Unfortunately, the story is mostly about what’s not in the report, which I’ll get to. As for what is included, start with the fact that it contains many factual errors (this is a “draft” report and they would presumably have been caught in a full copy edit, but still), as evidenced by the warnings that appear on nearly every page.

The autopsy does not really present a unified theory of why Kamala Harris lost in 2024. The unnamed author writes, among other things, that the party moved too far left and failed to define Trump and go negative effectively. But it arrives at these conclusion with a surprising lack of new research but with a lot of pundit conventional wisdom and “analysis” you’d expect from someone committing the Strategist’s Fallacy — the tendency for campaign consultants and political strategists, especially on the Democratic side (where quantitative analysts are overwhelmingly focused on policy positions and ideological point-positions), to map their mental model of how they make political decisions onto voters.

I don’t know how much the DNC pays for reports like these, but presumably if it really wanted to understand why Harris lost it would want to invest some resources into fact-finding research like surveying state party chairs and local officials, as well as talking to voters who switched sides. Maybe it could even do some original causal research on its theories.

But the biggest problem is that the autopsy straight up ignores the major reasons Harris lost in 2024. Yes, it’s bad enough that the report doesn’t mention that party bosses failed to coordinate an early exit for Joe Biden, who was too unpopular to win. And there is no mention of Israel/Gaza, low turnout in the cities, and nothing on Harris’s race or gender. But this is a data-driven site, so I want to really focus in on what the numbers can tell us.

When we boot up the data, it’s obvious the main reason Harris lost is that 2024 simply had too much inflation-induced anti-incumbent sentiment for the incumbent party to overcome. This is curiously missing from its main diagnosis. The word “inflation” isn’t mentioned in the autopsy a single time (except in the context of inflation-adjusted ad spending).

The reality of the 2024 election is that it was going to be hard for a Democrat to win, regardless of who they were or how they campaigned. The broader economic and political conditions were so favourable to Republicans that you would have expected Trump to win about 90 per cent of the time, regardless of campaign or candidate effects.

Political scientists have been pointing out for decades that you can predict presidential elections reasonably well using just two pieces of information: how voters feel about the incumbent president, and how voters feel about the economy. There are many variants of this model — such as the “Bread and Peace” model (Douglas Hibbs), the “Time for Change” forecast (Abramowitz), Ray Fair’s “Fair” model, and Wlezien/Erikson’s work with “Leading Economic Indicators” — but all use a similar set of economic and political “fundamentals” to predict the result of the election.

None of these models is perfect, but they’re a useful baseline for forecasting elections and understanding why certain results happen. One use of the predictions is to distinguish the part of an outcome that’s about candidates and campaigns from the part that’s structural.

The chart below shows a model I built for exactly these explanatory purposes. It uses Gallup’s net approval of the incumbent president measured in June and the trailing two-year average of the University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index to predict the incumbent party’s share of votes cast for the Democratic and Republican candidates for president — what we call “two-party” vote share. That’s it: two variables, both measured before Labor Day (7 September), both knowable months before any ad runs, and in some cases, before candidates are even picked.

The dashed line is a perfect prediction. The shaded line shows the 80 per cent prediction interval for the 2024 election, and the solid blue dot shows the actual result of the race.

In 2024, Kamala Harris received about 49.3 per cent of the two-party vote. The model — using from 1956 through 2020, with 2024 held out — predicted she’d get about 48 per cent, with an 80 per cent prediction interval of 46.6 per cent to 49.9 per cent. Harris’s vote share lands on the upper end of this range, but still squarely inside of it.

In a sense, then, the surprise of the election is that Harris did as well as she did, considering the prevailing factors against her. Given Biden’s approval rating in June (deeply underwater, in the high 30s) and two straight years of the worst consumer sentiment readings outside of a recession, the Democratic nominee was on track to lose the popular vote by four points. She lost by 1.5.

Contrary to the autopsy and Strategist thinking, you don’t need a theory about Harris’s past issue positions, or whether the campaign spent too much on broadcast and not enough on connected TV, or whether Future Forward (a Democratic Super PAC) and the campaign had aligned strategies, to explain the 2024 outcome. The fundamentals already explain it.

I have found that people don’t like giving or hearing this explanation for election results. I recently tried at a meeting with congressional staffers, and I think it left them dejected and/or upset, because it gave them few action items besides “run anti-incumbent candidates when the economy sucks.”

Another reason consultants don’t focus on structural factors more often is that they can’t sell you any services to solve that problem, because there’s nothing you can do about them.

But generally speaking, “inflation was high, and Harris was going to lose anyway” is a much better explanation for 2024 than anything else in isolation. Since we have the track record of this inference, and it has been helpful historically, we can also be confident it will continue to be helpful in predicting future elections. A lot of the other explanations people are giving about 2024 don’t extrapolate well to future elections. (“We should align the campaign’s interests with its Super PACs” — what? duh!)

If you only read the DNC report, you’d think 2024 was a uniquely American failure of Democratic messaging, organising and candidate definition. And maybe you don’t buy my “fundamentals” regression of election outcomes. Well, to that person I’d emphasise that 2024 wasn’t just bad for Democrats; it was bad for incumbent parties all across the globe.

As data journalist John Burn-Murdoch documented in the Financial Times, every single governing party in a developed democracy that faced voters in 2024 lost vote share. The Tories were obliterated in Britain. Macron’s coalition lost its majority in France. The LDP lost its majority in Japan. And on and on. Incumbents from Portugal to South Korea either lost outright or were badly weakened.

What did all these countries have in common? Not Kamala Harris’s communications strategy. Not the Democrats’ rural organising budget. Not whether the party had gone “too far left” on social issues. They had inflation. The post-pandemic price shock hit virtually every developed economy, and voters everywhere punished whoever happened to be holding the gavel when prices went up.

Burn-Murdoch said on Twitter/X the day after Trump won:

We’re going to hear lots of stories about which people, policies and rhetoric are to blame for the Democrats’ defeat.

Some of those stories may even be true!

But an underrated factor is that 2024 was an absolutely horrendous year for incumbents around the world.

This should give the structural theorists more ammo in rebutting the autopsy truthers. When incumbents lose across dozens of countries with different parties, different candidates, different media environments and different campaign tactics, the parsimonious explanation should be the one variable they share. In 2024, the global post-Covid inflation rate was far beyond what was observed in prior decades.

Party autopsies are basically my Strategist’s Fallacy in its purest form. Tactical choices look enormous when you stare at them up close, but largely miss the point. From inside a campaign war room, every ad decision, every rally location, every reporter interview feels like it could swing the race. And in a truly close election, some of these factors might add up.

But the campaign decisions are small factors dominated by a much more influential set of fundamentals that predict roughly where the final result will land, regardless of who’s running the campaign.

