Cast your mind back a year ago.

It’s early 2025.

Donald Trump is set to be inaugurated for the second time after pulling off the most remarkable comeback in American political history since Richard Nixon in 1968. In a stunning upset, he has swept every swing state, becoming the first Republican candidate to win the popular vote in twenty years. Progressives haven’t just been defeated, they have been humiliated, forced to concede that their positions on issues ranging from immigration to crime to transgender rights are broadly unpopular and at odds with large swathes of the public. The multi-racial Obama voter coalition, which Democratic party strategists hoped would be the blueprint to secure total liberal dominance indefinitely, had fractured and been replaced with a new synergising force, one significantly younger and more diverse than anything the GOP had fielded.

The 2024 election seemed to signal a paradigm shift in not only American politics, but cultural discourse as major cultural institutions like Disney and Netflix shifted rightwards, axing DEI schemes and amplifying conservative voices in the hope of currying favour with the new administration and integrate themselves with what they thought to be a burgeoning political movement that would define the next generation.

For the first time, Trump had tangible cultural power, particularly in the sports world. He attended Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans where he was received enthusiastically. Pro athletes celebrated goals and touchdowns by breaking out the “Trump dance.” Amongst the Left, there was growing consternation that the Right had achieved massive cultural power through influencers, popular YouTube shows, and comics, causing many journalists to loudly proclaim the death of the liberal experiment.

The rise of the “Trump dance”—seen everywhere from college football stadiums to international soccer—was a sign of the wider cultural normalization of Trump. He had gained ground with a lot of people who, not so long ago, didn’t like him at all. Young men, in particular—not just white men without college degrees, but from a wide array of social, racial, and economic backgrounds—had warmed to the president. They thought he was funny, someone worth imitating—and, importantly, saw no social cost for embracing him.

And Trump was winning over these people in part because America had wholly rejected the liberal cultural hegemony it had been subjugated to for 20+ years. Democrats had become the condescending, morally-lecturing HR department, who demanded that every joke, every comment be filtered through a before approval. They wanted to police the thoughts and speech of every person who dared to stray outside their socially acceptable perimeters.

Fast forward to the present. While an eternity feels as if it’s passed since then, the cultural dominance enjoyed by MAGA lasted fleetingly, a brief cacophony that drowned out the airwaves and spread its tentacles across the internet zeitgeist before ignominiously retreating just as quickly as it had emerged. Trump now prefers to stay at home tweeting from the refuge of Mar-A-Lago rather than wallowing in the adoration of the crowds. All of his allies are too afraid to show themselves in public in fear of rallying protestors. And the best counter-programming his allies can come up with is a performance by one of the most talentless, washed-up performers American culture has produced in the last quarter-century whose song lyrics consist of mating with fish.

Is it any surprise then that Trump’s support among young people has cratered over the last year, with approval among voters aged 18 to 29 at 25% and 67% disapproving, down from 50% approval and 42% disapproval in Feb 2025. His popularity is just as dire with Latinos and Asian-Americans, two demographics instrumental in his election victory. A lot of this can be attributed to a case of the midterm blues, voters growing disillusioned as the lofty campaign promises hit the wall of reality, but the extent and pace at which Republicans have lost their mandate is unprecedented in modern American history.

This is a familiar, lowly position for the right, which has spent most of the last half-century whining about how American popular culture is mean to conservatives. But what is surprising is that, a year ago, it seemed like that was finally changing. The right had made real progress, from podcasters (and comics) like Joe Rogan and Theo Von to comics (and podcasters) like Matt Rife and Tony Hinchcliffe, to the aforementioned athletes doing the Trump dance last fall and winter.

Instead of delivering the results he had campaigned and been elected on - reducing the cost of living, ending the forever wars, streamlining bureaucracy with efficiency savings - Trump has betrayed everyone who voted for him, chasing the adoration of the Zionist lobby, aided by a cadre of sycophants who dare not to question their infallible messiah. The end result: an increasingly isolated administration.

The biggest story of the last year is that Trump has, in a very short amount of time, squandered most of his political capital by running a directionless and incompetent administration that stumbles from one scandal to the next with very little tangible accomplishments to brag about. He has hemorrhaged the vast majority of his newly-won supporters and even alienated long-term allies. But the second biggest story is that the Right has squandered all of the cultural capital his election brought them.

It’s a damning indictment of how political movements entirely predicated on nothing more than grievances and tearing things down without any other purpose rather than blind rage are not built to last. Fundamentally, they are destined to fail because their very foundations are built on little more than a continuous cycle of resentment, fueled by professional outrage tourists who offer no compelling alternative. Dominating culture makes it a lot harder to be mad at things, so they prefer to shout from the sidelines in perpetual opposition.

When you look at liberals, you see artists, musicians, directors, writers - a versatile ensemble of creatives responsible for the media we all lovingly consume. It’s through this vector they subconsciously shape and mold public opinion. There is something of substance for people to latch onto. The right has no such thing. It doesn’t nurture talent. Creatively bankrupt, they’re back to pretending to like Kid Rock, while everyone in the country gets to enjoy the Super Bowl halftime show.

When thinking of England, one may imagine cosy villages nestled inside rolling verdant hills, old stone forts dating back to the first Roman settlements under overcast skies, streets lined with red phone boxes and red double-decker buses, people queuing in the morning for their tea and scones. Stereotypical as they may be, not long ago, this was what came to define most of the United Kingdom, an island renowned for its adherence to order, discipline and good manners, with cherished traditions and a shared identity confidently evoked by the citizens in their everyday customs. It was fertile conditions like this which gave the world Shakespeare, Austen, Tolkien and many other great writers and scholars that graced language and culture.

Enter instead the modern UK: rucksacked Deliveroo cyclists in convoy, swarming along road and pavement. Tattered, pockmarked high streets, enlivened only by phone repair shops, chicken shops and random outbursts of violence. And, most prominently, Black and South Asian men, the former threateningly ski-masked and communicating exclusively through drill rap, the latter combining an aggressively masculine form of Islam with inner-city gang culture. Welcome to “the yookay”, the verbal and social corruption of the UK. The grubby successor state to the country once known as Britain, now possessed by third-world immigrants, alien cultures and mounting anarchy.

Rather than an organic process happening naturally over decades, however, the multicultural transformation of Britain was spearheaded by think tanks and editorials, birthed in Whitehall and then disseminated across the country in large bursts. No warning was communicated to the people already living there. Their objections were overruled and it was calculated that since the people would never accept such a drastic change willingly, the only way in which such a paradigm shift could occur was through force.

Born from the late 1990s, when the country first opened its doors to embrace the world’s masses, the Yookay is a distinctly Blairite experiment, a petri dish interested more in destroying something beautiful than creating something new. Forget the invasion of Iraq, the Good Friday Agreement or even devolution, this rapid demographic shift is the true lasting legacy of Blair - his magnum opus, if you will. Multiculturalism imposed from the top down by a man with a messiah complex, drunk on delusions of grandeur, wanting to sear his mark on British society anyway he could, even if it meant striking a match on gasoline.

When it emerged as the guiding organisational principle of the British state, multiculturalism was sold, in the words of the hugely influential Parekh Report, as “perhaps the country’s biggest single national advantage”. The arrival of peoples from all over the world, bringing with them their unique perspectives, cuisines, religions, dresses, and cultures, would allow Britain to move on from “a narrow, English-dominated backward-looking definition of the nation” into something altogether more vibrant and exciting. Multiculturalism was to “widen a society’s range of options and increase its freedom of choice, for it brings different cultural traditions into a mutually beneficial dialogue and stimulates new ideas and experiences”. All those within society would thereby gain the opportunity to escape the narrow constraints of the culture they happened to be born into, instead becoming free to choose from the plethora of practices they would encounter every day, in doing so creating all sorts of dynamic new cultural mixes.

Envisioning a rich tapestry of cultures interwoven with shared communal bonds, the Blairite managerial class took no heed of the dissenting opinions, the fears that such rapid change could alienate those not consulted, and remolded society through the lens of their utopian vision with dictatorial conviction. To them, the ends justified the means. As they saw it, history would vindicate them as pioneers, rejuvenating a Britain conditionally stunted, unable to achieve political or economic maturity because of its innate conservatism. The entire system would have to be dismantled before it could be rebuilt.

Though his time in office ushered in the first wave of migrants, Blair’s greatest success lay more in the way he was able to dictate the terms of the following governments, who would go on to treat his guiding principle almost akin to religious doctrine, infallible and incorruptible, the new Gospel from which every policy and every decision would be measured against. A new boundary had been drawn. Even the Conservatives, despite their performative outrage, were destined to carry on the legacy they had inherited. There would be some push back, yes, but it would only amount to trivial bureaucratic tinkering. The new order had been firmly established.

“A million poor wretches, armed only with their numbers...ready to disembark on our soil, the vanguard of the multitudes pressing hard against every part of the tired and overfed West” - The Camp of the Saints, Jean Raspail.

A quarter of a century later, many of the predictions from the Parekh report have come true, though perhaps not in the way the author originally envisioned. The hope that multiculturalism would transform a nation that was grey, drab and bland into something better, more exciting and colourful, never quite materialised. Instead, Britain remains just as grey (it turns out multiculturalism could do little about the weather) and those drab cityscapes have remained just as dreary, even with the injection of halal butchers and fried chicken shops.

The exciting new aesthetic quality underpinned the appeal of multiculturalism, as the very best the cultures of the world had to offer would descend upon Britain, injecting some much-needed dynamism into a turgid and tired society, enlivening Britain into a vibrant global marketplace. Yet rather than delivering something akin to Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar, Britain increasingly resembles the low-grade commercial sprawl, devoid of taste or order, that can be found throughout the developing world. The promise was exciting new experimental fusions of disparate cuisines; in practice, the culinary fusion most commonly on offer in high streets across Britain is that of the Turkish kebab with American fried chicken, sometimes with Italian pizzas thrown in the mix for good measure. Instead of high streets full of exotic shops selling Persian rugs or Moroccan spices or French delicatessens, we get an incomprehensible number of vape shops and Turkish barber shops of dubious legality. Once mysterious religions that enthralled Anglo-orientalists have been thoroughly demystified, reduced to rackety dawah stands obnoxiously blasting nasheeds amidst backdrops of decaying commercial centres.

It’s not so much the mere existence of people of foreign origin but more the way in which they proliferate like an aggressive strand of bacteria, consuming everything in their path until the wider community is corrupted into something unrecognisable from what came before it. Rather than integrate, the arrivals force their new home to adapt and change to accommodate them in a form of reverse assimilation, which has been the biggest driving force behind the yookay-ification. A subversive mutation.

Perhaps the best encapsulation of the discrepancy between the high hopes for multiculturalism and deeply underwhelming reality is within the sonic realm, with the soundtrack of multicultural Britain becoming drill music, a genre which came to existence as a way for gang members to boast about murdering their rivals. Moral panics about popular music genres are nothing new, but those of previous eras concerned with the supposedly subversive and dangerous influence of groups like the Rolling Stones or Sex Pistols now seeming laughingly quaint in comparison to songs created for the purpose of gleefully recounting murders and mocking their dead victims’ mothers over thumping beats that all too often assaults the senses in Britain’s public spaces.

Accompanying these aesthetic changes are issues far more profound that affect innate human needs for belonging, social bonds, and a sense of dignity and pride. The aesthetic transformation of Britain has created a world that is increasingly bizarre and discombobulating, lacking any sense of familiarity or continuity.

The most mundane tasks become an experience of alienation and dispossession. Quotidian interactions that establish a local sense of belonging, like having a brief chat with a shopkeeper or receptionist, become reduced to their utilitarian minimum, lacking in the sufficient language skills or common cultural touchpoints to advance beyond a few ritualistic grunts. The ambient sound of local transport becomes a cacophony of indecipherable languages, with even the adverts making you feel out of place, encouraging you to enjoy some gupshup or give money for Zakat, whatever that means. All add to a profound sense of alienation and isolation, like your home is no longer something you can recognise or even understand. You are forced to become a stranger in your own area, where your surroundings become meaningless and devoid of anything to which you can feel personal attachment.

This is the reality of actually-existing-multiculturalism, a world of endless chicken shops and Turkish barbers, of constant unfamiliarity, estrangement, and alienation, of a common language flattened of its regional varieties into a crude Multicultural London English ‘pidgin’. This is a vision of Britain that no-one seriously defends, let alone champions as a positive model for the future. Multiculturalists cling onto a fictitious vision of what multicultural Britain should be, what they wish it to be, whilst understanding very little about what it actually is. Slogans about diversity being a strength and multiculturalism making Britain a more exciting place to live ring hollow in contrast to the tattered reality it has brought about.

When a multiculturalist seeks to defend their views, they should be bluntly confronted with the society they have created. There is no point speculating about the “mutually beneficial dialogue [and] new ideas and experiences” it might bring; instead, just look around. Go to those areas of Britain where multiculturalism has been most totalising — take a trip to Luton, Newham, or perhaps Slough — and question: “is this the kind of society I want to live in? Is this better than what came before? Is this better than the alternatives?”

Corbynism should have died a little past 3AM on the 13th of December, 2019. Jeremy Corbyn even delivered the eulogy himself at his general election count, declaring he would not lead the Labour Party into any future campaigns. “We will forever continue the cause for socialism, for social justice and for a society based on the needs of all,” he said. “Those ideas are eternal.” Set against the backdrop of a demolished Red Wall, it was less a battle cry than a death rattle.

From then on, the spectre of Socialism was exorcised from the party as Starmer and his closest circle waged an unforgiving brutal crusade to wrestle the apparatus of the party from his predecessor. Corbynites were de-selected and barred from running as candidates, even when they commanded full support of the local constituency party. In their absence, Blairites and any other obedient lapdogs groomed for power in focus group test labs in Whitehall were parachuted into safe seats, defenestrating faithful party members and entrenching themselves into the organs of power. Even Corbyn himself was removed in a public putsch that would’ve made Stalin blush from how unabashedly blatant it was. Starmer’s victory effectively banished Corbynism back to its primordial pre-2015 state — a disconnected mess in search of a cohering force, its adherents cowered and adrift.

A year into Keir Starmer’s government, however, and the spectre of Corbynism continues to haunt the British left. Coventry South MP Zarah Sultana announced, to much fanfare on social media, that she was resigning from Labour in order to set up a new party with the former opposition leader, alongside various other independent MPs, campaigners and activists, intertwining the disparate groups that represent British socialism in a new popular force. Citing the prime minister’s welfare reforms, which were tortuously voted through a few weeks ago, and his pro-Israeli tilt regarding the ongoing genocide in Palestine as their rally call, this new burgeoning movement hopes to now carve itself out a niche part in the fragmenting British political landscape. With 500,000 interested members and growing, this -as-of-yet-unnamed party aims to ecclipse the already established parties to become the largest in Britain.

It couldn’t have had come at a better time. Political conditions have never been more fertile for a left-wing insurgency than now. The Prime Minister may have passed his welfare bill, but even the staunchest ‘Starmerite’ would be hard-pressed to claim this as a success. Reforms which were intended to save £5 billion annually will now cost the Treasury up to £6 billion and No.10’s authority is in tatters following a large backbench rebellion which publicly exposed the fault lines in the Labour camp. Satiated with their first taste of victory, rebels will now find themselves more confident in challenging the prime minister’s authority, knowing they can pry concessions.

One would think having such a hard-line, Stalinist approach to party management would mean a government ultra-committed and last-focused on implementing a grand vision, a national project of renewal. But what’s it all for? What is the animating force behind Starmerism? There’s no purpose to any of it. It smacks of late-Soviet authoritarianism: repression more out of habit than belief, in the service of a dying regime nobody believes in. The Starmer-Reeves-Streeting Triumvirate staked its pitch on the ambiguous concept of growth, yet there is none. Bold reforms like overhauling planning regulations and streamlining the welfare state are now stuck in this weird limbo: chiseled down to a bare-bones state that offers nothing meaningful yet tangible enough that it still riles up its biggest detractors. All that is left is Plan C: juice the house market and deregulate the city. To summarise: a politically bankrupt vision.

It should come as no surprise then that Starmer is now less popular than Corbyn and Farage. While the two are still divisive to the wider electorate, they at least can boast of having convictions, standing by a set of principles that can galvanize their fanatical following; no one is inspired, let alone pleased with, sterile neoliberalism in its death throes.

Research from More in Common last month showed that half a dozen once-safe Labour seats in London are already poised to switch to a prospective Corbyn-led party. What’s more, even Keir Starmer would be vulnerable to losing his seat in Holborn and St Pancras. The old party loyalties are dead (or at least in the early stages of terminal decay), evidenced by extreme volatility in polling. At the start of last year, Labour was polling as high as 49%; after a year in power, that figure is now 23%. During the same period, Reform UK has risen from just 5% to 27%. Some polls have put Nigel Farage’s party as high as 34%, a larger proportion than Labour received at the last election. Within just 18 months, Labour and the Conservatives have gone from a combined 76% of the electorate to just 36%.

While Reform has profited from disaffection on the Right, as well as from working-class voters angry about high levels of immigration, there is a fairly conspicuous gap in the political market. On the face of it, the Green Party should have been the obvious “Reform of the Left”. But the Greens have barely grown their support in the last 12 months, creeping from 7% at the general election to about 10% in polls now.

The only real surprise is how long it took for Corbynism 2.0 to get its act together: for all the shortcomings of the first version, the ideas that drove the movement have subsequently become common sense across an increasingly postliberal political spectrum. On all sides, it is now assumed that the purpose of the state is to protect a national community of producers from a parasitic globalism, and that social problems can be reduced to populist oppositions between the “many” and the “few”.

Corbyn’s much mocked post-election claim that he “won the argument” is, to an extent, true. He was, as it turns out, on the “right side of history” — albeit not, perhaps, in the way his supporters like to think.

Somewhat awkwardly, given the anti-capitalist pretensions of Corbynism, its history is that of capitalist development itself. After the 2008 crisis instigated the unravelling of neoliberalism, the consensus across global and political divides today seems to be that only a more state-driven economy — with greater barriers to the movement of goods and people — can keep the capitalist show on the road. In retrospect, it is clear that Corbynism was rubbing with the grain rather than against it.

As in 2015, any new party’s success depends on whether it is able to keep together the disparate, at times contradictory, elements of its support long enough to exploit the possibilities opened up by a rapidly fragmenting electoral system.

Despite some attempted historical revisionism from some of his supporters, Corbynism was never politically coherent. This spanned two sets of struggles straddling the financial crisis. From the pre-2008 period, vague liberal-Left anti-Iraq war and pro-Second Intifada sentiment combined with a sectarianism that was variously Leninist and, in certain localities, Islamist. Post-2008, meanwhile, saw a newer, younger Left opposed to austerity and welfare cuts led initially by the horizontalist likes of Occupy and the student movement, before being co-opted by the trade union machine in the Miliband era.

