation that comes with the job: to defend positions whether or not one agrees with them. You see each other constantly in social settings where everything is light and civil and wine is served, and then you clash in a debate or security council vote; it engenders a sense of irony.

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They are comparable to soldiers in that they don’t make policy; they obey directives. A sensible government will consult them, listening to their estimations of the chances for success, heeding their warnings about unanticipated fallout. In the end though, ambassadors must represent whatever decision is made, and with conviction.

But what if they simply can’t? Here is where diplomats, as a rule, are in a better place than soldiers. A soldier or officer who walks away in protest can be prosecuted or, depending on the circumstances, even executed for desertion or treason. For most ambassadors, the stakes are not quite that high.

As with military officers, they are patriots, so it’s unlikely to be an easy decision, especially at the hard-won career level of ambassadorship. But what if they come to feel that they can no longer, in good conscience, defend the actions of their government? They have options: retire, resign, or jump ship altogether and seek asylum. The first two can either be accomplished quietly or be accompanied by statements of dissent. And what happens then? That very much depends on what country they are from.

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Some ambassadors, by resigning, improve their personal circumstances. Diplomats from Afghanistan were famous for abandoning their posts, even before the recent Taliban takeover. Currently — though now at least with some justification — 55 Afghan ambassadors and staff have requested asylum in the U.S. In general, it’s more common for diplomats from volatile, poor, or conflict-ridden countries to resign postings in more prosperous, Western countries. Without doubting the sincerity of their motives, the move has at least as many benefits as costs. They and their families receive asylum, gain residency, and typically receive a comfortable sinecure.

The Trump era was studded with ambassadorial resignations. In 2018 James Melville resigned as U.S. ambassador to Estonia in protest over President Trump’s stance towards the European Union. He moved on to become Associate Dean at the College of Charleston. In the same year, U.S. ambassador to Panama John Feeley went public about his resignation in an op-ed in the Washington Post, titled “Why I Could No Longer Serve This President.” Therein he wrote that Trump had “warped and betrayed” what to him were “the traditional core values of the United States.” He moved to Miami and joined a media company. Everyone remained alive, well, and able to earn a respectable living.

But then there are countries that take a far dimmer view of absconding diplomats. During Communist era Poland, for example, their ambassador to Japan Zdzislaw Rurarz defected to the U.S. to protest his government’s imposition of martial law. He was tried in absentia and sentenced to death. He was stripped of his citizenship, and his property in Poland was confiscated. Information about North Korean diplomats who defect to the South is murky, with rumours of their children being abducted and forcibly repatriated, and their family members back at home being punished or possibly even killed.

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There is one last, less dramatic way ambassadors can exit their posts — they can have their accreditation yanked and be expelled, not for anything they did wrong but as stand-ins for their government. The State Department is not quite ready yet to do this to Antonov; so far they have only expressed their displeasure by withholding visas for his embassy staff’s spouses and family members, and as he laments in the Politico article, sending home his cook. Our U.S. diplomats in Russia have seen worse; they’ve had family pets killed and their young children waylaid and intimidated on the way to school, all to signal Russia’s anger with the administration they represent.

American ambassadors to Russia have resigned in years gone by, but I couldn’t find evidence of the reverse. Given the treatment of dissidents and even of private citizens who are seen to be disobedient, I suspect it’s not extremely advisable for Russian officials or diplomats to express public disagreement, let alone defect. Yet to their immense credit, in light of the horrific actions of their government in Ukraine, some courageous individuals in public roles have done just that.

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By Edward Luttwak

Russian climate envoy Anatoly Chubais resigned his position and departed Russia, citing his opposition to Putin’s war in Ukraine as the reason. Ironically, it was Chubais who gave Putin his first Kremlin job in the mid-1990s, remained his strong supporter and held several important posts in various state companies. Arkady Dvorkovich, was the senior economic adviser to Dmitry Medvedev during his presidency, and was deputy Prime Minister until 2018. He stepped down as head of the state-backed Skolkovo technology fund after condemning the invasion.

Andrei Kozyrev, who was Russia’s Foreign Minister and later a Duma member under President Boris Yeltsin, told Newsweek that Russian envoys have the responsibility to oppose the actions of Putin by resigning in protest. But his career ended some years ago and he lives in balmy Florida, so that’s easy advice to give.

