It is more than passing strange. In the Soviet era, so-called socialist realism was enforced in the fine arts, which depicted happy collective farmfolk; academics portrayed the Russian Revolution in lectures and books as the dawn of the world’s first workers’ paradise. The media published one glowing economic report after another; posters depicting radiant construction workers hung everywhere; new composers vied to embed heroic anthems to communism in their symphonies. A few lines critical of Stalin in a poem by Osip Mandelstam that Mandelstam read to a small group of friends resulted in a betrayal, the poet’s arrest and his death in a gulag. “Only in Russia is poetry respected,” Mandelstam had once wryly written. “It gets people killed.”

A drab, Philistine approach to culture is essential to a repressive regime, and for the Philistine Trump and his band of intellectual and cultural mediocrities, attempts to coerce American institutions into an optimistic sameness blend seamlessly with the coarseness of their taste. From universities to the Smithsonian, Trump wants an official American culture that projects only the “greatness” of America, with no flaws or blemishes. He dismisses reporters who criticize him as “scum” or “evil”. He has made it clear that, from government agencies to private banks like Goldman Sachs, he desires economic statistics that report only positive news. Like a dime-store Lenin, his giant portrait now hangs in front of the Department of Agriculture building in Washington.

The official optimism of the Soviet era was the result of a complex ideology that sought to engineer a desired future by reconfiguring the past and lying about the present. Yet Trump’s coercive sunniness has nothing to do with an ideology born from historical conflict and oppression. It is the bright, blinding bluster of a businessman, delivered in the ominous tones of a demagogue. It puts you in mind of the recent trend of “creative” television commercials for insurance companies. They almost always follow the same model: they (other insurance companies) fail in this or that comical way; we give it to you straight, and honest, and effective. The Ur-commercial or advertisement has always depended, whether explicitly or implicitly, on planting in the viewer or reader’s mind the inadequacy and inferiority of the competition.

So when Trump, in a move that might have warmed the heart of Putin, the ex-KGB man, recently fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in order to replace her with someone more likely to, in classic Soviet fashion, disseminate statistics favorable to the regime, he wasn’t acting like some modern-day Lenin. Lenin used the concept of “production propaganda” to heroicize workers and exaggerate both the success of Soviet industrialization and its revolutionary effects. That was the product of theory, rooted in history. Trump is marketing reactionary politics as though he were selling a car. As H.G. Wells put it in Tono-Bungay, his visionary novel about the role of commercially created perception in modern society: “the struggle for life takes the form of competitive advertisement and the effort to fill your neighbor’s eye.” Trump is, day after day, filling the American eye.

Trump’s reflex to send the American military into American cities, most recently into Washington D.C., coupled with his expansion of ICE’s deportation and detention activities, should be seen in this light. It is chilling, of course. It is, without doubt, an autocratic spasm, the likes of which are making ordinary Americans from every walk of life careful about what they say or write. But because Trump’s use of the military is rooted in a competitive attempt to manipulate mass feeling, and not in some iron idea or ideology, it comes across as a weird combination of Soviet-style repression and American mercantile ingenuity. “An intellectual hatred is the worst,” wrote W. B. Yeats. But Trump’s crude initiatives are, at bottom, pitches to commercial feeling: Look at their decaying, crime-ridden cities. Now look at our safe and shiny ones. Where would you rather put your money — and your vote?

I don’t mean to make light of what Trump is doing. He is destroying the fabric of American creativity and freedom — they are the same thing — in everything he does. Like a lot of people who define themselves by the money they accumulate, Trump seems mortally offended by qualities that are non-transactional and non-quantitative. More than one avid and earnest young person, speaking their heart out in an uninhibited moment, has looked up to see someone staring at them with daggers in the eyes, riven by envy of their inner freedom. It’s why Iago hates Othello. It’s why John Claggart hates Billy Budd in Herman Melville’s great story of the unfathomable, implacable hatred harbored by coarseness of fineness. It’s why Iago-Trump hates Obama-Othello beyond all reason or explanation. 

It is no wonder, then, that Trump is pushing a government initiative to pour nearly $100 billion private dollars into AI. That is how business replaces independent thought — how Claggart replaces Billy. The official sunny culture of the Soviet regime sought to replace independent thought with a kind of production-propaganda AI. Its algorithm of an inexorable march to utopia did the thinking for its citizens. In America, an AI washed and rinsed of all original insight, which is born out of original experience, is now doing the thinking — quantitatively, aggregately — for American citizens. America is not on the verge of totalitarianism. It is in the throes of businesstarianism. 

It would not be prudent to take with a grain of salt Trump sending the military into Washington to keep order as if the city were in flames. But it would be paralyzing to see it as an irreversible step toward authoritarianism. Rather it is Trump gussying up his Right-wing showroom in advance of the 2026 fall retail season — I mean, the midterm elections. They want the police to be engaged in “brokering and enforcing social cooperation”, in the words of Brandon del Pozo, a Rawlsian former chief of police and now assistant professor of public health at Brown University. We just want to put the bad guys in jail, where they can’t hurt you. You get a lot more miles per gallon with us.

Suggested reading

The new Cold War will divide the West

By Philip Cunliffe

It is not quite what Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini or any modern dictator pursuing the merciless logic of an historical equation had in mind. This American moment is the product of democracy’s meltdown, not of a rival political system to democracy. The old distinction between negative liberty (the state limits itself to protecting rights and ensuring safety)  and positive liberty (the state helps individuals realize their potential) has broken down. The social justice movement, well meaning as it is, has been indulging its own autocratic spasm in almost entirely drowning out negative with positive liberty. In a society where people are going to “realize their potential” — i.e. get what they want, any way they can —  a state that helps certain groups but not others to achieve that goal is going to be perceived as an oppression to everyone else. In a super-mega-hyper competitive society like America, social justice is seen by many as just another way for someone to get a leg up.

And in an American society where the idea of community never extended beyond where you lived, where religion has receded even where its rituals are observed, where the screen both causes and sanctions increasingly anti-social, or even incomprehensible, behavior, a lot of people respond to news of the military on American streets with shouts of “It’s about time!” As for Trump’s custom Italian-made heel on the neck of universities, the media, low and high culture, plenty of people don’t perceive it so much in its particulars as revel in its aggregate. Finally, they say, at a time when democratic freedoms have, in so many ways, tipped over into the type of freedom that alarms and threatens rather than inspires and transports, here is someone — true, a sociopathic and vindictive clown, but hey, he’s our sociopath — addressing the problem.

For these people, Make America Great Again means make America simple and safe again. On some fundamental level, that is a non-partisan desire. After all, echt-liberal democrat Kathy Hochul, governor of New York, also sent the National Guard into New York, specifically its subways. On Friday, Putin won’t be interested in negotiating about Ukraine; he only cares about what he wants. What he might wish to talk about, but wouldn’t dare to, is how Trump is bringing back Soviet-style conformism, but in Russia’s great rival, and combined with a spirit of American entrepreneurial chaos and greed.

My question seemed to be answered the following day. On Truth Social, the president posted pictures likely taken from the motorcade that morning or the next, as he returned for another round of golf. Alongside images of roadside tents and trash, Trump wrote, “We’re having a News Conference tomorrow in the White House. I’m going to make our Capital safer and more beautiful than it ever was before.” Sure enough, at a marathon briefing on Monday morning, Trump announced that he was placing the DC police force under federal control and deploying the National Guard to secure streets long blighted by disorder — and bloodied by the fourth highest homicide rate in the nation. 

At first, I hardly noticed the encampment. My parents dropped me off for college at Foggy Bottom 14 years ago this month, and as far as I can remember, tents have dotted that part of the city ever since. But rumours were swirling that a federal takeover of DC was imminent, so I spent the ride thinking back on the last decade.

Washington, DC, is like most other major American cities: dirty and crime-ridden in some pockets, idyllic in others. But it isn’t just another city. It’s the centre of American power and the seat of American democracy. It’s the gateway to America. Trump himself illustrated this well by reflecting on something his father, Fred, had told him when he was young. “Son, when you walk into a restaurant, and you see a dirty front door, don’t go in, because if the front door is dirty, the kitchen’s dirty also.” The president added: “Same thing with the capital. If our capital is dirty, our whole country is dirty, and they don’t respect us. It’s a very strong reflection of our country.”

This is the deepest tragedy of the capital city. It really does reflect the country. It reflects our class dynamics, our inability to end cycles of poverty and crime, our aborted ambitions.

Trump’s critics are correct that Washington is lovely and, like many cities, much improved since a nadir in the Nineties  and early Aughts. True, Covid ravaged the city, to the point where downtown streets sometimes resembled surreal scenes from dystopian fiction. That is no longer the case, though there are more empty storefronts than there should be; fentanyl visibly haunts the homeless community; and heinous violence still visits multiple corners of the city every week. 

The place feels better than it did amid the riots and lockdowns of 2020, but that’s a low bar. While city statistics show the population is growing again and crime is falling, the police union accuses leadership of manipulating data on the latter. “To evade public scrutiny, MPD leadership is deliberately falsifying crime data, creating a false narrative of reduced crime while communities suffer,” the union’s chairman said in a May news release. Allegations of data tampering are under investigation in the police force.

Perhaps most important, the school system is crumbling. A sweeping Washington Post investigation this summer found that the number of students in the public school system “who missed at least two weeks of class in a school year increased 110 percent over the past decade”; and that “more than 18,000 reports of truancy went uninvestigated in the last three full school years.” 

Just this spring, local media reported that “the number of juveniles arrested in DC has gone up each year since 2020. More than 2,000 were arrested in 2023 and 2024.” The report, from NBC Washington, continued: “Juveniles also accounted for 51.8% of all robbery arrests in 2024, according to the police department. About 60% of all carjacking arrests made to date in 2025 are juveniles,” and “nearly 200 juveniles arrested in 2024 for violent crimes had prior violent crime arrests.”

In April, Metropolitan Police Chief Pamela Smith warned: “We have seen an increase in fights in our schools and more serious criminal offences outside of our schools. And we have seen an increase in juvenile suspects involved in criminal offences district-wide.”

Just days later, the Navy Yard neighbourhood experienced the first of several violent teen takeovers that have rattled the city. “In just a matter of weeks, our neighbourhood has witnessed yet another teen crime… terrorisation — for lack of a better word — of our neighbourhood,” a commissioner recounted to residents assembled at a May community meeting. He described the event as “a planned attack on our community orchestrated by youth from across the region.”

Hillrag reported, “Hundreds of teenagers have converged on Navy Yard twice over the past month, first on April 18 and again May 17,” during which the commissioner said (and much video evidence confirmed) the kids “entered communal spaces of private residential buildings, fought in public spaces, robbed adults exiting local bars, and yelled at police officers positioned at metro stations.” 

This crisis has persisted through the summer months. As in many other cities, each week brings more horrifying anecdotes of murder and assault. Of course, apologists for the existing state of affairs remain unbending. An Associated Press report in January asserted that, overall, “experts say most cities are seeing a drop in crime levels that spiked during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. But they say misleading campaign rhetoric in the run-up to the November elections and changes in how people interpret news about crime have led to a perception gap.” 

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Why Gotham’s bad old days are back

By Michael Alcazar

In DC, at least, the police union seems to believe perceptions of a steady crime rate are more accurate than the city’s figures. Regardless, the low bar set during the apocalyptic days of the pandemic explains why Trump’s bluster is being met with scorn and mockery in the press corps. He’s obviously not right about everything. DC has been worse. Many American cities have been, too. But perhaps the most important message Trump sent on Monday isn’t about the data, it’s about refusing to tolerate what every single American knows is a vicious cycle of crime and poverty in the nation’s greatest cities. The public reaction of DC journalists will be much cooler than the public’s, inside DC and out.

To be sure, the success of Trump’s intervention isn’t guaranteed. The roots of the problem are clearly planted deep in the city’s failing schools and shattered families. Conservatives will point to dependence on government programs, and liberals will argue those programs are underfunded. But the National Guard won’t fix these underlying problems, though a posture of intolerance for crime and enforcement of the law will surely help. If the plan succeeds, hundreds of kids in DC will be spared from the trauma of being victimised by crime and also the trauma of participating in it. 

The problem is worse than it should be in this historic centre of global wealth and power. Quibbling over the data isn’t unimportant, but it risks obscuring the bigger picture. Washingtonians, and Americans, can do much better. That isn’t really up for debate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading

Europe is clinging to yesterday

By Wolfgang Munchau

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

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

Further reading

Donald Trump's second coming

By Christopher Caldwell

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

Can these two competing impulses be synthesized?

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

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

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

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

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

His words of wisdom came to mind with renewed relevance when, after hours of listening to union leaders, state senators, small-town mayors, mid-west Lieutenant Governors, and other various and sundry lawmakers drone and splutter into the microphone at this week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the actor and director Tony Goldwyn waltzed up centre stage.

“Hello, Chicago!”

His voice was rich, warm and inviting, his gaze direct and guileless, his delivery straight from the Academy Theater on Wilshire Boulevard — smoothly evincing the supreme artistic feat of artlessness. “Wow,” he said. “How about that AOC?”

To be honest, it didn’t really matter what the hell he said. What mattered was his presence, which coalesced what had been one minute before a rag-tag bunch of rabid networkers, lunch-box pols and sign-toting riff-raff, and sanctified a ritual of celebration. Everyone knew that Tony Goldwyn stood on the dais of the United Center as the incarnation of Fitzgerald Grant III — not a real President of the United States, but the one he played on TV, the one from Shonda Rhimes’s Scandal.

This kind of deliberate and fully conscious public performance that conflates art and life has become common in American politics. In the weeks after Kamala Harris became the Democrat’s nominee, as Chris Rock and Joy Behar made the rounds of Democratic fundraisers, treading the tailored lawns of ritzy Long Island mansions, it was as if the “forests wild” of A Midsummer Night’s Dream — that enchanted grove of magic and misperception — had been transported to the Hamptons. In short, the lines separating entertainment, politics, news media and money had been irrevocably breached. Nor did it take Rod Stewart mocking Donald Trump for turning orange or George Clooney denouncing the ex-President as a “xenophobic fascist” to suggest that there was something about celebrities that might power Kamala to the Oval Office.