Corbyn remains a valuable asset to the British Left. Whereas other figureheads would have been too precise about their worldview to please the motley crew this movement assembled, his moralistic platitudes about peace and justice seemed to create a common, if vague, cause.

That does not mean there isn’t challenges ahead for this new British Left.

Labour’s Pasokification may have enabled the rise of the Corbynites, but Starmer’s triumph last year killed the idea that they were the Left’s best shot at winning power post-Blairism. This new movement is at once profoundly different from the giddy optimism which defined the early days of the Corbyn project, and a fruitless effort to recapture the magic of 2017.

The issue is that there is a very fragile potential coalition to hold together. It is set to include socially conservative Gaza independents with whom Corbyn sits in Parliament, Leninist organisers and operators with whom he has long surrounded himself, plus socially liberal young Leftists who likely feel the pull of the Green Party under a potential Zack Polanski leadership. In the intense social media heat of how views are aired and policed on the Left today — something Corbynism 1.0 did not have to reckon with in 2015 — even the magnetic pull of Palestine may not prevent this coalition from crumbling.

We’ve seen some of these electoral experiments before, from “Respect” to the “People’s Alliance of the Left”. They tend to be led by people who, despite seeing themselves as Trotsky-style strategic geniuses, draw upon little experience of political success and operate in a state of militant obscurity happily disconnected from public opinion. The legacy of Corbyn’s leadership of one of the country’s traditional parties of government, however, means the current provisional committee for a new party begins with a pool of existing MPs and muscle memory of steering a mass movement. Beyond this, precisely which social and political divides this iteration of Corbynism seeks to exploit is unclear. Without any capacity to convincingly call upon a “people” or “many” as its core constituency, the Left has little to say on the national stage other than “nobody likes us and we don’t care”.

For Corbyn, though, that could be enough: to play spoiler, rather than claim the spoils. Even his supporters acknowledge that, initially at least, he had no intention of winning the 2015 Labour leadership contest. His goal, then and now, was to change the parameters of mainstream Leftist debate, to end the party’s subjugation to New Labour and take it back towards its socialist roots. As mass politics crumbles (except possibly among the populist Right), the eking out of small victories in specific localities shaped by particular demographic dynamics could still make heavy political weather.

Five years ago, as Covid-19 ravaged New York City, claiming the lives of 45,000, Andrew Cuomo was at the apex of his political power. Watched by millions as he delivered daily televised briefings as the governor of New York, he offered a stable and moderating force in the state of New York at such a tumultuous time. Many flirted with the idea that Mr. Cuomo would replace Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket or run for president in 2024. Zohran Mamdani, a then-unknown 28-year-old, was running for State Assembly as a democratic socialist in the gentrifying Western Queens neighborhood of Astoria.

He would prevail by fewer than 500 votes.

So much has changed since then that it’s almost akin to a Shakespearean tragedy, with its twists and sudden upheavals. Mr. Cuomo’s star began to wane in light of the revelation that his administration had deliberately withheld the date of COVID-19-related deaths in state nursing homes by as much as 50 percent. Any support Cuomo had left vaporised after eleven women brought forward credible sexual harassment charges during his time as Governor, leading to his fall from grace and flight from Albany. Meanwhile, Mr. Mamdani, the David in this story of David vs Goliath, steadily built up a reputation in the New York City Senate as a reliable and down-to-Earth representative, eager to champion the interests of the city’s most vulnerable constituents. He commuted to work on the subway, met constituents in their homes and workplaces and emphasised with their concerns and needs.

Until Tuesday night it seemed unfathomable that the Cuomo legacy, a defining feature of the politics of both the city and state for over 30 years since Andrew’s father, Mario, served as Governor, could be defeated. So entrenched was the family in the inner workings of , it was effectively akin to a strand of the state’s DNA, synonymous with power and prestige. Every major powerbroker in the Democratic Party rallied around Mr. Cuomo, from former president Bill Clinton to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

When Mr. Mamdani entered the race, it wasn’t difficult to reach the conclusion that he would just become another footnote swept up in New York City’s rapidly changing political tide. For most of the race, the idea Mr. Mamdani could be competitive, let alone win, was considered an impossibility, a political anomaly. He was a no-name senator with few achievements to list, going up against a political titan with instituional backing.

Yet, as the polls closed across the five boroughs, it quickly became clear that Mr. Mamdani would not only defeat Mr. Cuomo, but by a convincing margin, winning the most votes in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens. He did so by assembling a wildly diverse coalition of college-educated Whites, Latinos and Asian-Americans, under-employed 20- and 30-somethings, single mothers, and immigrants - Marx’s much-maligned lumpenproletariat.

While Mr. Cuomo’s core coalition bookended the ends of the economic spectrum (the wealthy and the poor), Mr. Mamdani’s coalition was the in-between (working-, middle- and upper-middle-class renters spanning white, Hispanic and Asian neighborhoods). Rooted in ideology, age and a relentless cost-of-living message, Mr. Mamdani’s unique campaign outperformed expectations across the five-borough mosaic. He did so by staying relentlessly on message and grounding that message in affordability. Ask an Andrew Cuomo voter for some of his top policy ideas, and they will probably struggle to name one. Ask a Mamdani voter, and I bet he or she could name a few: “Freeze the rent,” “free buses,” “a city you can afford.”

Mamdani’s pitch was simple: the cost of living is crushing working people but the municipal government can lower costs and make life easier. He vowed to bring down rent, boost the standard of public transit, and support families. These are hardly radical ideas. Really, they are basic social-democratic policies which wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in Berlin or Barcelona. But in American politics, particularly in the Democratic Party’s calcified centre-left wing, they represented something genuinely threatening: actual change.

The party establishment’s impulse to stifle and ignore some of its most exciting emerging voices isn’t limited to progressives. Take Chris Deluzio in Pennsylvania or Pat Ryan in New York. While decidedly more moderate than Mr. Mamdani, both congressmen campaigned last fall on bringing down costs for people in their swing districts and taking on huge corporations and billionaires, a strategy Mr. Ryan described as “patriotic populism.” Even though it won them both races, Washington Democrats have been hesitant to embrace that strategy since. A similar complacency befell Ruben Gallego’s successful Senate campaign in Arizona, whose blunt-spoken style was seen as too risky by senior Democratic consultants.

Part of this is motivated by a fear amongst the establishment of losing their monopoly on power. Mamdani. Gallego. Deluzio. Three men of different backgrounds and conflicting rhetorical styles share one thing in common: they represent a clean break from a 40-year neoliberal consensus where economic populism is sidelined in favour of sterile technocracy: small tinkerings around the edges while the fundamental structure is preserved, to insulate party leaders and high-profile donors from accountability.

No clearer sign of this generational divide was visible in the final demographics of the race. Mamdani led among voters under 50, white New Yorkers, and college-educated voters by double-digit margins, then increased those numbers on election day. Young people, facing impossible rents and diminishing prospects, finally found someone speaking their language rather than the consultant-tested pablum of establishment Democrats. While older voters settled for the known quality in the former governor, shying away from anything too radical.

Andrew Cuomo, conceding the race, looked exactly like what he was: a relic from an exhausted political tradition that had finally run out of gas. Mr. Cuomo had disingenously used the Democratic primary as a vehicle to attempt a comeback and resuscitate his political career. Those ambitions failed. Cuomo thought he could coast to victory on name recognition and TV ads. He lost even after enormous sums of money were poured into the race on his behalf by big donors, including former Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The days where name recognition brought loyalty may be at an end as the party starts to graviate away from the Clinton-dominated nucleus and towards a younger, more experimental centrifugal force.

Beside his policies, Mr. Mamdani also got creative about how to communicate his message. He broke through on social media with viral videos that reached beyond the professionally online crowd. While Mr. Cuomo and his allies wrote off Mr. Mamdani’s social media success, they missed how it was manifesting in palpable enthusiasm across the city. We saw that at the ballot box on Tuesday, but even before they started counting votes, you could feel it. Mamdani also had a robust field operation that reached voters who had long been ignored or taken for granted by politicians like Cuomo. You could see that when Mr. Mamdani walked the length of Manhattan — about 13 miles. As he walked by, street vendors recognized him and shook his hand. Outdoor diners jumped up from their tables to tell him that he gave them hope, and young people waiting outside of bars screamed his name and took selfies with him. Some supporters joined in on the walk after they said hello. It reminded me of the “Forrest Gump” scene where he runs across America and slowly crowds join in behind him.

While the next mayor isn’t officially to be decided until November, given how Democratic-friendly the city is, the primary is all but a coronation. Barring some major upset, Mamdani will be New York’s next mayor. The next question is how he governs.

Looking to the future, there are two plausible outcomes for a Mamdani mayoralty:

1. If he translates this momentum to tangible change, appoints competent people and compromises with the City Council and Albany, he could end up as a fairly successful reformer. Progress could be made on tackling the city’s unaffordability crisis, lowering rents and providing free bus travel. More importantly, the city’s powerbase could perhaps be wrestled away from the corrupt police unions and Wall Street bankers and given back to ordinary New Yorkers. A tall order, but not an impossible one. Progressive mayors like Michelle Yu of Boston already offer a blueprint that proves electoral politics can be a force of good.

2. The more cynical interpretation is that Mamdani inherits the poisoned chalice that has been the downfall of other ambitious men and becomes just another name in a growing list of failed NYC mayors. It must be said that many of his stated goals are rather flatly impossible. Free buses and rent freezes sound lovely until you start asking about municipal budgets and state preemption. City-run grocery stores? Ask anyone who’s dealt with New York City bureaucracy about that one. Governing well is just not something mayors in NYC can do given how low-information voters perpetually complain and think they have far more power than they do in reality, especially since transit, one of the biggest issues, isn’t even fully in their jurisdiction. To successfully wage his reforming crusade (or, perhaps, more appropriately, Jihad), Mamdani will need to demonstrate remarkable flexibility and prowess, something the untested 33-year-old may struggle to channel.

In the broader context, Mamdani’s victory offers a few lessons. Democrats need to learn how to embrace candidates who can authentically speak to the electorate they’re running to represent, whether they’re in red, blue, urban or rural areas. And they should not be so quick to squash exciting candidates just because they seem risky, look different or challenge the status quo. Sometimes it's worth experimenting with new things.

Poland Shifts Right

Last Sunday, MAGA won in Poland. Maybe not directly, but it definitely won a symbolic victory. After voters rejected Trumpist candidates in recent elections in Canada, Australia and Romania - enough to suggest that an international anti-Trump wave was starting to build momentum and halt the populist surge - Polish voters went the other way. They elected Mr Nawrocki, a conservative historian and former boxer with a taste for chauvinistic qualities, rejecting Rafal Trzaskowski, the liberal mayor of Warsaw, in what became the closest fought election race in modern Polish history. The country has never been more polarised than it is now, with the final election results being an almost perfect 50-50 split. Just two short years after delivering Donald Tusk, the former President of the EU commission, a strong liberal mandate, Poland has once again swung right. Like the US election of 2024, it was another bruising reminder of how populism remains resilient and sticky and that liberals have yet to find a reliable formula to defeat it.

For Polish liberals, everything was on the line. While Mr Tusk’s centrist coalition had defeated the nationalist Law and Justice Party in 2023’s parliamentary elections, it won a small majority in the lower parliament, made worse by the need to juggle several factions at odds with each other in a fragile alliance of social democrats, social conservatives, economic and social liberals, and centrists.. Given the coalition’s wide-ranging ideological divisions, it has meant that Mr. Tusk has spent more time juggling several contentious issues to satisfy his coalition partners rather than making any progress on his reforming crusade. Plans to legalise abortion, recognise same-sex civil unions and wrestle control of the institutions from PiS’ loyalists have been put on the backburner while the government has prioritized issues that all members agree on, which, in such an increasingly polarising political climate, gets fewer with each passing day. The one adhesive holding them together, opposition to PiS, now finds itself weakened by the respectable performance of the party’s presidential candidate, effectively a referendum on their term in office. The outcome is a resounding rejection of the Tusk mandate.

Nawrocki, inevitably, has been painted by European media as an existential danger, the figurehead of a nationalist wave sweeping the continent. These concerns are not entirely baseless — Donald Trump blessed Nawrocki in the Oval Office in early May; his Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, travelled to Poland and endorsed him — but they are perhaps exaggerated. Nawrocki is not a fascist, nor is he an aberration. He is a product of a specific moment in Polish politics, which are riven by competing ideas of sovereignty and identity. Its recent economic success has bred the climate for the re-emergence of atavistic impulses — religious, cultural — that had been suppressed in its people’s pursuit of prosperity. Poles, possessing an economy that is the envy of the continent, are now squabbling over what it means to be Polish and European, Christian and modern.

The presidential race has exposed the depth of division over these questions. The loser, Trzaskowski, is a polished career politician. A member of the Civic Platform party and an Oxford alumnus, he is liberal, competent, fluent in English, and admired in Brussels. As Warsaw’s mayor, he marched in Pride parades and ordered the removal of crosses from government buildings — a choice that, while earning him the adulation of metropolitan Poles, infuriated conservatives who see their civilisational history as being inextricably bound with the Catholic Church. Their champion is Nawrocki. He was born into extreme poverty in the port city of Gdańsk. Ports, particularly in impoverished places, tend to become familiar with organised crime, and Nawrocki was exposed to this world at an early age. He sought release in athletics, became a boxer, and occasionally participated in football brawls. Working as a security guard at a hotel, he is alleged to have procured prostitutes for guests. This is not the curriculum vitae of a defender of Christian values.

But the new president is the beneficiary of a deepening resentment among those Poles who — convinced that their social values are being eroded and their sovereignty endangered by liberal elites pandering to Brussels — are willing to trade character for belligerence.

Nawrocki’s election ensures that PiS retains its stranglehold on Poland’s governance. The suggestion that it paves the way for a broader PiS victory in the next general election does ignore, though, the extent to which the duopoly of PiS and Civic Platform — the two default parties of government — has disillusioned and pushed many young Poles to the extremes. In the first round of the presidential poll, fewer than 25% of voters between the ages of 18 and 29 backed either Nawrocki or Trzaskowski. This is a steep decline from the presidential election of 2020, when almost 45% of that demographic cast their ballots for the mainstream candidates.

While Tusk has sufficient numbers in parliament to sail through this tumultuous storm, the only way out of this gridlock for Poland is a reconciliation of sorts between Tusk and Nawrocki — or a collapse of Tusks’s government. Either way, what lies ahead for Poland is a period of political chaos.

Dutch Political Turmoil

Political dysfunctional seems to be the new norm in Europe. Where one government rose, another fell.

Following months of building tension, the Dutch government, a coalition of right-wing parties, collapsed after the largest party, the PVV, withdrew from the agreement. Devoid of a parliamentary majority, snap elections have been called for October.

Mr. Wilders was able to form a government with three other right-wing parties — the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, a center-right party; the Farmer Citizen Movement, a populist pro-farmer party; and the New Social Contract — after more than six months of wrangling. It was the first government to include Mr. Wilders’s party, which mainstream parties had previously shunned.

Together, the four parties held 88 seats in the 150-seat House of Representatives, a comfortable majority. But in a sign of how uncomfortable their arrangement was, the parties agreed not to name any of their own leaders as prime minister. Instead they settled on Mr. Schoof, a civil servant with no elective office or party affiliation.

In effect, it was a marriage of convenience. No parliamentary arithmetic existed for any other possible arrangement, so they tied the knot, said their vows and hoped and prayed their honeymoon would last long enough to deliver a functioning government that could at least see a few of their interests acted upon.

It barely lasted a year.

Mr. Wilders aimed to bring the “strictest migration policy ever” to the Netherlands, including calls for a complete halt to asylum, a temporary stop to family reunions for asylum seekers who had been granted refugee status and the return of all Syrians who had applied for asylum or were in the Netherlands on temporary visa. But his coalition partners, who lean significantly closer to the progressive axis in comparison, refused to sign onto the demands, considering them too ‘extreme’. The partners effectively conspired with the Dutch elite and opposition to deny the Dutch people’s wish for a more militant immigration policy. Faced with the prospect of languishing in a government rudderless and unable to fulfill his central demands, Mr. Wilders’ perhaps made the best strategic choice given the circumstances and offered to let the rotten system collapse rather than decay along with it. He now returns to where he is most comfortable: a disruptor, the demolition expert assailing the bastion of establishment politics, trading in inflammatory rhetoric and bombastic declarations.

Though, the story also offers another cautionary tale of the relative ineptitude of these new populist forces, of how their quest for dismantling institutions clashes with reality when their actions fail to reach the high expectations set by their campaign rhetoric. Mr. Wilders is unlikely to return to government anytime soon. His party has been hemorrhaging support for months now and the next government will not want to waste anymore time flirting with someone so erratic. A Dutch right-wing insurgency will have to wait. Indefinitely, perhaps.

The Divorce Of The Century

I don’t think many of us were surprised that the relationship between Trump and Musk eventually unraveled. Both men are narcissists who thrive on self-adoration. It was a clash waiting to happen. Perhaps what was most shocking was the level of vitriol and undignified childishness of the bickering between the President and the world’s richest man. The break-up, we were told at first, was amicable. Elon Musk had spent long enough in government, finished the job he was hired to do, and was now leaving to spend more time with his companies. He would, of course, always be welcome back, and the Trump administration was eternally grateful for his service to America, so much so that the president personally handed the billionaire a special key molded out of gold and imprinted with the Reddit logo. That was the narrative the Trump administrated pushed. If only for a few brief moments. It did not take long for this conscious uncoupling to disintegrate into an acrimonious divorce.

Perhaps poetically for an administration dominated by online discourse, the squabble played out on the new arena of social media, where both parties proceeded to denounce each other in increasingly rabid terms. Musk accused Trump of being a hypocrite, a man who pretended to care about the US budget deficit while conspiring to make it worse. He said that Trump ought to be impeached and replaced by his vice president, JD Vance. Trump, meanwhile, hit back saying that the real problem with federal deficits was all the unearned subsidies and corporate welfare that Musk was leeching from Uncle Sam. And Steve Bannon piled on calling for Musk to be deported back to South Africa and have his citizenship revoked. By now, the love-in on the White House lawn, with Trump advertising Tesla and Elon expressing devotion, is but a distant memory. Bridges have been burned; there will be no reconciliation.

The ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ broke the camel’s back. Musk, after spending months talking about fiscal responsibility, the danger of the exploding deficit and suffocating levels of debt, was expected to endorse a bill that would exacerbate these problems. Ketamine addict he may be, even Musk lacked the cognitive dissonance needed to accept such a jarring u-turn without rebuke. Adding insult to injury where Musk is concerned, the budget bill also terminates nearly all ongoing subsidies for EVs, while leaving the corporate welfare handouts for internal combustion engines in place. Clearly, no good deed in Washington ever goes unpunished: after sacrificing his own reputation on the Trump altar, Musk has been rewarded with a knife slipped between his precious Tesla’s ribs.

The dramatic collapse signifies a deeper shift. Washington, after all, is intensely transactional; if you donate large sums of money to a party, you naturally expect to get something in return. Given how incredibly spendthrift Elon Musk has been, it is extremely noteworthy that he would end up being denied access to the pork barrel. This is not, however, a sign that Congress has decided to reject corruption — the existence of the ‘big, beautiful bill’ is proof enough that the swamp has only gotten worse. No, the messy divorce is a sign that the political process — even the process of ordinary political corruption — is starting to break down.

The parallels between this crisis and the one that triggered the French Revolution of 1789 grow ever stronger. Elon Musk has played out his role as America’s Jacques Necker to its conclusion; he has gone from rockstar technocrat enjoying widespread popular support to spurned sidekick whose attempts at reform were frustrated and blocked by the very people who brought him in in the first place. The French monarchy did actually try quite hard to escape its looming bankruptcy during its last years in power; but, just like with DOGE, those reforms became more and more chaotic and even tyrannical or illegal towards the end, as the political system slowly collapsed into anarchy and infighting. With Trump taking the same path as Louis XVI, will he suffer the same fate?

Fresh off victory in May’s local elections, Nigel Farage, grinning ear-to-ear with that signature Cheshire-cat smile, a foaming pint of real ale in hand, stands before his newly assembled army in what might just be the most romantically English setting possible, a pub deep in Lincolnshire. He is the Duke of Marlborough reborn, a general who has never lost a battle, a man who defines the battleground on his terms and his terms only. The great leviathan beast, the Conservative party, which has remained entrenched in the county’s DNA for decades, lies dead at his feet and around its corpse the victors celebrate and toast a new tomorrow. For this army has its sights on another herculean effort: the gleaming fortress of Westminster, impregnable, but wearing with age, cracks already forming at the base of the bastille. Farage is certain, he assures the faithful, that with a few heaves, the whole decaying structure can come down.

As Reform cements its regional presence through local government, establishing the networks and strongholds of a truly nationwide political party, talk of it winning hundreds of MPs and having a role in the next government no longer seems fantastical.

Although another general election is not due until 2029, both Britain’s major parties find themselves in a brutal struggle with these populist insurgents. Labour, whose hesitant performance in government derives in part from a dizzy uncertainty about its mandate – its huge parliamentary majority resting precariously on a mere third of the popular vote – already has the bedraggled appearance of a depleted administration. Alarmingly, Reform’s populist message appears to resonate with Labour’s core working-class base, without which it might shrivel into an uncompetitive party of the urban intelligentsia. Tory anxieties are similarly existential, indeed more so. The Conservatives – reduced at July’s election to a rump of 121 MPs – face the daunting possibility of extinction.

The stunning rise of Reform UK parallels political trends across the Western world. Nativist anti-immigrant parties have displaced traditional parties of the centre right in France, the Netherlands and Italy. Populism – mostly on the right, but sometimes on the left, and often positioned as the voice of authentic working-class concerns – has disorientated politicians across the political spectrum. The mainstream left, such as the Social Democrats in Germany, no longer seems naturally attuned to the concerns of ordinary people. In the US Farage’s friend Donald Trump and his Maga followers have hijacked the Republican Party. Everywhere one looks, the momentum in politics seems to lie with illiberal populist movements and nativist start-ups.

Explanations for this widespread phenomenon tend to be correspondingly broad-based. Globalisation has been devastating for many regions that flourished in earlier phases of Western industrialisation, but are now scenes of disused factories and exhausted coalfields. Mass migration has led to further dislocation, especially for the populations of these left-behind places. This is exacerbated by “welfare chauvinism”: the benevolence that legitimises welfare states appears to extend only to one’s own kind. Commentators have also noticed across the West a cultural backlash against what is perceived as the hyper-liberalism of university-educated elites. Liberal identity politics – an emphasis on the rights of minorities, on multiculturalism and on a green agenda – as well as the opposition to it are both products of a turn against materialism, whereby an emphasis on values and identities is replacing a class politics based on economic management, wealth distribution and the burden of taxation.

Frictions between the generations and growing divergences between male and female voting patterns compound these trends. Older voters are dismayed at the whirl of social change, while an aggressive new form of masculinity among younger males – the attitudes associated with the online manosphere – questions what it regards as the lopsidedly feminised cultures of educational institutions and workplaces. Yet, whereas in previous eras traditional media outlets were able to filter out obnoxious opinion, social media algorithms now place a premium on provocation, which has the effect of bringing rowdy populism from the margins into the mainstream.

It remains to be seen how Reform weaponises this newfound power. The party, to its benefit, is relatively scarce on concrete policy details, granting it the flexibility to outmanoeuvre its opponents by adapting to the ever-changing winds of what the voters demand and never allowing itself to be properly defined, allowing voters to project what they want onto the party. If Nigel Farage were an artist, he would be a celebrated impressionist. He has a refined, seemingly effortless talent for painting the distilled essence of a political movement. What does Reform stand for? Even seasoned politicos might struggle to name or detail a Reform policy, but the party’s “vibe” couldn’t be easier to feel.

The finesse of how to govern well can wait — for now, Reform can simply ride the wave, propelled by the euphoric high of political momentum. Realism and political temperance comes second to whether “The Establishment” is running scared. The old playbook is simple: identify ruling power structures that feel distant and aloof, be they parties or institutions, and campaign against them in an uncompromising, boisterous fashion.

But Farage’s script, refined over a political career spanning decades, is changing. He has declared, both privately and publicly, that he hopes to lead Reform into government in the next election. That’s quite a shift in political aim: from outsider revolutionary to governor.

One of most effective tools in Farage’s arsenal has been his tight, clear messaging. But, as recent history tells us, marrying rhetoric with reality is a challenging business. It wasn’t so long ago that “stop the boats” was launched as a short, simple and seductive slogan. Stopping the boats in practice? Well, just ask Rishi Sunak for just how challenging three short words can be to put into effect. Recognising the challenge of governing actually requiring policy, senior Reform operatives are working to set up a politically aligned think tank to support policy development, modelled on the US think tanks that serve as ideological outriders to the Trump presidency, the FT has reported. It cited an internal document that declared the planned organisation would “support Reform with policy development, briefing and rebuttal” and seek to “change opinion around key issues and provide technocratic competence”.

But the very act of defining a policy platform will reveal tensions simmering between the surface. The prevalence of foreign money in British think tanks is quite limited — especially when compared with equivalent American outfits and their vast endowments, payrolls and genuinely global influence. But the FT reported that Reform’s proposed think tank would seek funding from “US donors from MAGA, tech [and] religious conservatives”, in addition to more regular UK sources of funding. No wonder Farage is looking abroad — the sheer scale of US political money embarrasses our own campaign and political research spending. Looking for dollars from the United States, the new Right certainly fits the pattern of Farage’s regular cross-Atlantic visits — and his genuine star appeal at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a jamboree of American Right-wing politicians, broadcasters and influencers.

But Reform’s choice to seek inspiration and funding from a country which has an entirely different political culture could become its undoing. Reform’s online activists too are steeped daily in the disputatious politics of the American Right. Emboldened and energised by a fresh Trump-MAGA victory, the American new Right might look like a winning template for populist-Right parties worldwide. But Reform should exercise caution in the lessons it draws from abroad. There is a discordance between a more pedestrian party of suburban, coastal England, and the radical libertarian-conservative ideology of Silicon Valley tech elites like Peter Thiel and Musk that leads the American new Right. They may align on attitudes to immigration and share the culture war scepticism of anything “woke”, but it doesn’t take long to find friction between the two movements. Whether you consider it a national fault or not, Brits are simply less culturally or ideologically invested than the average American in radical, sweeping changes in the scope of the state.

It’s a glimpse behind the curtains at his personal Thatcherite past. And while the Siren call of American money will be welcome to a movement without established labour union or business funding routes, Reform will have to watch itself and avoid trying to push radical American libertarianism on its more staid, less provocative voters.

Farage is self-aware about his place in British political tradition, but the way he positions himself in relation to his antecedents is at times surprising. This is because Farage – though at one time a member of the Conservative Party – presents himself as a classical liberal. In his memoirs he stresses the influence on his ideological formation of John Stuart Mill’s argument that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others”. Farage has described these as “sacred words” and maintains that his political creed is one centred on the individual’s right to “self-determination”.

The undeniable strength of the Reform and Farage brands can paper over a lot of these contradictions on the way up in the polls. When you don’t fill the policy space, voters imagine what they like, and project it onto parties they culturally identify with. But as Reform professionalises, media scrutiny intensifies, and the general election draws nearer, policy positions, influenced by think tanks, will have to start crystallising, exposing the ideological cracks in the party coalition. Farage will need to decide soon if he wants to continue to be the revolutionary leader and terroriser of institutions, or start to work out a framework for actually steering them as a leader. If these tensions aren’t addressed, expect a bumpier ride in the near future.

At their core, Reform–supporting Britons are voting against the radical, disorienting pace of social and economic change experienced in recent decades. Society has moved too fast for them, and they don’t understand it. But unlike their American equivalents, they want to ease off the accelerator, not stamp hard on the brakes. Farage the impressionist can paint feeling but a government needs blueprints, budgets and hard choices. With the local elections, it’s Reform’s first big test to see if they can actually solve the litany of problems that face the British state when given the opportunity to do so. It’s hard to resist the wealth of American money, but Reform should never forget that even if we share a language, we do not share a culture — and there has rarely been a time more in need of solutions over vibes.

Now that the dust has finally settled on Thursday’s local elections, a clearer picture is emerging of a political landscape caught in the flux of sizeable changes. The story of these locals may perhaps be the emergence of a truly multi-party Britain, as Labour and the Conservatives saw key battlegrounds slip from their grasp to insurgents on their right (Reform) and left (Greens and Independents).

While many, myself included, expected a large realignment given how increasingly unpopular the two establishment parties have become in recent months, not even the most sanguine could have predicted the sheer scale of the collapse that unfolded last Thursday. It wasn’t a light tremor, it was a seismic shift in the tectonic plates of British politics, breaking decades of entrenched loyalty for the two-party duopoly. The Conservatives lost more than half their seats while Labour recorded losses almost everywhere from an already pathetic starting position. Combined, the two main parties accounted for 35% of the popular vote, the lowest total for a local election in recorded history.

The establishment parties are firmly in retreat. None of this is new. We saw it in 2016, when the UK voted for Brexit and again in 2019 when voters used the perceived irrelevance of the EU elections to voice their disdain. Terminally complacent liberals mischaracterised these events as electoral accidents, the result of biased media reporting, or worse, of Russian intervention. There is always a story that politicians can tell themselves to avoid having to solve the problem. The surest sign of political decline is an obsession with who is to blame: as opposed to what needs to be done.

I’ve seen many commentators make the naive assumption that Reform is merely UKIP 2.0, that is to say, a protest party that will make a big scene on the political stage, make some grandstanding statements and then fizzle out just as quickly as it rose to power. But that would be a fundamental misunderstanding of the moment we are living through. UKIP was a spasm of anger, a blind rebuke of the establishment that lacked direction, discipline and organisation. Once its animating purpose had been achieved, it collapsed overnight. It was a structure built on tenuous foundations, a means to an end. Reform is a different beast entirely. It is a much more coherent movement, with defined parameters and a clear sense of purpose. It doesn’t just stand against immigration; it is a rejection of lenient judiciary sentences given to criminals, net-zero energy policies that defile the unique identity of quaint English villages, identity politics that seek to humiliate the English people, suffocating-high taxation, bloated bureaucracy and the establishment in general.

The moderate centre-right party used to be the big beast of politics. It was the party of small businesses and farmers, the party of small towns and villages, and affluent suburbia. Across the West, it was the champion of globalisation, free movement of capital, goods and people. It was the party of the Transatlantic Alliance. No longer. Last Thursday, the centre-right represented in Britain by the Conservatives suffered an electoral bloodbath in the local elections at the hands of Nigel Farage’s Right-wing Reform party.

When the Conservatives lost in 1997 to Tony Blair, they spent the next 13 years in the political wilderness, which gave them plenty of time for soul-searching. The reason they settled on for their failure was down to voters growing fatigued with a party that had held power uninterrupted since 1979. This time, there’s a feeling of betrayal, which Conservative MPs will find out is a much more powerful emotion than fatigue to overcome. When the voters’ faith in a political party is broken and an alternative willing to deliver on that broken promise presents itself, voters will flock to that alternative and once the exodus starts, it’s almost impossible to stop, let alone reverse.

Thursday’s election results made one thing abundantly clear: the Tories are a stinking, bloated carcass that will surely decompose over the coming years. Sure, perhaps someone like Jenrick can still swoop in and stem the bleeding, but any chances of restoring the party to its once dominant role in British politics is naivety bordering on delusion. Why would any conservative vote for the party of mass immigration, high taxes and high crime rates when there is another vessel to choose from? Those that are appalled by the inflammatory rhetoric and questionable closeness to Putin from Farage have a home in the now-recovering Liberal Democrats. The niche occupied by the Conservative Party in British politics is shrinking and soon there might not be any room left.

Probably the single biggest big mistake made by the centre-right was the failure to address the downsides of globalisation when voters stopped believing in that win-win fairy tale. The current system works well for those working in the service sectors of global cities, or in Silicon Valley. It also works for people who work in lithium mines or have manual skills that are currently high in demand. But it does not work for Ohio or Michigan; for Yorkshire or Lincolnshire; or Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia.

Britain attempted to disconnect itself from the current system with Brexit. But to work, that would have required a different economic model. The Conservatives did not deliver a new model. Labour isn’t either. The difference between the centre-left and the centre-right in the UK boils down to relatively minor shifts between spending and taxation, but there is no fundamental disagreement about the model.

While the inner workings of Durham county council might seem insignificant when compared to the tumultous tsunami raging across the world, its divorce from the Labour Party which once dominated its halls is a monumental paradigm shift in the dynamics of British politics. The two parties no longer seem invincible. FPTP, which once secured their dominance, is now their undoing. For the first time, other parties seem viable. Once that taboo is broken, once voters realise that other choices are available to them, its very difficult for them to return to their old voting habits.

If Labour does indeed pivot to the right, as party insiders seem to think it will to compete with Farage, then it may find itself vacating space to its left that can be filled by the Greens - who, if Zack Polanski is successful in his leadership bid, may challenge them with an eco-populist message. Or perhaps even by socialist-sympathetic independents, who are already finding strength through minority groups in inner cities to voice their grievances.

Within the coming years, it is possible that the British political landscape will look more like a mosaic, dozens of smaller parties representing incredibly niche grievances, fighting over consistencies and winning with offensively small majorities. FPTP strained to its limits. An ungovernable island.

Local elections rarely hold much significant in the UK given powerless local authorities are, but this year’s slew of battlegrounds - spanning the rural countryside of Lincolnshire to the post-industrial urban centres of the North East - offer a glimpse at the shifting dynamics of Britain’s evolving political landscape, now the most volatile it has been in decades. Inconsequential perhaps any other year, these upcoming elections could set the political narrative for the rest of this parliamentary term.

The story of these locals may perhaps be the emergence of a truly multi-party Britain, as it’s the old Labour vs Conservative battlegrounds that Reform has in its sights while the Greens and Liberal Democrats hope to galvanise left-wing agitation to Labour’s recent austerity drive.

As the polls suggest, the contest is wide open. The Conservatives are in the worst position as they are defending the most seats in more than 900 wards, which they won at the high-water mark of Boris Johnson’s popularity in 2021. Of the 23 authorities holding elections, 19 are controlled by the Conservatives and just one by Labour, with the others under no overall control.

Labour, besieged on all sides thanks to some of the ruthless measures they’ve been forced to take in office, is not in the strongest position. But the party has little to defend this year, and I wager there is even room for growth. Many of its MPs represent these shire England seats (having taken them off the Conservatives in 2024). The question is whether they can convert this into a strong local government base. While Labour is a few points below where it was in 2021, the Conservatives are down almost 20 points from 2021 and in first-past-the-post contests, that difference in support could grant Labour more than enough marginal wins to record net gains rather than losses on 1 May. This is far from guaranteed, but something to be mindful of.

Meanwhile, in the Home Counties and the West Country, the Liberal Democrats are determined to reinforce their parliamentary gains with local success. There is a chance they can continue to chisel away at the so-called Blue Wall in the country’s southwest, entrenching their support amongst affluent rural voters. The Greens, likewise, may be hoping to make gains in unexpected places, winning rural seats from the Conservatives and more urban areas from Labour.

When these seats were last up for election, it was set against the backdrop of a fairly successful vaccine rollout, which contributed to the final results, almost a mirror image of the 2019 general election: a sea of deep blue, as the Conservatives swept convincing across the country. Four years later, the UK couldn’t be anymore different. What had then been a sense of optimism - newly freed from the oppressive lockdowns, looking ahead to the post-Covid world - has now been replaced by a gloomy and defeatist spirit, as voters seem almost resigned to terminal decline.

Everyone has their own examples of this granular decay. Think of the rats, so plump off Birmingham rubbish, they’re now the size of cats; or the metal security tags protecting £4 fish fillets; or the depthless cring of police officers who dress up as Batman and Robin to catch con-artists within spitting distance of Parliament.

The decay runs much deeper. Falling living standards and a death of well paid jobs creating an expectation gap, seeding resentment and apathy through whole generations. The creeping normalisation of identiarian factionalism across British life, both daily and political, weakens our ability to function as a coherent nation. Unprecedented levels of immigration produce growing anxiety in the majority population, an anxiety that may metastasise into something darker if left untreated. Finally and perhaps more damingly of all, a rising crisis of government illegitimacy.

All of these conditions provide the fertile ground necessary for a populist uprising, one which Reform hopes to spearhead. Farage, while assailed by his fair share of scandals, has masterfully filled in this vacuum of leadership, weaponising discontent against the Conservative-Labour duopoly in an anti-establishment crusade that threatens to fundamentally reshape not just British politics but British society as well.

The party hopes to prove it can win votes off the Conservatives and Labour alike and have what it takes to be a serious force in politics. Now leading most opinion polls, the party is snapping at the heels of the Conservatives on the east coast of England, and in the Midlands, and in Kent. Lancashire, once a clear Conservative vs Labour fight, is now a three-way. Reform wants to win big in Burnley and Accrington, and may pull off a surprise in Morecambe and Lytham St Annes.