What should Antonov the Abandoned do? His choices are not great. Unless the US expels him he can remain in place, but his goal of bridge-building has been blown to smithereens right along with the buildings of Mariupol. Perhaps there will be a thaw again at some future point, but not until Putin is well and truly out of the picture. And any new and different leader will appoint his own people as diplomats. Is walking away a possibility, or does he have family members who would pay a price? Or does he, perhaps, out of loyalty or conviction actually support the unfolding barbarism?

You can’t help but love the way an old-timer in a white aran sweater and houndstooth flat cap tells it. You want to believe in the solidarity of the diaspora. But if what he says is true, the Irish would not have just won their independence; we’d control India, Australia, and, God forbid, Canada.

Instead, what we got was the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, signed 100 years ago this week. The treaty promised Ireland self-government under British dominion, as well as an exit plan for the Ulsterman in the counties to the north. With peace restored after centuries of violence, the Irish, naturally, decided to have another war. The victorious rebels now found themselves fighting the IRA and Éamon de Valera, who rejected the treaty as being too favourable to the British.

The provisional government, led by Michael Collins and the subsequent Irish Free State, turned their attention to an important front in the civil war: the United States. The Government lacked diplomatic recognition under the terms of the treaty, but its mission was not to wrangle support in Washington, DC; it was to convince the Irish Americans who had financed and armed Irish revolutionary forces to rally behind the treaty.

Two years earlier, the American-born de Valera had arrived in the United States as a stowaway on the SS Lapland, having just escaped from prison in England. Once ashore, the self-proclaimed president of the Irish Republic raised the equivalent of $70 million for the revolution in a coast-to-coast barnstorming tour, which drew disapproval from American elites. The grandees of Washington may have thought it uncouth to welcome a phantom dignitary from a non-existent country, but local and state politicians knew they would be whipped from office if they ignored the visit.

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Ireland's Brexit blackmail

By John Lloyd

Babe Ruth’s Boston Red Sox drew 15,000 fans to its 1918 World Series victory, the club’s last championship for nearly a century. Nine months later, 50,000 people packed the same stadium to witness de Valera speak, flanked on the podium by former Mayor James Michael Curley and every member of the city’s Democratic machine. The rapture from the crowd prompted invitations from the governors of New Hampshire and Massachusetts, as well as city leaders in Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco.

Ultimately, De Valera’s year-long jaunt across the United States helped the Irish win their independence — and once the civil war started, leaders of the provisional government feared his contacts could be mobilised against the treaty. What they did not appreciate was how polarising a figure de Valera had become among the Irish diaspora.

Irish American leaders bristled at de Valera’s imperial attitude; he was happy to cash the checks and happier still to dismiss his financial backers when they opined on how to spend the money. The Gaelic American, the mouthpiece for the republican movement in the United States, opposed the treaty right up until the moment de Valera agreed with it. “This half-breed Spanish-American Jew intends if he can to turn Ireland into a miniature Mexico where defeated candidates for office refused to abide by the decision of the majority rendered at the election and seek to overthrow the will of the people by force,” the paper said in an editorial.

While some Irish American activists continued to oppose the treaty, Free State officials determined the silent majority of the Irish in America were satisfied to hear that their countrymen had received a reprieve from British oppression. The details of whatever government emerged were of little concern. “The most effective propaganda is frequent dignified statements from the government of the Irish Free State showing that it is functioning successfully and is determined to do so,” diplomat Timothy Smiddy wrote in a memo back home.

Smiddy shifted the focus of the pro-treaty forces from winning the hearts and minds of Irish American activists to publicly re-enforcing the legitimacy of the new government. He set about attempting to undo the very work in America that had helped the Irish win independence, pressing US officials who had once turned a blind eye to gun-running to crack down on it. He prevailed upon activists to ignore the pleas of IRA widows when the hat made its way around the pub. He succeeded on all fronts, but nothing helped his cause more than the American Irish’s unity in their own domestic political machines where ethnic solidarity trumped ideological difference.

As for De Valera, he was soon chastened by the civil war that followed the Anglo-Irish treaty. He appeared to have learned a few important lessons from the machine politicians that kissed his ring back in 1919. James Michael Curley, like the Irish rebel leader, did two prison stints for fraud. This did not stop the Boston Irish from sending him to Congress, the governor’s mansion, and on four occasions to the Mayor’s Office. When he was barred from attending the 1932 Democratic convention with the Massachusetts state delegation, he arrived in Chicago alone. The party clerk must have been puzzled during roll call when the Puerto Rican delegation sent forth its new ‘representative’: Alcalde Jaime Miguel Culeo. The people of Boston could forgive any crime or public embarrassment, so long as Curley delivered on the patronage projects that won him the nickname the “Mayor of the Poor”.