Suggested reading

The speech Kamala owes America

By Lee Siegel

Already, stars and household names were beginning to tweet and Insta their full-on Kamalamania, as out marched the splendorous legions of Kamala’s LA posse, from Cardi B to Charli XCX — not to neglect Lizzo. Prognostications of Kamala’s chances caromed across the star-struck commentariat in language that had little to do with the geography of the electoral college or, say, the swing districts of Georgia or Michigan, tending instead towards one of those Maps of the Stars they hock on Hollywood Boulevard, promising vicarious visions of, well, everyone up to and including the starlets of RuPaul’s Drag Race  — each of whom had declared their support for Kamala. To be honest, in the days before the convention I was tempted to do nothing but exhaust my allotted 2,500 words with a list of bold-faced names, send the invoice to UnHerd, and call it a day.

Donna Langley, Chairman of Universal Studios, was on Kamala’s side, as was Chris Silbermann, managing director at Creative Artists Agency, and Disney Entertainment co-chair Dana Walden. Jeffrey Katzenberg and Barry Diller had opened the coffers. All of which gave wonky reporters and political oddsmakers licence to start pontificating as if they, too, were in the business. Across the board, Harris’s selection of a running mate struck many as an episode of The Bachelorette. The old gray lady herself, The New York Times, could not resist the temptation of summing up Harris’s choice of Tim Walz in TV terms: “If Ms. Harris’s campaign started out as Veep, it has now taken a detour to Ted Lasso.” Even the staid Wall Street Journal descended to the language of Swifty Lazar, shrewdly (if unoriginally) noting that Harris had cast her Vice Presidential nominee as Coach Taylor, from Friday Night Lights.

All of this surprised absolutely no one, as American politics and Hollywood public relations offices had been banking on suspension of disbelief long before there was such a thing as “real” housewives. Which brings us back to Tony Goldwyn on the DNC dais — the actor, director and nepo baby extraordinaire. There he stood, as aristocratic as Hollywood aristocracy gets, confident in his ability to emcee the world’s political future.

Hollywood and Washington share such hubris — and something else. They are both founded on family businesses, from John Adams and his son Quincy to the Rockefellers of New York, the Kennedys of Massachusetts and the Udalls of Arizona, not forgetting the feuding Hatfields and McCoys presently known as the Obamas and the Trumps. Meanwhile, the West Coast offered its mirror image through generations of Barrymores, Coppolas, Douglases, Fondas and Redgraves. And as is the case with all royalty, the line eventually ends in imbecility and decadence. Thus, the Kardashians.

As a rule, the family originator comes from nothing. Tony Goldwyn was the grandson of Szmuel Gelbfisz, a glovemaker from Gloversville, New York, who way back in the winter of 1913 had gone west to produce Hollywood’s first major motion picture. He changed his name to Samuel Goldfish, then did it once again, becoming Sam Goldwyn.

In 1924, Goldwyn sold his motion picture business to Louis B. Mayer — himself the penniless son of a scrap metal dealer. Mayer was the genius who first perceived that Washington and Hollywood were twins separated at birth, and that a smart studio executive might seize the mantle of Shelley’s rusticated Romantic poets and become legislator of the world.

Suggested reading

Kamala Harris, triumphant cat lady

By Kat Rosenfield

In this spirit of entitlement, Mayer rallied all the support he could behind the ill-fated presidential candidate Herbert Hoover. He delivered the two biggest stars of the era to the conservative cause: Ethel and Lionel Barrymore, and despite the ensuing Great Depression, Mayer’s efforts paved the way for Ginger Rogers, Adolphe Menjou, Gary Cooper and Walter Pidgeon to fly their freak flags of conservatism. It took the opposition a few years to catch on, but by 1940 more than 200 stars — including Lucille Ball, Henry Fonda, Humphrey Bogart and Groucho Marx — collected themselves into “Hollywood for Roosevelt”, and the Hollywood liberal was born.

The battle lines separating Left Coast Whigs and Tories were fatally drawn during the Hollywood Blacklist, which I happen to know a little about, as my father fronted for the most famous of the Hollywood Ten, Dalton Trumbo, thereby complicating the rest of his Hollywood career. Reactionary California politics did not bode well for Dad, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party and a screenwriter at Metro. In the wake of McCarthy’s purges, his not-so-secret lefty agenda met steady streams of opposition, as Right-wing Hollywood discovered its prophets in the faux-cowboys who roamed the backlots of Warners and Universal: Gary Cooper, John Wayne, and the greatest beneficiary of all who named names, Ronald Reagan.

Since the Gipper left office in 1989, liberal Hollywood has grown more and more dazzling, while the Republican star has waned. The days when conservative glitz and power reigned from Bel Air to Hancock Park may seem quaint and far removed from greybeard Clint Eastwood conducting a rambling conversation with a chair on the stage of the 2016 RNC in Cleveland, not to mention last month in Milwaukee, when septuagenarian Hulk Hogan ripped off his shirt as a public display of loyalty to SAG pension collector Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, the trope of the Hollywood liberal has remained strong and steady. The fact that my father owned a Bentley, an Aston Martin, a Jaguar, a Porsche, a gull-winged Mercedes and a beach house in Malibu never abated his enduring rage on behalf of the world’s oppressed. He dreamed of curing all that ailed America through film, and throughout his volatile career he would retain an urge to sneak in the line, the message, the meaning. As a self-professed member of the American aristocracy — that is, as a Hollywood liberal — he would take it upon himself to light the path towards liberty and justice for all, much in the way that George Clooney took it upon himself to declare Biden’s tenure as leading man had gone kaput. 

Clooney was not the first Hollywood royal to assert his divine political right. The movie star and the political star have long circled one another’s gravitational fields, each struggling to establish who was the sun, who the mere planet. On the one hand, such tensions resulted in a number of extraordinary connections: Rat Packer Peter Lawford and JFK’s sister, Patricia; Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden; Arnold and Maria; Food Network star Sandra Lee and ex-New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. There were grotesqueries, too, typified by the moment in 1972 when Sammy Davis Jr. threw his arms around Richard Nixon — a bromance now claimed to be a result of Davis attempting by any means necessary to alleviate his monstrous burden of back taxes.

Some affairs were more fleeting. Frank Sinatra’s dedication to American liberalism came crashing to earth for the most Hollywood of reasons. When JFK came to Palm Springs, he chose not to stay at Sinatra’s place (even though he had installed a helicopter pad for the occasion), but at the manse of rival crooner Bing Crosby. Legend has it that a furious Sinatra took a sledgehammer to the concrete landing pad. Thus it came as no surprise that when 1980 rolled around, the famously irascible Chairman of the Board donated $4 million to Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign.

Gradually, the princes and princesses of each world came to understand they were all in the same solar system after all — namely, the business of impersonation, improvisation, persuasion and make-believe. On day four of the DNC, the actress/activist Kerry Washington took over Tony Goldwyn’s job as host of the proceedings. She had played President Grant’s love interest, Olivia Post, in Scandal — his partner through seven seasons of quickies in the closet, hot make-out sessions in public parking garages, and Oval Office oral sex.

The actuality of make-believe had become palpable. Who cared that Tony wasn’t really President Grant, or that Washington wasn’t really his paramour? Wasn’t Kerry, like Kamala, crisis-solving America? Politics and the movies were both matters of life imitating art imitating life. And after 124 episodes of preparatory pantomime, real and fake had lost their distinctive features.

Certainly, the chanting hoi polloi of Chicago did not care to parse differences. By the end of the week, the political proceedings had become a mash-up of every meme and tweet that might ever have sparked a flash within a neuron, only to recede into the sub-consciousness of our national ADD. Case in point was the flitting appearances throughout the week of the actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who had uttered lines such as: “I should be President, or something” as Selina Catherine Meyer on Veep, a show that has seen its viewership skyrocket more than 300% since Harris became the nominee. Louis-Dreyfus — who had emceed the final night of the previous DNC — had won six Primetime Emmys for her role as Meyer, so it was natural that when Harris got the nod, the actress vowed to be “extra-involved”. Thus did Kamala-Selina-Julia become a single trope.

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MAGA Republicans are nothing new

By Frederick Kaufman

Which gets to the heart of the matter: our present political predicament has gone beyond questions of truth and post-truth, fact and alternative fact, actor and politician, saviour and grifter. We have lost the thread when it comes to what philosophers call “epistemology”, that is, our knowledge of what constitutes reality. For some, it’s cause for celebration, as Hollywood and Washington revel in ambiguity and distraction. If you haven’t noticed, ambiguity and distraction are where the money is.

Proof of concept came when the world’s first black woman billionaire took the stage. The mononymous Oprah needed less than 15 minutes to collapse the antiquated Hollywood-Washington duality into an Oprahfied field of logic in which petty distinctions no longer matter, such as being president or playing one on TV, thereby out-faking and out-flanking Donald Trump’s strictly 20th-century lies.

By the time Kamala hit the stage to talk about the strength of knowing who we are and where we’ve been and where we’re going, the Democratic National Convention had locked up every possible nuance of text, subtext, and metatext. Congratulations were due all around, most especially to Oprah and Julia and Tony and Kerry for reuniting those royal twins separated at birth — Hollywood fame and Washington power — and making aristocracy equal populism.

These are not terrible ambitions. To the end of his days, my father cherished his desire to legislate what was best for everyone else, and stood ready to protest anything otherwise. When the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences made the controversial decision to award an Honorary Oscar to Elia Kazan — the man who had prospered by naming names during the Blacklist, the director who was never mentioned in our house without the epithet “bastard” — my father, now in his eighties, drove his Jaguar from the Hollywood Hills to the Academy Theater to stand across the police lines and picket, joining the riff-raff relegated to the wrong side of Wilshire Boulevard, no longer an aristocrat, at long last a civilian.

In the centuries that have followed, not a single monarch has been assassinated, and only one Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, has suffered such a grim fate. And he was killed not by political rivals, but by a merchant with a grievance. Before 1688, though, deposed kings and other politically inconvenient royals often faced a darker end than the exiled James II. Royals including two Edwards, Henry VI, and Mary, Queen of Scots, either died mysteriously in captivity or were executed publicly.

This is not especially surprising. In a monarchy proper, as opposed to the constitutional kind, political legitimacy rests not in the system so much as in the person of the monarch: a king only becomes meaningfully a king when enough powerful people perceive him as having that special extra something that elevates him to royalty. And a pretender is someone else competing to be seen in this light — either by the same cadre of the powerful or by a rival cadre. In this situation, the only sure-fire way to eliminate the risk posed by a pretender is to eliminate the pretender.

Whatever name Vladimir Putin gives his system of government, its operations in practice make more sense in monarchical than liberal democratic terms. Take, for example, the death in prison of Alexei Navalny last Friday. While of course reprehensible from a democratic perspective, his death was wholly predictable from a monarchical one. For Navalny was, in effect, a pretender to the Russian throne, with considerable public and international support behind his protests against Putin’s regime. Thus, much as with Henry VI in 1471, the only way to eliminate the threat he posed was to eliminate him.

Writing against the French Revolution, the Savoyard reactionary Joseph de Maistre argued, in 1794, that the government of a people is not something that can be composed in the abstract; rather, it emerges from the distinct history, culture, and disposition of the people as a whole. With this in mind, we might suggest that, notwithstanding superficial changes of regime, from the Romanovs through Stalin to Putin, Russia has never really abandoned rule by tsar and aristocracy.

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This is more difficult to grasp from the vantage-point of the anglophone West, though. For here we’ve grown accustomed to thinking of the Anglo-Saxon model as the only sane and decent way of doing politics. First formalised in the 1701 Act of Settlement — then, across the Atlantic, stripped of its vestigial monarchy 75 years later by the Declaration of Independence — this model views politics as properly a contest of ideas rather than individuals, conducted in a political space that at least aspires to neutrality. Political rivalries, in this order, are to be contained via a matrix of shared norms — one that, importantly, includes a convention of not imprisoning, persecuting, or bumping off one’s rivals.

But this modus operandi has arguably only come to seem so self-evident and eternal by virtue of the outsize role played first by the British Empire, and subsequently by the American one, in shaping the modern West. Both these regimes share a common intellectual and religious legacy and, initially at least, some considerable common demographics. But today the Old and New Worlds are diverging increasingly sharply — including in political outlook. Notably, in today’s England, even supposedly insurgent Right-wing parties colour dutifully inside the conventional political lines. By contrast, the Anglosphere nation now most openly debating direct autocratic rule is the Land of the Free.

There, after Biden’s victory, Trump was mockingly linked to James II. More recently, though, jibes about an impotent king in exile has morphed into mounting anxiety about a Caesar-in-waiting. Those on the Right have made their contribution, not least via mischievous memes comparing the profile of Trump’s son Barron with surviving images of rulers from classical antiquity. And Trump himself has done little to assuage those who fear he aspires to Caesarism, declaring recently that he would not govern as a dictator on election “except on day one”.

In response, Republican Never Trumper, Liz Cheney, has warned of “a sort of sleepwalking into dictatorship in the United States”. Is this really happening, though? In a political attention economy that incentivises hyperbole, it’s hard to say. But if it is, the surest evidence in favour of an American tilt towards autocracy comes not directly from Trump, or even from neoreactionary writers or online shitposters. Rather, it lurks in the political class, in the tiers just below Presidential incumbents or hopefuls — and especially in the weaponisation of American institutions as tools of political persecution.

This is, increasingly, a bipartisan strategy. On the day Navalny died, a court in New York City ordered Donald Trump to pay a $354 million fine in a civil fraud trial, one of a plethora of ongoing efforts to impeach or otherwise hamper Trump via the courts. Trump now claims himself subjected to a Putinesque campaign of persecution, calling the ruling “a form of Navalny” and declaring: “If I weren’t running [for president] none of this stuff would ever happen.”

Two days before the Trump fraud ruling, meanwhile, a parallel Republican mobilisation of the formally neutral institutions of justice produced a special counsel report, which found Biden had “wilfully retained and disclosed classified materials”. When the special counsel nonetheless declined to prosecute on the basis of these findings, this was interpreted as further evidence of partisan abuse of neutral institutions, and denounced by Republican House Conference Chair Elise Stefanik as a sign of the “unAmerican, two-tier justice system that exists in Joe Biden’s America”. The outrage only grew louder the following day, when a key witness in the Trumpist attempt to impeach Joe Biden was charged by the FBI with fabricating allegations about the President and his son taking bribes.