Out of all the contests taking place in the local elections on 1 May – council seats, mayors, even a by-election – the mayoralty for the new Greater Lincolnshire Combined County Authority is perhaps the most consequential, not just for the residents of Lincolnshire, but for the story it holds for the rest of the country.

Beyond the historic market square, Boston displays all the familiar signs of a decaying English town: empty shop fronts sandwiched between bookies and discount stores, anti-social youth loitering about. These issues – the hollowing out of the town centre, farming, transport, immigration - most animated the candidates. A fierce debate broke out about Ed Miliband’s climate agenda, and net zero in general. There were calls to prioritise food security and condemnation of putting solar panels on prime agricultural land. What is abundantly clear is that the sense of dissatisfaction with Westminster has only grown, fuelled by Labour decisions to restrict winter fuel payments and change inheritance tax rules on farms – critical in an area that relies so heavily on agriculture.

It is here, in the part of the country that most heavily voted Leave in 2016, that we will see if the momentum Nigel Farage’s Reform Party has been building since the general election translates into concrete results. Andrea Jenkyns, Reform’s candidate, is hoping to win in a traditionally conservative region. Her prospects in this race after defecting are being watched closely by other Tories dispirited by the state of their party and wondering if Reform might offer a viable alternative.

Panicked conversations are underway in Conservative circles regarding a potential merger or electoral pact with Reform – even the removal of Badenoch and appointment of a “unite the right” leader who can bring the two parties together. Last week, the Telegraph published a leaked recording of the Tory MP Esther McVey suggesting her party should “let” Reform win the Runcorn by-election on 1 May as part of an electoral pact where Reform would stand aside in places the Conservatives have greater chance of winning, and vice versa. It comes as Robert Jenrick, a rising star on the party’s right, has publicly voiced support for a potential merger.

That message isn’t just to disillusioned voters wondering which box to tick on their ballots. If Andrea Jenkyns can win for Reform in Lincolnshire, what does that say to other disgruntled Conservatives? The narrative here – of a Brexit-backing, Boris Johnson-era Conservative defecting to Reform and then winning – would turbocharge fears of the Tories’ demise. Conservative politicians are said to be watching intently.

If Jenkyns does win, the Tory party is braced for further defections – and for a renewed frenzy over a potential deal or even merger. But if she doesn’t, some of the momentum Reform has built up will slow. The party has poured everything it has into Lincolnshire. If it can’t win here, doubts will emerge over how solid it’s polling figures really are.

Reform leads the Conservatives by two points nationally. It has momentum. And Farage leads Badenoch on public preference for prime minister. But the stakes are high: to break the mould of politics in Britain, Reform needs to demonstrate it can make widespread electoral gains.

If Reform succeeds against Labour, either in the by-election or on councils, then fearful Labour MPs could tack right and demand Starmer do likewise. Blue Labour could become the norm, not the exception, in the factional fights over conference season. If Reform succeeds against the Tories, then Badenoch’s status as a non-entity leader will be confirmed. If Reform fails, however, then all the talk of Farage running the largest party come the next election would turn out to be little more than noise.

From laptops in South Korea to wine in Italy, from Nike trainers in Vietnam to coffee in Colombia, these array of goods, once a testament to America’s enduring role as a champion of free trade and its standing as the most lucrative market for goods from around the world, are now among the vast categories of goods subject to additional taxes after President Trump, on Wednesday, imposed universal tariffs on all U.S. trade partners. The decision marks a tectonic shift in American trade policy, which has been dominated by a neoliberal consensus since the late 1980s.

The announcement, hailed by Trump as America’s “Liberation Day,” sent shock waves across the world and raised the specter of a global trade war. Stock markets tumbled on the news, as investors were surprised at the size and scope of the tariffs. Even close allies such as Japan and South Korea were not spared. Neither were countries like Australia and Brazil that buy more from America than they sell to it. It was the latest example of his willingness to take a maximalist position, essentially daring his opponents to take him on.

Allies and adversaries are now scrambling to make sense of Mr. Trump’s tariff barrage. Some threatened to retaliate. Others openly pressed for negotiations, while some quietly pushed for concessions through back channels. Alternatives exist but there will be pain and transaction costs in any diversification.

Protectionist industrial policies are by no means new to American politics. They first saw a resurgence in Trump’s first term when the president levied tariffs against Chinese steel, some of which were kept in place by Joe Biden, who introduced additional levies on Chinese goods such as electric vehicles and solar panels. But the sheer magnitude and scope of these new ‘liberation’ tariffs is unprecedented, offering the fullest repudiation of an embrace of global free trade that began on a bipartisan basis in the 1980s.

Ask any renowned economist whether tariffs will produce economic prosperity and most of them will reply with a resounding no. Conventional theory argues that tariffs raise prices and therefore reduce consumption. In addition to raising prices, tariffs slow economic growth — thus risking stagflation, the bane of every flourishing economy. And, by protecting firms that might not be able to compete with imports, tariffs ensure that a country drifts away from the technological frontier, widening gulfs between its foreign competitors. It’s one of the biggest reasons the global economy embraced free trade in the aftermath of WW2, leading to an explosion in economic development, as middle-class families enjoyed new, cheaper foreign alternatives while developing countries reaped the rewards with new employment opportunities and a chance at modernising their societies.

Not everyone benefited from this exchange, however. In the postwar heyday of American manufacturing nearly 20 million people once made their living from the sector. The United States was a leading producer of motor vehicles, aircraft and steel, and manufacturing accounted for more than a quarter of total employment. Following the drafting of NAFTA in 1994, however, which crystallized this move to a neoliberal economic framework, working-class workers across the Midwest saw their communities dry up as factories were closed down and shifted to Southeast Asia, leading to a decline in the once mighty Rustbelt. As U.S.-based multinational corporations matured, executives and activist shareholders realized that they could often increase production at lower wages overseas, enabling higher profits and reduced prices for domestic consumers. State and federal policymakers, frustrated by testy battles with labor unions in that era of inflation, often supported such adaptations by globalizing firms.

While output and efficiency rose in America when it opened up to China in the Nineties, the gains were largely coalesced by large owners of capital, leaving small businesses and workers behind. Industrial hubs in the American interior have often withered, leaving many strongholds of Mr. Trump’s base on the economic fringes.

An expansive cohort of economists and business leaders remain deeply skeptical of the tariff campaign, however, and of its ability to reverse the decades-long drop in manufacturing employment. Few experts dispute his general diagnosis, however — echoed by a new breed of conservatives, including Vice President JD Vance — that deindustrialization caused a sort of pain that went unnoticed for too long.

President Trump’s imposition of tariffs on a scale unseen in nearly a century is more than a shot across the bow at U.S. trading partners. If kept in place, the import taxes will also launch an economic project of defiant nostalgia: an attempt to reclaim America’s place as a dominant manufacturing power.

It’s too easy to dismiss the decisions taken as the ramblings of a senile, schizophrenic, as our media is so prone to do. There is both an economic and political rationale underpinning Trump’s flirtation with tariffs. They present a chance to rebuild American manufacturing, once the cornerstone of most communities in the Rustbelt, and restore the working class to its former glory. This brings us to a different school of economic theory, one that has found itself a new home in Trump’s orbit. Economists of this kind argue that tariffs can be effectively employed in a strategy to build a country’s industrial base. The classic examples of this are postwar Japan and then South Korea, each of which rebuilt their war-ravaged economies using a combination of state nurturing and protectionism. As a result, they became global manufacturing champions. This is the model Trump’s circle wants to emulate in the hope of spurring a manufacturing renaissance in the country.

It is also a big gamble. Trump thinks - and hopes -that American shoppers are willing to pay higher prices, at least for a while, in exchange for forcing manufacturers to bring jobs back to America. It is a gamble, essentially, that protectionism works, and that the only way to solve the problem is to draw from the lessons of William McKinley, the president Mr. Trump lauded in his inauguration speech. But there are other bets he is taking. He thinks that other nations around the world will reduce tariffs and other barriers to American goods, rather than face the pain. He has argued that tariffs will provide a new revenue stream for the United States, making America less dependent on income taxes.

The fundamental problem is that it’s hard to detect much evidence of strategy in the way Trump is going about it.

For some inexplicable reason, he’s targeting countries that aren’t the source of the US’ problem. the us runs a much bigger trade deficit with China than with Canada but both countries have a similar level of tariffs. Worse, hefty tariffs on Canadian cars won’t actually benefit American carmakers because they’re highly integrated with Canadian firms, meaning that once the tariffs have been implemented, these domestic car manufacturers will be paying for the goods imported, making their products more expensive than imported models from elsewhere.

Trump’s tariffs also lack precision. he’s slapping them on indiscriminately, imposing then suspending them, or announcing carve-outs. Rather than set an economic plan and stick to it, he’s entrenched a reactive policy in which the US will play tariff whack-a-mole with trading partners. It’s hard to parse what advantage the US would gain from raising prices on Colombia coffee, for instance, because the US lacks the capacity to build its own coffee industry due to weather and soil conditions.

Rather than respond to his tariffs by altering their production plans, businesses are starting to stand back, waiting for the fog of war to lift so they can plan better for the future. Knowing the volatility of the president, many seem content enough to just wait and stick to what they’re currently manufacturing and not make big risky moves in case there is another last minute reversal.

Tariffs, when used in moderation and along a coherent strategy can manipulate the market into reducing trade deficits and shifting the demand to domestic goods, reviving national businesses. A good and more recent example to use of tariffs in practice would be the ones the Biden administration imposed on electric vehicles manufactured in China. the reason this was pragmatic was because they were a defined good from one country and were done in tandem with other efforts to substitute demand domestically by subsidizing domestic industries It sought to promote labor union empowerment across all sectors, but especially manufacturing, by backing groups like the United Automobile Workers in old industries and subsidizing new industries like green energy, with made-in-America qualifying provisions.

When applied in Trump’s manner, though, it’s akin to taking a sledgehammer to global markets.

This reveals another apparent flaw in Trump’s approach to this war. Like many declining empires, America is both overestimating its strength and underestimating that of its opponents. The American exceptionalism of recent years, in which its economy has grown strongly while other developed countries have stagnated, was always something of a debt-fuelled illusion. American borrowing has grown at twice the pace of GDP over the last few years. If the US had lived within its means, its economy would be as moribund as its G7 peers.

And where America has been profligate, its trading partners have often been prudent. This has left many of them with ample fiscal firepower to respond to Trump’s provocations. Germany, China and the EU have all announced major increases in spending to stimulate their economies. This will help soften the impact of tariffs and further encourage investors to return home and chase the higher returns on offer.

One theory is that this is all part of a plan — that Trump is deliberately engineering a downturn to squeeze excesses out of the economy before teeing up a strong rebound once his tax cuts and deregulation kick off. It would be a pugnacious approach to economic revitalization, especially since he didn’t ask for a mandate from voters to do this. But it is at least plausible, since that’s essentially what Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan once did. Still, it’s hard to square this fine-tuned strategy with the volatility of Trumpian policy-making. Besides, the tax cuts being proposed are largely baked in, being not new but an extension of the 2017 tax cuts. It’s not clear how much added stimulus they’d bring.

Whatever happens, this much is certain: the backlash from foreign countries will likely be severe and risks plunging the US into a brutal trade war where consumer prices can be expected to rise sharply, undermining one of the key pillars of Trump’s mandate to tackle inflation. But it could also trigger a global realignment that leads to a new chapter in global trade and economic theory, one where the allure of cheaper products takes a back seat for reviving domestic industries.

Culture is more than just an abstract concept that fades in and out of view when we choose to perceive it, complimenting the background of our daily lives when we log in to Netflix or switch on the TV. It is the physical manifestation of the living society it is nurtured by, articulating the parameters of debate a society engages with. This has never been more pertinent in the age of rapid information, where our perception of history, of demographics and reality itself, are distorted by the messaging of modern culture. We are – at least, society as a collective – vulnerable to subtle persuasion. And because of that it is also a powerful social engineering tool that can and has been weaponised to manufacture consent for certain ideas and beliefs.

To better represent this development, a new term has entered the lexicon: ‘Blackwashing’. A juxtaposition to ‘Whitewashing,’ it refers to the practice of replacing a traditionally White fictional character or historical figure with a Black actor. It is a fairly new phenomenon that traces its origins to the progressive movement of the 2010s, where cultural institutions sought to deflect accusations of racism and institutional bias by changing the race of the characters in a desperate bid to seem more racially accepting. This definition has since expanded to include anyone from an ethnic minority background (Black, Latino or Asian) that has been substituted in for a traditionally White role.

At the root of this is the notion that art is inherently political, and hence that every mainstream entertainment property must necessarily double as either a morality play, or a salvo in the ongoing culture wars. Take advertising, for example.

Advertising doesn’t exist solely to promote specific products or services. It also exists to shape the culture and to change social norms. This isn’t a conspiracy theory; it’s a view openly held by advertisers. Back in 1938, an American trade journal described the role of business in creating not only new forms of merchandise but also new forms of culture. After learning how to manufacture products and bring them to market, “the future of business lay in its ability to manufacture customers as well as products” (Printers’ Ink, 1938, p. 397). Much of what we call “propaganda” began with techniques originally developed to market goods and services.

The sheer over-representation of Blacks in commercials, despite their minority status, is a recent indicator of this. We are seeing the same pattern in Western countries where Blacks are a small fraction of the population. In the UK, a study of a thousand advertisements shown over two months found that 37% of them featured Black people, who nonetheless make up only 4% of the British population. A more recent study found even higher non-White over-representation in British (59%) French (55%) and German (47%) advertisements, so much so that if a foreigner had nothing to go on but our ads, he might reasonably conclude that Europe is a racial melting pot rather than homogeneous societies.

It’s not just limited to advertisements either.

The study of history is particularly vulnerable. Most historical scholarship involves judicious selection from a vast and usually incomplete body of material. It is possible to create an entirely false narrative without actually lying, by exaggeration and tendentious selection. The major threat to historical integrity comes when the criteria of selection are derived from a modern ideological agenda. We have been witnessing the reshaping of the history of the past four centuries to serve as a weapon in current political disputes. Objectivity and truth have been the main casualties.

Powerful groups control the intellectual framework within which ideas are discussed and determines what constitutes knowledge. In the modern age, historical truth is not discovered. It is made by historians, in accordance with unconscious prejudices moulded by the power structures of society. The new task of the historian is now not to present historical sources in an objective way, but rather to deconstruct the hegemonist West and substitute a different power structure in which other people’s truth could be acknowledged.

This includes the elimination of historical accuracy to incorporate and over-represent minority races. The blackwashing of Cleopatra on Netflix is an example where a historical figure is replaced by a minority race actor. In fact, the historical revisionism in this case was so egregious that Egyptian lawyers initiated legal action against Netflix to ban the streaming service of the movie in Egypt to preserve the historical accuracy and integrity of their country’s rich history. How many impressionable minds will watch this Netflix version of Cleopatra and think that she was African, not Greek?

Both Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII of England, and Queen Charlotte of England were depicted as a black women in two Netflix-produced shows. No one genuinely believes any of these historical figures were black. No historian would claim they were, and anyone seriously interested in history would deride the idea as ludicrous, let alone ahistorical, yet, these properties exist and continue to forment.

It’s easy to wave all of this away as nothing more than a cheap tactic from studios, who hope that by stirring controversy they can promote their products, but in a culture where more and more people are outsourcing their information to the media they consume, it poses legitimate questions as to how detrimental this will be to the broader perceptions of history, race and demographics. Intentionally distorting history will lead to long-term cultural consequences, acclimating a new generation to tolerate or, even, accept this new fabricated world.

The repudiation of Europe’s past in the name of a modern political agenda is currently a minority position. But there is a serious risk that it will become the orthodoxy of the next generation. It is strong in some important groups, notably the young and politically active, and a vocal contingent in the academic world. It may not be a passing phase. The habit of reinforcing one’s political instincts by adopting whatever facts suit them is too deeply ingrained in human nature. Today, it is intensified by the social media. They are a major source of information, especially for the young. But they are curated by algorithms which amplify views that already exist, suppressing nuance, balance or doubt and giving a misleading impression of a great tide of opinion when the material is often generated by a handful of fanatics.

Films and TV shows are engaging in the practice as well, swapping traditionally White characters for ethnic minority representation.

In Snow White (2025), Disney’s latest live-action bastardisation of a beloved classic, the eponymous character, known for her pale skin, is played by Rachel Zegler, a Latino actress with dark brown skin. Zegler bears no physical resemblance to the character, save for her iconic yellow and blue motley dress. The same is true of The Little Mermaid (2023). Ariel, a White, red-haired princess, was, once again, substituted for an African-American actress. Now there are growing calls online to cast a South East Asian actress as Rapunzel for the inevitable live-action adapation that is no doubt imminent.

If Disney and other movie studios are so intent on diversifying their porfolios, why not adapt pre-existing stories featuring diverse characters? Why hasn’t The Princess and the Frog, the first Disney animation to feature a black woman as its lead, still not been translated to the big screen? Why do other existing stories need to be corrupted in the pursuit of these goals?

Admittedly, this is a very adult complaint about a film that is ostensibly for children — but then, I’m not sure children are Snow White or The Little Mermaid‘s intended audience. Like so many of Disney’s live-action remakes, this movie is for the now-middle aged millennial women who grew up watching (and loving) the 1989 original — only to become scandalised, as adults, by their heterocentrism, their whiteness, their phobias and all the other isms. A sort of proxy war for the soul of the nation — the Disney content mill is plagued by the same anxieties as much of its adult audience.

Many of its newer offerings are meant to be part of that future, explicitly catering to progressive sensibilities — and, perhaps equally important, sparking consternation among conservatives. The Little Mermaid — with its vague handwaving in the direction of consent culture, its dutiful nods to the environmental damage wrought by humans on the undersea world, and a black actress bringing the house down in a traditionally white role — is clearly intended to be part of that “more inclusive future”.

In fact, that heady mix of liberal millennial guilt and Nineties-era nostalgia is an animating force behind much of today’s most controversial entertainment.

While the characters may be fictitious, they’re still heavily inspired by European mythology and are a reflection of those - predominantly White - cultures. Snow White was inspired by classic German folktales while Rapunzel was developed from the French literary tale of Persinette, which itself is an alternative version of the Italian tale of Petrosinella. None of them featured non-White characters. They were intertwined with the culture and heritage of those countries. In a way, they were authentic ways for parents to teach their children moral lessons. They weren’t some globalised artificial slop designed to push a hidden message of forced diversity.

Black-washing them in this way isn’t just a refutation of the source materials but an explicit attack on European and, by extension, White identity in general. It is almost an admission that White or European culture is inherrently wrong and can only be improved once their defining traits have been stripped away and replaced with something deemed acceptable to the new cultural zeitgeist.