The autopsy’s diagnoses — Democrats didn’t define Trump, didn’t go negative enough, didn’t engage male voters, didn’t show up in rural areas, didn’t invest enough in digital ads, didn’t have a “permanent campaign” strategy — could all be simultaneously true and roughly irrelevant to the 2024 outcome. They might matter at the margins in a future election where the fundamentals are neutral. But they probably didn’t matter much in 2024 because the fundamentals weren’t neutral.

Worse, by attributing the loss to strategic failures, the autopsy invites the party to learn the wrong lessons. If you decide Harris lost because she didn’t run negative enough ads against Trump, you’ll spend 2028 running more negative ads. If you decide she lost because the campaign didn’t have a clear definition of the candidate, you’ll spend 2028 obsessing over the candidate definition. Neither will help if the next Democratic nominee inherits another period of high inflation or low presidential approval. And neither will be necessary if they inherit a recovering economy and a popular incumbent.

The deeper problem with the autopsy is that it imagines a voter who doesn’t exist. The kind of voter the report’s recommendations would persuade — someone weighing Harris’s issue positions against Trump’s, watching campaign ads carefully, updating their beliefs in response to messaging frames — is essentially a Washington consultant, not your grandma who can’t afford to pay her bills because gas is up 50 per cent and electricity subsidies just ended. One of the problems with autopsies is that voter psychology takes a lot of work to understand well, but the people who have that skillset largely aren’t the type of person the DNC is hiring to audit their choices.

Start with what we know about the anti-system voter. A large and growing share of the electorate doesn’t think in terms of “left vs right” or even “Democrat vs Republican.” They think in terms of “the people running things are screwing me, so throw the bums out.” They are not persuaded by an ad explaining that the “opportunity economy” is a better plan than the “Trump economy,” because their objection to the status quo isn’t about specific policies — it’s about the status quo in general. A large portion of voters simply cast their ballot against whoever they perceive as being more a part of “the system” or “the establishment.” And this can be a decisive bloc!

This is also why the hidden axis of American politics — the well-being-oriented, “non-ideological” dimension that runs orthogonal to traditional ideology — keeps catching strategists off guard. Most Washington-based political professionals were trained to think about voters along a single left-right spectrum, and to design messages to “move” voters along it. But a huge fraction of the electorate is non-ideological. They hold a mix of progressive and conservative views that are basically uncorrelated with one another, and they choose candidates based on cues that have little to do with the policy debates that animate party staff. They want change. They want competence. They want leaders to “fight” for them. They do not want to hear about left-right identity politics if the price of a gallon of milk is $6.

And then there is the low-information voter, who decided 2024 more than any other group. The voters who broke hardest for Trump in 2024 were the ones who paid the least attention to politics. These are voters who, in our surveys, cannot name the party in control of Congress, don’t follow the news regularly if at all, and make decisions mostly based on vibes and what their social groups are saying. The DNC autopsy spends pages on messaging strategy aimed at engaged voters and almost no time on the people who actually moved.

This is what strategists miss when they treat campaign choices as the dominant drivers of vote choice. But you can’t ad-target your way out of an inflation problem. You can’t define your opponent if your opponent’s main appeal is that he is not the person currently in charge while gas is $5 a gallon. And you certainly can’t run a 107-day campaign aimed at low-information voters and expect them to suddenly start paying attention to your six-point plan on housing. Whether you “defined your opponent early” has no bearing on the dominant force in politics.

There is one thing the party could have controlled that the autopsy almost entirely sidesteps: the decision to stick with Biden and not have a primary at all in 2023–24. Biden’s approval rating had been underwater for nearly three years by the time he dropped out. The forecasting models were warning early that Biden’s odds of winning in November were perilous and trending lower. As we have seen, based on the fundamentals, they may have been even worse.

By letting the party nominate Biden without a primary or convention, party bosses closed themselves off to those paths to November that ended in victory. The party had years, not weeks, to coordinate a graceful handoff to a successor who could have built a real campaign around economic reform, distanced her/himself from the Biden era, and had a fair shot at competing against an incredibly flawed opponent.

The autopsy mentions the truncated timeline for Harris’s campaign in passing, but does not engage with the actual decision-making chain that produced the truncated timeline at all. That omission tells us a lot about the Democratic Party as an institution — about who has power, who exercises it, and who is ultimately (not) being held accountable for 2024.

You can argue that even a hypothetical Democratic nominee who entered the race in 2023 would have lost given the fundamentals. I think that’s probably true! But “we would have lost by less and the party wouldn’t be in this crisis of legitimacy” is a meaningful counterfactual, and it’s the one piece of self-criticism the institution most needed to do. (I might argue that the soul searching about 2024 — the notion of an “autopsy” in general — to explain a 1.5-point defeat is all a bit dramatic anyway, but your mileage may vary.)

If you are the type of person who buys into the autopsy’s Strategist Brain theories of political outcomes, then you are going to dramatically misread the moment in 2026 and 2028.

If Democrats lost in 2022 and 2024 because economic conditions were bad and they were in charge, they should expect to win in 2026 and 2028 if conditions are bad. That’s because they are the out-party now. But if you buy the explanation for 2024 presented in the DNC autopsy, and ignore the structural factors at play, you are less likely to see this as the dominant messaging strategy for your campaign.

Consider that Trump’s approval is already underwater enough to give Democrats the House and maybe the Senate in 2026, and the presidency in 2028. Consumer sentiment, after a brief post-election bump, has cratered as tariffs have inflated costs of goods and the war against Iran has caused gas prices to spike. If the trends we’ve seen in general and special elections in 2025 and 2026 hold, we are looking at a substantial Republican defeat in the midterms and a genuinely favourable environment in 2028.

But here’s the catch, and it’s a big one. Those very same fundamentals that will create positive conditions for Democratic wins in 2026 and 2028 will also start working against them the moment they take power. Anti-incumbency in the post-pandemic era has been unusually durable — voters across the developed world have been throwing out whoever is in charge, regardless of ideology, for five straight years now. If Democrats win the House in 2026 and the White House in 2028 on the back of Trump’s economic mismanagement, they will inherit the same trap that swallowed Harris: a public that is structurally pissed off about the cost of living and willing to punish whoever happens to be in charge when the next election rolls around.

We should not expect economic anxiety to simply fall away. A new New York Times/Siena poll fielded on 11–15 May finds that 88 per cent of potential Democratic supporters say the American economic system is unfair to most Americans, and 83 per cent say the political and economic system needs major changes (63 per cent) or to be torn down completely (20 per cent). Only 1 per cent want no changes at all.

The only way to escape the gravity of anti-incumbent sentiment is to do something big enough that voters actually feel it, or signal that you’re trying. You don’t need a twelve-point plan and to rattle off macroeconomic indicators from the Oval Office; Biden tried that. The next Democratic candidate will need something on the scale of the New Deal or the Great Society — a generational project that reorders the relationship between the American economy and the American worker, and that voters can point to and say “My life is better because of this party.”