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To be clear: I am not taking a stance here on the truth or justice of any of these allegations or campaigns. Nor, unlike Trump, am I drawing an equivalence between efforts by Republicans and Democrats to wield American state machinery against their political rivals, and the tendency of Vladimir Putin’s enemies to die in plane accidents or (like several English medieval royals) mysteriously in prison. Nonetheless, it should be clear that a new consensus is solidifying among the American political class: one that departs increasingly dramatically from its British constitutional forebear.

In this emerging order no one expects to persuade their opponents. This is perhaps understandable: polarisation is now so acute in the Land of the Free that almost two-thirds of young Americans would reject a prospective partner based on incompatible politics. There is no point contesting ideas, if people’s loyalties are tribal. But if this is so, how do you win? The answer appears to be: by capturing institutions, then going after the other tribe’s leader. There is no such thing as neutral regulatory, governance or administrative infrastructure in this existential struggle against political opponents.

A similar institutional trench warfare is also being fought today in Poland. Since the deposition of the conservative PiS party, a coalition led by former EU President Donald Tusk has taken over and fired key personnel from the state broadcaster, is legislating to pack the judiciary, and is also reportedly preparing to prosecute key PiS officials. Supporters see these actions as an “iron broom” sweeping out anti-democratic distortions. Opponents, though, view Tusk’s efforts themselves as the assault on democracy.

But perhaps again this makes sense from de Maistre’s perspective. Poland’s tradition of liberal democracy is so short as to be practically non-existent. The country enjoyed four years as a fully independent democratic state, from 1922 to 1926, and then another 13 between the end of the Cold War and before EU accession in 2004. Otherwise, the lands and peoples known as Poland have been ruled with vacillating boundaries by an assortment of monarchs, strongman rulers with largely cosmetic parliaments, and Eastern or Western empires.

Thus the face-off between Tusk and PiS represents, if anything, a reversion to the Polish norm, following a brief outlier effort at doing politics on something like the Anglo-Saxon model. And seen across the globe and through time, this is also more generally true: Anglo-Saxon liberal democracy is the outlier, and assorted forms of autocracy and empire are the historic and cross-cultural norm. So perhaps we should greet the competing claims of institutional capture now emanating from America’s rival factions with a measure of fatalism, even if these suggest that American political-class support for the legacy Anglo system is fading.

And again, perhaps, from de Maistre’s perspective this development makes sense. For while its founding political order drew heavily from England both in sensibility and in core assumptions, it is less obvious why modern America should continue in this vein. A “propositional nation” from inception, over time the Land of the Free has become, by design, ineluctably less Anglo in demographic terms. And seen thus, it is perhaps unsurprising to note how many American culture war issues, from statues to “whiteness”, cash out as disputes over how (or whether) to value the nation’s Anglo cultural legacy.

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Following the same de Maistrean logic, it’s to be expected that as the demographic composition of a nation changes, so too will that nation’s emergent — as opposed to written — constitution. It is not unthinkable that one casualty of this change might be the once-unshakeable baseline of public support for a style of procedural politics strongly associated with America’s early Anglo-Saxon Protestant settlers.

What will emerge in its place? Will a rapidly-diversifying 21st-century America find itself, by virtue of its changing composition, more inclined towards more autocratic governance? Certainly, albeit in a less violent fashion than Russia, an order seems to be emerging in which victory requires more than just defeating opposition parties: it necessitates the annihilation of rival pretenders. And in turn implies the replacement of a politics of ideas, by one of divinely marked persons. Should this order consolidate itself, it will, whatever the window-dressing, be a monarchical regime.

At present, the keenest supporters of American diversity are generally also those loudest in expressing anxieties about a putative Trumpian Caesar. It will be ironic in the extreme if it does turn out that the real bulwark against autocracy was America’s now rapidly dissolving Anglo heritage.

The word charisma is ubiquitous today. Marketers use it to sell everything from shampoo to perfume to olive oil. But it arrived relatively recently into common usage. Back in the Fifties, my father, then a journalist at Fortune magazine in New York, used it in a profile of the labour leader John L. Lewis. His editor sent a draft back to him with the word circled, and the comment: “What the hell does this mean?”

My father had taken the word from the great German social theorist Max Weber, who, in the early 20th century, adapted it to describe a form of disruptive authority based on an intense, emotional connection between leaders and followers (its original, much older meaning was theological: a gift of divine grace). For decades afterwards, charisma remained a technical concept in the social sciences. But in the Fifties, writers such as my father found it useful in analysing an American political scene increasingly dominated by television and other mass media. John F. Kennedy seemed to embody the quality better than anyone, and ever since his election in 1960, journalists have routinely counted charisma as a key component of presidential politics.

In their usage, charisma is a purely personal quality: you either have it, or you don’t. Weber, however, offered a more subtle and persuasive interpretation. As he pointed out, it is not enough for leaders to have unusual talents and a magnetic personality. The followers need to perceive them as doing so. Charisma, in other words, lies at least partly in the eye of the beholder. In extreme cases, such as in totalitarian societies, charisma can effectively be manufactured. Thanks to pervasive, unrelenting propaganda that presented the secretive mass murderer Joseph Stalin as a heroic superman, a large proportion of the Soviet population saw him as intensely charismatic. Many North Koreans today probably feel the same about Kim Jong Un.

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Recent American history also illustrates Weber’s point. Most American liberals saw Barack Obama as intensely charismatic. He exuded energy and hope, and was a brilliant, incantatory speaker. But his magnetic appeal was entirely lost on most Republicans, who dismissed him as a phoney huckster, and mocked his reputation among liberals by calling him their messiah. Donald Trump, by contrast, both horrified and disgusted most liberals, but has appeared as a quintessential American hero to his supporters, and almost God-like to the most fervent of them. To the Republican base, he remains the very embodiment of charisma.

Still, in free societies without Stalinist-level propaganda, charisma can’t simply be manufactured, and personal qualities remain crucial. Kennedy wouldn’t have been perceived as charismatic without his youthful vigour, his easy, sexy manner, his brilliant smile, and his ability to give an enthralling speech. Obama has genuinely extraordinary oratorical powers. And Trump, whatever one thinks of him, is an enormously talented entertainer, and has an uncanny ability to sense and express his supporters’ most visceral feelings. He has a neural connection to the Republican id.

Charisma hasn’t always been this partisan. In fact, as I argued in a recent book, it has often played an important, positive, unifying role in democratic societies. Charismatic leaders have inspired trust even among their political opponents, thereby helping to bring fractured nations together. By the power of their oratory, they have broken through political logjams and brought about needed action. They have put warm flesh on the bones of abstract constitutional principle. At the start of the democratic age, figures such as George Washington in the United States, Toussaint Louverture in Haiti and Simón Bolívar in South American all exemplified these uses of charisma, even if the fervour they inspired in their followers also tempted the last two towards dictatorship. In the United States, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Kennedy, while each the target of fierce criticism, also exerted a charismatic appeal that went well beyond their own political camp, as illustrated by the nation-wide outbursts of grief that followed their deaths.

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But for charisma to have these positive, unifying effects, ordinary people need to at least be open to the possibility of seeing figures from the other camp as charismatic. The record of the Obama and Trump presidencies suggest that America is now far too divided for this recognition to take place. And as a result, charisma has lost much of its positive role in the United States. No matter how brilliant the personal qualities, they only work on followers already ideologically disposed towards the candidate in question.

The rise of virulently partisan radio and television, of social media, and of internet algorithms have all exacerbated the problem enormously. Thanks to my own browsing history, literally every time I open a new tab, Microsoft shows me a news story about the awfulness of Trump. A conservative cousin gets the same horror stories, but about Joe Biden. The same forces make it all the easier for ordinary people across the world to feel a charismatic bond with populist politicians like Trump, or Narendra Modi, or Viktor Orbán, who appeal directly to the emotions. By contrast, technocrats like Emmanuel Macron, who last week sternly scolded French families for not raising their children with sufficient “authority”, are all the easier to mock as elite and out of touch.

All this brings us to the current presidential campaign, and the figures of Joe Biden and Ron DeSantis. Biden, whatever one thinks of him, has been a significant president with some important achievements to his name. He succeeded in passing a massive infrastructure bill and an “Inflation Reduction Act” which will allocate unprecedented sums to fight climate change. He strengthened the Western alliance in the face of Russian aggression and cannily resolved the debt ceiling crisis. During his administration, unemployment has hit a 50-year low, and inflation is returning to normal levels after the pandemic.

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But Biden gets very little credit for these achievements, even from people who voted for him. Barely 40% of the American population approves of his record as president, while more than 54% disapprove. To be sure, conservative Republicans loathe him, seeing him as corrupt and disruptive. But their opposition alone cannot explain these dire numbers. A better clue comes from a recent column by Pamela Paul of The New York Times, who lamented the prospect of a Trump-Biden rematch in 2024. Surely, she moaned, we can do better than these two visibly declining old men. She first damned Biden with weak praise, allowing that he has restored norms and “been decent”, but then went on to damn him, full stop: “That old age is showing. Never an incantatory speaker or a sparkling wit, Biden seems to have altogether thrown in the oratorical towel.” In other words, she ignored Biden’s actual record as president, and focused on his charisma, or rather his lack of it.

Lack it he does. On video, Joe Biden unquestionably cuts a poor figure. He looks his age. He moves haltingly. His speech stumbles, stammers and wanders. It is all too easy to portray him as senile. Yet the same conservative critics who call him a senile puppet will often, in the very next breath, denounce him as a criminal mastermind. Both can’t be true, and in fact Biden’s record as president very much belies the charges of senility. As president, he has made no memorable speeches, to say nothing of incantatory ones. Instead, he has effectively applied skills he perfected in his long career in the Senate: glad-handing, making deals and crafting coalitions behind the scenes. But in the eyes of journalists like Paul, these skills, and what Biden accomplished with them, matter less than his glaring lack of charisma.

On the other side of the political abyss, DeSantis’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination illustrates equally well the way Americans continue to over-emphasise charisma. Nine months ago, after winning re-election as governor of Florida by nearly 20%, DeSantis looked poised to replace Trump as the Republican Party’s darling. He was “Trump without the chaos”, “Trump without the baggage”, “Trump without the nonsense”. At 44, he had vigour, obvious intelligence and a record of challenging and provoking liberals at every turn. In February, a conservative columnist anointed him the Republican Kennedy. Whatever one thought of his actual policies (I, for one, thought him a menace), he seemed an obvious frontrunner for the Republican nomination.

Unfortunately, he also turned out to be “Trump without the charisma”. As the campaign began, it became painfully obvious that he lacked Trump’s easy rapport with crowds, his neural connection to them. In public, indeed, DeSantis appears incapable of relaxing. His voice vibrates with tension. He has no visible sense of humour. Charisma, as Weber emphasised, requires the ability to establish an emotional connection with followers, and DeSantis seems, at crucial moments, either to shrink away from them, or to laugh maniacally in an awkward attempt to bond. It should not be surprising, then, that DeSantis currently lags Trump by more than 30% in most polls, and just this week has cut more than a third of his campaign staff. Barring an unexpected turn of events, he might well end up withdrawing from the race before a single primary vote is cast.

Is it possible, in our current moment, to imagine a figure whose charismatic appeal might help unite the country instead of further dividing it? It is not implausible that our political divisions will get even worse, leading to government paralysis, violence, and a crisis severe enough to shake Americans out of their ideological certainties. In that case, they might well flock to a charismatic figure promising to restore unity. But would that figure respect democratic, constitutional norms? The historical record is not encouraging. In one of the most prominent cases, the bitter partisan divisions of the French Revolution opened the door for Napoleon Bonaparte, who ruled as a dictator while sacrificing millions to his wars.

But meanwhile, in the short term, the most likely upshot of America’s continuing obsession with charisma is that it will help Donald Trump back into power 15 months from now. That alone is an excellent argument for not putting too much emphasis on it.

Opec Plus was formed in rather different geopolitical circumstances. In late 2016, the cartel constituted a rapprochement between the two large, and hitherto generally antagonistic, Eurasian oil producers as they were adjusting to the shock of the United States’ re-emergence as a top-tier oil producer. Forging an association between Opec and Moscow was an act of Saudi desperation. For the previous two years, Riyadh had sought to bankrupt the American shale sector by allowing prices to slump, but largely succeeded only in emptying its own foreign exchange reserves. When they finally reversed course in September 2016, the Saudis found that, having alienated most other Opec members with their recklessness, they could no longer control prices. Two months later, Russia and 10 other states agreed to support a second Opec oil output cut, and Opec Plus was born.

Undoubtedly, some broader geopolitical convergence between Riyadh and Moscow against Washington followed over the next three years. When King Salman visited Putin in October 2017 — the first ever state visit of a Saudi monarch to Moscow — the two leaders discussed military co-operation and the possibility of the Saudis purchasing Russian arms. But however much the threat of American shale united Opec Plus, a large geopolitical fault line ran through the new producer alliance: while Russia had been moving closer to Iran since Moscow’s intervention in Syria in September 2015, Saudi Arabia had been engaged in a proxy war with Iran in Yemen since 2014.

When, in September 2019, Iran — either alone or acting with its Houthi allies in Yemen — destroyed the large Saudi oil processing facility at Abqaiq with drones and cruise missiles, that chasm was laid bare. While the Saudis were crushed by the failure of their Patriot missile defence system, bought at great expense from the Americans, Putin appeared with the Iranian president and mock-solemnly pronounced that Moscow could sell Riyadh protection that would actually work. Denying even that Tehran was responsible for the ambush, Putin said that Russia was “supportive of Iran, wholeheartedly”.

Only four months later, Opec Plus had to deal with its first serious oil market crisis, as China’s demand plummeted at the start of the pandemic. The Russian-Saudi compact splintered. Unable to agree with Putin on how much production to cut,  MBS sped off in the opposite direction, flooding the market in another bid to grab market share. In sending future prices into negative territory, MBS left it to Donald Trump, of all people, to patch Opec Plus together again — by threatening to withdraw American military support for Riyadh unless the Saudis and Russians agreed to slash output.

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The Trump administration’s Abraham Accords, which saw the UAE and Bahrain normalise relations with Israel in September 2020, compounded the cartel’s lack of internal coherence on Middle Eastern matters. In oil terms, the Accords also appeared strategic: the UAE is the only member of Opec Plus other than Saudi Arabia with clear spare capacity, and Bahrain has been sitting on a known large offshore shale oil formation since 2018.