This is an industry-wide epidemic that encompasses television commercials, print ads, television shows, documentaries, and movies. White replacement is at a rate disproportionate to demographic realities, proving this is a deliberate, ideologically driven effort. This is a neo-Marxist strategy to undermine the accomplishments and history of the European people and redefine Western history and culture on terms benefitting their worldview. The point is to humiliate, to desecrate beloved properties people hold dear as a pseudo-form of reparations for the guilt of their ancestors.

Perhaps, the Trump administration’s recent moves to roll back D.E.I schemes and apply pressure on entertainment companies to comply with their anti-Woke crusade will yield results in this regard, bringing a welcome end to the Left’s weaponisation of culture. Or, perhaps, like his many other promises, it will amount to nothing. Regardless, the backlash agains this blatant absurdity is growing and will soon reach a breaking point, if it hasn’t already, hopefully spelling the end to this ignominious chapter.

When Sahra Wagenknecht left Die Linke (The Left), she wanted to destroy her former party. But in the end, it was Die Linke that showed her up.

Her new party, the eponymous Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), narrowly failed to enter the German parliament, winning only 4.97% of the vote in yesterday’s federal election, just shy of the 5% needed to cross the electoral barrier. Wagenknecht has since launched a campaign to recount the votes, though this has very little chance of gaining much momentum.

Because it failed, there are more seats for the other parties, meaning a grand coalition between the Christian Democrats (CDU) and Social Democrats (SPD) is possible. The difference between an unstable three-party coalition and a firmer two-party coalition ruling Europe’s largest economy came down to fewer votes than some British MPs’ majorities. By contrast, Die Linke — thought until just weeks ago to be heading out of parliament — celebrated an 11th-hour surge, storming into the Bundestag with nearly 9% of the vote.

What went wrong for the BSW? By the time the snap election was called in November, the party had been racking up success after success. Just six months after its creation, it won 6% of the vote in the European elections last June. Three months later, it won representation in three state parliaments, entering government in two. It seemed a given that Wagenknecht would enter the Bundestag. Her brand of self-styled “Left-wing conservatism”, combining skepticism about immigration with Russia-friendly foreign policy, may not have been mainstream but it resonated with enough voters for her to carve out a niche in the market for herself.

But the BSW was caught off guard by the snap election. The party lacked local infrastructure and was short on cash for the campaign. It was forced to hurriedly register regional branches in order to participate in the national election.

If the party lacked its more established opponents’ ground game, it also became increasingly irrelevant as the campaign wore on. A series of terror attacks committed by refugees and asylum seekers focused the debate on migration. Recriminations over CDU leader Friedrich Merz’s decision to weaken the “firewall” by seeking Alternative for Germany (AfD) votes for a resolution on immigration only confirmed the far-Right’s centrality to the new political reality.

In that context, Wagenknecht’s offer of slightly more respectable anti-migrant populism than the AfD fell flat. Her unapologetically Russia-friendly foreign policy was also overtaken by events, with US President Donald Trump quickly initiating an anti-European turn in America’s foreign policy. When the most powerful man in the world is threatening to impose so-called “peace” in Ukraine on the Kremlin’s terms, why bother voting for a minor German party running on a platform of pro-Russian foreign policy?

This wasn’t so much a failure to convince voters but a series of mistakes made by a young party and a deliberate defamation campaign by the established powers. There is a stronger fear in Germany of somebody who challenges the official Russia narrative than of right wingers who are mixed up with some unsavoury Nazi-leaning people. But in both cases the establishment has weaponised populist stereotypes of dangers from the left and from the right.

Wagenknecht may also have overestimated her own personal appeal. Personality-driven parties have a poor record in German politics, and it doesn’t get much more personal than naming the party after yourself. The BSW leader was relatively absent from the campaign train — a critical weakness for a party so closely associated with her.

Ironically, Wagenknecht leaving Die Linke may also have made her former party more electable. By ridding Die Linke of many of its most reflexively pro-Russian members, the party became more appealing to young people, whose support was key to its success. Die Linke’s surge was largely thanks to a speech made earlier this year by leader Heidi Reichinnek, which sharply criticised Merz for seeking AfD votes for a resolution on immigration, a first for postwar Germany. “I want to tell people: don’t give up, stand up and resist fascism,” Reichinnek said in the speech, which garnered tens of millions of views on social media. It may not have had the same effect if the party were still stuffed with its most vocal Russian apologists.

Wagenknecht hearkens back to what the left used to be, unfortunately since there is no real Leftwing politics in the West anymore (pro workers rights, anti-corporate, pro-peace & state directed economic policies), it doesn’t resonate with the wider German public (the opposite, really). She gets a very raw deal in the media generally and gets attacked from all sides for her idiosyncratic (though not inconsistent views). Her basic argument against immigration is that migrants push prices prices up and wages down and should therefore be controlled. She also takes an autonomist view of Europe, which is ironically where Merz claims to be heading,

What next for Wagenknecht? During the campaign, she pledged to retire from politics if her party didn’t enter the Bundestag. But other parties also failed to enter parliament on the first try — including the AfD, now the second-strongest force in German politics.

The BSW has a solid base in state parliaments and in Brussels. Having failed to enter the Bundestag by a rounding error, it will be reflecting on how to capitalise on its still-significant influence. Wagenknecht is certainly putting a brave face on it. At her election party at a communist-era cinema last night, the East German-born politician pledged: “This is not the end.” If she wants any inspiration for a political comeback, she need only look at her former party.

Last year, the European Union mobilized $19 billion in military and financial aid for Ukraine. What would’ve been a respectable figure was instead surpassed by the $22bn the bloc spent on importing Russian oil and gas, a vital export that continues to fuel Putin’s war machine. It’s a sobering contrast that perfectly juxtaposes the inherent hubris of the actors in this play. They’re out of their depth when it comes to maintaining a united front on the world stage and their actions rarely match their rhetoric.

If there’s one thing unelected European officials are indisputably skilled, it’s the weaponisation of language. Case in point: drafting sternly-worded tweets that carry no diplomatic weight.

Following the verbal spat between American President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Zelensky in the White House last week, an avalanche of tweets and statements came pouring from European leaders, who not only condemned Mr. Trump’s treatment of Zelensky as unfair but also reiterated their support for Ukraine in repelling the Russian invaders.

Such talk manifested itself in a hastily-organised summit in London on Sunday, where Keir Starmer hosted several European leaders to chart a new course for the war, one veering away from dependence on America. Few concrete decisions were made but each attendee pledged to replace any loss in American aid and vowed to support Ukraine, financially, militarily and diplomatically, until the war could be won on terms deemed satisfactory to Kiev.

The event may very well have set into motion a paradigm shift in geopolitics, with senior European bureaucrats now openly questioning for the first time their reliance on the Trans-Atlantic, which has formed the cornerstone of European security in the post-war era.

Yet behind the scenes in Europe’s capitals, a dispiriting refusal to abandon the dogmas of old still lingers. Beyond the warm words over the past few weeks, London and Paris are largely sticking to the tired national strategies they have clung to for much of the past 50 years. The French talk of European autonomy but in reality are pursuing national autonomy; the British pretend they are a mini America but, instead, are becoming an ever cheaper imitation.

The absurdity of the European position was perhaps best captured in its full hubris last year by the historian and writer Anne Applebaum when she won a prestigious German peace prize. During her acceptance speech, she maintained that victory was more important than peace, asserting that the West’s ultimate goal should be regime change in Russia. “We must help Ukrainians achieve victory, and not only for the sake of Ukraine,” she said. “If there is even a small chance that military defeat could help end this horrific cult of violence in Russia, just as military defeat brought an end to the cult of violence in Germany, we should take it.” This is the Second World War model in its distilled form, a model which has shaped the parameters of most neo-conservative operators, guiding them to engineer regime changes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, to disastrous results.

The UK and European Union governments face two interlinked dilemmas in their approach to the Ukraine peace process initiated by the Trump administration. It is not clear from the conclusions of Sunday’s London summit whether they will be able to navigate these dilemmas, or even fully recognise them.

The first dilemma is how to strengthen Ukraine’s position in peace negotiations without simultaneously emboldening Ukraine to reject a US-Russia deal. Such a move might provoke Trump into abandoning Ukraine, shifting all responsibility for Ukraine over to the Europeans — who cannot, in fact, meet this responsibility, no matter how often they convince themselves otherwise. More on this later.

The second dilemma the UK and EU face is how to make themselves look important and “relevant” (something that the European elites see as vital, though it is not incumbent on the rest of us to do so) without making promises they have no intention of actually fulfilling.

Against all of this, Brussels remains hesitant to define what a lasting peace looks like. A return to pre-2022 borders seems hopelessly unfeasible at this stage of the war. That much was made clear by the total failure of the Ukrainian army to dislodge Russian troops from their entrenched positions along the border during the Summer 2023 counter-offensive, a campaign that yielded very little tangible results and whose small gains have since been erased by subsequent Russian counteroffensives.

Not only has Europe failed to grasp this, it has also failed to map out a strategic path to victory. Politicians, journalists and academics parrot meaninglessly that Europe will do whatever it takes. Or they assert that Putin will blink first, if only the war goes on for a little while longer. Or that the Russian economy will collapse as sanctions take their toll. But solidarity is not a strategy. Virtue signalling is not a strategy. Sanctions are not a strategy if the primary goal is to minimise the pain to ourselves.

A strategy is something that is costed, politically stress-tested, and that responds to different scenarios. A strategy has primary targets, together with an agreed definition of second-best outcomes. A strategy also has a clear exit route mapped out. Europe has nothing.

Donald Trump wants peace, now. Volodymyr Zelensky and his European supporters want victory, later. This is what the very public disagreement in the Oval Office on Friday was all about. Peace through victory — essentially the Second World War model — is the lens through which virtually all European leaders, and most commentators view the Russia-Ukraine conflict. America sees it differently.

It is dangerous for Europe to insist, instead, on victory. For while Trump has talked a lot of nonsense about Zelensky and the war, he is right in one critical aspect: without America, there is no road to victory for Ukraine. This is not primarily about weapons, ammunition, and financial aid, but about satellite support and intelligence. If the US were to switch off the satellites and stop the flow of information, the Europeans have no way of plugging the gap. Britain has been prepared to run down its military stocks and by one estimate, only has 14 pieces of heavy artillery left in Estonia. Without the US, it’s over for Ukraine.

Before any real progress can be made on this front, European leaders need to sober up to reality. The narratives they’ve been feeding themselves for the last few years have blinded them to the facts on the ground.

Unlike what some in the mainstream media like to portray, Putin is not just some stereotypical bloodthirsty, war-mongering barbarian, trying to carve out a neo-imperialist empire for himself. He is a cold strategist, playing chess on a higher frequency to most of his peers. Ukraine represents a piece on the board - to strengthen Russian territorial integrity, to keep Russian shipping lines operational, to maintain the monopoly over oil and gas imports into Europe.

Here is the fundamental driving force behind the war: Russia moors its Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, Crimea and has done so for 300 years. The engineering of NATO membership for Ukraine began at the NATO Bucharest Summit of 2008. If successful, this meant US warships moored in Sevastopol, something Russia could never accept, just as America would never accept Chinese warships moored in Pearl Harbour. In addition, Sevastopol is Russia's only warm-water port, as the rest freezes in the winter, rendering the Russian Navy ice-bound, vulnerable and useless. Clearly, Russia could not accept losing Sevastopol. And thus - post Bucharest 2008 - began the events leading to Maidan 2014, Russia seizing Crimea and the war in 2022. So, isolating Russia isn’t a winning strategy, much as cornering a wounded animal would be.

Another crucial point is Western leaders’ ignorance as to how the war is going. It was actually over within weeks of it starting. By June 2022 Russia had seized control of eastern Ukraine, which is all it wanted because it provided a land bridge to Sevastopol and Crimea. The Russians dug-in behind five defensive lines and have remained there ever since even as brave Ukrainian soldiers were killed in their hundreds-of-thousands trying to breach the lines whilst journalists in the West lied about Ukrainian successes and Russian defeats to manufacture consent amongst the general public to perpetuate the war.

This leads us to where we are today: stalemate. Russia, operating on sunken-cost, cannot withdraw or end the war any time soon without some tangible victory to celebrate after the sheer magnitude of resources they’ve invested into the conflict while Europe can’t bear the damage to their prestige that will come from backing down. It’s the classic case of an unstoppable force colliding with an immovable object.

This speaks to the subtle ingenious of the mineral deal Trump hopes to negotiate with Ukraine. It is astonishing just how many nominally intelligent people fail to understand the purpose of the deal: using American megacorps as human shields for Russian aggression creates a durable, implicit security guarantee without formalizing it in terms Putin can reject. The minerals proposal is an attempt to replace the Washington Consensus approach of rights and duties, written and then just as quickly ignored, with a paradigm of powers and incentives. America won't defend Ukraine because they "have to" (like NATO) but because they want to.

Without a costed exit strategy now, and as America turns away, how then is the EU to defend itself in the future? Even if the EU were to set itself an agreed trajectory towards military spending of 3% of GDP by 2030, and to pool their procurement to make defence spending more efficient, I struggle to see how the continent can find the unity and determination to replace the US as guarantor for our security. Kaja Kallas, High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy, laughably exemplified Europe’s myopic attitude to strategy when she said “the free world needs a new leader”. This is preposterous, typical of European grandstanding. The EU, with its veto rights, its qualified majority voting and the explicit exclusion of defence from the single market, is structurally unsuited for foreign and security policy in a Hobbesian world.

If Europe does indeed want to replace America as the sole arbitrator over the conflict, they must ask themselves how they hope to enforce their demands.

With what industry? European leaders have spent the last three decades castrating their own industrial bases, shifting supply lines to China and undermining attempts to reach energy self-reliance. Germany closed down all of their nuclear power plants, which made them more reliant on Russian gas and oil. Even amidst the backdrop of this increasingly delicate situation, Rachel Reeves, the UK Chancellor, contemplates scaling back the scope of her country’s mini nuclear power project. This does not sound like a government intent on insulating their country from supply-side shocks.

With what army? Even after a war has been raging in their backyard for three years, most European countries still don't satisfy the NATO spending requirements of 2.5%. The UK army is the smallest it has been since before the Napoleonic Wars. Instead, they have been relying on the benevolence of American taxpayers to subsidize their national defense.

The truth is: the EU can posture about disentangling themselves from American influence all they want, but taking concrete action is a lot harder than talking. These lofty ambitions do not reflect the reality on the ground. The EU is a vassal of the American Empire by design, not just from Washington but Brussels itself, who felt comfortable outsourcing their security because their leaders are feckless cowards who shy from responsibility. Nothing will fundamentally change until Europeans accept that.

Anyone who considers themselves a realist must speak to the unfortunate realities we are saddled with. Contemporary Europe is anti-masculine, anti-vigour, anti-innovation but instead the biggest spenders on welfare. We are anesthesising ourselves to the pain of life, making it only natural that vigorous cultures will replace us. There is no sense of sacrifice or service amongst the European people. It’s been taken away from them after being coddled for sixty years.

Nobody in Britain or Europe should deceive themselves into thinking they can successfully continue on their own for very long if Washington pulls the plug. Europe could spend 10% of its GDP on defense, but the simple fact is that most Europeans are unwilling to die for their own country, much less a foreign one. Giving up the welfare state for Ukraine is a proposal that's not going to fly anywhere, lest politicians are willing to flirt with assured electoral oblivion.

A structural increase in defence spending would require sacrifice. The US spends 3.5% of its GDP on defence. In 2023, the 27 EU countries spent an average of 1.6% of EU GDP. This gap of almost 2 percentage points arises because we Europeans spend the money on other things. Germany has a gold-plated social system. People are entitled to a basic citizens’ income whether they work or not. Germany has also given itself a budget of €150bn for the energy transition. The US, meanwhile, has food stamps, and no net zero policy. You cannot do it all. There are necessary trade-offs involved which the Europeans have not even begun to discuss.

This molly-coddled, self-absorbed Europe is not about to fight and win a war against Russia. We applaud speeches calling for regime change in Moscow. But we want someone else to do it for us just like in the Second World War. The difference is that back then, America was willing to play a progressively stronger part. This time, the US is in open retreat.

Voters might support helping Ukraine in the short term when the level of assistance feels abstract but I suspect when the war continues to delay or escalate, there will be a growing discontent with the lack of tangible results on the battlefield, similar to what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If the Europeans were smart, they would take Zelensky to one side, without the cameras, and tell him that the game is up, and that he should cut a deal with Trump now. They should insist that what the President was trying to negotiate before the Oval Office showdown is as good as anything Ukraine will ever get — the minerals deal will keep the US engaged in the besieged nation’s future. For now, though, it seems clear that Europe and Ukraine are currently asking for more than Trump is willing to concede, especially since the White House is convinced that they aren’t ready for peace.

If, though, Ukraine continues to insist on it, and Trump loses his temper and walks away from the peace process and support for Ukraine, then Ukrainians may pay a terrible price for European theatrical posturing.

There is a vast, petrifying hollowness to the British economy.

In everyday life, the reassuring facade of the state is still there - the schools, and hospitals, the police and emergency workers. And yet, if you dig below the surface, if you take a minute to look around, you are immediately struck by the eerie feeling that there’s not much left behind that facade. Like the crumbling mansion in Giuseppe Tomasi die Lampedusa’s The Leopard, Britain spends its time in just a few rooms, cordoning off whole wings once thriving with life, dust sheets draped over the armchairs, curtains drawn tight.

No other city embodies this national decline better than Liverpool. Before WW2 and the dissolution of the British Empire, the city prided itself on its grand imperial port - a place of extraordinary wealth and prestige, which served as one of the main transit hubs between the workshop of the world and the ever-expanding colonial possessions overseas. Thousands of men found employment in its dockyards and there was a spirit of local pride in the unique identity Liverpool held.

It was obviously not all like that. While Liverpool was a heaving metropolis by the sea, it was also a city of appalling squalor and exploitation; an English Belfast, where Catholics and Protestants crammed into teeming tenements sealed off from each other. Today, thankfully, life in the city is immeasurably better. The slums have all been cleared, and the sectarian division is all but gone.

However, in the absence of the Empire and the northern workshops whose goods the city once transported, Liverpool lost its character. Due to the ever-changing currents of world trade and geopolitics, England’s focus shifted towards Europe, and Liverpool’s geographical location on the west coast became its undoing. Now Felixstowe and Harwich are England’s main ports, not Liverpool. Bereaved of its defining identity, the city was forced to adapt, prostituting itself to global capital and becoming just another service hub. No new wealth is created. Nothing physically tangible lasts. It just serves as another artery pumping wealth, talent and skills back into the ever-bloated London.