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What if Ireland were united?

By Colm Toibin

By 1926, de Valera cut ties with Sinn Féin and established Fianna Fáil, pledging to take his seat in the Dáil and achieve republican government from within the Irish Free State. In 1932, Fianna Fáil dominated the elections on a populist platform dedicated to public works projects and social security. He delivered on the social safety net, which kept Fianna Fáil in charge long enough to gut the constitution of any trace of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. By July 1937, just two months after someone dynamited George II’s imperial monument in St. Stephen’s Green, the Irish had a new constitution. That “half-breed Spanish Jew” had made good on delivering an authentic and unique Irish Catholic vision for what a Republic could be.

The Sons of Gael who threw their fivers into the hat and their .38s into the barrel throughout the Troubles believed their contributions would deliver de Valera’s romantic vision to their compatriots to the north. Today, you’ll find their American grandchildren on barstools listening in awe to the Old Timer in the Aran Sweater and singing along to “A Nation Once Again”, as indifferent to the particulars on the ground in the old country as their great grandfathers were at the time of the Anglo-Irish Treaty.

These youths have embraced smoking and the Clancy Brothers and unapologetic popery to stick it to the secular, technocratic, iconoclastic, opioid-addicted world the dominant protestant class left the United States. Éire is a counter-culture preserved in amber, an escape hatch from a modernity that has left them feeling just as alien as their great grandparents must have felt at Ellis Island.

They have no idea the freedom fighters of the IRA are mere heroin dealers now. That the Emerald Isle has become Europe’s answer to the Cayman Islands, rather than that beacon standing athwart brute materialism. Ireland, freed from the oppression of the Black and Tans, voluntarily followed London’s lead into financialisation and speculation.

It is a nation of bankers and those on the dole, waking up to the realisation that Silicon Valley’s dream of universal basic income exists so the jobless masses can have just enough money in their pockets to pay the billionaire overlord class. The robots aren’t advanced enough to take all the jobs just yet, so they make do with Polish labourers — the only people in Ireland who still go to Mass in the modernist concrete churches.

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The IRA's hunger for martyrs

By Jenny McCartney

To look at Ireland from abroad is to understand the world of John Swanwick Drennan, the least appreciated of the great Irish poets:

A golden casket I designed
To hold a braid of hair
My Love was false and now I find
A coil of serpents there

The Irish resent the pedestal erected by the diaspora. They desire the same freedom to squander the national inheritance as the rest of the West. Occasionally, Irish Americans — or at least a sliver of its activist class — take notice of the retreat from what made Ireland unique only to be dismissed as Cromwellian interlopers.

When Ireland’s technocratic banker class moved to strike the constitutional protection of the unborn, Americans rallied to its defence (the pro-life movement being one of the last vestiges of Irish Catholic machine politics). Irish authorities, hungry as they are for US investment when it comes to corporate tax dodges, suddenly developed an allergy to American dollars. Just as the Irish Free State appealed to higher authorities in DC to stifle the flow of guns, the ruling class turned to Dublin corporate resident Mark Zuckerberg to successfully disarm the opposition.

One hundred years on, de Valera is as welcome in Ireland today as Curley was at the 1932 Democratic convention.

Today, the Democratic Party seems more united, still glowing in the aftermath of the defeat of Trump. But that is just an illusion: Joe Biden’s first hundred days in office are almost up — and the internal conflicts of his party are bound to surface soon.

These divisions are not petty, or merely personal, but based on demands from a number of incompatible constituencies and ideologies. Take the Democrats’s newest supporters: America’s tech oligarchs, Wall Street financiers and urban real estate speculators. They may act “woke” on issues surrounding gender, race and the environment. But such “virtue signalling” is no substitute for the drastic policies pushed by the party’s Left: the confiscation of vast wealth, the break-up of monopolies and the introduction of ever-higher taxes. Big business, after all, is the clear winner in the status quo that the Left, with good reason, despises.

But the impending Democratic civil war is more than, as some conservatives see it, a two-dimensional conflict between “the establishment and the radicals”. Largely ignored in this narrative is the most unappreciated, least articulate yet arguably the largest Democrat-voting bloc: middle and working-class moderates who make up roughly 50% of the party. These voters may often favour populist economics, but remain threatened by the cultural, economic and environmental policies pushed by the other two factions.

All of which leaves Biden in an unenviable position: if he seeks to placate both the corporate woke and the activist Left, the Democrats could sever their last connections with the vast majority of the country, and allow the GOP, even in the wake of the Trump disaster, to recover political momentum.