But for the past three years, events have conspired decidedly to strengthen Opec Plus. With the new Democratic administration in Washington unable to bring Iran into another nuclear deal in 2021, and post-pandemic growth in the shale sector nearly entirely concentrated in the Permian Basin, Biden, just eight months into office, had to ask Opec Plus to increase production. His trip to Riyadh the following summer for the same purpose yielded little. Indeed, in the months after Biden’s visit, Opec Plus appeared to toy with the American president, announcing a major production cut just weeks before the mid-term elections. Unable at any time during his presidency to influence the cartel, Biden has had to release so much reserve US oil that in March 2023 the Strategic Petroleum Reserve contained only 58% of what it did three years previously.

Russia’s war has only amplified the autonomy of the Arab members of Opec Plus, paradoxically by recasting China’s role in the oil market. From at least the time of the cartel’s inception, the Chinese leadership has wished to deepen its relations with all the major Middle Eastern oil producers. Most ambitiously, it reached an agreement with Iran in 2019 — formalised in 2021 — on a 25-year co-operation programme, which will see China make large investments in Iran’s oil and gas sector.

But prior to February 2022, China was also willing to act with other large consumer countries to counter Opec Plus’s influence on oil markets. Notably, when prices were rising in the second half of 2021, China agreed to co-ordinate withdrawals from its reserves with those Washington was then making. Now, Moscow’s war against Ukraine appears to have ended any structural rationale for Sino-American co-operation on oil. As China can benefit from discounted Russian crude, it does not share the American interest in forcing Opec Plus collectively to supply more oil to bring down Middle Eastern prices. Moreover, oil and gas security for China lies only in maintaining diversity of supply, and hence avoiding over-dependence on Russia. Therefore Beijing’s interest lies in preventing a bifurcation of the Opec Plus market between Asia and Europe, as well as reducing the vulnerability of passage of tankers through the Strait of Hormuz to Saudi-Iranian friction.

These changes have restructured Saudi choices in a world in which Washington expects its allies to take its side in the Sino-American conflict. In the tech war at least, Saudi Arabia has chosen to align with China. This reality was made very clear in December 2022, when MBS hosted Chinese Premier Xi Jinping in Riyadh for two China-Gulf summits. In finalising a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Agreement, first mooted in 2019, the two states promised “firmly [to] support each other’s core interests”. Meanwhile Huawei struck a number of investment partnerships with Saudi firms. This year, Saudi Arabia appears to have begun applying this binary geopolitical logic to relations with its long-term regional antagonist Iran, allowing China to broker a rapprochement that has restored diplomatic ties between the two states after a seven-year break.

The Saudi shift has been replicated by other Arab members of Opec Plus, not least the two Abraham Accord states. In February 2022, the UAE agreed to buy fighter jets from China. Two months earlier, it had pulled out of a prior agreement to buy American F35s, struck as a side deal to the Abraham Accords, because it would not meet Washington’s demands over cutting out Huawei from its 5G infrastructure. Most strikingly, Bahrain has, under the umbrella of the Chinese-sponsored Saudi-Iran rapprochement, moved towards normalising relations with Iran — despite the fact that Iran has long had a territorially revisionist approach to the archipelago kingdom and backs the country’s opposition groups.

In the UAE’s case, closer relations with Tehran and Beijing are matched by deepening ties with Russia: in January this year, the US State Department sanctioned individuals and firms in the UAE with links to the Wagner Group, and Russian money has moved to the UAE to escape Western financial measures against Moscow. This Arab version of Obama’s attempted Pivot to Asia cannot but have at least some military ramifications in the Persian Gulf, given that Bahrain is host to the Fifth Fleet of the US Navy and US Naval Forces Central Command. Last May, the UAE withdrew from the US-led Combined Maritime Forces. A month later, reports surfaced in the Qatari press that China was co-ordinating naval collaboration between Saudi Arabia, Iran, the UAE, and Oman in the Persian Gulf.

Yet where this Saudi-led tilt to China leads geopolitically is still open to contest. The strength of the emerging anti-US Eurasian bloc can easily be overstated. There is no evidence that Washington intends to concede it naval dominance in the Persian Gulf or that China has the maritime power capacity to replace it. All the challenger-powers, including Saudi Arabia, are vulnerable to serious domestic political disorder. The scale of Saudi’s present additional oil capacity is far from clear. Indeed, the collective output of Opec Plus has been largely stagnant for the best part of two decades.

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Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is not taking China’s side on finance. Although Beijing may be pushing for the Saudis and other Opec Plus members to accept the renminbi as payment for oil and gas, there is no evidence that Saudi Arabia is moving to purchase their financial assets. By sharp contrast, when the United States moved towards a privileged relationship with Riyadh in the Seventies, to enhance its oil security, the Saudis did rapidly increase their dollar assets. Indeed, it is precisely the legacy of that financial turn to the United States, including the peg between the Saudi currency and the dollar, that constrains Saudi options in the financial and monetary space now.

Nonetheless, the Biden administration’s bet that the energy transition over the next two decades will reduce American oil demand enough to allow Saudi Arabia at least partially to drift is likely to be sorely tested. While the International Energy Agency judges that the most significant extra output over the next five years will come from outside Opec Plus, it also predicts that the Middle Eastern members of the cartel will dominate medium- to long-term oil production as the shale fields are depleted. Even if electric vehicle usage soars, any sizeable reduction in oil consumption in the medium term requires substitutes for petrochemicals.

In this scenario, Saudi Arabia has a resource that will probably be more important to the United States in the 2030s than it is now. Consequently, the largest Gulf producer and its Arab allies may have options in navigating between the respective pulls of the United States and China that other states, without a crucial commodity to export, do not possess. But the degree of energy unknowns in play, and the resilience of American financial power, mean that hedging between economic gain and security alliances is still a high-risk strategy. In this turbulent geopolitical world, this Saudi dilemma can only make the Persian Gulf a direct site of the rapidly-spreading Sino-American competition.

There is a longstanding theory that “wrestling explains Trump”, who has hosted and occasionally even performed on McMahon’s WWE shows. Vann Newkirk first made the case in The Atlantic in May 2016 and several articles with similar arguments followed. Trump had successfully navigated a chaotic primary “fight” to become the Republican frontrunner. A few months before he was elected, Jeremy Gordon asked, in the New York Times, if “everything” was wrestling. Back then, the discourse profoundly misunderstood the relationship between sport and politics. So why is it, like Trump and McMahon, making a notable comeback?

Last month, for instance, Abraham Josephine Riesman published a book that attempts to explain — to a mainstream audience — McMahon’s rise as a wrestling tycoon in relation to Trump’s emergence as a national politician. Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America, argues that “neokayfabe is the essence of the Republican strategy for campaigning and governance today”. Here, “kayfabe” refers to what was an unspoken rule of the wrestling world, until 1989: that everyone pretends that the outcomes of the matches weren’t predetermined. “Old kayfabe was built on the solid, flat foundation of one big lie: that wrestling was real”, Riesman writes in a New York Times op-ed. (The “real” matches of a century earlier often degenerated into long, boring grappling affairs on the mat, eventually necessitating some fakery to spice them up.) Even outside the ring, the industry’s employees were expected to uphold the illusion that the matches were genuine athletic contests, and the wrestlers’ emotions authentic.

That is, until 1989, when McMahon publicly disclosed that match outcomes were predetermined, to evade regulatory costs imposed on legitimate sports — as opposed to mere sporting exhibitions — by the New Jersey State Athletic Commission. This revelation marked a major turning point in the industry. From then on, companies promoted wrestling as entertainment, rather than simply a contest of excellence — concentrating on storylines, characters and theatricality, in addition to the performers’ athletic prowess. Neokayfabe, Riesman writes, “rests on a slippery, ever-wobbling jumble of truths, half-truths, and outright falsehoods, all delivered with the utmost passion and commitment”. It’s not hard to see why he’s tempted to draw political parallels.

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But there are many oversimplified accounts of wrestling, and alas, Riesman’s is one of them. The “kayfabe” boundary was never strict. The audience was always at least vaguely aware of the sport’s falsity, in part due to the periodic exposes that appeared throughout the 20th century. Yet most wilfully participated in the ruse — some for fun, others to honour the commitment of the performers to the illusion. Besides, McMahon’s “neokayfabe” was merely an amplified version of what came before — an exercise in entertainment, bolstered by aggressive national marketing, branding, intellectual property protection, and numerous collaborations with celebrities.

However, Riesman, to make his point, has to oversimplify. He offers few fresh insights into McMahon’s life or career — because McMahon is intended to represent more than just himself. He is, rather, the cunning businessman who provided a “neokayfabe” blueprint that his old pal Trump adapted to craft a vivid, aggressive, and anti-truth strategy. It was this strategy that the American Right adopted, to sow discord across a country recently united by Obama’s calm, paternalistic centrism.

It is a straightforward, superficially appealing narrative — especially for those who casually watched wrestling in the late Nineties, when McMahon, with his steroidal physique and signature swagger, would confidently stride onto Monday Night Raw as the villainous boss. However, as Joe Biden might say, it’s simply “a bunch of malarkey”. Both Trump and McMahon owe their fame and fortune to something much bigger and older than both of them. Something at the heart of the American Dream: marketing.

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By Michael Lind

Marketing and advertising are America’s most original contributions to global culture. This nation, best known for refining and selling the ideas of others, has produced great evangelists, poets, and statesmen — all of them more skilled at promoting concepts than actually articulating them in any detail. The myth of America’s founding, as an uninhabited land with unlimited opportunities, served as a necessary fiction to persuade immigrants to endure a treacherous ocean journey and start anew. Americans have, ever since, been particularly susceptible to marketing strategies promising a destiny of endless prosperity.

And it was through ever-evolving marketing methods that pro wrestling evolved — from a carnival attraction with roots in the collar-and-elbow and catch-as-catch-can grappling styles imported from the United Kingdom into a multi-billion-dollar global phenomenon. These methods also transformed a portly man with a poor hair weave and a knack for composing oddly memorable tweets into the world’s most powerful leader. Trump harnessed marketing to achieve exceptional worldwide name recognition; McMahon used it to consolidate control over the somewhat disorganised wrestling industry that operated throughout the United States until the mid-Eighties, transforming the $1 million company he bought from his father in 1982 into a $9 billion sale in 2023.

The reductive comparison between the intricate landscape of US politics and the spectacle of pro wrestling is just another form of marketing. Much of the media reduces political events to us-versus-them narratives, in order to boost ratings or clicks. It’s easy to forget that politics is a multifaceted system with various influences — and that it directs all our lives. Politicians can only talk to us through the media, after all. Marketing must necessarily play a crucial role in shaping their decision-making. It took an entire team of millennials to write Hillary Clinton’s tweets, for instance.

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Adderall is not an identity

By Oliver Bateman

Politicians work on their personal brands more than most businesspeople, and promote policy positions like any other “product” in the marketplace of ideas, constantly competing to employ new tactics and technologies to reach voters more effectively. This approach is working in politics: the 2020 election saw a record number of ballots cast. It worked, too, in wrestling. In the Nineties, McMahon’s company and its main competitor, World Championship Wrestling, combined to achieve remarkable ratings, through the innovative strategies that fall under the umbrella of “neokayfabe”. But it doesn’t follow that wrestling guided politics; merely that both were guided by the eternal American undercurrent of marketing.

Indeed, comparing the producers and consumers of “neokayfabe” to politicians and voters is both misleading and condescending. While there may be some parallels in the blurring of reality and fiction, the stakes, motivations, and consequences of political actions are vastly different from those in professional wrestling. Equating the two undermines the seriousness of the political process, and to reduce Republican campaigning and governance to “neokayfabe” ignores the multitude of forces — class, race, gender, international relations — shaping political decisions and strategies. Entertainment may influence politics, but politics is not, ultimately entertainment.

Wrestling, too, is more than entertainment. Reisman’s narrative does a disservice to the sport, by telling its story through the lens of one vague concept from McMahon’s life. Pro wrestling, while diverging from its ancient roots by becoming scripted, maintains a connection to the motivations that drove ancient Greeks to compete in it: the desire to use each agon, or contest, to prove arete, or excellence, still motivates daredevil wrestlers such as Kenny Omega and Will Ospreay. The physical techniques and manoeuvres used in pro wrestling are often derived from traditional wrestling styles. And wrestlers still train rigorously to develop their physical abilities and execute complex moves in the ring — even if their performance in matches is ultimately governed by employers seeking a good spectacle.

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Steroids won't cure toxic masculinity

By Oliver Bateman

It’s crucial to distinguish between — rather than conflate — these forms of performance, and the consequences they have. Even seasoned political commentators, who primarily observe and analyse, can occasionally misinterpret the the sort of performance they’re watching (“Trump is just taunting us like a pro wrestler trying to sell tickets to his match; he’ll drop out soon!”), and thereby fail to understand the possible outcomes (Trump, conducting an unconventional yet highly effective political campaign, secures the presidency).

In wrestling, fan-driven publications known as “dirt sheets”, such as Dave Meltzer’s Wrestling Observer Newsletter, play a role comparable to that of Vox and Politico in politics. These publications provided insider knowledge, enhancing fans’ enjoyment of the sport. However, a fixation on firings, hirings, booking decisions and television ratings sometimes overshadows the fact that there are actual matches to appreciate. This situation parallels the way an obsession with political gossip, which bears at least a passing resemblance to “dirt sheet” reporting, can divert attention from the substance of politics itself.

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The Ozempic class war has begun

By Oliver Bateman

Wrestling’s deeper meaning is not found in the destructive rhetoric of its interviews or the “neokayfabe” that supposedly blurs the lines between backstage manoeuvring and centre-stage presentation, but in the camaraderie among athletes of diverse backgrounds. Gatherings such as Red Bastien’s Shootout in Dallas exemplify this, as wrestlers get together to reminisce and refer to each other as “brother”. Riesman reduces the sport, fundamentally the business of these performance-bonded “brothers”, to a mere prop for a partisan argument. Hasty to criticise McMahon, Trump, and an entire political party, the author neglects to provide an insight into the wrestling business, instead peremptorily declaring the demise of “real” wrestling and “real” Right-wing politics. In so doing, Riesman also dismisses the substance of still-extant “real” Right-wing politics and its impact on the 70 million Americans who support it — people who voted for Trump because they had faith either in him or the Republican Party.