Democrats need a president who, in 2029 — like Zohran Mamdani in New York City — says the cost of housing, healthcare, childcare and energy is the central political question of our time, and who proposes to do something on the scale of that problem. There are lots of options on the table for a party that wants to go big. Build millions of new homes. Cap the price of insulin and expand negotiation to every essential drug. Subsidise childcare or make it a public good. Build out clean energy infrastructure fast enough to combat rising costs from AI infrastructure and climate change. Tax the people who have captured most of the economic gains over the last twenty years and use the money to fund the policies ordinary people actually buy. Pick fights with the industries that profit from scarcity and dysfunction — and win them.

This, of course, will be hard; defying gravity always is. It requires governing the way Roosevelt and Johnson governed, with the assumption that bold action creates its own political coalition. And it also requires you to look back on your failures with a holistic view of what causes certain outcomes.

I have not yet seen anything close to this from the Democratic Party, from the think tanks, or from the leading 2028 contenders. There are gestures toward the “abundance” agenda, populism and “radical centrism,” but these mostly read like positioning exercises, not serious agendas for a people that are really hurting. The 2024 autopsy was a chance to start that conversation by being honest about why Harris lost. It failed to do that.

This matters because the fundamentals giveth and the fundamentals taketh away. A Democratic win in 2028 built on Trump backlash, without a generational economic vision behind it, is a Democratic loss in 2032 waiting to happen. The only durable answer to anti-incumbent sentiment is to actually earn re-election. The party has roughly two and a half years to decide whether it wants to think that big — and that creatively.

I would have liked to see a DNC autopsy with more data, more research, and more attention to the real hard work on voter psychology, economic anxiety, and the path forward. The 2024 autopsy was the party’s chance to confront the thing it actually got wrong. Harris lost because prices were high, Biden was unpopular, and voters across the world were in a mood to punish whoever was in charge. It is surprising to read a hundred pages about messaging discipline and rural organising and still miss that fundamental fact. And yet.

Democrats are about to be handed a win in 2026–28 by voters who are angry at the party currently in power. If they mistake that for vindication of a new strategy that fiddles around the margins — instead of the same structural anti-incumbency that buried Harris — they will spend the 2030s out of power and wishing they had thought bigger when time was still on their side. •

This article was written by G. Elliott Morris and published at his newsletter, Strength In Numbers. It has been republished here with his permission. Read more from Elliott at gelliottmorris.com.

The post The real reason Democrats lost in 2024 appeared first on Inside Story.

As it happens, the blinking had occurred sometime before. Almost as soon as Moscow learned of the blockade it ordered Soviet ships to stay clear. Contrary to the apprehensions of Kennedy and his advisers, all Soviet ships were far away from the quarantine line by the time Rusk made his comment.

Nor was that the moment of greatest danger. More blinking would be done before the crisis was over. The big test was getting the Soviet missiles out of Cuba. Nonetheless, that moment showed the crisis was potentially manageable and the Soviets were wary about escalation.

Not one but two blockades are currently in place in the Strait of Hormuz. The first, imposed by the Iranians in response to the initial US–Israeli strikes, effectively shut the Strait. Iran’s leaders did, however, intend to allow their own and other favoured ships through, as well as those prepared to pay a toll to Tehran. That led to the second blockade, this one imposed by the Trump administration to deny Iran those benefits. Both blockades are being enforced, with merchant ships fired on and Iranian vessels seized.

In 1962 the world watched the developing crisis in the Caribbean with anxiety. Everything was dependent on decisions being made by a few people in Washington and Moscow. If the crisis got out of hand then all would suffer the consequences of what could be a nuclear war. In 2026 the world watches a contest of wills between Tehran and Washington, also with anxiety. Much economic damage has already been done: the longer the standoff the greater the prospective chaos.

For the standoff to end both sides must blink together to end their respective blockades. That might have happened on 17 April when Iran announced that the Strait was open. Trump welcomed the move but still decided to keep his blockade going to demonstrate the US had the upper hand. Iran immediately reimposed its blockade. Trump appeared to think the pressure on Iran would increase if it could not export its oil. It would have to keep more in storage tanks, which would soon fill up, and shut its oil wells. This has not happened.

The formal positions of the two sides on peace negotiations still seem to be far apart. Yet Trump on Tuesday suggested that “tremendous progress” was being made towards a deal. We have been here many times before, with Trump claiming some imminent breakthrough only for imminent peace to turn out to have largely been in his imagination. From the start Trump’s utterances on this war have sown confusion and got in the way of serious peace-making. (The Washington Post has a useful compilation of his many and inconsistent claims on the timeline of the war and the likely prospects for peace).

Yet that burst of optimism from Trump was combined with statements to the effect that the active stage of the war was over. After looking at whether Trump has started blinking, I’ll consider in this post the incentives for the Iranians to do some blinking of their own, and the possibility that the Strait might be opened soon.

Trump blinks first

On 3 May Trump announced yet another initiative — somewhat unoriginally named “Operation Project Freedom” — intended to undermine the Iranian blockade. The US would “guide” ships through the Strait of Hormuz from the next day, with a warning to Tehran that any attempt to prevent them getting through would be met by force. This was presented as a “humanitarian” move. On Truth Social, Trump said:

The Ships movement is merely meant to free up people, companies, and Countries that have done absolutely nothing wrong — They are victims of circumstance. This is a Humanitarian gesture on behalf of the United States, Middle Eastern Countries but, in particular, the Country of Iran.

We have told these Countries that we will guide their Ships safely out of these restricted Waterways, so that they can freely and ably get on with their business.

If, in any way, this Humanitarian process is interfered with, that interference will, unfortunately, have to be dealt with forcefully.

The humanitarian issue is real enough. The International Maritime Organization, in passing a resolution condemning Iran’s blockade, noted the threat posed to the “welfare of seafarers” as well as the danger to life and the “serious risk to the marine environment.” The Pentagon says 22,500 mariners have been stuck on 1550 vessels for more than nine weeks.

In the event, two US-flagged tankers that had been trapped were guided through the Strait. But compared with the scale of the problem this was of only modest value. Without Iranian cooperation, which was never likely, ships’ vulnerability to drones or sea-skimming missiles, even if they stayed close to the Omani coast, was enough to deter commercial vessels from taking any risks. Other than guidance the idea was that the US would use all its available assets to create some sort of security “umbrella.”

Seven Iranian small boats were sunk and some Iranian cruise missiles and drones were intercepted, but Iran still made its point by attacking several merchant ships and an oil port in the United Arab Emirates. So despite the US secretary of defense claiming a path had been secured and that commercial ships were lining up to pass through, the reality was much more precarious. Then, after forty-eight hours, Trump paused the operation, ostensibly because of progress in the negotiations, but also because it was not going to provide a way out of the impasse. The Iranians gloated that they had thwarted yet another American attempt to gain the upper hand.