This phenomenon is not just limited to Liverpool, unfortunately. It haunts every major English city. Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Newcastle - all the great cities of the union outside London’s orbit. All were once major, thriving industrial heartlands that have now fallen into destitution and abandonment.

Everywhere you go in this country - be it the rolling hills of Dorest, the cobblestone streets of York, or the highways of Birmingham - you are greeted by a scene of civic failure. Not only does it manifest itself in low-level littering or graffiti-stained walls, but startling homelessness - beggars slumped outside hotels, lying in tents, pizza boxes slung from their roofs with pleas for help sprawled over them. You don’t need to study the latest GDP figures to know something is wrong with Britain; there is a sickness seeping through the land, a breakdown in our society.

But, why is this so? Why aren’t we more angry? And what can we do to fix this? For conservatives, this decline is a question of waste, inefficiency and spending priorities. To them, local councils are too obsessed with frittering money on diversity training programmes or bloated government contracts that fall into an endless sea of bureaucracy. For Labour, meanwhile, it is the opposite. The declining state of the public realm is due to a harsh austerity regime imposed on it by the central government. Paradoxically, both of these proscriptions are right and wrong.

The Conservatives are right to claim that inefficiency lies at the heart of our government services, but that’s only because accomplishing infrastructure projects like HS2 or Hornsea 3 is now structurally expensive. And cancelling HS2 doesn’t alter this. In fact, it rehabilitates it. It is an admission of gross government failure and ineptitude.

Labour is also right to claim that better funding would solve or reverse some of the decline, but the effectiveness of such a policy can only be guaranteed by addressing Liverpool and other regions’ structural depravity. Central government can alleviate some of the worst excesses of austerity, but it does not change the fact that all British regions, aside from the South East and London, are net drains on the economy - they depend on money being transferred from other parts of the country. That’s not a sustainable economic model.

The malaise is steeped in economic issues, from energy-price inflation and low investment to the weakening of flagship industries. But it has a more fundamental cause: citizens’ declining faith in the state. The much-vaunted British social model, a product of the postwar decades that combined state-led investment, welfare protections and labor rights, is foundering. Its slow capsizing has cast Britain into a deep hole from which there is no easy exit.

As our society grew more complex, more and more of the government’s function took the form of social insurance, with each of us chipping in through our taxes to protect ourselves collectively - for unemployment benefits if we lost a job; pensions to lessen the indignities of old age; reliable electricity and phone services for those who lived in rural areas where utility services otherwise make a profit; public schools and universities to make education more egalitarian.

It worked, more or less. In the span of a generation and for a majority of people, life got better, safer, more prosperous, and more just. A broad middle class flourished. The rich remained rich, if maybe not quite as rich as they would have liked and the poor were fewer in number and not as poor as they would otherwise have been. And if we sometimes debated whether taxes were too high or certain regulations were discouraging innovation, whether the so-called ‘nanny state’ was sapping individual initiative or a certain programme was wasteful, we generally understood the advantages of a society that at least tried to offer a fair shake to everyone and built a floor beneath which nobody could sink.

Maintaining this social compact, though, required trust. It required that we see ourselves as bound together, if not as a family then at least as a community, each member worthy of concern and able to make claims on the whole. It required us to believe that whatever actions the government might take to help those in need that nobody was gaming the system and that the misfortunes or stumbles or circumstances that caused others to suffer were ones to which you at some point in your life might fall prey.

Over the years, that trust proved difficult to sustain. Harder economic times strained civic trust. As the British growth rate started to slow in the 1970s - as incomes stagnated and good quality, high-paying jobs for those without university degrees declined - the scope of people’s concerns narrowed. We became more sensitive to the possibility that someone else was getting something we weren’t and more receptive to the notion that the government couldn’t be trusted to be fair. Promoting that story, a story that fed not trust but resentment, had come to define the modern Conservative movement. With varying degrees of subtlety and varying degrees of success, conservatives adopted it as their central theme. It became the template for right-wing newspapers, the foundational text of every think tank. The government was taking money and jobs away from hardworking people and giving it away to leeches, social parasites.

And maybe there was a sliver of truth to some of those assessments. Maybe the government had swelled to an overwhelming, bloated size and needed trimming and reforming in certain areas. Maybe the scope of some services could be reduced and replaced with more streamlined, cost-effective measures. But the anecdote to this social malaise from the Right never offered a credible, detailed plan. It was just unfettered austerity, cutting services and reducing taxes for the benefit of their wealthy lobbyists, not society and the vulnerable. The idea was to starve the beast - make all public services so unproductive to the point where selling them out and privatising services was the only option left.

The intensity of these convictions put liberals and leftists on the defensive, making leaders less bold about proposing new initiatives, limiting the boundaries of political debate. A deep and suffocating cynicism took hold. Indeed, it became axiomatic among political consultants of both parties that restoring trust in the government or in any of our major institutions was a lost cause and that the battle between the two main parties each election cycle now came down to whether Britain’s squeezed middle class was more likely to identify the wealthy or poor as the reason they weren’t doing better.

Yet, if most people believe hard work should pay, poor wage growth and longer working lives have put that aspiration out of reach. This frustrated promise of meritocracy catalyzes all sorts of other grievances, from anti-government sentiment to protests against fuel-tax rises. All of this has led to where we are now - a society falling apart at the seams, one where predatory corporations thrive on the backs of the misery and anguish of the workers.

If this wasn’t demoralising enough, there is an absence of a broad debate in national politics of where to go next, how to fix or reverse these structural weaknesses. Both of the establishment parties appear too exhausted to offer a convincing vision that will navigate through these uncharted times and lead us to a future where most of the issues are restrained or fixed.

The policies McDonnell offered in the 2017 Labour Party manifesto (broadly) made sense to me, although the New Left radicalism of 2019 was drastically over-ambitious in scope and scale. But Corbynism was an ideology for an era of ~0% interest rates. Borrowing an extra £500bn for public investment is now far less affordable without very large increases in revenues, either via growth, or via tax hikes that can induce capital flight or dampen investment. It’s a delicate line to straddle, one no party seems willing to tackle. Trouble in the bond markets under Reeves would be amplified 10x with a McDonnell-style reformer, and the latter never had a convincing answer on how to react to a run on the pound or sell-offs etc.

I think today there are ways to broaden the tax base, build a more social-democratic model, and ease fiscal pressures in a way that also placates/encourages the private sector with some pro-market policies AND doesn't cause a financial deluge à la Mitterand/Syriza/Truss because ultimately all 3 were brought to heel in similarly ignominious circumstances.

A few of the ways this could be achieved include: the BoE curtailing QT and lowering rates; lower taxes on private investments in domestic, productive assets (stemming capital outflows into foreign assets); introduce fully-liberalised, zonal planning and expedite approvals on critical infrastructure, over-ruling vetoes from local authorities; sustained public capital investment in housing/transport/energy via publicly owned enterprises/a sovereign wealth fund, 'crowding in' private; use public procurement as lever to support private domestic industry; increase top rate on higher incomes and capital gains but expand full expensing/100% capital allowances for private investment in plant/tech/R&D/training etc.; and deregulate/liberalise in some areas (e.g. planning, or allowing AI/MedTech access to anonymized health records), but ALSO re-regulate in others (e.g. strengthen workers' rights/min. wage/sectoral collective bargaining).

This is by no means an exhaustive list. It will not magically fix or reverse all of the macroeconomic problems plaguing the British economy, but it will fundamentally halt the decline and provide a stable foundation to build from.

What is missing is the political capital to put these ideas into action. The irony is that, as a nation, we do have able people who could start turning the ship of state around. There is, however, given the current nature of the political parties, no means of getting them anywhere near the levers of power. Social mobility in the echelons of power is very much predicated on favours and loyalty. Politicians are awarded on their loyalty, not merit, which makes it incredibly difficult, if not outright possible to purge the old guard with new technocrats because the predecessors often make sure their successors adhere to the same orthodoxy.

Democracy as it exists in this country is simply not functioning. It is failing to play one of its most crucial roles: recruiting and giving power to competent leaders, policy-makers and administrators. The transmission belt for this - the political parties - is broken. It might take pressure from another immense event to catalyse any of this into action. Until then, us noble citizens can only wait and and watch as the country continues to slip into the abyss.

To anyone who has been keenly following British politics for the past few months, one of the most striking and baffling developments has been the ongoing dispute over the future sovereignty of the Chagos Islands, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean home to a joint British-American naval base, the Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia. It’s a story that proves the limits of unitary states in an increasingly globalised world order and the vested interest of British politicians and where their loyalties lie, especially the prime minister, Keir Starmer.

Before spilling into a tirade, it would perhaps be prudent to provide some brief context. In 2019, the International Court of Justice issued a non-binding advisory opinion stating that the UK had “an obligation to bring an end to its administration of the Archipelago as rapidly as possible” in pursuit of the UN’s aims on decolonisation. Two years later, this ruling was strengthened by another one issued by the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, which confirmed that the UK had “no sovereignty over the islands” and argued that the best course of action was for the territory to be handed back to Mauritius.

Following these rulings, the Foreign Secretary at the time, James Cleverly, opened up negotiations with the Mauritius government. Small progress was made until the negotiations were put on hold until after the snap election where they were reopened by the incoming Labour government.

This is where we now find ourselves.

After “renegotiations,” the UK is planning to double its financial payments (legal double-speak for historical reparations) to Mauritius while relinquishing the last vestiges of bargaining power it has over the disputed territory by giving Mauritius a veto over the renewal of the lease. Under the new terms, the UK is expected to pay £30 billion over a 40-year time period from the already-overstretched Defence Budget with no legal guarantee it could remain in control over the territory. Just for scale, the agreed sum is worth more than Mauritius's annual GDP and the cost of the new Dreadnought SSBN programme, an obscene amount to waste by a government that is supposedly constrained by a £22bn financial black-hole.

No-one can still explain what this potent legal threat that would’ve compelled the UK to relinquish the base might be because as many have already noted it doesn’t exist. It’s not about security, it’s about “decolonisation”.

Aside from the sheer insanity of the new terms, this dispute is more interesting in what it reveals about Starmer’s philosophy, how he views Britain’s place in the world and what obligations he feels the country is entrusted with. The way in which he zealously upholds the ICJ’s ruling at the expense of the UK’s bargaining position is an apt reminder that Starmer is a lawyer first and foremost, not a politician. He sees everything through the prism of international law and how Britain is regarded on the world stage. Presentation matters, not substance. It doesn’t matter that the latest deal places a heavier burden on the UK treasury than the last version. It doesn’t matter that the deal would deprive the UK of one of its last few naval bases of strategic importance, thus undermining its projection of hard power and opening the country to more historical grievances from former colonies. What matters is appeasing an international order Starmer and his ilk have been trained to revere at the cost of everything else, a subjugation that plays a role in the way most activist lawyers conduct themselves, often at the expense of the people they ostensible serve.

The global human rights industry was largely a product of America’s unipolar moment, holding out the prospect of an international enforcer of liberal values, the closest to a global hegemon that history has yet witnessed. Having convinced themselves that history had ended, with themselves the victors, buoyant liberals, as the political theorist Patrick Hayden observed, saw the creation of an international human rights regime as a means of “replacing the realist national interest-based security paradigm with a cosmopolitan, person-based paradigm”. Within Britain, there was no more zealous enforcer of either American power or human rights legislation than New Labour, and the legal supergroup Matrix Chambers it spawned — of which Starmer, Cherie Blair, Philippe Sands and Attorney General Lord Hermer are all alumni.

Yet, Britain’s continued rule by the Matrix Chambers coterie does not serve it well in this actually-existing era of international competition. In October, the Attorney General condemned politicians “who appeal to the ‘will of the people’” rather than adhere to the perfect and unchangeable abstractions of international law. But the latest revelations of Hermer’s pursuit of war crimes charges against the SAS, following his long history of acting against the interests of the British state and people, pose a problem for Starmer. A country increasingly sick of activist lawyers will not long consent to be ruled by them, nor to pay heavily to advance their pet projects, as with the self-defeating Chagos Islands surrender, a personal Sands crusade.

For Sands and Starmer, the world is divided between righteous advocates of the rule of law and “populists” who seek to overturn it. It is a version of cosmopolitanism honed into an uncompromising, even fundamentalist vision. Above mere nation-states shines down the perfect and immutable Law, towards which frail, misguided, even wicked human societies, swayed by the currents of mere democracy and the temptations of national self-interest, must be shepherded, whether they will it or not. If it weakens individual statehood — “that most artificial and fake of constructs”, as Sands once put it — so much the better: only thus can utopia be reached. Unlike America itself, which along with Russia and China has always placed its sovereign interests above treaties and tribunals, we remain ruled by zealots, highly-educated naïfs who affirm that international law exists as an objective reality in itself, rather than a political construct derived from state power and the will to wield it.

In essence, the British government is an open conspiracy of human rights lawyers against the national interest. The state itself has become a treasonable enterprise against the nation. Most of our political class basically openly identify as partisans of other countries. If they ever support any notion of the 'national interest,' you can be sure that the nation in question isn't the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Fortunately, sanity has not yet deserted some on the Labour frontbenches - for now at least. Sources who spoke to The Times under the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive information lambasted the deal. One MP said they “don’t understand why the UK is sending so much money to Mauritius when the Treasury is asking departments to make brutal spending cuts at home”. Another called for Starmer to cancel the deal. Even Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, hardly one known for his national chauvinistic views, described the deal as a “shambles” and urged for a review.

Whether any of this amounts to a tangible political backlash remains to be seen. Thanks to his comfortable majority, Starmer is immune from any threats to his rule and because the topic does not command the urgency of the public, there is unlikely to be any real incentive to make it a major campaign issue. The only hope in the deal being derailed lies with Donald Trump, who has openly mocked it and expressed a willingness to intervene on behalf of the UK in reversing the deal.

Trump, only a few months into his second term, has already proven the extent to which hard power still shapes the conduct of states by bringing forth a ceasefire deal after pressuring his Israeli counterparts with threats of halting financial aid. While the long term prospects of this new accord remain fragile, it achieved more in stopping the bloodshed in one day than the Biden administration managed in over a year of managing the ongoing war. Appeals to international law had no impact on Benjamin Netanyahu’s behaviour, but reasserting the raw facts of relative power appears to have ended the war in an instant. States have always been governed and interacted with each other according to their national interests; those who impede these interests are swept aside.

The global order in which Starmer grew up idealising is dying. States are once again reasserting their sovereignty. America hopes to add new territorial possessions in Panama and Greenland while China ramps up its claims over Taiwan. This makes the UK’s actions in regards to the Chagos Islands all the more pathetic and self-defeating.

The victory of Donald Trump in November signalled the end of one epoch and the beginning of another. This new age will likely be defined by the rise of techno-feudalism, a retreat to protectionism, heightened global tensions and, most curiously of all, the return of undisguised imperialism. Out went the performative activism and morality-policing of the Biden-Obama years, in came a new belligerent, untamed fanaticism that continues to evolve with each passing day.

After a four-year hiatus, we are once again compelled to go spelunking into the deeper caverns of Donald Trump’s brain to understand what the president hopes to achieve in his second term. It is a necessary trip given the president’s history of ideological schizophrenia. So, we climb under his ego, which makes up 87 percent of his neural tissue; we burrow beneath the nucleus accumbens, the region of the brain responsible for cheating at golf; and then, deep down at the core of the limbic system, we find something strange — a history textbook, gathering dust, bookmarked with greasy stains on a page for the 1890s.

Over the past few months, and especially in his second Inaugural Address, Trump has gone all 19th century on us. He seems to find in this period everything he likes: tariffs, Manifest Destiny, seizing land from weaker nations, mercantilism, railroads, manufacturing and populism. Many presidents mention George Washington or Abraham Lincoln in their inaugurals. The immortal Trump cited instead was William McKinley, a name most Americans may have considered lost to the annals of history.

You can tell what kind of conservative a person is by discovering what year he wants to go back to. Some yearn for the days of Calvin Coolidge, when the federal government took a more laissez-faire attitude to regulations and taxation, fostering an environment where the entrepreneur was firmly in the driver’s seat and the government nothing more than a background actor. Others get nostalgic for the 1980s, when the Cold War was in its twilight years and the US was firmly ahead of all its geopolitical rivals, when Regan was president, balancing aggressive military spending with tough-on-crime measures while embellishing it all with an outwardly spiritual context.

For Trump, it seems to be sometime between 1830 and 1899. It’s easy to see the appeal. America was a boisterous, arriviste nation back then, bursting with energy, bombast and new money. In 1840, there were only 3,000 miles of railroad track across the entire country. By 1900, that had exploded to roughly 259,000 miles of track. Americans were known for being materialistic, mechanical and voracious for growth. In his book “The American Mind,” the historian Henry Steele Commager wrote of his 19th-century forebears: “Whatever promised to increase wealth was automatically regarded as good, and the American was tolerant, therefore, of speculation, advertising, deforestation and the exploitation of natural resources.” In essence: Trumpian.

It was a time when the national character was being forged not among the establishment circles in Boston, Philadelphia and Virginia but out on the frontier, by the wild ones, the uncouth ones. It was the rugged experience of westward expansion that had given America its vitality, its egalitarianism, its lack of interest in high culture and polite manners. The West was settled by a rising tide of hucksterism — the spirit of the circus master P.T. Barnum more than that of the aristocratic novelist Henry James. It was a golden age of braggadocio, of Paul Bunyan-style tall tales. It was also an age when to be American was to be wreathed in glory. Much like the Israelis, many Americans believed that God had assigned a sacred errand to his new chosen people, to complete history and to bring a new heaven down to earth.

It’s not hard to see why this image of a wild, raw, aspiring America appeals to Trump. There’s something romantically nostalgic there, a time when the frontier was not yet defined, where the individual was solely his own master. The grievances Trump offers appeals to those left behind, the losers of the information age - the working-class, the unemployed, the incels. And the age of McKinely was a nationalism filled with aspiration, daring, hope and future-mindedness.

Maybe the century’s key appeal for Trump is that in those days America was firmly anti-establishment. You can draw a straight line from this (semi-mythical) image of America to the movement Trump leads today. He too leads a band of arrivistes, establishment-haters, money-seekers and unreconstructed nationalists. Trump is drawing on themes that have been deep in the American psyche at least since Andrew Jackson became president in 1829. Populist movements, like most movements that represent the dispossessed, tend to be led by men who radiate power, masculinity and wealth. They harness Americans’ natural distaste for rules, regulations and bureaucratic moralists.

The age we are now living through is no different, with the only change being the victims and their oppressors. Today’s populist ire is directed not at the European establishments living across an ocean nor the robber barons, but at the American social-liberal class on the east and west coasts. This is a war not defined by economic status but a cultural schism, for it is culture which offers the fault lines. It is a debate between an open or closed society, globalism or isolationism, bureaucrats or mavericks, reformers or disrupters.