Both modern wrestlers and Trump excel at emotional appeals — but both realms of performance are merely marketing-improved variants on carnival hucksterism. Wrestling emerged from carnival sideshows, and its goal, as with any field of endeavour that utilises sales and marketing, was to extract as much money as possible from unsuspecting customers. Trump’s continuing scorched-earth tactics — such as using his recent arrest as a means to dominate the news cycle and overshadow his chief Republican competitors for the presidential nomination — resemble short-sighted promoters who enflame fans’ sentiments for immediate gains, perhaps risking long-term destruction.

This marketing-centred approach is not exclusive to politicians and wrestlers; it is also employed by tech bros, bankers, and rappers. Indeed, marketing tactics are so prevalent in American society that it is easy to forget that, beneath surface-level spectacles, there are still some shared values and meaningful relationships. But by focusing on these deeper, more enduring aspects, we may find ourselves able to engage with everything, from politics to sport, in terms of what truly matters in our lives.

In this view — as strongly argued recently by the journalist Glenn Greenwald, for instance — the US arms manufacturing industry, the military, and our politicians are all essentially engaged in a circle of corruption and collusion to make each other rich. This common understanding of the military-industrial complex — and of how politics in Washington works in general — is essentially conspiratorial. The theory goes something like this: big defence contractors bribe the politicians with large donations, and the generals and other government officials with board seats and other lucrative positions, and they in turn come up with reasons to justify shovelling ever-increasing piles of taxpayer money into buying new weapons from the arms makers.

Washington has thus become a “multi-tentacle war machine”, Greenwald says, because “no matter what is going on in the world, they always find — or concoct — reasons why the military budget must grow no matter how inflated it already is”. (Emphasis mine.)

Let’s call this the Corrupt Conspiracy Model of how Washington functions (or dysfunctions). It is a model that can be powerfully convincing, because it taps into the truth that people really are naturally flawed and self-interested creatures, demonstrably prone to corruption. From this viewpoint, Washington politics is all basically a con game led by a pack of greedy psychopaths. As Greenwald notes with some frustration and confusion, this used to be a characteristically Left-wing critique of government and corporate power, but following the Great Political Realignment it’s now become more common to the disaffected Right.

Reading his argument made me recall how, back when I was younger and Left-leaning, I too believed in this model, at least implicitly. As noted, it can be quite persuasive, even satisfying, in its simplicity. It’s also a subtly idealistic and optimistic theory: the American system would work great, just as it was designed to, if not for all the selfish bad actors taking advantage of the system. The only problem was that, after enough time in Washington, I had no choice but to re-evaluate. Because what I found is that the swamp is populated almost wholly not by cynics, but by true believers.

True believers in what? Answering that will require trying to nail down a second, more complex model to explain how people in the Imperial City make decisions.

First, let me qualify by acknowledging that yes, Washington is indeed awash with lobbyists, corrupt politicians, psychopathic executives, cynical operators, and backstabbing climbers. It is a veritable hive of scum and villainy. They just aren’t what really makes the place tick. In fact, all these people conform themselves parasitically to that which does.

The real issue to contend with is that almost no one in Washington actually thinks in the terms of the Corrupt Conspiracy Model; i.e. they don’t think: “I will advocate for a hawkish, interventionist foreign policy so that the resulting wars will benefit the arms industry and make me and my friends rich…” The reality is more disturbing than that, honestly.

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By N.S. Lyons

What runs Washington is a Spirit. Or, alternatively, a Story.

No one wants to live a meaningless life. Humans are meaning-seeking creatures and they desperately want, need, what they do to have meaningful value. If they cannot find inherent meaning in life, they are liable to come up with a narrative framework — that is, a story — that imbues what they do with some sense of higher meaning. Since everyone wants to be the hero of their story, the story becomes central to their personal identity. And no one wants their identity to be dull (even if they’re a government bureaucrat).

But while a few very special people can create and maintain their own personal stories indefinitely, living life entirely in their own self-sustained dramatic reality, for most people the much easier and more reassuring route is to simply adopt a collective story that already exists. The more popular or high-status this story is, the more attractive and self-reinforcing it will be — and the harder it will, therefore, be to disbelieve, dissent, and defect from.

Now, when one talks to members of the Washington establishment, the collective story they hold to tends to quickly become apparent.

None are, in their own minds, either corrupt cynics or ideological zealots. Instead they are moderate, prudent, wise “public servants”; the trained and chosen elite guardians of American interests and values. Sensible centrists, they do what must be done to ensure America’s security and prosperity, steering the ship of state along a pragmatic course, eschewing both the goodhearted but naïve idealism of the too-far-Left and the crude jingoistic nationalism of the populist-Right.

This pragmatism does not, of course, preclude their simultaneously being moral exemplars. They embody America’s highest ideals, given that they are the ones extending the light of whatever truly makes America great, whether that be liberal democracy, equality and human rights, pluralism and diversity, scientific progress, or economic liberty. In protecting the global world order of Pax Americana, they make the world safe for American ideals. In fact, these guardians are basically the bulwark of Enlightened Civilisation writ large, taming barbarian savagery wherever it rears its ugly head, whether in Afghanistan or Alabama. Even a moment’s slackness and “the jungle grows back”.

American power is righteous, because it is on the right side of History; as clearly demonstrated by the fact that America is so powerful. And if that power is righteous and good, it deserves to be exercised. To use righteous power to remake the world in our own image would by definition be to make the world better. Thus extending American power is both the most pragmatic and the most idealistic possible course.

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Should America be more like Ukraine?

By Mark Lilla

This story, which has dominated Washington since at least the end of the Cold War, is what we might label The Consensus. Maybe all or some elements of The Consensus are true. Or maybe it’s all nonsense. It doesn’t really matter; that’s not the point. Those who submit themselves to The Consensus can by doing so automatically consider themselves better people, engaged in more meaningful lives. And their peers will consider them to be as well.

A term that one is liable to hear used in Washington is “Serious Person”. On being asked to meet with someone he doesn’t know (maybe a journalist, or a potential new hire), for example, a Very Important Washingtonian may first inquire of his staff: “Well, is he a Serious Person?” But what makes a person Serious? A Serious Person is, naturally, an orthodox follower of The Consensus. Asking if someone is a Serious Person is a bit like a secular version of how one might have asked, back in the day, whether some new fellow was in fact a “God-fearing Christian?” “Yes,” would come the reply, “and he went to Yale.” “Good enough, let’s put him in charge of the OSS,” you could then say with confidence.

Rumour that some new acquaintance is in fact a Serious Person is greatly reassuring, as it means he is not a “Wingnut”. A Wingnut is an unsociable crank, living outside of The Consensus. Wingnuts demonstrate this by suggesting unserious ideas, such as cutting the defence budget, curtailing the surveillance state, or questioning the demands of the public health bureaucracy. Glenn Greenwald is a Wingnut par excellence. Nobody wants to be associated with a Wingnut, as that can taint your reputation as a Serious Person. And then you’ll never be invited to a swanky conference in Aspen again. Which is probably why for every mile closer to Capitol Hill a foreign policy think tank is, the more measurably it advocates in favour of militant internationalism. These are the Serious Institutions, able to court the serious money necessary to afford prime real estate.

Here then is the point: why is it so likely that any given person in the Washington “Blob” will automatically support raising the defence budget, or intervening militarily in some country abroad, or otherwise expanding the security state? In the vast majority of cases, it’s not because they’re taking bribes from some defence contractor. It’s because they simply want more than anything to be counted among the Serious People. And to do that they first have to accept the word and practice of The Consensus.

Sometimes they may not fully buy it, but conform merely because it’s the path of least resistance. Often, they do buy it completely. I once had a former General and Director of the CIA tell me, with complete earnestness, that the United States had to occupy every single “ungoverned space” on earth — every conflict zone, every “rogue state”, every barren patch of sand large enough for an Isis terrorist to do doughnuts in a Toyota pickup. No one was paying him to say this (yet); it was pure idealistic conviction. And there are a lot of people in Washington far less distinguished than he who labour daily to help shore up The Consensus: legions of non-profit workers, lowly staffers, and ambitious interns who happily pump out endless Consensus-reiterating briefing papers, reports, op-eds, and legislative bills (all of which are written by people under 35 who have no idea what they’re doing, by the way). The military-industrial complex doesn’t have to bribe any of them. They are working to cultivate the illustrious aura of a Serious Person.

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The American experiment has just begun

By Anton Jäger

Any financial rewards are secondary to the power, prestige, and psychological assurance of being counted among the ruling class and holding the right opinions. This does not of course mean there aren’t significant financial rewards that flow to senior figures, but to the “public servant” they genuinely bear no conceivable trace of wrongful quid pro quo. As far as they are concerned, they are merely doing the right thing in service to the public and the nation, and being fairly compensated for it. Being paid to sit on Raytheon’s board and lobby for a strong national defence is public service, as is being paid by CNN to go on TV and call dissenters a dangerous threat to our democracy. Advancing The Consensus is, after all, the essence of public service. This complex is utterly impervious to any charges of corruption or hypocrisy, because from the inside such charges literally sound like the mad rantings of an immoral and maliciously anti-American Wingnut.

It would be tempting to call this ideological capture, but I don’t think that quite describes it. The Consensus is not an ideology with clear or coherent doctrines. And it is extremely adaptable and flexible, seamlessly incorporating new threats and opportunities (which is why “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is now regularly cited as a top foreign policy priority). Instead, it works more loosely, subconsciously, to shape what individuals and institutions value and what they believe is right and normal and just. It really is more like a deep story about the world and how it works; or a spirit that moves subjects without their understanding how or why, or even that it exists.

Which is why I think I need to introduce one more element in order to fully explain what really runs Washington.

Everyone and everything needs a hierarchy of values to operate, otherwise they risk having no telos — no purpose, motivation, or orientation for action. And at the top of this pyramid of values or principles must necessarily be some highest value or principle, from which all others descend.

Bureaucracies, which are themselves pyramidal, subsume an individual’s values and objectives into themselves; the individual’s value hierarchy and telos is then effectively restructured or replaced by the telos superimposed from above by the bureaucracy. Which is why the bureaucracy so often seems to co-opt its individuals and take on a life of its own. But many singular bureaucracies, such as the Defence and State Departments, exist side-by-side in Washington and operate simultaneously. And, at least theoretically, they are all part of the same government and on the same side. What unites them in direction and orientation, if anything? Some pyramid of higher values, naturally. This is the role of The Consensus.

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The West needs to grow up

By Paul Kingsnorth

Does The Consensus itself also exist as part of an even higher story? Maybe. The author Paul Kingsnorth has I think wisely described there being, at the pinnacle of our collective Western civilisational subconscious, an “empty throne,” where once sat God:

“[E]very culture, whether it knows it or not, is built around a sacred order. It does not, of course, need to be a Christian order. It could be Islamic, Hindu or Daoist. It could be based around the veneration of ancestors or the worship of Odin. But there is a throne at the heart of every culture, and whoever sits on it will be the force you take your instruction from.”

“The modern experiment,” however, “has been the act of dethroning both literal human sovereigns and the representative of the sacred order, and replacing them with purely human, and purely abstract, notions — ‘the people’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘democracy’ or ‘progress.’” But one sacred value must necessarily rule above all others, and “when a culture kills its sovereign, the throne will not remain empty for long”.

What now occupies this empty throne today, if anything? Kingsnorth has suggested it is “money”. As I’ve written before, I don’t think that’s it. I think it is something more fundamental: I think it’s what could be called the spirit in Man that hungers for infinite “control” — meaning power itself. The power to have all good things, from material comfort to equality, without any limits or contradictions; power over all evils and all suffering and all dangers; power over human nature. It’s the desire for the power to eliminate all friction between the will and the world; to have the power to overcome all resistance and achieve heaven on earth, as fast as possible, by any means necessary.

The efforts of those few poor souls who spend their days trying to reason with Washington and convince it to follow some policy of “realism and restraint” are doomed. The place is busily fighting a holy war against the terms of existence.

When a Wingnut reveals himself as a Wingnut, it is because he has resisted the unrestrained exercise of power in some way. Such an act is grounds not for admiration of virtue, but for shock and suspicion: by doing so he has challenged the whole story of the new sacred order. In a real sense the Wingnut is not just unsociable but impious.

It may be that at some point in the past, when the empty throne was occupied by its rightful ruler, America’s governing institutions and the people who make their gears turn participated in a greater shared story, which subsumed their lower interests and appetites and rightly ordered them with a telos oriented toward a genuine highest good. Maybe this was God. Maybe it was the American Idea, or the Republican Ideal. Whatever it was, perhaps its very existence moderated and disciplined them. But if the baser value of power has now been elevated to this highest place, then they no longer have any internalised limits, and their quest has no stopping point. There are no longer any moral brakes on the run-away train of the state.

If so, then even all the money of the military-industrial complex definitely doesn’t run Washington. Indeed, if the military-industrial complex didn’t exist we’d have to invent it immediately just so that we could hand it all of our money.

A version of this essay originally appeared on The Upheaval on Substack.

The magic of Our Great National Parks isn’t in Obama’s voiceover — he’s still a better orator than a narrator, as it turns out — but in his mere presence onscreen. “Join me in this celebration of our planet’s greatest national parks and wilderness,” he drones pleasantly in the trailer, over magnificent footage of scurrying ants, cascading sea ice, a monkey leaping through an otherworldly landscape of jagged rocks. An extended riff on the micro-ecosystem that lives inside the fur of a sloth ends with the money line: “This sleepy sloth might just save us all.”

The vibe, to use a very Obama-era buzzword, is decidedly hopeful.

But it’s also a little bit odd. How did the 44th President go from leading the free world to hosting nature programs?

The path from the White House to the screen is not completely unprecedented; former Vice President Al Gore, who lost his bid at the presidency in 2000, went on to win an Oscar for his climate documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. But where Gore’s foray into filmmaking was blatantly scaremongering, designed to terrify a complacent public into taking action on climate change, Obama greets us like he’s taking us on a date: standing barefoot on the shores of a Hawaiian beach, welcoming viewers to a visual pleasure cruise through the world’s most gorgeous places. It’s just delightful — and, it must be said, a good look for him.