The move certainly underlined just how much the administration wants to get out of this mess of its own making, preferably without losing too much face. Pete Hegseth was at pains to stress that none of the drama around “Project Freedom” affected the ceasefire. We were then told that active operations were effectively over, and so the ceasefire was effectively permanent. This was also in line with Trump’s insistence that he could ignore the sixty-day limit in the War Powers Act because the ceasefire meant that the war was over.

With the blockade still in place, however, this is not the case, as a blockade is an act of war. Trump said “It’s a very friendly blockade. Nobody is even challenging it,” but by 6 May he seemed to be having second thoughts about whether he really wanted to take the option of a return to bombing off the table.

Despite his apparent insouciance Trump doesn’t want this situation to continue for much longer. The war is unpopular in the United States. If it was successful then the political and economic price being paid might be acceptable. But so far this war has been far from successful, with many negative consequences and no positives. This became painfully apparent during last week’s congressional hearings when Hegseth acknowledged that the war had already cost $25 billion.

Hegseth sought to hide its limited achievements by engaging in a rhetorical confrontation with Democrats, at one point accusing them of being the enemy within. He praised Trump for his “bravery” in taking on the Iranians, explained how the Iranians had been allowed to do terrible things against the US for forty-seven years without anybody doing anything about it, and mentioned how dangerous it would be if the regime getting nuclear weapons. He emphasised that the regime has lost layers of leaders, along with lots of ships, missiles and other military capabilities.

But any boasts seem more than premature when the regime appears to be in a stronger position internally than it was in February and is far from being fully disarmed, with the status of its nuclear program thus far unaffected. The main change is that the Strait of Hormuz was open in February and isn’t now. The other difference is that US relations with its allies have deteriorated badly because Trump blames them for insufficient support. This is not what a victory looks like.

When he launched the war he seemed to have had in his head the Venezuelan model in which, once he had abducted president Nicolás Maduro, everyone left in the government was happy to work with the US to ensure their own survival. The differences with the Iranian situation are too numerous to mention. Trump’s key difficulty is that, having presented Epic Fury as a stunning victory for the US that left him with “all the cards” in the negotiations, Iran has clearly not been defeated and has a bargaining position that cannot be ignored if the aim is to bring the war to a close.

Will the Iranians blink?

Part of Trump’s preferred narrative is that the Iranians are desperate for a deal, and are only held back by splits within the regime and a consequential inability to take the hard decisions. Differences of opinion undoubtedly exist inside the regime, but not fragmentation. The IRGC (revolutionary guards) has used the war (as they used the Iran–Iraq war of the 1980s) to consolidate its position and suppress dissent. It is riding high on its defiance of the Americans, which has done wonders for its international reputation, at least among those sections of the international community deeply hostile to the United States.

And yet. The immiseration of the Iranian people continues. People must scramble for the essentials of life. Many are not getting paid, cash is hard to come by, and inflation is out of control. The regime’s supporters have been energised by the conflict but a large portion of the population remains disaffected, suffering in silence, unable to share their thoughts because of fear of the IRGC. The internet is still down.

The American blockade has emphasised the difficulty of turning Iran’s control over the Strait into a money-making venture, but it does allow the IRGC to sustain a state of emergency and maintain its grip over the country. It must wonder about what will happen when it must declare the war over and the dire state of the country can no longer be ignored. With no quick fixes to Iran’s internal problems, perhaps that is one reason why the its leaders have had few incentives to make big compromises to end the conflict. The IRGC’s determination to show no sign of weakness is why it responded so vigorously to the American attempt to find a way to break the blockade.

But they can’t sustain the current position indefinitely. Many of those who are pleased to see the American embarrassed are being hurt by the closure. This includes China, which is getting increasingly nervous about the long-term impact of the Strait — through which it imports about a third of its oil and gas — staying shut. President Xi Jinping will soon welcome Trump to Beijing and doesn’t want the summit to be dominated by this issue. Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi has recently been in Beijing.

Iran’s attacks on its neighbours have also left it regionally isolated. Few in the Gulf region are disposed to help it out of its troubles given the harm already caused to their own economies.

Fitful negotiations

Iran’s demands have been as maximalist as Trump’s. The Trump administration’s proposals start with Iran’s nuclear activities. It seeks severe limits on uranium enrichment, verifiable guarantees Iran will not develop nuclear weapons and long-term monitoring of nuclear facilities, as well as a re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz and no Iranian control over shipping passing through.

The key feature of Iran’s response was to postpone the nuclear issue until everything else was sorted to its satisfaction. This would require the US to withdraw all its forces from near Iran’s borders and end its blockade of Iranian ports, and for all hostilities — including Israel’s offensive in Lebanon — to cease. It wants guarantees of no future US or Israeli attacks and also reparations for the damage caused, it wants sanctions lifted and billions of dollars of frozen assets released, and it still wants to manage shipping through the Strait. Only then could discussions begin on its nuclear program (without which there is no prospect of sanctions relief). It will not abandon uranium enrichment but does seem ready for a long moratorium.

When this latest Iranian proposal was received, via Pakistan, last week Trump dismissed it. He could not “imagine that it would be acceptable.” He wrote in a post on Truth Social on 2 May, suggesting that Iran deserved punishment: “They have not yet paid a big enough price for what they have done to Humanity, and the World, over the last 47 years.”

Nonetheless, last Sunday the US sent another proposal, and Trump spoke of “very positive discussions.” Presumably “Project Freedom” was designed to strengthen the US position and force the Iranians to take its proposal more seriously. Yet now Trump is signalling he has had enough. His position had been that if there was no deal “fighting resumes.” He appeared to have taken this threat off the table but then on Wednesday he put it back on again. In a post on Truth Social he said that failure to agree a deal will result in bombardments “at a much higher level and intensity” than Epic Fury.

Meanwhile, secretary of state Marco Rubio, who has not played a prominent part in the administration’s presentation of its case until now, has suggested the blockade was sufficient to keep up the pressure because it denied Iran revenue for “whatever remains of their frail economy.” He insisted that “we’re done with Epic Fury” and are on to “Project Freedom.” Unfortunately for Rubio’s credibility, Trump immediately paused Project Freedom and promised yet more bombing at a greater intensity than before if the peace plan was rejected.

Blinking at last?

Anything Trump says on peace deals as well as his more lurid threats must be discounted. There are other reasons for some optimism. Despite Monday’s events, and despite a flare-up on Thursday, the Iranians want to sustain the ceasefire and foreign minister Araghchi has also said that “talks are making progress.” A number of other countries, including Saudi Arabia and China, are now part of the conversation. International pressure to get this sorted is growing. The Iranians have now said that the Strait of Hormuz could be reopened if there was an “end of the aggressors’ threats,” but without specifying whether all ships could pass through and whether it would still want to collect tolls. (The IRGC statement refers to “the shadow of new procedures”).