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California is collapsing

By Joel Kotkin

For what it’s worth, Biden has often been associated with this largely neglected group of what might be called FDR Democrats. His reputation as a moderate “reasonable guy” helped secure the votes of older Democrats, Independents and African-Americans in the recent election. In the primaries, it gave him an edge over both the radical Sanders, whose program frightened many older voters, and the candidates of the corporate elite, notably the well-financed former Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg. These voters may be fading in the numbers, but still constitute up to 44% of the total electorate, easily the largest identifiable class constituency.

Certainly, parts of Biden’s program — expanding health coverage as well as investments in basic infrastructure and manufacturing — could appeal to these voters, who are now generally supportive of an activist government. But Biden has also backed measures on cultural and environmental issues that are unlikely to win over the traditional working and middle classes. For example, fracking bans, already endorsed by Vice President Harris, could, according to the US Chamber of Commerce, cost 14 million jobs, far more than the eight million lost in the Great Recession.

Belying his regular guy image, Biden has also expressed support for programmes that would force suburban areas to densify. It is likely few suburbanites, the majority of all Americans, would welcome federal overseers deciding how their communities should be changed. Meanwhile, attempts to force residents out of their cars and into transit, something they were abandoning well before Covid, seems quixotic as well as politically stupid. The President’s Transportation Secretary has even suggested a tax on “vehicle miles” travelled, a measure almost calculated to alienate middle and working-class families outside a few dense urban cores.

And then there’s the Biden cultural agenda, built largely around critical race theory. It would, in effect, force the majority of Americans, particularly Asians, to accept permanent race discrimination in terms of access to jobs, college educations and entrance to competitive high schools. Moreover, its timing could hardly be worse: it galls many to see, amid a pandemic and deep recession, a sudden huge surge of refugees at the border. Even Hispanics in some border states, whose politics tend align with grassroots working-class interests, see this new wave of immigration as a direct threat to their constituents’s  personal and economic safety.

How did their interests fall so out of favour? Well, their waning influence is principally the result of a merging of wealth and corporate power in Democrat politics that has been building for at least fifteen years, blossoming richly under President Obama. Both Biden’s primary campaign last year and his election victory were financed largely by big Wall Street firms, tech oligarchies, the mainstream media and other wealthy elites. Vice President Harris, in particular, is close to America’s new oligarchy, notably Facebook, while National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has close ties to Microsoft.

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What haunts Hunter Biden?

By Tanya Gold

Biden has already delivered on one of tech’s biggest concerns: the restoration of HIB tech workers — essentially, relatively cheap short-time servants from Asia. The Bay Area economy, for example, depends on for as much as 40% of its workforce from non-citizens. It’s no surprise that the travel ban and Trump’s often crude policies on immigration helped transform Silicon Valley  into a virtually one-party state .

But this corporate Leftism extends well beyond Silicon Valley. Where the Democrats once ruled mining and manufacturing towns; today they represent 41 of the 50 wealthiest Congressional districts. Wall Street and the tech oligarchy can afford not to see Biden’s “green agenda” as raising living costs or threatening jobs. Instead, Valley oligarchs and Wall Street financiers salivate over the potential killing to be made from subsidies for their renewable fuels investments and electric car schemes, as the radical filmmaker Michael Moore, among others, has documented. The green economy has already spawned its first mega-billionaire, Elon Musk, whose core businesses feed largely on regulatory and tax policies that favour his products.

All of which grates somewhat with the third Democrat faction: the illiberal neo-socialist Left. People like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez rail against the extreme inequality associated with Silicon Valley and Wall Street. AOC has even suggested a country that “allows billionaires to exist” is immoral.

But while this inevitable conflict is yet to achieve centre-stage in Washington, it is surely only a matter of time before it erupts. Already in Seattle, local progressives have been feuding with Amazon, the city’s mega-employer whose founder, Jeff Bezos, is a Democratic ideological enforcer (through control of the Washington Post and the book industry) and donor to Biden. Meanwhile, San Francisco has also passed legislation to confiscate some of the wealth of its huge tech elite.

Ultimately, it won’t be easy for Democrats to accommodate both the world’s most avaricious capitalists and grassroots radicals. These agenda-setting Leftists are openly hostile to free enterprise system. Indeed, the recent bitter fight in Nevada, where insurgent socialists won all five party leadership positions in the local party, will likely be replicated around the country.