But by Obama’s own admission, this isn’t what he wanted. His departure from office in 2017 was also supposed to mark a big step back from public life, as he cited the “wise American tradition of ex-presidents gracefully exiting the political stage and making room for new voices.” That idea is an American original, first expressed by George Washington in his farewell address. Then, the slow fade of the elder statesman was an almost parental fantasy: of leaving the nation you raised from infancy to its own devices. By the time Obama left office, it was a more standard expression of confidence: this was simply how it worked, and the wheels of democracy would keep on turning without him.

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By Justin Webb

The trouble is, they didn’t — and certainly not in the direction liberals wanted them to. For those on the Left, the president’s vow to step back from public life at this moment was practically a form of criminal negligence, leaving the country in the highly incapable hands of a heinous orange madman. And while nobody said so at the time, the impending Trump administration was sort of Barack Obama’s fault. The outgoing POTUS had been instrumental in pressuring Biden, his own Vice President, not to run in 2016, even though he would have been traditionally next in line for the nomination.

And while we can never know if Biden would have performed better against Trump than Hillary Clinton did, in hindsight, it’s hard to imagine him doing worse — or that his chances weren’t badly undersold. Joe Biden was a lifelong public servant, a supporting actor in the nation’s most historic presidency. Discouraging him so that the woman Obama had once grudgingly called “likeable enough” could have her chance at the big game might have seemed expedient — in the sense that following up the first black president with an old white man just felt like a step in the wrong direction. But when it came to winning the election, it was almost certainly a strategic error.

There were signs early on that Obama knew this, and felt bad about it. The former president began surfacing periodically during the Trump presidency, mostly with gentle attempts to keep the more strident elements within the Democratic party from driving the whole enterprise fully off the rails. Then, his goal was clear: to prevent his party from pushing radical policies that would alienate even more voters and result in a two-term Trump presidency. But now that the 2020 election is won and done, he’s become more visible, not less. Podcasts, panels, daytime TV appearances: suddenly, the man seems to be everywhere.

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How great is all this for democracy? Certainly, it can’t be great for Biden — whose approval ratings have plummeted amid national frustrations over inflation and never-ending pandemic restrictions — to have his young, fun, wildly popular former boss still here and hamming it up for the adoring public. Barely into his mid-fifties at the close of his time in the White House, Obama admittedly makes for an unusual elder statesman: younger than either of the presidents who succeeded him, naturally at ease with the permanent fame that is an artefact of having been the first POTUS in the social media era, and perhaps most importantly, still beloved as a representative of the recent past in which even the most jaded liberal could feel proud to be American.

When we look at Barack Obama, we see one of the best things America has ever done. When we look at Joe Biden, we see the guy we voted for out of sheer desperation not to weather a second term of Trump.

The Netflix documentary is the least of it: much has been made this week of a video in which Biden appears to linger forgotten in the background at a White House event while Obama works the crowd. And while the full context thankfully paints a different, less humiliating picture, there’s still a reason why it got so much attention in the first place. It feels like a microcosm for their whole relationship, where Biden is forever the sidekick to a charismatic, beloved American hero. That running joke about how people would have voted for Obama three times if they were allowed to was never really a joke.

Hence the craving for Obama’s reassuring presence in our living rooms, if not from behind the Oval Office desk, then as a documentary tour guide. Just seeing the former president in a public-facing role again is like liberal comfort food, a throwback to a familiar and more optimistic time. Before Trump. Before Covid. Before the devastating decline of public trust that left our social fabric in tatters. If we can’t have him back in the White House, then this is the next best thing: a wholesome tour through the planet’s wonderful wild places, replete with hopeful messaging about “our shared birthright”.

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And as long as we studiously avoid thinking about the less-savoury aspects of Obama’s legacy (just try not to picture the sleepy sloth being murdered in a drone strike), and focus on how great he makes us feel, this arrangement could last for decades.

It’s not that Obama and Our Great National Parks will actually solve the nation’s problems. But it’s surely a perfect piece of escapism at a moment when real life is getting increasingly bleak: a message of common humanity at a time when we’re tragically polarised.

And frankly, maybe we need this. Let the former president’s familiar voice transport you far away from the endless churn of the news cycle, from the horrifying reports of foreign wars, to a peaceful, hopeful place. Let yourself forget about the red wave of Republican victories that’s been prophesied for November, about President Biden’s latest bumbling performance, about the fact that the woman in line to be our next Democratic nominee might as well have been designed in a lab to alienate as many voters as possible. Behold the natural world whose inhabitants live free of political conflict (even if they do occasionally, out of necessity, eat each other.) Imagine yourself, just for a moment, as a citizen of the Earth instead of one single state, country, or tribe. Who knows: maybe the sleepy sloth will save us all.

I had first met Putin seven years before and was not surprised by his rapid domination of the new Russia. We were introduced by Yevgeny Primakov, widely known as “Russia’s Kissinger”, who I had met in Moscow multiple times during the Cold War years when I advised Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford. Primakov was a no-nonsense thinker and writer. He was also a special emissary for the Kremlin in conducting secret discussions with national leaders around the world.

When Yeltsin tasked his advisor Anatoly Sobchak with identifying and recruiting Russia’s best and brightest, Putin, then a local politician in his hometown of St Petersburg, was top of his list — so Primakov took Putin under his wing to tutor him in global power and security issues. Eventually, Primakov introduced Kissinger to Putin, and they became close. That both Primakov and Kissinger took time to coach Putin on geopolitics and geosecurity was a clear demonstration that they saw in him the characteristics of a powerful leader. It also showed Putin’s capacity for listening to lengthy lessons on geopolitics — as I was soon to learn.

In 1992, I received a call from a meeting organiser at the CSIS think tank inviting me to join a US-Russia St Petersburg Commission to be chaired by Kissinger and Sobchak. The purpose would be to help the new Russian leadership in opening channels of business and banking with the West. Most of the Western members would be CEOs of major US and European companies, as well as key officials of the new Russian government. I would attend as an expert. I was told that a “Mr Primakov” had personally asked if I could make time to participate. I could hardly refuse such a request, and I was intensely curious about the emerging Russian leadership, especially about Putin.

Arriving at the first meeting, I saw several people gathered around Kissinger and a man I was told was Putin. An official identified himself to me and said he had been asked by Primakov to introduce me to Putin. He interrupted the conversation with Kissinger to announce my arrival; Putin warmly responded that he was looking forward to chatting with me about how I see the world from inside Washington.

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We spoke on several occasions between meetings, and he arranged to sit next to me at a dinner, accompanied by his interpreter. At that dinner, he asked me: “What is the single most important obstacle between your Western businessmen and my fellow Russians in starting up business connections?”

Off the top of my head, I responded: “The absence of legally defined property rights — without those there is no basis for resolving disputes.”

“Ah yes,” he said, “in your system a dispute between businesses is resolved by attorneys paid by the hour representing each side, sometimes taking the dispute to the courts which normally takes months and accumulation of hourly attorney fees.”

“In Russia,” he continued, “disputes are usually resolved by common sense. If a dispute is about very significant money or property, then the two sides would typically send representatives to a dinner. Everyone attending arriving would be armed. Facing the possibility of a bloody, fatal outcome both sides always find a mutually agreeable solution. Fear provides the catalyst for common sense.”

He used his argument in the context of disputes between sovereign nations. Solutions often require an element of fear of disproportionate responses if no deal is struck. The idea of forcing adversaries to face horrific alternatives seemed to excite him. In essence, he was describing to me the current Ukraine impasse between the US and Russia. Putin knows Russia cannot afford a prolonged ground war with Ukraine. He also can see Biden is facing crucial midterm elections with a domestic congressional impasse, and cannot afford a major foreign crisis distraction. The two sides have no choice but to strike a deal.

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On a different occasion, Putin asked me how decisions are really made in Washington, with its complex division of Presidential and Congressional powers. He said Kissinger could explain the broad parameters of a Presidential policy decision, but could not clarify how political consensus was achieved between the House, Senate, and the Executive Branch.

It was evident he had been given a deep intelligence brief on my career. He said Kissinger enjoys the public theatre of powerful people meeting in elaborate dinners or meetings with many aides ready to guide them. And he told me he had been informed that I preferred backroom meetings to shape consensus and provide room for negotiating details.

I tried to explain the elaborate process of balancing the interests of the many players in Washington, including Congress, the major agencies, and the intricate business arrangements that might be affected by any decision. I told him of my first personal meeting with Nixon, who had said he was impressed that I had strong personal support from leaders of both major parties. However, he added, this raised worries among his staff in the White House — so he really needed to know whether I was a Republican or a Democrat. To which I replied: “Yes.”

When Nixon asked what that meant, I explained that I was not a partisan warrior, but rather a problem solver. To get a solution I would always be ready to work with key players of both parties depending upon the specific problem. This seemed to amuse Putin.

The impression of Putin that I was left with was of a man who was more intelligent than most of the politicians I had met in Washington and in other capitals around the world. I was reminded of my childhood: I grew up in a predominantly Sicilian neighbourhood, with a mafia maintaining order. No disorganised crime allowed. Putin did seem to have the instincts of a Sicilian mafia boss: quick to reward but quick to pose mortal risk in the event of non-conformity to the family rules.

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The closing of the Russian mind

By John Lloyd

Looking back to those times of growing disarray in Russia’s leadership, I can recall the prolonged, multi-year paralysis of the Brezhnev Presidency, which was followed by the brief Presidencies of Andropov and Chernenko. Gorbachev was not strong enough to impose his will. Yeltsin had good ideas but was easily distracted and lacked follow through. Russia was in urgent need of a strong leader — and so Putin stepped in.

As for how Putin sees himself, he did bring up several times his admiration for Peter the Great, so much so I was convinced he sees himself as his incarnation. I have not been a guest of the Kremlin since 1988, but I am told Putin had portraits of Peter the Great hung in several important meeting rooms there — rather than portraits of himself, as would be more customary. What this means for Biden, Nato and Ukraine is slowly becoming clear. There is more to Putin than meets the eye.

I didn’t expect excitable millennials to quote Hunter S. Thompson at me, at a conservative event. But at the National Conservatism II conference in Orlando last week, Fear And Loathging In Las Vegas was everywhere: the mood the night before kickoff had that exact sense of giddy incipient lunacy.

For my adult life, being both young and a conservative has been deeply, irretrievably cringe. Not so here, where the modal attendee was a bearded, trim, often tattooed male Hunter S. Thompson fan, under the age of 25. NatCon II was where Conservatism Inc. met Conservatism Ink.

The Conservatism Ink guys sported blue blazers and Richard Spencer haircuts. They made the bar noisy and excitable, added youth and buzz to events — and were notably absent from the centrepiece panel, in which the event’s organisers attempted to craft a ‘new fusionism’.

Here, conference organiser and Burke Foundation chairman Yoram Hazony took to the stage alongside the Catholic integralist writer Sohrab Ahmari, whose 2019 article ‘Against David French-Ism’ saw the first full-scale battle within the American Right, between the liberals and the then still emerging ‘post-liberal’ strand.

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For Ahmari, David French epitomised a Right-liberal thinking that conceded too much territory. By accepting the liberal idea that moral values should be kept out of the public square, the argument goes, conservatism merely becomes a strategy for losing more slowly. Instead, Ahmari states that the Right should aim for “defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good”.

It’s hard to see, though, how this stance can easily be made to square particularly with Ahmari’s co-panellists Dave Rubin, a noted libertarian, and Douglas Murray, the ne plus ultra of anti-woke right-liberalism.

For me, this event encapsulated the NatCon’s quandary: what kind of alliance, if any, is possible between liberals and post-liberals? And, crucially, ordered to which values? Everyone on the panel was unenthusiastic about wokeness, at pains to stress that they weren’t rabid authoritarians, and seemingly unsure about how to resolve the question of how state power could align with moral values, without treading on at least some of their friends’ toes.

Hazony argued that America could and should re-Christianise its public square, and simply manage some kind of ‘carve-out’ for groups such as gay people and orthodox Jews. Murray, meanwhile, argued that the Church only had itself to blame for mass secularisation. (He didn’t quite say they were all nonces but it was heavily implied.) Ahmari, perhaps the lone post-liberal on the stage, was surprisingly conciliatory.

Afterwards, Conservatism Inc. raved about the discussion. At the bar, though, where they were ignoring the whole event, the Conservatism Ink bros were less sure. They drank bourbon and muttered that with anti-woke liberals such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali on-board, nothing would ever change. Too big a tent means a lack of focus. 

It wasn’t just the Gen-Z raw-eggs-and-dank-memes boys. “I was into this before it was cool” is the abiding cry of hipsters the world over, and it was (more or less explicitly) everywhere over the three days of conference. But if the the purists of NatCon I were complaining about liberal entryism, this isn’t just about new money coming into the movement. It’s also an effect of how radically the political backdrop has changed since 2019.

Between Brexit/Trump in 2016 and the pandemic in 2020, there was a widespread feeling that something new was needed to replace the technocratic ‘double liberal’ consensus. And indeed, since then something new has emerged, in the wake of Covid-19. It’s just not what was envisaged.

Back in 2019, people were dreaming about ordering Western state power to a more substantive moral programme than that of empty individual freedom and consumerism; a new, human-scale politics of meaning and necessary limits.

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And behold, the pandemic state of emergency did indeed shatter the consensus about individual freedom. Across the developed world, the liberal privileging of individual freedom has been replaced by a de facto acceptance that state power absolutely must be ordered to the common good, up to and including coercive measures where necessary. In other words: all politics is now post-liberal. 

But inasmuch as we have achieved consensus on what ‘the common good’ means, it doesn’t extend much beyond ‘public health’, understood in bare terms as the preservation of physical life: lockdowns, masks, vaccinations and so on. The new Western normal is one of authoritarian regimes now visibly reluctant to relinquish their grip on a state of emergency.

But these regimes are more, not less, technocratic — and there’s been no new politics of meaning. Instead, the last year and a half have felt like a relentless assault on everything that makes us human: interpersonal bonds, organic social organisations, in-person contact.

This situation has confused the hell out of the loosely post-liberal caucus who made up the intellectual backbone of NatCon I in 2019. It aimed to revive a more substantial nationalism capable of incorporating realist foreign policy; industrial policy; patriotism beyond divisive racial politics. There was a Republican in the White House; I’m told policy debates were detailed and impassioned. You never knew what might trickle up to actual centres of power. 