The current focus is reportedly on a one-page memorandum which includes, according to Axios, a suspension of Iranian nuclear enrichment, the lifting of sanctions, and a restoration of free transit through the Strait of Hormuz. Rubio has suggested the nuclear clauses will be more of an agreed general framework for further discussions rather than a final agreement.

“We don’t have to have the actual agreement written out in one day,” he said. “This is highly complex and highly technical. We have to have a diplomatic solution that is very clear about the topics that they’re willing to negotiate on and the concessions they are willing to make at the front end in order to make those talks worthwhile.”

This is sensible enough, although clearly far from what the administration originally wanted. If that is all the Americans get out of this war — about the same as they could have got without its attack — then it will be even harder for the administration to brag about a great victory.

Internationally the nuclear issue will attract far less attention than whether the Strait can be opened and ships can start moving again. Even if there is a negotiating breakthrough it is unlikely to come quickly. Everything is going through the Pakistanis. There are no current plans for direct talks.

We have probably reached the stage where both sides are dissatisfied with what the other is proposing but neither wants the talks to collapse. External pressure to get the Strait opened is becoming more persistent. Conceptually it is not hard to work out what needs to be done, but the detail is difficult and any engagement by Trump can scuttle a promising initiative. We are probably inching towards a deal. But for now it is more a wink than a blink. •

The post Who will blink first? appeared first on Inside Story.

The idea in a nutshell was this: Two giant American tech companies, Google and Meta, had abused Australian news publishers by “taking” their stories and including them in their search results and social feeds. Publishers were due compensation for this wrong — but the tech giants refused to negotiate over how much. So the government ordered these negotiations to take place; Google and Meta would need to strike individual deals to pay some undetermined number of publishers some undetermined amount of money.

If the government felt they’d paid publishers enough, then that’s that. If it didn’t, though, the government could mandate further bargaining and, eventually, require third-party arbitration that could cost companies bigly.

I am in favour of publishers getting money, and I am in favour of Google and Facebook being the ones writing the cheques. But the system had major problems, both philosophical and practical.

Last week, the Australian government announced a successor to the News Media Bargaining Code — the (annoyingly similarly named) News Bargaining Initiative. It’s a clear improvement. Indeed, with a single change, it’d be close to an ideal system. But without that change, I suspect it’ll end up repeating many of the old system’s flaws.

You can read my 2022 piece for a lengthy discussion of those flaws, but here’s a summary of the two big ones.

Problem 1: The code lied about what problem it was addressing

Australian media companies, like their peers around the world, have long complained of the tech giants’ “theft” of their intellectual property. That “theft” consisted of… letting Facebook users link to news stories and Google including news stories in search results. Those things are not theft; social media platforms and search engines are legal. And if you want to argue that they are theft, then why are they theft only for a small set of news companies and for not every site on the internet?

The intellectual-property theft claims have always been a way to paper over publishers’ actual complaint, which is what this has always been about: Google and Meta have a near-monopoly on digital advertising revenue. More than 80 per cent of all Australian digital ad dollars go to those two companies. It turns out that putting ads next to search results and social feeds is a much more lucrative and scalable business than putting ads next to news stories. News outlets used to make enormous sums from advertising in print and broadcast media, but online they only earn a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of what these two tech giants do.

This is, to be clear, a very legitimate complaint! Google and Meta having that much market power is a dangerous thing from an antitrust perspective. It is perfectly appropriate for both Australian publishers and the Australian government to be concerned that their nation’s media is being undercut by a new revenue paradigm they can’t win at. Liberals will argue quality journalism is a civic good essential to an informed democracy. Conservatives will argue this is an important Australian industry that deserves protection. Populists will argue the need to confront American cultural imperialism. They’re all correct.

But it’s not the complaint the News Media Bargaining Code was based on — the complaint that including news stories in search results and social feeds is somehow a violation of publishers’ rights and that they are due financial compensation for it.

You might say that’s just a philosophical quibble. But Meta turned it into a very practical one when it called Australia’s bluff — twice. First, in 2021, it announced that, if the problem was really how Australian news appeared in Facebook feeds, it had a solution: banning Australian news stories from Facebook. Problem solved, right? Of course not — because the “theft” of letting someone share your story on Facebook was never the actual problem. Meta lifted the ban after extracting concessions from the plan. (It repeated the move in Canada when faced with a similar program — except there, it’s never lifted the ban, making it clear to governments that it considers news very much optional on its platforms.)

Then, two years ago, Meta announced that it was done negotiating these deals with publishers and let all existing ones expire. Did the government then follow through with what the News Media Bargaining Code allowed — declaring Meta in violation of its obligation to negotiate fairly and force them into mandatory arbitration? No. Instead it did… well, nothing, really. It didn’t pursue further action (called “designating” Meta, in the code’s parlance) because it believed that doing so would just lead to Meta blocking news on Facebook again, and it wanted to avoid that outcome.

This has never, ever been about the platforms’ “theft” of news. It has always been about the platforms’ dominance of the digital advertising market and the hole that has left in publishers’ budgets.

Problem 2: The code had zero transparency and uneven power

The code set no firm requirements on what these “negotiations” needed to entail. It didn’t set how many publishers needed to be paid or how much. It just said that Google and Meta needed to show a good enough effort that the government wouldn’t designate them as unfair bargainers. Which basically came down to vibes — the companies weren’t required to share the totals with other publishers or even with the government itself. It was all done in secret. Deals contained clauses forbidding publishers from revealing how much they got.

That’s an artifact of the code’s fundamental lie that this was about business negotiations between private companies. Google was supposed to figure out how much it “owed” News Corp for the crime of including Brisbane Courier-Mail stories in search results, and News Corp could keep saying “higher” until it got a number it was happy with. It was a private act of theatre.

This had several negative knock-on effects. First, the country’s largest news publishers — Rupert Murdoch’s aforementioned News Corp and Nine Entertainment, owner of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age — had some actual power in the negotiations, because they were big enough to plausibly complain to the government if they felt they weren’t getting enough. But smaller fry were either given perfunctory take-it-or-leave-it offers or excluded altogether.

(It surely didn’t hurt that the largest reported payments went to News Corp, which just happened to be a big supporter of the conservative prime minister Scott Morrison, whose government came up with the scheme.)

The contracts were also dishonest about what the tech companies were buying. On paper, the deals were all about Google and Meta licensing news stories for Google News Showcase and Facebook’s News tab. In reality, those products were constructed in part to be vessels for these payments to happen.