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The death of American dignity

By Justin Webb

In contrast, the GOP, once the country-club party, does not ignore the sentiments of the unwashed —  white working class voters, small business owners and, to a surprising degree, minorities such as Latinos, whose economic interests, aspirations and social views are often at odds with the Democrat’s new “progressive” agenda. Today, you often hear more interesting social democratic ideas about boosting the middle class and curbing the oligarchy  from the conservative intelligentsia and GOP Senators like Florida’s Marco Rubio.

Yes, these proposals are often detested by libertarians and the last vestiges of traditional corporate conservatism, but there’s not much clamour in the electorate for a return for the Bushes or Mitt Romney. The populist wing of the Right has identified patriotism, homeownership, small business and upward mobility at its core — ideas which are largely ignored or even demonised by the Democrats’ dominant factions.

As their traditional constituency shifts, Democrats will struggle to maintain their odd coupling of the woke and the ultra-rich. They could try to square the circle by devising a more regulated economy that would curb competition — always manna for the monopolists — while dishing out more welfare and subsidies to allay the potentially disruptive masses.

But this trick, particularly as the bond markets and foreign investors begin to recoil from massive deficits, may ignite a battle over raising taxes, which would force the party to go after the tech monopolies, who historically pay little. It could also force them to increase levies on its cadre of educated upper-class adherents.

In the meantime, however, the contradictions between socialism and even woke capitalism may prove too massive to reconcile. It seems certain that far-Left candidates will continue to challenge and replace old FDR-style Democrats, particularly in big cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, St. Louis and Seattle.

Growing pressure from the Left, and also from the financial markets, could undermine Biden’s brief kumbaya moment, forcing him to choose between the interests of his elite and grassroots supporters. A Democratic Civil War seems inevitable — and in such a scenario, the winner will only be the Republicans.

Earlier in the week, a professor of politics had reminded me that election nights in the United States were traditionally times to heal campaign wounds and celebrate their democracy. No longer. For the mood of America is angry and divided — and this was seen all too clearly outside that famous white building, as results flowed in from around the country. One woman with a piercing voice preached Christian messages, while a person inside a papier-mâché Donald Trump waved its tiny hands nearby. A bearded man with a bandana, carrying the US flag, explained to reporters why he was not wearing a mask, watched by a Black Lives Matter protester whose head was encased in a gas mask. Nearby an enterprising soul pursued his vision of the American dream with a makeshift stall selling BLM T-shirts.

After watching this vaudeville show for a while, I walked back to my hotel to catch up on the latest results, only to find bizarre scenes outside on a roundabout. It was almost 11pm, yet on the lit-up steps of a large church a film crew was recording an ecumenical religious service as a couple of homeless guys stood watching. “That’s so off-key,” said one observer after a young preacher in red and white robes starting singing. On the other side of the circle scores of young protesters were gathering. Most were clad in black balaclavas, while many carried gas masks and some wore helmets and body armour, or held shields. About 20 police on bicycles watched them warily as a helicopter hovered overhead, then I counted as 18 cop cars in a convoy pulled up on an adjacent street.

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What's the mood in Trumpland?

By Ian Birrell

The demonstrators moved off towards the White House, led by a figure waving an anarchy flag. They chanted the sort of stuff I had heard ten days earlier in Portland, Oregon, mostly revolving around the concept that all cops are bastards but also dismissing Joe Biden as much as Trump, as they disavowed the need for police or a president. They angrily rounded on a man who seemed to be urging them to stay peaceful and things briefly became ugly, but then they marched on letting off their fireworks and shouting their slogans. The police watched but did not intervene. This is, after all, a country where citizens have the constitutional right to protest.

These late-night sorties in the capital are another indication of the fissures in this country, exposed so starkly in the tight election race. I saw this clearly in Portland, where there have been almost-nightly protests for months and the city centre has been boarded up since May; I saw it when travelling into the heart of Trumpland in West Virginia, where many see Biden as a prisoner of the Left. One country but two very different outlooks on life, a nation filled with partisans that think their political foes deserve prison and protesters that believe they have the right to take the law into their own hands.

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How white radicals hijacked Portland's protests

By Michael Tracey

Look at the polls and there are stark differences in perception between the two tribes on everything from the state of the economy to the fight against the pandemic. Now look at the new electoral map and you see this sharp delineation across the land: a vast chunk of Republican red across the middle fringed by Democrat blue states on the left and top right.