And the liberal mainstream was sincerely shocked by their suggestion that maybe state power and moral values should be aligned. Now, though, there’s no longer any need to make that case: in response to the pandemic, states across the West have enthusiastically seized power.

The pre-pandemic post-lib pipe-dream was of a revived human-scale politics of meaning, to challenge the bloodless grip of technocracy and its mantra of never-ending progress. Post-liberals were happy to talk about limits and state power as means of pursuing such a politics of meaning. Now, plot twist: existing post-liberalism has ordered state power to a set of moral values that 2019’s national conservatives really don’t like.

So the ‘state power’ bit is settled in principle. (Though for conservatives under Biden, the question of how to obtain it for themselves is both open and, they’d argue, urgent.) The ‘moral values’ bit is a bitter battlefield — even within the national conservative caucus.

With that in mind, it was perhaps inevitable that the programme trended negative: toward focusing on what we can all agree we don’t want. Along with Hazony’s sincere but inconclusive panel effort at shaping a ‘new fusionism’, this meant plenty of speakers whose primary argument was not for anything particular so much as against wokeness. Playing conference bingo with a friend, we were obliged to delete ‘cultural Marxism’ from our cards a few hours in because it came up too often. 

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To my eye the most interesting attendees were those who sought to address the how of power, or the what of values — without simply relapsing into complaints about wokeness. Informally, perhaps the neo-reactionary Curtis Yarvin (also known as Mencius Moldbug) qualifies here. He ran a kind of three-day mobile conference plenary, in which (seemingly without ever needing to draw breath) he addressed a little flock of the Conservatism Ink bros who followed him like ducklings.

Elsewhere, New Founding’s Matt Peterson outlined a plan for a commercial and cultural startup, aimed at propagating a positive lifestyle vision for the American Right. It was a for-profit entrepreneurial approach to moral renewal that felt both very American and somewhat baffling to a Bongland ex-Lefty.

More intelligible from my perspective was the session on ‘Worker Power’. Here, Oren Cass of American Compass joined Brian Dijkema of Cardus and Sean McGarvey of NABTU to discuss the sometimes vexed relationship between conservatism and trade unions. There’s been a lot of noise from the American Right about how the Republicans are now a multi-ethnic, working-class party, and Marco Rubio did endorse Amazon unionisation efforts in Alabama back in March. 

Even so, the souvenir conference mugs were, somewhat ironically, made in China; and attendance at the ‘Worker Power’ session was sparse. This spoke to one of the conference’s real tensions: what relation does this would-be counter-elite actually have to the masses? One approach to this question came from Hungary’s soft-power outreach team, who were present in force at NatCon. Balázs Orbán, Minister of State to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s office (no relation), gave a presentation that positioned Hungary as a successful model for actually existing national conservatism.

Orbán boasted of Hungarian growth, lack of anti-semitic violence, church and synagogue renovation and improving birth rates. These, he argued, demonstrate that national conservatism with Hungarian characteristics is not, as Western liberals like to claim, a totalitarian dictatorship but in fact a popular regime that’s delivering what the Hungarian people want and need.

Whether you nod along with this framing of Fidesz probably depends on your political commitments. But from this perspective, an elite whose values are aligned with those of the masses can use authority to implement those values responsibly throughout the regime. What’s unclear, though, even among sympathetic conservatives, is how applicable the Orbánist model might be in the West — and particularly in America. 

It’s relatively easy for a reigning elite to align values to state power in a homogeneous nation of 10 million people. It’s far from obvious how this might be achieved in a deliberately decentralised, pluralistic nation of 300 million people, with a highly individualistic founding ideology that’s constitutionally allergic to state-mandated values.

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Chris Rufo’s Leninist strategy for ‘counterrevolution’, which I’ve discussed here, offered part of the answer, in the playbook he proposed for getting American conservatives to win the culture wars. In Rufo’s view, the aim of such a counter-elite should be galvanising and providing language and representation for a mass that Rufo sees as subjected to the top-down imposition of alien values by a narcissistic, nihilistic Left-authoritarian state. 

Meanwhile, the writer Mary Eberstadt looked straight past Conservatism Inc., instead making a heartfelt address to Conservatism Ink in the name of shared values as such. She argued that the young have been robbed by ‘zero-sum progressivism’ of everything that gives life a ‘higher purpose’: family connections, faith, belonging, a cultural patrimony.

Taken together, Rufo’s right-Leninism and Eberstadt’s empathetic politics of meaningful relationships felt like the public and private facets of this movement’s better part. Eberstadt brought a deeply matriarchal quality to proceedings. 

She’s emerging as a compassionate figure in a sometimes dour or combative 21st-century American conservatism, and I hope her voice continues to be heard — especially by the Conservatism Inkers her talk addressed. After all, Rufo’s Right-Leninist vanguardism in the name of shared conservative values will make little sense if it’s pursued in the name of a people who don’t actually have any shared values.

But if Rufo and Eberstadt together comprise top-down and bottom-up facets of something approaching a workable, effective and ethically-grounded conservatism, there are plenty of other visions for where this version of the right goes next: Thielite space fascism, Bitcoin exitism, libertarian anti-wokeism, hard-edged nationalism, doctrinaire Catholic integralism or simply reabsorption by the neocon blob. 

It’s a heady and at many points self-contradictory brew, in which the central question — whose values? — remains undecided, a dilemma that will either prove the movement’s greatest strength or weakness.

After three days in bat country, I stumbled to bed on the last night past a swarm of Conservatism Ink chanting ‘Let’s Go, Brandon’ in the hotel bar. I left with an abiding sense that national conservatism has money behind it, but also plenty of punk energy and belligerence.

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As ever, money will play a huge part in what happens next. And there are plenty of boomercons with fat chequebooks, who would like to see room on the ark for at least ‘our’ kind of liberal. In particular, as far as the neocons are concerned, it’s noteworthy that there’s been some debate over whether foreign-policy realists were well enough represented on the roster — especially given how central debates over US military obligations have been to shifts on the Right since Trump.

There are probably plenty as well who would like to see the more punk end of this movement defanged, and Conservatism Ink toned right down. Meanwhile, the Gen-Z right-wingers now flocking to this corner of politics have altogether wilder and stranger ideas, that often owe more to the fringes of the Weird Online Right than the Founding Fathers. And they’re the ones with the energy: they still got up at 6am to lift. Even after all that bourbon. 

Who will win? My best guess is that in the short term we’ll see this movement re-absorbed by the DC blob. Then there’ll be full-scale revolt by Conservatism Ink when they are, in aggregate, old enough to wield power. And then we really will be in bat country.

White House staffers, and Obama’s first Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, would ridicule Biden’s repetitious perorations that simply ignored the expert consensus: both the civilian and military chiefs in the Pentagon, backed by leading “think tank” experts, fully agreed with Generals McChrystal and (Dr.) Petraeus. They were the commanders in Afghanistan who believed that progress was accelerating as more and more Afghans were rejecting fanaticism to embrace progress… and the first-class experts agreed with them! Petraeus would soon promulgate his Counterinsurgency manual FM 3-24 ( my review: “counterinsurgency as military malpractice”).

On April 1 2011, when Mazar-i-Sharif demonstrators attacked the UN Assistance Mission, they killed three “Christians” including the female Norwegian colonel Siri Skare. This after President Karzai (yes, him) had denounced a Koran-burning incident in the United States. At no point did Petraeus stop and deplore the Koran burning, nor the murders, or the responsibility of made-in-USA Karzai for the fiasco.

Biden’s Afghanistan problem was that he could not persuade Obama because Obama was already fully persuaded. But as a new President new to Washington, new even to politics Obama simply refused to oppose the Washington consensus of  media-savvy generals, would-be tough think-tankers and CIA-friendly columnists. It all had to wait till Biden himself became President, but by then his Afghanistan policy (evacuate) had become Trump’s and so…

But in 2009, Biden’s other problem was even bigger: one more reason he wanted the US out of Afghanistan (and Iraq) was to focus on China as a rising threat, when very few Americans agreed with him, and none in the White House. At that very time — the worst of the financial crisis — the US was asking the Europeans, Japan and also China to pump up public spending to save the world economy that was falling into a depression. The Europeans were skeptical (“Crisis? What crisis?  Just your Lehman crisis, you fix it”, was the European response). Only the British responded, and the Chinese, who immediately launched Belt and Road, and other projects that deliberately employed tens of thousands with shovels — not just bulldozers. Obama was grateful and the US Treasury Secretary Geithner was ecstatic —it took two years (!) for the Europeans to react, and even then they moved very slowly, and spent very little.

In this climate, Biden was again isolated when he pointed out that China’s helpful public spending included very fast-growing military spending that contradicted its Peaceful Rise policy proclaimed in 2004. Having long chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Biden heard warnings from several experts including the present writer [The Rise of China and the Logic of Strategy Harvard U Press 2012] and more importantly, Kevin Rudd, then Australia’s prime minister, who explained that China’s leaders believed that the fatal “General Crisis of Capitalism” had finally arrived. It had come too late for the USSR but just in time for the PRC to become the world’s most powerful state.

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When Obama White House aides plaintively asked (the Treasury was more dignified) for fast spending from the PRC, its leaders took it as their licence to assert China’s power in all directions. Of that I received a personal intimation from Vice Foreign Minister Fu Ying 傅莹. She had always been a charming lady, but when I met her in Beijing at the height of the 2009 financial crisis she was almost shouting: “America is down! China is up!”. When I later complained to Zheng Bijian author of the Peaceful Rise policy he replied: “Shīkòng de mǎ”, 失控的 — “runaway horses”.

Rudd’s opinion was especially weighty because he was considered pro-Chinese (he happily speaks Chinese and even has a Chinese name, Lù Kèwén). In that year, 2009, Australia published a Defence White Paper that called for a broad coalition to contain China. At the time, India’s PM Singh refused to be diverted from the economy, Japan had its first neutralist government and Washington liked China better than Europe. It was only later that Japan’s 2010 Senkaku incident — which resulted in anti-Japanese riots, border intrusions in the Himalayas, and incidents at sea — changed attitudes. And it was only at the end of 2011 that Hilary Clinton as Secretary of State spoke of rotating out of the Middle East to focus on China, with Susan Rice on Obama’s staff strongly disagreeing… until Xi Jinping ‘s 2015 visit ended all illusions.

Again, as on Afghanistan, Biden’s China policy was anticipated by Trump, who in his own blundering way finally implemented Kevin Rudd’s coalition strategy, meeting Japan’s PM Shinzo Abe even before his inauguration, and India’s Modi as soon as he could, building up the alliances; while his White House staff cut off China from the US technology pipeline, in spite of Silicon Valley’s resistance. So it is only now that Biden can finally implement his 2009 policy — covered in opprobrium because the Afghan army had turned out to be a fraud exactly as he had predicted, leaving him only the cruel choice between sending troops back to Afghanistan or chaotic flight. But on China at least he has full support at home, and in every country around China except for Pakistan — which will not receive one cent more from Biden.

Right — and yet, in that appealingly strict dichotomy, a little bit wrong as well. And wrong in a way that matters now as we survey the scene 20 years on.

A personal memory to illustrate my point: why, in the summer of 2001, would you want to go to America to work as a BBC correspondent? America: devoid of news, its politics dull, its people porky and contented. Stay in Europe, my Brussels colleagues said, where everything is happening. The Euro is coming! The Commission has resigned and is being rebuilt! The Finns have the presidency and we’re all going to Lapland!

I hated Brussels — mainly for the weather (living on the inside of a milk bottle someone said) — but I couldn’t deny that the news was all there. From the day, in 1999, when the Austrian farm commissioner, Franz Fischler, presaged the commission’s demise with the immortal line: “I’ve resigned. I’m going for a drink,” we felt, those of us lucky to be in the Brussels press corps, at the very centre of the universe.

But, still, I hankered after the USA. The BBC view was that it was largely a features-led role — injuries caused by shark attacks were the biggest news — which required some considerable imagination to get stories that would make it onto programmes in London. A senior editor said he thought I could do better; he suggested Vietnam. But if I insisted, then my application for the vacant job of Washington Correspondent would be considered.

In my interview, I burbled about the sharks and a near-miss between a Chinese and US plane. I tried hard to hide the fact that my central concern was to see sunshine. When I got the job, I asked to delay until 2002 because I wanted to see my last real news: the introduction of Euro notes and coins at the beginning of that year. Nobody thought that a problem: a fill-in was sent to cover.

What I have just described seems now to have a faintly ludicrous, almost feckless feel to it. That’s because I think we characterise our recent history according to our current psychological state. Powered by Tony Judt’s abrupt division — before and after the twin towers — we have decided to remember the months, the years, before 9/11 as a waste of time and space, and the months and years afterwards as an angry violent period of endless wars and triumphalism and failed nation building.

From shark attacks to imperial hubris in the passing of a morning. It’s neat but it’s nonsense. My memory of Washington life – when I arrived, finally, in mid-2002 – suggests to me that the Judt picture needs revision. A period needs to be inserted between that September day and the mission of Donald Rumsfeld et al. It fuelled the mission far more than the fantasies of some neo-cons. It powered everything in my early months in Washington. It coloured all politics, all journalism, all of life.

It was fear.

We forget the fear.

I remember an early visit, after arriving in Washington DC to the hardware store to buy duct tape for the windows. We had been advised that this might be helpful in the event of a chemical or biological attack. That was what was people were expecting. Everyone thought another blow was coming and that it would be worse.

But this wasn’t what I had expected. I had come to Washington to live in a film set: I had in mind The West Wing or any number of movies in which the city shimmers as the backdrop for some eventually successful power play, a place of consequence, polished white monuments, polished black cars. Everyone and everything recognisable. Slick repartee leading to bold American decisions: “Let’s do this!”

Now we were halfway to The Road: dystopia beckoned. In the sky there was the roar of fighter jets, random but constant. On the ground there was duct tape and a glassy-eyed sense that the end times were upon us. At a dinner party to welcome us to Washington the host raised a glass for a toast: “Death to al-Qaeda!” I nearly choked but the other guests jutted out their chins and swallowed hard, as if thirsty, or just plain frightened.