These are significant problems, and they all come down to that fundamental act of pretending what this is all about. If this is about how individual companies have been wronged, and all the government is doing is bringing the two sides to a negotiating table, then you can argue this secrecy and imbalanced power is fine. But cloaking a government-mandated subsidy in the language of “bargaining” made the system worse at every turn.

What the News Bargaining Initiative changes

Morrison’s party was ousted in 2022 and he was replaced by the Labor government of Anthony Albanese. While Albanese’s government was the one that declined to “designate” Meta after it stopped paying publishers, it recognised that a new approach was needed. After much process, it unveiled its proposed result last week: the News Bargaining Incentive.

It’s an improvement. But unfortunately, the Albanese government seems intent on continuing to dress up a public policy decision as the marketplace at work, and that will continue to weaken the system.

The NBI, as the name implies, still aims to offer an incentive for Google and Meta to bargain with Australian publishers. But it creates a different backup mechanism if they don’t do so to the government’s liking.

It expands the targeted companies from two to three — Google, Meta and now TikTok. Second, it creates a 2.25 per cent tax on those companies’ Australia-generated revenue, which the government expects to generate more than A$300 million a year. And it gives the companies a way out of paying that tax by instead negotiating deals with publishers.

Here’s how it would work: For every A$1 Google pays to News Corp via a negotiated deal, Google’s tax liability will be reduced by A$1.50. And for every A$1 Google pays to what the government defines as a “small or medium” publisher, that tax liability will be reduced by A$1.70.

That’s a good change. Instead of an incentive to overpay the loudest potential voices (*cough* Murdoch), tech companies will have a (mild) incentive to pay more to smaller outlets. The NBI also adds a (minimal) requirement to spread the money around by saying companies must make deals with at least four different media companies to offset their entire tax liability. (Under the old system, there was no rule saying a company couldn’t just give News Corp or Nine a giant lump sum and declare itself done.)

Is the NBI more honest about what this money is actually for? Well, yes and no. Not rhetorically — at his announcement press conference, Albanese still paid homage to the idea that this was about compensation for content being “taken”:

We think that investment in journalism is critical to a healthy democracy. It matters. It’s something that defines the way that Australian society operates. And frankly, if the work is being done by the people here at this press conference and in other places right around Australia, then your work needs to have a monetary value attached to it. It shouldn’t just be able to be taken by a large multinational corporation and used to generate profits for that organisation with no compensation appropriate for the people who produce that creative content.

Still talk of “taking” without “compensation,” alas. At the same press conference, assistant treasurer Daniel Mulino was closer to the mark: “What we know is that news media organisations are having to deal with large digital platforms which have very substantial market power, and that’s undermining the traditional business model.”

But what’s important is that the Albanese bill itself actually gets this right. It makes it clear that tech giants will be subject to this scheme regardless of whether they have anything to do with the news. As the government’s own explanation of the bill puts it, “A significant social media or search service does not need to carry news content to attract an NMI [News media bargaining incentive charge].”

In other words: Meta, don’t try to pull that banning-news-on-Facebook trick again.

The addition of TikTok to the program also shows how little this has to do with news “theft.” Google and Facebook do at least display headlines from news stories in the act of directing users’ attention to them. But TikTok? TikTok bans the sharing of links in all but a few specific contexts, and it wants nothing more than to keep you scrolling from vertical video to vertical video, forever. The idea that it is engaged in compensation-worthy theft of news is laughable.

Unfortunately, the NBI is only marginally better on transparency and market imbalance than the old code was. Tech companies would have to report their deals to the government in order to cancel their tax liability — so at least someone would know how much money was changing hands. But there’s no language requiring those deals to be reported publicly. Which means that Australians will still have no idea how much money outlets are getting — and, more importantly, other publishers won’t know either. So smaller outlets won’t be able to be more informed bargainers, and tech companies will still be able to play politics or favourites however they wish.

The solution that’s under everyone’s nose

So what happens under the NBI if the tech giants decide not to play along? What if Meta sticks to its guns and says we still won’t make any deals?

Well, they’d have to pay that 2.25 per cent tax to the government. And what would the government do with that money? It would give that money to Australian news organisations based on a simple formula — how many journalists they employ. Albanese:

Importantly as well, this is not about government revenue. Every single dollar will go back to journalists to pay for the journalism that you all produce here in the Gallery, but newsrooms right around the country produce as well.

Here’s Anika Wells, the government’s minister for communications:

The News Media Bargaining Incentive means if a platform doesn’t do a deal with a news publisher, the money will come to us and we will deliver that funding to news organisations based on how many journalists they employ. The more journalists they have, the more money they will get under this proposal.

That sounds… awesome?

A straightforward formula that directly incentivises news outlets to hire journalists. (There is zero requirement that tech company money given directly to publishers be spent on journalism at all. News Corp could use it all on a new jet for Lachlan if it wanted to.) It would completely eliminate the uneven bargaining power among small and large outlets. It would eliminate the need for kabuki-theatre “negotiations.” And of course there’d be more money to go around, since tech companies are getting those 150/170 per cent incentives to make deals.

Such a plan would create a reliable, sustainable revenue source that Australian news publishers could count on. No more need to hope that your corporate office did a good job debating made-up numbers at the negotiating table. I think it’s fair to assume that Google, Meta, and TikTok will keep increasing revenue in the coming years, which means that the amount going to publishers would automatically increase as well. And if some new platform comes along that starts to eat up ad revenue, they’ll get automatically added to the program when they reach a certain size.

In fact, a tax like the one Albanese is proposing is exactly what I proposed back in 2022:

Google and Facebook are too big and powerful for the good of society. Their business, highly targeted advertising, is one that naturally tends toward monopolies: the more data you have, the bigger you get; the bigger you get, the more data you have. And while they make some fine and useful products, they aren’t creating the civic good that the earlier advertising gods — newspapers and other local news organisations — did by doing good journalism on a huge scale.

So tax them. Say you’re going to put a 1.5 per cent tax on the targeted digital advertising revenue of all companies with a market cap over $1 trillion, or annual revenues over $20 billion, or whatever cutoff you want. That would generate billions of dollars a year in a way that doesn’t warp competition or let Google and Facebook use their cash as a tool for targeted PR payoffs.

Then decide how to spend it. Maybe you subsidise reporter salaries in a big way… Maybe you give it all to public media… Maybe you distribute it as vouchers to [Australians] so each of them can spend $100 a year on news subscriptions at no cost to them.

There are lots of ideas! Some you might like, some you might not. But they’re all better than giving Rupert Murdoch $50 million a year and small local publishers zilch because of who they know and how much the tech giants value their silence.

What’s frustrating about the News Bargaining Initiative is that it… incentivises bargaining. It creates this powerful, transparent system to sustain journalism — and then asks everyone involved to make the same sort of shady secret deals the old system encouraged. The Albanese government has been very clear that it doesn’t want tech companies to pay this tax and would rather they keep striking deals. Albanese:

We have engaged in extensive consultation. At this point, the three organisations, Meta, Google, and TikTok as well have been consulted with and we’ll continue to engage with. But we want to see these deals done as were previously done under the previous regime.