Back in my hotel room, I watched, appalled, as Trump falsely claimed victory in states he has lost, made phoney accusations of fraud and pledged legal challenges to official state results. Even after four years of his leadership, which has so diminished the US, it was still shocking to watch a president deliberately stoke the fires of discontent smouldering away so dangerously in America.

Just over a month ago, I was in Belarus, watching protesters fighting to free themselves from the shackles of dictatorship. I saw huge numbers turning out each week in mass demonstrations over a stolen election, along with smaller marches by women and grannies. They have been met with sickening violence, mass arrests, water cannon, tear gas, rubber bullets. Some have been jailed, maimed, sacked from jobs. I was chased myself by the paramilitary police. But I left inspired by people showing bravery, restraint and unity in the face of state brutality, driven by their desire for the sort of freedoms that we take for granted in our democracies.

I had seen the same raw courage in Hong Kong a few months earlier, as another set of people, many of them still teenagers, confronted the terrifying might of the Chinese dictatorship with just umbrellas and wok lids to place over rounds of tear gas fired at them. They freely admitted their fears and the almost certain futility of defeating the Communist Party chiefs who were tightening the noose around their city; they carried on in the faint hope they could salvage democracy. “What alternative do we have?” asked one. “Who thought the Berlin Wall would fall?” said several others.

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The fall of the Wall powered up my politics

By Ruth Davidson

Back in the States, today, we have a shameless egotist in the White House, stirring up dissent in a volatile climate as he seeks to cling on to power. The leader of the world’s most important democracy is casually corroding the kind of political freedoms that those people in Belarus and Hong Kong are risking lives and liberty to achieve. At the same time, his behaviour offers succour to the world’s autocrats. This demeans both his nation and the nature of democracy at a time when it is losing support, especially among younger generations frustrated by its failures.

I am relieved if this is the end of Trump’s time in power. Yet while there is much to absorb from these results, they appear in many ways a terrible outcome. Nothing is certain as I write but it looks like a cliff-edge Democrat victory, close enough for Trump to spray around allegations of fraud and send in his army of lawyers to challenge results. It seems the Republicans may hold on to the Senate, ensuring the partisan games so off-putting to many citizens will continue to tarnish Washington. The narrow result means the GOP will probably remain wedded to Trump-style populism (although it may prove less lethal without such a skilled showman at the helm) while Biden will come under renewed pressure from progressives — inflamed into insane fury over four tough years of Trump — to turn sharply Left after squeaking to victory.

Biden is a genial character. He has shown unexpected strength in resisting the Left over his long campaign. But however genuine his desire to unite his nation, it is hard to see how this doddery and consensual politician will solve the deep-rooted issues that led to Trump’s takeover four years ago. Is he really the person to tackle profound issues of capitalism, globalisation, inequality, racism, technology and the desperate need for political reform that are tearing apart America? Sadly, whatever happens over the coming days and months, it is hard to be optimistic that the whirlwind of fury buffeting the soul of the nation can be salved, whichever elderly man is running the country.

Look at that electoral map again: after four years of the disruptive Trump in office, almost half the voters in the United States wanted to see him returned to power, even amid the pandemic, while the other half see him as devil incarnate. On both extremes sit unsavoury groups that proclaim the use of violence to achieve their goals in a country seeing surging gun sales. Only a fool would dare predict what comes next. Yet all is not lost, even when police chiefs and sober analysts discuss the possibility of serious civil unrest. For one thing still seems to unite pretty much all the people here, regardless of their political stance — the desire to end all the hate and patch up their differences. There is still hope for American salvation.

And one by one, they announce their jobs as lobbyists.

It’s perhaps the most blatant case of legalised corruption in Washington: the revolving door through which America’s elected officials and high-level appointees cash out to become millionaire lobbyists or consultants for special interests who are seeking to game the very system those same public officials helped create.

This year has seen the usual cashouts — a handful of members, almost immediately after leaving office, announcing their new jobs at lobbying firms. Former Representative Dave Reichert (Republican), was chairman of the Trade subcommittee on the tax-writing Ways & Means Committee. His term ended on 3 January. Already, he has joined a lobbying firm where he will be “advising the firm’s clients on trade issues”.

Akin Gump, a lobbying giant, announced three days after the 115^th Congress ended that it was hiring former Representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lamar Smith. The firm bragged that Ros-Lehtinen was the first woman to chair the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and she asserted that she would “absolutely” be lobbying for foreign governments. From shaping America’s foreign policy to lobbying our government on behalf of foreign governments — it’s the American Dream!

Plenty of others will follow their lead. If things proceed as they have in most recent years, then about half of the 100 departing House members and about half of the 10 departing Senators will go into lobbying.