Democrats are mistaken if they think they can rebuff Trump by howling the words “fascism” or “authoritarianism,” or by clutching their pearls every time he does something vulgar or immoral. If they decide to continue the culture war between the coastal, cosmopolitian elites and the masses, their fate is predetermined.

The problem with populism and the whole 19th-century governmental framework is that it didn’t work. Between 1825 and 1901 America had 20 presidencies, with most of them only surviving for one-term as voters kept throwing the incumbents out because they were not content with the way government was performing. The last three decades of that century saw a string of brutalizing recessions and depressions that profoundly shook the country. The light-footprint government was unable to cope with the burgeoning process of industrialization.

Many populists were ill equipped to even understand what was happening. In his classic book “The Age of Reform,” Richard Hofstadter writes, “Populist thought showed an unusually strong tendency to account for relatively impersonal events in highly personal terms.” In other words, they thought they could solve the disruptions of industrialization if only they could find the evil conspirators who were responsible for every ill. Their diagnoses were simple-minded, their rhetoric over the top; their proposals, Hofstadter noted, wandered “over the border between reality and impossibility.”

Here’s how America recovered: Populist indignation finally got professionalized. In the 20th century, members of the progressive movement took the problems the populists were rightly angry about and built the institutions that were required to address them effectively — leading to the creation of the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve. Populists had trouble thinking institutionally; the progressives, who were well trained, morally upright, self-disciplined, intellectually rigorous and disgusted by corruption did not have that problem.

The United States had to build a stronger central government and a leadership class if it was going to take responsibility — responsibility for the people who were marginalized and oppressed and, as the century wore on, responsibility to establish a peaceful and secure world order. Americans have a perpetual problem with authority, but for a time — from say 1901 to 1965 — Americans built authority structures that voters trusted.

Now we live amid another crisis of authority. Institutions have not managed to keep up with the savage inequalities produced by the information age — especially between the college educated and the less educated. Populists are again indignant and on the march. But, as before, they have no compelling theory of change.

The colorful menagerie of people who make up the proposed Trump cabinet all have one thing in common: They are self-identified disrupters, rewarded for their loyalty, not their experience. They aim to burn the system down, dismantling each institution methodically and absolutely. That might be cathartic in a conceptual sense, one where the actions have little consequence but that doesn’t translate to the real world.

The history of the world since the French Revolution has proven that rapid disruption makes governments cataclysmically worse. Trump, the anti-institutionalist, is creating an electoral monarchy, a system in which all power is personalized and concentrated in his hands. That’s a recipe for distorted information flows, corruption, instability and administrative impotence. As we’ve seen over and over again down the centuries, there’s a big difference between people who operate in the spirit of disruption and those who operate in the spirit of reform.

If the Democratic Party had any sense, they would tell the American people that Donald Trump is right about a lot of things. He’s accurately identified problems on issues like inflation, the border and the fallout from cultural condescension that members of the educated class have been too insular to anticipate. But when it comes to building structures to address those problems — well, the man is just hapless and incompetent.

When asked why they voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 US Presidential Election, most of his voters gave one of three responses: ‘to lower costs,’ ‘to disentangle from the many foreign wars the Biden Administration had become caught in’ and ‘to reduce immigration, both legal and illegal’. While other examples were given, those were the three fundamental issues animating the Trump election wave. It’s why he was the first Republican since George Bush in 2004 to win the popular vote. It’s why he won every single swing state.

Yet, his victory was not as decisive and monumental as all of the fawning opinion pieces would suggest. Trump only won the popular vote by 1.5%, smaller than the 4.5% Biden secured in 2020. Most of the swing states were also won by relatively small margins. And it seems the election was decided moreso by Democratic fatigue rather than a sudden new burst of enthusiasm for a total conservative reallignment. Trump and his allies would be wise to keep this in mind as they make prepare themselves for the inauguration on Monday. The foundations of their support is tenuous at best. The mandate given to them may have been a rejection of the old social-liberal orthodoxy but it wasn’t at the same time a blank cheque for the complete inverse.

As chief executive after chief executive pay homage to Trump and MAGA, with Apple, Meta, Amazon and OpenAI making identical $1 million donations to Trump’s inauguration, either through their chief executives or their corporate accounts, there is a sense that his election signals some sort of sweeping ideological, paradigm shift, a triumph of right-wing populism over all its foes.

It is no such thing.

The truth of the matter is that we don’t know whether Trump’s second victory will have an enduring ideological impact on American politics at all. If Trump fails, then all the ideas he supposedly vanquished, from “wokeism” to neoliberalism to Reagan-style conservatism may well come roaring back in the vaccum.

Many Republicans believed Bush’s re-election heralded a new era of Republican political dominance — right up until the Democrats swept Republicans out of power in the House and Senate in 2006 and took back the White House in 2008.

Barack Obama’s victory, combined with his filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, represented a moment of Democratic triumph. At long last, the emerging Democratic majority — described by Politico as “a left-of-center coalition of minorities, young people, women and knowledge economy professionals” — was asserting itself and transforming American politics.

That consensus also lasted all of two years, until the libertarian-minded Tea Party revolution wiped out the Democratic majority in the House and gave Republicans immense confidence that Obama would be a one-term president.

But then, in 2012, the emerging Democratic majority reasserted itself and Obama won re-election. Then Republicans routed Democrats in 2014 and Trump won a narrow victory in 2016. Democrats defeated Republicans in the House in 2018, won a narrow presidential election in 2020, and performed better than expected in 2022.

Both parties have high floors of support, and the few voters who oscillate between them (and ultimately decide presidential elections) aren’t embracing new ideologies; they’re rejecting the person or party they believe has failed to achieve the results they want. At the mercy of the public conscious, if that new president/party fails to deliver just like their predecessor, they’re doomed to suffer the same fate.

Arguably the biggest factor behind Trump’s reelection victory was voter grievances with stubbornly high inflation, which had eroded consumer purchasing power, whittling away people’s living conditions. Incumbent governments around the world had been toppled over the issue. That economic anxiety drove millions of people from traditionally-safe Democratic-voting households - Hispanics, the Midwest working-class, younger, urban voters - to cast a ballot for the Republicans for the first time in their life.

Trump’s incoming team, however, have provided very little details as to how they plan to actually reduce prices, often waving it away with vague promises about opening up more drill sits to combat high energy prices and deregulating markets. No such concrete plan exists.

Complicating things further is the constant threats Trump has made about levying blanket tariffs on goods and services from foreign countries as a bargaining chip. Tariff, he once said at a campaign railly, “is the most beautiful word in the dictionary. More beautiful than love, more beautiful than respect.” Trump is no stranger to protectionist policies. He demonstrated a deep affinity for tariffs during his first term, using them as a cudgel to punish both allies and rivals as he tried to force companies to make their products in the United States. This time, he seems to be intent on a much more aggressive approach, a full-scale upending of the trading system in which the United States is no longer a partner in the global flow of goods, but a mercantilist nation intent on walling itself off from the world.

He has talked about tariffs as the solution to an array of problems, from making the country rich to funding tax cuts and paying for child care. But most central to his vision is the ability of tariffs to reverse decades of globalization and force factories to move back to the United States. It looks like it might become the defining feature of Trump’s second term.

While his approach could help some companies that are already making their products in the United States, since they would make the cost of entry higher for overseas competitors, those benefits would be outweighed by the costs, as the kind of broad-based tariffs Trump is envisioning would significantly raise prices for U.S. manufacturers and businesses that must buy material and parts from abroad. Higher prices would then be passed on to U.S. consumers, with the burden falling particularly on the working-class.

This is before even considering the multiple trade wars likely to be incited as other countries retaliate with tariffs on American goods. Those trade spats would reduce U.S. exports, disrupt global supply chains and shake the system of alliances that the United States has worked to construct since World War II.

The scale of what Mr. Trump is proposing - a universal tariff of 10 to 20 percent on most foreign products - is larger than any tariff increases that have been seen in nearly a century. To ban Chinese cars from coming into the United States via Mexico, he has said he would impose “whatever tariffs are required — 100 percent, 200 percent, 1,000 percent.”

A regime of universal tariffs would really be a grenade thrown in the heart of the system, worsening, not improving, the cost of living. One estimate by the Peterson Institute for International Economics put the annual cost at $2,600 for a typical American household. Another by the Yale Budget Lab, a nonpartisan research center, put the annual cost at $1,900 to $7,600 per household.

Another one of the central promises made by the Trump campaign was to pursue diplomacy in ending the Ukrainian and Gaza wars while gradually withdrawing American troops stationed overseas and shifting the responsibility of guarding corners of the world to countries local to the area. Enter instead: a bombastic, zealous return to the expansionist Monroe Doctrine, as the president-elect teases using military force to acquire Greenland, the Panama Canal and even Canada.

It would be easy to laugh off Trump’s annexation claims as little more than political trolling aimed at stirring up his MAGA base and usefully diverting attention from more pressing issues, such as the lack of a clear strategy for managing the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. There is, though, more to this story that just Trump shooting off his mouth. In fact, Greenland has long been a serious obsession for the former and future president, who first made a bid to purchase the island in 2019.

It’s not hard to see why. Greenland is rich in natural resources, including rare earth minerals, which are critical for America’s high-tech industries and green technologies. More important is its position at the doorstep of the geopolitically invaluable Arctic Ocean. Not only does the region hold vast untapped reserves of oil and gas, but as ice caps melt, previously inaccessible maritime pathways are opening up that could significantly alter global trade dynamics. Chief among these is the Northern Sea Route, along Russia’s coast and through the Bering Strait, which could cut transit times between Asia and Europe by as much as 40%, bypassing traditional routes through the Panama and Suez Canals.

While Trump is no stranger to masking sabre-rattling behind inflammatory rhetoric, the extent to which he and his team have fixated on this point over the last month suggests that the threats might hold more weight than previously expected.

Maybe Barron Trump has been feeding his father grandiose ideas of securing a lasting legacy, fueled in part by playing too many Paradox strategy games. Perhaps, the seed of this fixation was planted by someone else closer to the president-elect from the State Department who harbours expansionist ambitions. Regardless of the idea’s genesis, instead of pursuing an isolationist agenda, MAGA seems intent on invoking the Imperialists of the 19th Century and carving out a new empire for themselves. How Trump plans to harmonize this recent pivot with demands from some voters for America to take a step back from global affairs remains to be seen.

Even on immigration - once the defining feature of the MAGA movement - cracks have begun forming, with the dividing line being H1B visas, a foreign worker visa that allows U.S. employers to hire foreign workers in so-called specialty occupations. Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, both who are expected to chair the government deregulating board of D.O.G.E., publicly supported lowering the visa requirements for workers from India in a bid to recruit more workers for America’s burgeoning tech industries. The backlash was immense, with Musk even being raitioed under his own tweets. While the two have since backtracked, the issue has only gone on stasis, hinting that the incoming administration might just replace the inflow of new migrants from Latin America to Southeast Asia.

Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearing on Tuesday was further evidence that Trump doesn’t understand the reasons for his own victory. The Pentagon is a vast bureaucracy, and the military is facing a complex strategic problem in responding to a rising China, an aggressive Russia, and a wounded Iranian regime that may well try to race to assemble a nuclear weapon. To address that problem, Trump nominated a man whose chief qualification appears to be that he’s the most prominent (and loyal) MAGA veteran on television. The nation desperately needs competence, but, as The New Yorker reported, Hegseth was forced out of previous jobs for mismanagement, excessive drinking and “sexist” misconduct.

His probable confirmation is one of the most remarkable examples of “failing up” in modern American history. And MAGA seems mostly oblivious to the irony inherent in rewarding incompetent, unskilled workers for th

Just looking at Trump’s nominees reveals he’s not replacing D.E.I. with meritocracy, but with something that looks a lot like a pure political spoils system, where the main qualification for high office is loyalty to Trump and hatred for his enemies. This is just D.E.I. reskinned. Rather than draining the swamp, Trump is merely adding to it with more venture capitalists and unskilled yesmen.

There is only one way for Trump’s victory to herald a true American political realignment: He has to succeed, just not in the way he might think. He has to be able to swallow his thirst for vengeance and tame his erratic mind enough to actually begin to restore American confidence, delivering on the promises made on the campaign trail - lowering costs while fixing the social malaise plaguing America’s institutions.

If he won’t (or can’t), this MAGA moment will end the way every supposed realignment of the last 20 years has ended — in the agony of political defeat, cast aside by the next animating force that can capture the zeitgeist.

In any other developed country, the news that specific ethnic-religious communities had not only been systematically raping underage girls but had done so with the implicit consent of the establishment would send vibrations through the fabric of society so large that the only way it could manifest tangibly is through social upheaval. An expected consequence would be mass protests, online petitions, hatred and visceral spewing out of every commentators’ mouth, demanding justice and retribution. Not in the UK, however. Depressingly, the response has been muted, with the jousting of words mostly taking place on social media.

For years, the British establishment sought to stifle any coverage of the extent of major, organised grooming gangs in British cities over fears of stoking secretarian violence. Naz Sha, Labour MP, retweeted and liked a post saying that victims should shut up for the sake of diversity. Sarah Champion (another Labour MP) was bullied and heckled when she named the main demographic involved in the crimes. It was one of the reasons why the story faded from the public’s view. That was quickly reversed by Elon Musk, who tweeted about the scandal over the week. Regardless of one’s opinions of Musk, it cannot be denied that his close relationship with president-elect Donald Trump combined with his ownership of the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) now gives him considerable sway and influence in setting the terms of the online debate. Every comment he makes is boosted and amplified by his 200M-strong following, allowing him to bring attention to issues or scandals that would have otherwise been neglected by the mainstream media. Now, thanks to Musk’s recent intervention, the story has reached an international audience and pressure has begun building on the government to act, with the full scale of the barbarity in clearer focus.

On Wednesday, it was reported that Jess Phillips, the Minister for Safeguarding, had formally rejected repeated requests for a Home Office-led inquiry into Oldham’s historic rape gangs scandal. Phillips is ostensibly working under the assumption that it would be in the interests of the public if the inquiry was conducted at the behest of the local council rather than waiting for the government to intervene. A less charitable interpretation might point to self-preservation: despite her vocal opposition to violence against women and girls, Phillips may be worried about opening herself up to allegations of Islamophobia after nearly losing her seat to a pro-Gaza independent candidate last year in the predominantly Muslim constituency of Birmingham Yardley. Meanwhile, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner’s seat of Ashton-under-Lyne previously covered part of Oldham, and Jim McMahon, the Local Government Minister, served as a councillor on the authority from 2003 and as leader between 2011 and 2016.

The case for a centralised inquiry is clear: while this request was for Oldham alone, there has been a rape gang scandal in over 50 British towns and cities. This is a staggering scale of depravity, and most cases are marked by close resemblances in their systematic nature. The demographics of the rapists are often disproportionately men of Pakistani origin and their victims are particularly vulnerable young girls, often in social care. There have been large-scale cover-ups within ethnic communities, social services, police forces and council authorities.

When talking about an issue this multifaceted and still emotionally raw, it’s important to phrase any response delicately, but the discourse that has surrounded this scandal over the past decade or so constitutes just about as dramatic an example as you could want of a particular phenomenon/type of reasoning that I have been consistently exasperated by, and which needs to be reckoned with as much as the crimes themselves do.

Although there are many who will strenuously deny it, it is indisputable that a particular cohort of people in the country feel compelled - whether consciously or unconsciously - to downplay the severity of what has gone on specifically because they cannot allow any claim to be made that a privileged group has been victimised by a marginalised group. While there have also been many Hindu and Sikh girls that have been abused in the same way by these gangs, a disproportionate number of the victims were White, and seemingly not only targeted on that basis, but also racially abused as they were being sexually abused.

To people who base their entire moral framework on the privileged vs. marginalised dichotomy, this cannot be allowed to be widely known or believed. Even if you view this through a charitable lens and say that this compulsion is probably both subconscious and ultimately well-intentioned; but it explains the myriad deflections used (Catholic Church, Jimmy Saville etc), transparently fraudulent statistics proffered ("actually, the majority of grooming gangs are white") and the ultimate and inevitable recourse to accusations of racism. Unfortunately, what we have here seems to be a genuinely massive atrocity perpetrated against the race that these same people consider privileged. Perhaps, it is as simple of a fact that many still find it deeply uncomfortable to acknowledge how widespread the sexual exploitation of children is in the modern day. And the insane contortions people twist themselves into to avoid admitting it as such shows that on some level, they do not consider it possible for White people to suffer.

By that, I do not mean that they do not consider it possible for individual White people to suffer; rather they do not consider any action or event to constitute an affront to the dignity of White people as a demographic, even while they effortlessly consider far less serious events to be an affront to the dignity of other groups. The obvious double standard in this has been causing a terrifying rage to swell over the past twenty years or so, and has only been getting worse in recent years. The reflective instinct to dismiss or gainsay the suffering of one demographic on the basis that they are privileged, or treat those who don't do so as if they are crazy, stupid or wicked, is one of the most morally idiotic things to take place in a civilized society.

It should be blindingly obvious to anyone who thinks about it for more than a few moments, that if you are striving for a state of equality in a diverse society, but also earmark one demographic as being incapable of suffering, then all your efforts are in vain: there is no conceivable scenario (short of eliminating the privileged demographic altogether) that could possibly be considered equal when you adhere to that framework. However benign and intuitive it may seem, the conception of humanity as being divided into privileged and marginalised demographics is starting to look to me like one of the most morally short-sighted and dangerous ideas in the world.

Action is desperately needed, lest it fades into the background once again. Politicians have taken to passing laws named after victims — such as Martyn’s Law, Clare’s Law or Harper’s Law — to ensure the often appalling and nightmarish circumstances of their deaths never happen again. By contrast, it seems like politicians cannot wait to forget the victims of Britain’s grooming gang epidemic. While there have been isolated inquiries, such as the Jay Report and a 2013 report by the Home Affairs Committee, these have not provided sufficient answers. A report solely into the events in Oldham will arguably suffer from the same issue, as will any report provided by a council reporting on its own conduct. Given that many of those involved may still be serving, it will be difficult to name the individuals at fault.

Rather than treating each gang as a separate problem, the Government should launch an inquiry that deals with the disturbing phenomenon as a whole. It should treat this as what it is: a national problem, not a series of isolated incidents. It should provide the resources, authority and backing necessary to deal with the crisis as such and tackle the institutional cover-ups which happened time and time again, regardless of the council area responsible.