Mulino:

I’ll just conclude by saying that the intention here is that digital platforms will enter into deals, and that’s very much the way this has been designed.

Wells:

The News Media Bargaining Incentive encourages platforms to enter into deals with news outlets and to contribute its fair share to Australian laws. Platforms should do deals with news organisations. If they decide not to, they will end up paying more.

Albanese again, in response to a question about what happens if Meta decided not to do deals:

Then they will be subject to higher payments than they will if they do a deal with the news organisations. That’s why there’s this incentive being put in and the distinction that’s there between paying 2.25 per cent or paying 1.5 per cent. And by having that incentive, what we’re encouraging is for organisations to sit down with news organisations, get these deals done, and then we can move forward.

In other words, the Albanese government wants to create an efficient, equitable way to give more than A$300 million to Australian news outlets — and then ignore it, because it would rather give around A$200 million to a subset of those outlets who can do well in secret negotiations.

To make the News Bargaining Initiative better, all it has to do is reverse the incentives. Instead of offering tech companies a discount for striking secret deals with the most powerful news companies, give them a discount for paying the tax. Or don’t offer them a discount at all! There is no reason to believe that Google’s negotiators are going to distribute money more equitably than a clear, uniform government pass-through program that pays per journalist. Australia shouldn’t be asking them to. Relying on backroom deals will benefit the tech companies (by paying less) and the Murdochs (by emphasising their market power), but no one else.

This one change would repair the damage done by the News Media Bargaining Code’s fake free-market framing. This isn’t about individual news companies seeking compensation for imaginary thefts — it’s a question of public policy. The Australian government has good reasons to want to support its local media industry, and it has designed a good mechanism to do so. It should use it. Kill the bargaining — keep the tax. •

The post Kill the bargaining, keep the tax appeared first on Inside Story.

The question of why Americans are so negative about the economy is important, but here it want to dispel some widespread misperceptions — misperceptions that were especially acute during the Biden years. So today I’ll talk about what actually happened to ordinary Americans under Biden.

Let me address three issues in particular: purchasing power, inequality, and the labour market.

Purchasing power: Biden had the misfortune of being president when there was a large jump in prices, a jump that was out of his control and happened around the world. This came as a shock to Americans after decades of low, stable inflation:

This price jump clearly depressed consumer sentiment. It’s also often asserted that the jump in prices from 2021 through 2022 left most Americans substantially poorer. And that just isn’t true.

The next chart compares the rise in consumer prices to what has happened to the wages of ordinary workers since late 2019. Why start in 2019? Because average wage data in 2020 and much of 2021 were distorted by the pandemic, during which low-wage workers were disproportionately laid off. Using the eve of the pandemic as a baseline, we see that large increases in consumer prices were more than matched by large increases in wages:

Now, many people have the sense that prices are up more than the official numbers say. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which produces these numbers, is careful and scrupulous. And independent measures of prices, for example for groceries and rents, have generally been consistent with BLS estimates.

What is true is that the Consumer Price Index doesn’t take account of rising interest rates. In particular, monthly mortgage payments for new home buyers have risen much more than average wages, and the chart above doesn’t reflect that. But while this is a real issue, it isn’t consistent with complaints about huge, widespread declines in overall purchasing power.

Okay, I can safely predict many hostile comments, not just from Trump supporters sure that the Biden economy was terrible but from people insisting that to point to rising real wages is to deny the struggles of working families. So let me say that throughout the past five years many millions of Americans have had a hard time making ends meet. But this is always true, in good times and bad. It was actually less true than usual during the Biden years, a period in which wages at the bottom rose more rapidly than wages at the top.

Which brings me to the question of inequality.

Inequality: The economist Peter Atwater coined the term “K-shaped economy” in 2020 to describe an economy in which those at the top get ahead while those at the bottom fall behind. The phrase has stuck, as has the narrative.

But what actually happened during the Biden years, at least in terms of wages, was the opposite. In 2023 and in subsequent work, David Autor, Arindrajit Dube and Annie McGrew documented that there had in fact been an “unexpected compression,” in which the wage gap between the highly paid and the less well paid suddenly narrowed.

Dube has a terrific new book out, The Wage Standard: What’s Wrong in the Labor Market and How to Fix It, which is a manifesto on how to improve the state of workers. I will lift a couple of charts relevant to the tale of inequality during the Biden years to illustrate my point.

The chart below plots annual real wage growth across the wage distribution for two periods in time. On the horizontal axis is the wage distribution. For example, a person at the tenth percentile is considered low income: they earn a wage that is at or below 90 per cent of other Americans. Someone at the ninetieth percentile is high income: only 10 per cent of Americans earn a wage higher than theirs.

The solid line shows annual real wage growth across the wage distribution for the years 1979 to 2019. The dashed line shows it for the years 2019 to 2024, the Biden years.

This chart shows that real wages for the bottom 80 percent of workers grew substantially faster during the Biden years than they had over the previous forty years. Moreover, growth was especially high at the very bottom of the wage distribution. This was the “unexpected compression”: because low-earning workers experienced faster wage growth than those with higher pay, the wage gap between low income workers and high income workers was squeezed during the Biden years.

Second, let’s look at a direct measure of wage inequality, the ratio of wages at the ninetieth percentile to wages at the tenth percentile:

This ratio began rising under Ronald Reagan and was still near its peak, at 4.8, on the eve of the pandemic. But from 2020 to 2024 it declined substantially. America at the end of the Biden years was still a hugely unequal society, but less so than it had been for a generation.

Granted, stock prices rose substantially under Biden, and stock ownership is highly concentrated at the top. So the Biden economy was K-shaped in that sense. But if you think about it, it’s hard to see how rising prices for stocks, which are both bought and sold mainly by the richest 10 per cent of the population, hurt those below.

So wage inequality fell dramatically during the Biden years. Is income inequality now rising again under Trump? There are faint hints in the data to that effect, but no more than that so far. One thing we do know, however, is that the force Dube identifies as the strongest driver of wage compression — a “tight” labour market — has largely disappeared.

The labour market: Dube’s thesis is that a tight labour market — one in which workers find it easy to get jobs and employers find it hard to get workers — is essential to wage growth, especially among the low paid.

And for much of the Biden era the US job market was very tight. For evidence, look at the Conference Board’s “labour market differential” — the difference between the percentage of people saying that jobs are plentiful and those saying that jobs are hard to get. That number is usually positive — we are an optimistic nation — but it was exceptionally positive during the Biden years:

Source: The Conference Board via Haver Analytics

So, why is it important to set the record straight about the Biden economy? We can’t rerun the 2024 election (although if we could, Kamala Harris would win.) But misperceptions about that economy may prevent us from appreciating policies — especially the strong response to the pandemic — that were actually very good, and which we should be prepared to emulate in future crises.