But already 2019 has also witnessed a couple of extraordinary revolving-door moments — extraordinary because the politician didn’t seem to wait to leave office before firing up the lobbying work.

Congresswoman Lynn Jenkins had her lobbying firm already up and running even before she even left Congress. On 20 November — two weeks after Election Day, and six weeks before her term ended, Jenkins posted on Facebook: “I’m pleased to share that I have recently established LJ STRATEGIES, LLC, a consulting firm providing strategic analysis, comprehensive federal and state government relations, political consulting, and association management.”

“Comprehensive federal and state government relations” means lobbying. Of course, Jenkins couldn’t work for LJ Strategies while serving out the end of her term, but the firm bearing her initials was incorporated while she was still voting on and debating spending bills and other measures that could affect her firm’s future clients.

Running the firm while Jenkins was still in Congress was her longtime congressional chief of staff and former campaign manager Pat Leopold. Federal law bars the ex-Congresswoman from lobbying Congress for her first year out of office, but her lobbying partner and former chief of staff has no such restrictions on him. In fact, Leopold is allowed to lobby Jenkins’ successor, Republican Congressman Steve Watkins, whose campaign Leopold managed last year.

Jon Kyl provided the other extraordinary story.

Kyl, a conservative Republican from Arizona, served four terms in the House before winning a Senate seat in 1994. He served three six-year terms in the Senate before retiring after the 2012 election. That’s when he joined the mighty lobbying firm Covington & Burling. After the two-year cooling-off period federal law imposes on ex-Senators, Kyl began lobbying for clients such as weapons giant Raytheon, drugmaker Merck, and brewer Anheuser-Busch.

In September of last year, after the death of Senator. John McCain, Kyl left Covington to return to the Senate, appointed by Arizona Governor Doug Ducey to serve until a 2020 special election. “Mr Ducey’s aides indicated [Kyl] would sever ties to his clients,” the New York Times reported after the appointment.

But Kyl resigned his seat after just a few months, which wasn’t unexpected, and is already back at Covington & Burling. So while Kyl served as a US Senator, his lobbying firm was apparently keeping his lobbying job open for him.

Even in the swampy world of Washington’s revolving door, this was a remarkable conflict of interest: a lobbyist took a leave of absence from lobbying in order to serve briefly as a US Senator.

The defining trait of this year’s big cashout, though, seems to be that there are more retiring Republican politicians than there are lobbying jobs for all of them. “[M]ore than 60 Republicans exited the House this month,” Politico reported mid-January, “and so many of them are considering heading to K Street that not all of them are likely to find work, according to interviews with lobbyists and headhunters.”

Trying to find work is never fun, but former congressmen and Senators having trouble monetising their public service aren’t going to elicit a great deal of sympathy. A vast majority of Americans favour further restrictions on lobbying by ex-members, beyond the current one-year and two-year limits.

A full 86% in a 2017 poll found support for extended no-lobby periods. Pollsters also presented respondents with an argument against such restrictions. They pointed to the risks of the career and said, “If we cut off [the option of lobbying after retirement], it will discourage people from going into government for fear they may end up with highly limited career options.” Only 26% found that argument convincing.

Why is the revolving door corrupting? There are plenty of reasons. For one, consider the incentives it creates. On the simplest level, politicians and their staff have a personal incentive to play nice with industry and with lobbyists.

Jack Abramoff, the notorious convicted lobbyist from last decade, explained how he and his lobbyists would foster relationships with top staffers, taking them to baseball games in their luxury box suites, and other perks. Half of the point was to show off the wealth a lobbyist has. At some point, the lobbyist would say to the staffer: “By the way, if you’re ever looking to leave Congress, give us a call, you’d fit in well at our firm.”

From then on, even though the staffer still officially worked for the Member of Congress — and thus for the people — Abramoff had the staffer doing his bidding.

The knowledge that a lobbying job is waiting for them when they depart alters the behaviour of politicians and their staff—and thus it alters the shape of our laws. The Democrats’ top two legislative accomplishments of the Obama era, for example, were the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) and the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law. Neither was “socialism”, in that neither took any functions (and thus opportunities for profit) away from private corporations. Instead, both laws entangled the private sector and the government in a more intimate embrace — more regulations, more subsidies, more mandates. Both laws also made things much more complex for industry. Finally, both laws left incredible discretion to the executive branch agencies on how to implement them.

If staffers and politicians had crafted the laws solely to maximize their own value on the lobbying and consulting marketplace, they wouldn’t have done it much differently from this.