“An orgy of tall buildings will transform and arguably overwhelm London.” These prophetic words were written by the architect Eric Parry, in his 2015 book Context. They now read almost like an admission of guilt, given that Parry will soon be known as the designer of the joint-tallest building in London, and indeed western Europe. On Friday, the City of London’s planning committee approved Parry’s updated designs for 1 Undershaft, a skyscraper in the financial district that will draw level with the Shard at 309.6 metres. This is the maximum height permitted in London to avoid interference with air traffic.

In fairness to Parry, there is not much orgiastic about his building. Its shape is essentially that of four boxes stacked on top of each other, dutifully performing the basic function of a skyscraper: to maximise the floor space — and thus the returns to the developer — from a given piece of land. This sober profile (modest would be going too far) is the most striking thing about 1 Undershaft. It appears to signal the end of the playful skyscraper in London. Over the last 30 years, the city’s skyline has become littered with flamboyant shapes bearing familiar nicknames: the gherkin, the eye, the walkie-talkie, the electric razor, the cheese grater, the Shard. With Parry’s contribution, no such morphological metaphors spring to mind. It looks like something you might find in a data centre.

This is not the first indication that London’s tall buildings may be heading in a more conservative direction. A few years ago, mayor Sadiq Khan and then-housing secretary Michael Gove both rejected plans for the “Tulip,” a tower in the form of a glass bud atop a narrow stem. The reasons included environmental wastefulness — unlike 1 Undershaft, the Tulip did not provide a lot of office space for its height — as well as its outlandish appearance (the proposed shape was instantly compared to a sex toy). When Parry made the first designs for his new skyscraper a decade ago, the City of London reportedly insisted on a simple silhouette.

So maybe the relevant authorities have decided that London’s skyline has enough gimmicks. It doesn’t help that many of these tall structures are uncomfortably crammed together in the eastern part of the City, like overweight bankers in an elevator, so that their forms are barely identifiable in any case. More importantly though, the silly skyscrapers have already performed their role in the transformation of London. By providing a new topography of popular landmarks, they smoothed the process of destroying the city’s character and replacing it with a global real-estate market of anonymous glass and steel.

That process is now far advanced. The approval of 1 Undershaft comes just weeks after the City of London announced that Smithfield meat market, which has existed there for 900 years, will be closed. It is true that the planning committee also on Friday voted to protect the historic Bevis Marks Synagogue from an encroaching tower block, and for this it deserves credit. But the effort to brand 1 Undershaft as some sort of public space, with educational opportunities for “school children and local communities,” should fool no one.

The simple fact is, to quote from Parry’s own book again, “the vexed question of the city skyline and who determines it is ever present because tall buildings are inescapable.” His new tower may not draw attention to itself as ostentatiously as an earlier generation of skyscrapers, but it will stamp the power of his clients onto London’s horizon all the same.

At a time of unprecedented political volatility, in picking Kemi Badenoch for leader, the Conservative Party’s ageing membership chose continuity. It is perhaps a sign of how radically British politics is shifting (largely, ironically, as a result of the Conservative Party’s own failed governance record) that by the end the contest came down to two candidates of the Tory Right  — or at least what now constitutes as the Tory Right.

Did the party make the right decision? It is difficult to critique Badenoch’s platform on a policy level because her campaign chose not to propose any, instead running on vibes. Indeed, the battle between Badenoch and Jenrick was an intergenerational war within the British Right, with younger Reformists who had been flirting with Farage and what he offered backing Jenrick, and older members fighting the culture war battles of half a decade ago hailing Badenoch, often on grounds of identity politics.

On immigration, now rapidly becoming the defining issue of British politics, Jenrick possessed a clear advantage, having resigned in protest at the destructive “Boris Wave” of post-Covid mass migration, either as a matter of principle or, more likely, because he could read the political runes. Through a mixture of concrete policy proposals and a generally combative attitude, Jenrick suddenly went from a nameless cabinet minister to the defacto leader of the anti-mass immigration Right, outflanking Reform UK and presenting a plausible path towards retaking the Red Wall. Throughout the campaign, Nigel Farage had shown himself rattled by Jenrick’s performance, and his relief was palpable when Jenrick lost.

I haven’t commented much on Kemi Badenoch since she became leader, mostly because I don’t think she has much staying power and will end up as nothing more than a footnote in the Conservative Party’s history, the last gasp of its death throes. It remains unlikely she can revive the Tory Party’s fortunes. Starmer’s floundering Labour government will allow any opposition to play politics on easy mode – but it is hard not to view Badenoch’s victory as a missed opportunity for reformist conservative governance. As Labour slumps, and Reform sighs in relief, her elevation will leave British politics a three-horse race for the near future.

Where to begin? She's an absolute maniac, a delusional Thatcherite harping on issues and positions that do not matter within the current national debate. Hard-right economics paired with the funhouse mirror version of British liberals' dematerialised social policy -in other words, culturally woke and scolding. The novelty of her identity is her only shield from which she uses to deflect valid criticisms, much in the same way she chastises liberal elites for doing.

In 2018, Badenoch boasted in the Commons that she successfully lobbied to removing annual limits on work visas and also on international students to benefit her home country, Nigeria. In 2010, Badenoch wrote a blog post while running as a Parliamentary candidate for Dulwich & West Norwood, promising to “Use whatever influence I have to speak out against those who are cheating and robbing Nigeria and who seek refuge for themselves or their money in the UK.” Pandering toward the interests of an unassimilated ethnic subgroup in Britain is hardly socially conservative toward the native host population. Badenoch’s loyalties don’t seem to rest with the country she had made her new home, the country she wants to lead in the future, but instead with her ancestral homeland. How can the Conservative Party claim to want to conserve British traditions and institutions when their leader harbours ethnic pride for a foreign nation?

Badenoch has attempted to rehabilitate her image on this front, to varying degrees of success. In an article for the Telegraph shortly after becoming leader, Badenoch wrote: “Culture is more than cuisine or clothes. It’s also customs which may be at odds with British values. We cannot be naïve and assume immigrants will automatically abandon ancestral ethnichostilities at the border, or that all cultures are equally valid. They are not. I am struck for example, by the number of recent immigrants to the UK who hate Israel. That sentiment has no place here.”

While her astute analysis that cultures are not equally valid is worthy of praise, the litmus test for abiding by British values is not, first and foremost, a love of Israel. I myself have lived in Britain all my life and have never visited the Jewish state. Her rival, Jenrick, instead focused on how “English identity” — the shared culture, history, and heritage of native British people — is being erased by Woke revisionists. Such a sudden love for our collective sense of self led Jenrick to suggest historian David Starkey be given a “dukedom”. This certainly signifies a break from the Sunak government in which Jenrick served. That’s a break Badenoch has not yet proposed.

Thanks to her Thatcherite background, she's even too dogmatic to do the whole European-right, 'we must support working-families with subsidies so that we have a strong nation, workforce etc' bit. Instead, she remains hostile against maternity pay, child pay and childcare support in any capacity. To put simply, she’s the neoliberal version of the Khmer-rouge - give birth and keep on working in the field as soon as you've been brought into this world.

Her economic positions can be summarised as resuscitating the voodoo tax-cuts like it's still 1984; cutting into the bones after you've stripped the flesh from what bits of civil-society kept everything from going completely feral; gutting of what regulatory state remains and selling the copper-wire; war is good; no action on energy prices and new forms of energy development except either 'let’s have private firms do fracking' or a naive belief that 'the market will invent something'; environmental externalities don't exist so 'don't be so woke' about the excrement in the waters and executive bonuses; poor people deserve to go into the shredder if they can't bootstrap ('workhouses are too socialist'); and turbo-posting culture war slogans making up the rest. As far as hardline libertarian-conservatives go, she makes Liz Truss look like the second coming of Robert Nozick, intellectually.

Jenrick, to his credit, at least offered a noticeable break from the founding orthodoxy of the party, showing a willingness to entertain new economic proposals. While both contenders ritually invoked Thatcher’s legacy - as is customary for their party - Jenrick presented a clear and attractive emphasis on industrial policy. He focused on cheap energy with an emphasis on nuclear power — particularly the Small Modular Reactors so bafflingly neglected by the state — alongside infrastructure building and supply-side planning reforms. As Jenrick observed, “the economic consensus of the last 25 years is collapsing,” and in fact the rhetorical gap between him and Keir Starmer on reformist industrial policy is markedly narrow. If anything, Jenrick offered all the attractive elements of Labour’s economic offer with none of its flaws of crippling taxation and a risky and soon-to-be-politically-toxic emphasis on renewable energy over a stable and secure path to decarbonisation.

The crown of British political reform still lies in the gutter – if Badenoch means to wear it, she needs to start outlining what she proposes to do, not just who she is. The party may be won by platitudes, but the country remains restive and hungry for serious change – and is more willing than ever to turn on politicians who fail to deliver it.

The pessimist in me says that no matter what Badenoch does or says, the Conservatives are plagued by such deep institutional rot that it’s unsalvageable. That was most illuminating when Tom Tugendhat, one of the other leadership candidates, was asked which policy implemented by the past Conservative governments he most regrets and the only example he could give was ‘vaccine passports.’

Perhaps being stuck in an antiquated neoconservative paradigm explains why he thought vaccine passports were the most un-conservative policy implemented in the last fourteen years, instead of the irreversible cultural and demographic change, economic privation, and violent crime caused by admitting more than a million migrants a year. His proposed cap of 100,000 is ten times higher than promised by his predecessors. He refuses to withdraw from the ECHR. There is nothing “moderate” or “grown-up” about continuing a policy of failed foreign interventionism, and then importing en masse the aggrieved members of the same countries Britain declares war against.

For the Conservative party to reanimate from electoral irrelevancy, they must go against the remaining rump of wets on the green benches and speak straight to both members and estranged voters. This means promising to deport foreign criminals, reduce net migration to pre-Blair levels, and undo the economic harms inflicted on Britain by globalization, high tax, and net-zero policies. Whether or not they look credible in delivering on these promises will determine whether the Tories or Reform are the chief contender to Labour at the next general election. But for both the Conservative party and the British public, it will be a long five years in opposition.

Reversing the failures of the last 30 plus years of policy failures (both parties) in the UK is going to be brutal and will require a commitment, conviction, focus, energy and leadership that we have not seen since Thatcher or Blair. I am not optimistic because the rot is so deep and entrenched and the cure will have to be aggressive if not a little nasty that no one will stomach the fight.

When Donald Trump took the stage immediately after his election victory, he vowed that one of the first acts of his second term would be to put an end to the Washington DC consensus on aggressive military interventions abroad. “I’m not going to start wars, I’m going to stop wars,” he resolutely promised to a room packed full of boisterous supporters in Florida. While it may have seemed like an idealistic assertion, his campaign was marked by this constant critique of neocon-led military engagements in the Middle East, which most American voters have grown disillusioned with, even if little detail was given to how this foreign policy would manifest itself.

Such ambiguity is not outlandish for the former president, who has a history of making bold, sweeping statements, but one could parse the true intentions behind these words - an almost total rejection of the neocon philosophy. The slogan “America First” was interpreted by many not just as a call to focus on domestic issues but to shift away from overseas conflicts and regime change. And it was seemingly backed up by his running mate, J.D. Vance, who suggested that the Democrats failed because they “built a foreign policy of hectoring, moralising and lecturing countries that don’t want anything to do with it” — as opposed to the Chinese, who “have a foreign policy of building roads and bridges and feeding poor people.”

It was this anti-war stance that stood in contrast to a bipartisan political establishment discredited by the forever wars, allowing Republicans to make inroads with constituencies they have historically struggled with, such as Latinos, African-Americans and even Arabic-Americans in Michigan, a mosaic voter coalition that once seemed impossible to assemble together.

Nearly two weeks after Trump’s historic victory, however, this hope that the next president might pursue a more isolationist — or at least less interventionist — foreign policy is already fading into the distance.

A proxy war has been raging within the MAGA movement between restrainers and sabre-rattlers. When political commentator and comedian Dave Smith wrote on X “that we need maximum pressure to keep all neocons and war hawks out of the Trump administration,” he was retweeted by Donald Trump Jr, who replied: “I’m on it.” The anti-neocon faction had another reason to rejoice when news emerged that Nikki Hailey and Mike Pompeo, the most zealous military interventionists in the first Trump cabinet, would not be re-joining the administration. But, as Trump started unveiling his cabinet selections, this excitement quickly turned to despair — and anger.

For the position of Secretary of State, arguably the most prestigious role in a president’s cabinet related to foreign affairs, Trump appointed Marco Rubio, the senior Senator from Florida who has made a career for himself as a zealot warhawk, promoting neoconservative foreign policy positions. From agitating for a wider escalation with Iran to goading China into diplomatic brawls by highlighting the widespread human rights abuse in the western province of Xinjiang, he is no stranger to foreign provocations. Rubio was also a strong supporter of the war in Iraq, of the bombing of Libya and of the Obama administration’s failed attempt at regime change in Syria. Unsurprisingly, much like his Republican peers, he is a staunch ally of Israel, closely aligned with the views of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, leading him to oppose the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, arguing for stricter sanctions and even advocating military strikes.

Many of the other names chosen to fill key foreign policy and national security roles are, in fact, well-known neocons and war hawks who advocate a muscular foreign policy against countries such as Iran and China (much in the same vein as Hailey and Pompeo). Such appointments don’t suggest a pivot away from Biden’s reckless interventionism and imperial overreach, but rather a return to policies that Trump once criticized.

In a recent interview, Trump’s pick for Secretary of Defence, Fox News anchor Pete Hegseth, described himself as a “recovering neocon”, characterizing the post-9/11 forever wars as a mistake that had “made things worse”. However, he remains an ardent supporter of Israel’s war on Gaza, describing the story of Israel as the that of “God’s chosen people,” a view which aligns with his evangelical Christian background, where support for Israel is often seen as part of a theological stance.

Mike Waltz, Trump’s next national security advisor, is another militant neocon who criticised Biden for not escalating aggressively enough in Ukraine, supported allowing Ukraine to use US weapons to strike deep into Russian territory, advocated bombing Iran; opposed the US withdrawal from Afghanistan (to the point where he drafted a bill which would have forced American serviceman to remain in the country past the date agreed in the withdrawal agreement); called for “a new Monroe Doctrine” to deter Chinese influence throughout the Western hemisphere; and promoted escalating military support for Taiwan.

As is clear, fervent support for Israel is a common thread among all of Trump’s foreign policy nominees. Mike Huckabee, Trump’s choice as the next US ambassador to Israel is an evangelical Christian who describes himself as an “unapologetic, unreformed Zionist”, and frames his support for Israel through biblical and religious perspectives. He has been a vocal supporter of Israeli illegal settlements in the West Bank, which he refers to as Judea and Samaria. “There’s no such thing as a settlement,” he has said. “They’re communities. They’re neighbourhoods. They’re cities.”

Maybe it was naive to believe that Trump would break cleanly from the orthodoxy which has guided the State Department post-WW2. After all, while in office, Trump funded the Saudi blockade of Yemen, launched a trade war with China and brought the Middle East closer to the brink of a regional conflict by assassinating Qasem Soleimani, a high-profile Iranian general. On the surface, advocating for peace doesn’t seem to complement his faux masculine bravado. But there was a theory, one I, in fact, shared, that four years spent wandering the political wilderness, ostracised from the Washington Deep State, would polarise Trump and his closest acolytes against becoming entangled in overseas conflicts and instead towards pursuing a more conciliatory tone on the world stage, one where the disputes of countries were left for the involved parties to settle.

Sure, a 180-degree isolationist turn was never on the table, but there were signs he seemed to be breaking from this destructive way of thinking to a degree. The nomination of Tulsi Gabbard, a vocal critic of US involvement in what she called “counterproductive, wasteful foreign wars,” to national intelligence director could have been interpreted as a sign of this intent. His close association with RFK Jr, an avowed isolationist who criticised the US for ‘sleepwalking into the Ukrainian War,’ reignited hope amongst supporters that Trump could at least be swayed away from overextending American military presence.

But overall, it’s hard to make the case that Trump’s foreign policy line-up isn’t a victory for the pro-war uniparty. Even though the priorities may shift — as the focus moves to Iran and China rather than Russia — the next Trump administration looks unlikely to stray very far from the strategic orientation that has guided the US under the Biden administration, grounded in aggressively stemming the decline of American global dominance by resorting to diplomatic, economic and even military pressure. While we can expect Trump to prioritise diplomatic and economic tools over outright war, and to adopt a more transactional and less ideologically-driven approach to international affairs, this is ultimately no guarantee of peace.

This highlights the intrinsically contradictory and ambiguous nature of “America First.” For many in the MAGA movement, it evokes a return to a pre-World War II ethos, when the US prioritised domestic concerns over entanglements abroad. It suggests a focus on economic self-sufficiency and a military posture confined to defending the homeland rather than engaging in costly overseas conflicts. But for many in the incoming Trump administration — and Trump himself — it arguably means something quite different. It means a strategy aimed at recalibrating America’s engagements in order to maximise US interests, including by asserting military dominance while at the same time avoiding direct military involvement.

Trump’s actual philosophy seems to now be “more rubble, less trouble.” That is to say, Trump is willing to project violence abroad but wary of putting boots on the ground. It’s a yawning chasm to straddle, especially in today’s age of heightened geopolitical rivarly, in which the economic and military dimensions are deeply intertwined.

I still hold out hope that the innate loyalty shown by Trump’s cabinet appointments suggests he still wields some influence over them and can direct his foreign policy without succumbing to their warmongering tendancies. Naive? Maybe. But if any politician is prone to unpredictability, it’s Trump.

It would be better for the World, and for America itself, if the Republican Party embraced Trump’s ‘art of the deal’ approach to foreign affairs. It’s one of the quirks of Trump’s more enigmatic style of governing and the one advantage of being ideologically vacuous. Only he can switch from harping about the need to bomb Iran to articulating a desire to negotiate with U.S. adversaries such as China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia to de-escalate tensions and avoid fresh conflicts without suffering any shame. That ideological schizophrenia can yield promising results, as the Abraham Accords showed.

Going forward, isolationists should hope that Trump somehow lives up to his campaign promise and overrides his more hawkish advisers to implement an American First foreign policy that will decisively turn away from Joe Biden’s reckless interventionism and sponsorship of multiple wars. But they also have a right to be skeptical that Trump’s second term will be any more anti-war than his first. With the evidence at hand, there’s little reason to think that either Trump or his foreign policy team have the skill or the desire for a true anti-interventionist foreign policy, one that would draw down the American empire, use diplomacy to engage with rivals, and shift resources from the bloated military budget toward domestic repairs.

In such a context, anything less than a clean break with the US’s hegemonic approach is likely to lead the world down the same dangerous path laid out by the Biden administration, one where regional instability is the norm and civilian casualties are treated as nothing more than a statistical figure.