This atmosphere did have consequences. As the international relations scholar, Robert Kagan has suggested, it fuelled the Bush administration’s desire to do something, not out of a sense of imperial hubris but because America was on edge;

“For better or for worse,” Kagan wrote recently in the Washington Post, “it was fear that drove the United States into Afghanistan… A collective failure today to recall what the world looked like to Americans after 9/11 has certainly clouded our understanding of the consequential decisions taken in those first years.”

The idea of a cheerful and gung-ho crowd setting off on an adventure they had always had up their sleeve, always wanted to have an excuse to use, doesn’t tally with what I experienced in Washington DC.

I saw a previously sure-footed place stumbling. At the hardware store and at the office, including the Oval Office.

And then came a new round of killing. Small in scale, but psychologically undermining, they re-opened the bigger wounds. One death, in October 2002, was close to my home in peaceful north west Washington: a woman called Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera was filling her car with petrol when there was a sound described as “like a tyre blowing out”.

She was shot. At the age of 25. Married with a three-year old daughter. She was one of 17 victims of a duo who became known as the Washington snipers. They had a rifle with a long-distance sight and a car with a boot they had adapted to allow them to fire from. In a world of spiralling violence, a world in which fussing about shark attacks and the Euro notes and coins seemed so distant, the snipers added to the potent mix. I called my wife once from the corridor in the Pentagon outside the office of the deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz, to tell her there had been another shooting and maybe the kids should go home from the park. This was not normal and yet it was; it had become normal. Down the corridor there was a hole in the Pentagon where one of the 9/11 planes had hit. Who knew what normal was, or would be?

Even when the snipers were caught there was no sense of proper victory: their evil derangement (the older man had been damaged in the army, the younger was just angry) seemed to add to a sense of a world losing its moorings.

The British writer Jonathan Raban, writing in 2004 about his adopted nation, said: “It’s as if America, since September 11^th, has been reconstituted as a colonial New England village, walled in behind a stockade to keep out Indians.”

That was the mentality: I saw no hubris on the streets of Washington DC. Only unity and fear.

I wrote two of them, both hugely optimistic about the place. One is literally called Have A Nice Day. I hailed Americans’ sobriety and the gentle virtues of their system of government. It was published in 2009. How was I to know they were about to get high on Fentanyl and elect Donald Trump?

Anyway, it is with some annoyance that I have to tell you my friend Nick Bryant, the BBC’s New York correspondent, has written the antidote to all these vapid takes, mine included. Nick comes across on the news as a bit of a lad — actually he is a bit of a lad — but he is also a historian with a deep understanding of what makes America tick. And When America Stopped Being Great is an absolutely belting achievement for a hack, and an Englishman to boot. It is, as the title suggests, an elegy for a lost nation and a lost cause. The Washington Post gave the book a long and favourable review, calling it, “riveting, often revelatory, crammed with facts, occasionally personal, and almost always depressing”.

It is also wrong.

Not in its description of modern-day America, which Bryant knows well and captures superbly. The inequality, the intellectual poverty, the extremism, the mass shootings, the end of civility in debates on abortion or guns or anything. But he is wrong about the constitution. He points out — rightly — that it’s under pressure from modernity. A good example: Democrats can win the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, but the Republicans have nominated 15 of the last 19 Supreme Court justices. “That is why,” Bryant writes, “talk of a reboot or a reset of the current obsolete operating system is so misplaced.”

Really? Tinkering could sort things for another hundred years or so. Fixing the Senate to reduce the impact of the rural minority won’t be decorous or easy, but is it impossible? Might an America that conquered the empty(ish) spaces in the first place not manage to reinvigorate them, repopulate them with businesses no longer tethered to coasts — or physical places at all — and so rebalance political power?

Others have also thought the place was going to the dogs. I mean properly believing the system to be broken. So perhaps the answer to the current crisis, as Dennis Rasmussen suggests in his thought-provoking book Fears of a Setting Sun, can be found in the fears of her founders. The men who invented America mostly thought their invention a disaster, a mess from the start. As Rasmussen points out, even in George Washington’s time hatred poisoned everything: “The two main parties saw and treated each other not just as opponents who advocated the wrong policies, but rather as enemies of the Constitution who actively sought to subvert the basic principles of the Revolution… Newspaper polemics included ‘some of the ripest vituperation in American literary history’, in the words of one scholar. Cries of treason entered virtually every political debate, fears of foreign plots abounded, and physical violence was lamentably commonplace.”

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Rasmussen’s book is important because it reminds us not only that the founding fathers were disappointed with their creation but that they had reason to be. It really was a basket case (a “shithole country”, to use Trump’s terminology). With the notable exception of James Madison, Rasmussen writes, all of America’s early leaders, including Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton, were pessimistic that the American experiment in republican democracy would endure. They thought that Americans were too venal or stupid to cope with politics. They thought the federal system would buckle. They thought factions would bring the whole edifice down.

“The founders,” Rasmussen tells us, “frequently predicted that the republic that they had established would not last beyond their own generation — that the union would soon be sundered, that a new constitutional convention would have be to called, or that the government would gradually lapse into a hereditary monarchy.”

They also thought foreigners would interfere with American elections and affect the results. Ok, not Russia, but still, the idea of “intrigue” from abroad is not new. Nor is the idea of hereditary rule — of the kind that pits Trump children against Biden children or Clinton children or perhaps even Obama children into the distant decades. Adams predicted it; he thought it inevitable. He would not be delighted by the news that Rudy Giuliani’s son Andrew wants to be New York state’s next Governor, but he would not be surprised.

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And on and on the jeremiads go; down the ages they echo. Even Jefferson, the most optimistic of the founders, succumbs to disillusion in old age. Only Madison stands up for America and thinks it might work out alright, and he does so because, Rasmussen says, he compares the place to other regimes, not to some idealised perfect system of government.

Perhaps that is the key.

So how are they doing now, the Americans, post Trump? Better or worse than China on freedom; than Russia on state sponsored crime; than the EU on technological achievement? America is indeed badly governed and horribly divided, but is it moribund, as Nick Bryant argues, or merely troubled? Bryant suggests that if his young daughter wanted to see the most thrusting nation in the world, China might be the place to visit — though he hopes she would recognise the cruel authoritarianism of its system. Otherwise she could go to Australia for its lifestyle, an Asian mega-city for a glimpse of the future.

These places all have their strengths — though China will strike many as a pretty unconvincing role model — but none is anything like as vibrant as America, where everyone has come to play. America, where anything might happen — from a school shooting to the conquest of cancer. A nation that can combust with coronavirus but then invent and manufacture multiple vaccines and distribute them in huge numbers. A nation that can delegitimise government and then (perhaps, under Biden) rediscover its importance. A nation often deranged, but seldom stumped for long.

Madison’s other gift to modernity was a belief that politics could be a constant, unending argument without any shared understanding of the common good — but still work. He saw all America’s bipartisan talk as nice to have but unnecessary. Perhaps America was never meant to be united, free from factions, common in purpose. Perhaps it was always best seen as a herding of political cats, hissing and fissiparous from the start.

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Seen through that lens, Donald Trump looks less frightening. As Rasmussen suggests of the modern era: “We no longer face repeated, serious threats of secession and civil war. Political violence is far less common today … No contemporary election can compare with the presidential election of 1800 — a contest between Jefferson and Adams, two of our most revered founders — in terms of sheer viciousness. Today’s much-maligned ‘mainstream media’ is in reality far more responsible and fact based than the newspapers of the 1790s.”

America’s problems are more intractable but less existentially threatening than many suppose. They were there from the start. They are there today. And tomorrow?

I am not betting against the place. Nick Bryant says he fears more American Carnage, to use Donald Trump’s memorable phrase from his inaugural speech. It is true that some on the American Right have given up on their fellow citizens — particularly those with darker skin who have more recently arrived. It is also true that plenty on the Left have done the same thing, with rural white folk, whose “deaths of despair” can feel rooted more in lost status than lost life chances. It is true, too, that too many people are shot — or shoot themselves — though you have to be careful here. Most American lives are free of violence and the number of households with guns — around 42% — is not much changed from decades ago: they just have more of them.

Neither Rasmussen nor Bryant reach firm conclusions. This is wise. There is no American denouement in the offing. Any properly terminal decline, or reset towards revivification, will be imperceptible at first, and argued over forever. That’s always been the point of the place. The argument about the best path to political progress is not always edifying but is always, and forever, worth having. And America, forever, will be the place to have it.

Old foreign policy paradigms also don’t die, but unlike old generals, they don’t just fade away. They tend to be kept alive by the policy elites long after they cease to align with the national interests, as the elites resist pressure to take a hard look at received wisdom and come up with new ways to protect and advance the nation’s interests. 

If new discoveries challenge scientific paradigms and accelerate the process of change, international crises, wars in particular, play a similar role in forcing the elites and the public to reassess the reigning foreign policy paradigms. They do so by demonstrating the costs of continuing to maintain the status quo, but sometimes there needs to be a disrupter to challenge and remake the status quo.

From that perspective, the significance of the peace agreement signed by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Israel last week, a diplomatic win delivered by President Donald Trump, went beyond ending a state of war that did not actually exist between two small Arab Gulf states and Israel.

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Of course Trump can win

By Matthew Goodwin

Recall that Trump is the President who, since he ran for office in 2015, has been disparaged by members of Washington’s foreign policy establishment — the Blob — as having no experience in world affairs; a boorish and know-nothing chancer without the qualifications to lead the world’s only remaining superpower.

He was described by elites in Washington as an “isolationist” intent on destroying the post-1945 “liberal international order,” and a crude nationalist, who bashes America’s traditional allies while trying to be friends with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Eventually he’d end up drawing the United States into military conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere, perhaps even into a nuclear war. 

That these forebodings came from the same people who have been responsible for promoting policies that drew the United States into two catastrophic U.S. military interventions in the Middle East might have been cause for greater introspection.

But instead, they’ve continued to mock Trump for his political naiveté and gaucherie. For instance, they laughed when the President appointed his young son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a real estate executive, to make peace in the Middle East with the ‘Deal of the Century’.

Certainly, there’s an interesting comparison to be made between Kushner and President Barack Obama’s Secretary of State John Kerry, a Man of the World who had schmoozed with the elites in Davos and dined with almost every living world leader, and who was in charge, among other things, of securing Middle East peace.   

In order to achieve that goal, Kerry assembled a large team of foreign policy wonks with PhDs in international relations from the Ivies. He spent close to two years shuttling between Middle Eastern capitals, and doing the right thing — as the elites sees it — by putting pressure on Israel to make concessions to Palestinians suffering under Israeli occupation. Of course, nothing actually came out of all of this, which is awkward given the fact that Kerry was operating within the accepted U.S. Middle East paradigm. 

It was John Kerry who predicted that there would be “an explosion” if America moved its embassy to Jerusalem, in “not just in the West Bank, and perhaps even in Israel itself, but throughout the region”. And in 2016, he prophesied that “there will be no separate peace between Israel and the Arab world. I want to make that very clear to all of you.”

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Can bad men do good things?

By Stephen Pollard

Washington’s foreign policy establishment has clung for years to the dogma that the United States could not achieve its goals in the Middle East without resolving the Palestinian-Israeli issue: There is not going to be peace and stability in the Middle East until Washington forces the Israelis to withdraw from the West Bank and deliver the area to the control of the Palestinian leadership.

By negotiating the third historic Arab-Israeli peace treaty, Trump was in some senses presiding over a memorial service for this old way of thinking, as adhered to by the likes of John Kerry.

He might have muddled his way through, but Trump is the first President in decades to have charted a new path in the region. It was he who begun asking questions that should have been raised in the aftermath of the Cold War. For example, why are we in the Middle East anyway? What are exactly U.S. interests in the region at a time when America has become energy independent? And are we really advancing our interests by deposing rulers in the region and disrupting the status quo? 

He rejected the all-too-familiar advice of the members of the foreign policy establishment to force a regime change in Syria; to punish Saudi Arabia and Egypt for their human rights violations; to pressure Israel to make more concessions to the Palestinians; and to allow Iran to fill the vacuum created by U.S. disengagement from the region.

As Trump saw it, American policymakers had to stop fantasising about creating a “new Middle East” through neo-conservative prescriptions like nation-building by accommodating radical Islamist forces like the Iranian or the Muslim Brotherhood, as advocated by Obama and now by the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

Instead, the Trumpist approach toward the Middle East centres on the idea that the Americans need to support those forces in the Middle East that are ready to protect the region’s best interests without requiring direct U.S. military intervention i.e. most of the Arab-Sunni regimes and Israel.

It did therefore make sense to create the foundations for a new balance of power in the Middle East. Specifically, this means forming a regional alliance between Israel and most of the Arab-Sunni states, backed by Washington, and aimed at countering the power of Iran and its regional partners.

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Will America ever be great again?

By Justin Webb

The United States would continue providing its allies with military support and perhaps serve as a balancer-of-last resort, ready to intervene if a global player was threatening the status quo.

This breakthrough has come as another shock to a foreign policy establishment consistently wrong-footed by the Trump administration. Remember it was them who warned that Trump’s approach towards North Korea would risk igniting a nuclear war. On Iran, they said that rescinding the nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic would lead to a U.S. military conflict.

They predicted that the world would come to an end if Washington did not intervene militarily to end the civil war in Syria. And let us not forget Trump’s alleged plans to sabotaged NATO, the United Nations and the World Bank. As for Trump’s trade war with China, there were fears of a threat to the entire global economy.

Instead, the global economy is intact (despite Covid), the World Bank remains open, and most importantly, under Trump the United States has not been pressed into new military adventures in the Middle East. In fact, he was able to get Arabs and Israelis to make peace, a goal that Obama and Kerry failed to achieve.

Trump has embraced a very pragmatic approach that assumes that foreign policy paradigms evolve in response to domestic and international changes, and are not dogmas that need to be kept alive forever. He believes that U.S. national interests and not some universal dream of a perfect world should determine American foreign policy. As for intervention, he thinks that America should help those friends who can help themselves, and certainly not try to appease those players who hate America and what it represents.

So far it’s working despite the opposition from the Blob. Indeed, you do not need a foreign policy wonk to figure out the right approach. Sometimes all it takes is an outsider with no vested interests in maintaining the status quo — perhaps a real estate tycoon from New York for instance.