After these bills became laws, insurers, hospitals, drugmakers, banks, and hedge funds all relied much more on the clout and insight of former lawmakers and their staff. Sure enough, we got the Great Obamacare Cashout and Great Dodd-Frank Cashout of 2010 through 2013.

Chris Dodd, one of Dodd-Frank’s cosponsors, saw his chief counsel Amy Friend cash out a few months after the bill passed. In the words of the firm that hired her, Promontory Financial, Friend joined a firm to help financial-sector clients navigate “the regulatory implementation of the Dodd-Frank, Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, which, at 2,300 pages, is one of the most complex and wide-ranging overhauls of the financial regulatory framework in decades”.

More complexity, more business-government entanglement, more opportunity for that lucrative post-congressional work.

The Great Cashout of 2019 is barely underway. It will continue through the Spring. Don’t be surprised to see the firms who scoop up top staff and lawmakers brag about these public servants’ role in shaping America’s byzantine regulatory and tax structure.

Reform is unlikely. There are currently a few bills before Congress to extend the current 1-year or 2-year lobbying bans to lifetime bans, and to expand which officials are covered. But nobody really expects Congress to curb its own ability to make a good living — a good living they believe they are guaranteed by the First Amendment, and have earned through their “public service”.

So while the capital region grows richer, government grows more complex, and public distrust in Washington skyrockets, the revolving door continues to spin smoothly: perfectly legal, while perfectly corrupt.

In a short but brilliant piece for Bloomberg, Tyler Cowen identifies another growing division – one that runs straight through the ‘in’ camp:

“…today’s America has two fundamental and really quite different cultural and intellectual centers: Washington and its environs, and the Bay Area (including Silicon Valley, San Francisco and, if I may cheat a little, Seattle).”

Of course, there’s always been a distinction between east and west coast America. With such a great physical distance between them, it could hardly be otherwise. But Cowen’s point is that the growing power of Silicon Valley (in its broader, not-so-geographically-specific definition) means that what was a distinction is now a rivalry.

This is how he describes the key strengths of Washington DC:

“The D.C. area is the center of legalistic thinking, which is increasingly important with the growth of government and the regulatory state. Lawyers and policy-makers are our engineers for incentives, so to speak, even if they don’t always get it right. Their efforts are backed by an array of economic, legal, political, public opinion and bureaucratic expertise that is without parallel in history…

“D.C. has also become an increasingly important media center, where so many rhetorical battles over the future of the country are started…

“The D.C. area is also the only major U.S. metropolis where the resident intellectual class is more or less evenly divided between left- and right-wing, giving it a nice and potent diversity.”

Silicon Valley has a different set of super-powers:

“The Bay Area is full of engineers of the more literal sort, producing rapidly scalable goods and services, at least once the initial code is cracked. It’s given us operating systems, internet search and browsers, personal computers, smartphones, ride-sharing apps, Facebook, Amazon delivery and much more…

“These new services are built on technical expertise, but they also require the ability to imagine how the future might be quite different, a fundamentally philosophical and ideological skill, even if it is not always recognized as such.”

The differences aren’t just economic, they’re also cultural.

“When it comes to the leaders, D.C. is run by mostly native-born Americans, the Bay Area often by immigrants. And D.C. is old, while the Bay Area is young, again showing two opposing poles of the American experience.”

Nations are often divided between a centre of power and a hinterland – and at times, as at present, tensions can sour into bitterness. But perhaps yet more dangerous is when a nation is riven between rival centres of power.

An interesting, if inexact parallel, is the rivalry of Athens and Sparta in classical Greece.

Athens was the Washington DC of its time – a deeply flawed democracy, from which many groups were excluded; but also a wellspring of culture and philosophical diversity.

Sparta couldn’t have been more different: a totalitarian society, one that was notably egalitarian with respect to the Spartans themselves, but which subjugated and dehumanised the Helot majority by means of total dedication to the arts of war.

To make the parallel with Silicon Valley, read tech for war, screen addition for dehumanisation, and the outsourced workers and unpaid content creators of the digital economy for the Helots.

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The human staplers of Silicon Valley

By Peter Franklin

Like Silicon Valley in our world, Sparta was the disruptor of the ancient Greek world. Though Athens excelled in many things and was therefore the more accomplished culture, Sparta excelled in the one thing that allowed it to disrupt and eventually defeat its rival.

Will Silicon Valley’s technological prowess count for as much as Sparta’s military prowess?

We’re about to find out.