And understanding economic reality when consumer sentiment plunged is crucial to making sense of the vibecession debate, about which I’ve written in this follow-up piece. •

The post The vindication of Bidenomics appeared first on Inside Story.

Yet within hours, any hope the precise decapitation strikes would limit the scope of the war was dashed. Iran launched hundreds of ballistic missiles and drones not only at Israel but also across the Gulf. Air raid sirens sounded in Tel Aviv and Haifa. Missiles slammed into interceptors over Doha and Abu Dhabi. At Al Udeid Air Base, in Qatar — the forward headquarters of US Central Command — personnel took shelter as interceptors streaked overhead. Air defences flashed into action at US bases at Al Dhafra in the United Arab Emirates and Ali Al Salem in Kuwait. Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia reported incoming drones. Near the US Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, naval forces were placed on heightened alert.

The Iranian response has had enormous ramifications for the Gulf, killing civilians, shuttering airports, threatening shipping and oil exports, and tarnishing the region’s image of stability and safety. An iconic hotel on the waterfront in Dubai caught fire after debris from an intercepted drone fell into its upper floors. Kuwaiti authorities reported damage near civilian airport facilities. According to news reports, several tankers have been struck near the Strait of Hormuz, prompting a spike in insurance premiums for shipping through the Gulf. Soon after the conflict erupted, oil futures jumped sharply as traders priced in the risk of sustained disruption to one of the world’s most critical energy chokepoints.

Iran’s strikes cannot be dismissed as acts of scattered retaliation, the flailing lashing out of a dying regime. Rather, they represent a strategy of horizontal escalation, a bid to transform the stakes of a conflict by widening its scope and extending its duration. Such a strategy allows a weaker combatant to alter the calculus of a more powerful foe. And it has worked in the past, to the detriment of the United States. In Vietnam and Serbia, US adversaries responded to overwhelming displays of American airpower with horizontal escalation, eventually leading to American defeat, in the former case, and, in the latter, frustrating US war aims and spurring the worst episode of ethnic cleansing in Europe since the second world war.

Decapitation strikes, in particular, create powerful incentives for horizontal escalation: when a regime survives the loss of its leader, it must demonstrate resilience quickly by widening the conflict. Although the United States has hugely battered Iran, it must reckon with the implications of Iran’s response. Otherwise, it will find itself losing control of the war it started.

Horizontal escalation occurs when a state widens the geographic and political scope of a conflict rather than intensifying it vertically in a single theatre. It is especially appealing as a strategy for the weaker parties in a military contest. Instead of trying to defeat a stronger adversary head-on, the weaker side multiplies arenas of risk — drawing additional states, economic sectors, and domestic publics into the remit of the conflict. Iran cannot defeat the United States or Israel in a conventional military contest. It does not need to. Its objective is to gain greater political leverage.

The strategy of horizontal escalation follows a recognisable pattern. First, Iran has demonstrated resilience. US decapitation strikes intended to paralyse the Iranian military. By launching large-scale retaliation within hours of losing the supreme leader and many senior commanders, Tehran signalled continuity of command and operational capacity.

Second, Iran has widened the conflict well beyond Iranian territory, effecting what scholars call “multiplication of exposure.” Rather than confining retaliation to just Israel, Iran struck or aimed at targets in at least nine countries, most hosting US forces: Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Greece, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The message was unmistakable: those countries that host American forces would face severe consequences and the war Israel and the United States started will spread.

Third, Iran has politicised the conflict through its strikes. Its retaliation has resulted in the closure of airports, the burning of commercial property, the killing of foreign workers, and the disruption of energy and insurance markets. Gulf leaders have been forced to reassure foreign investors and tourists. The war has migrated into boardrooms and parliamentary chambers. In the United States, the widening scope of the war has alarmed members of Congress. Numerous actors have now entered the conflict, each pursuing distinct interests, none fully coordinated, and all capable of altering the trajectory of escalation beyond Washington’s control.

The final dimension of Iran’s strategy is time. The longer multiple states feel pressure, the more politics both within and among regional states can intensify the conflict. Without a version of NATO in the Middle East or a single American general effectively running the military operation for all the countries targeted by Iran, there is a high risk of wires getting crossed.

US officials have, for instance, floated the idea of stoking an ethnic rebellion in Kurdish parts of Iran to help target the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. But that might provoke responses from Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, countries that would not welcome a powerful Kurdish insurgency in the region. The recent downing of three US jets in a friendly-fire incident over Kuwait also illustrates the logistical and coordination problems that bedevil any attempt to fend off Iran’s escalation in the Gulf.

Iran’s foreign ministry reinforced this logic publicly, framing the missile barrages as legitimate responses against all “hostile forces” in the region. The phrasing has widened responsibility for the attack on Iran beyond Israel and the United States to encompass the broader US–aligned order in the Gulf. Although Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has apologised to Gulf neighbours for the attacks, the installation of a new supreme leader aligned closely with the Revolutionary Guard suggests such gestures are tactical rather than a signal Tehran intends to abandon its strategy of horizontal escalation.

Fundamentally, Iran’s horizontal escalation is a political strategy. It plays directly to the audience Iran seeks to persuade: the Muslim populations across the region that might not be ideologically aligned with Iran but are generally poorly disposed toward Israel.

Operation Epic Fury is certainly not the first time the United States has acted out of the belief that overwhelming airpower can compel rapid political collapse. The US war in Vietnam exposed the limits of this assumption.

By 1967, the United States had dropped three times more tonnage worth of bombs on North Vietnam than it had used in the second world war. Operation Rolling Thunder, launched in 1965, was designed to break Hanoi’s will and destroy its capacity to wage war. Washington possessed tremendous air superiority and apparent escalation dominance, meaning North Vietnam could not hope to match the United States blow for blow as Washington ramped up the conflict. By the northern autumn of 1967, US airpower had devastated the crucial communication, military, and industrial centres and arteries on which North Vietnamese military power was thought to rest.

But just a few months later, in January 1968, North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces launched coordinated attacks on more than 100 cities and towns across South Vietnam. They breached the US embassy compound in Saigon. They fought for weeks in Hue. They struck provincial capitals simultaneously. Although the offensive was costly for communist forces, it shattered the perception that a South Vietnamese and American victory was near.

President Lyndon Johnson soon announced he would not seek re-election. Public confidence in the prosecution of the war eroded. The war’s political trajectory shifted, even as American firepower remained dominant.

The lesson was not that bombing failed tactically. It was that Hanoi escalated horizontally, widening the conflict beyond rural battlefields into South Vietnam’s cities and political nerve centres, transforming a military contest into nationwide political upheaval, and reshaping domestic calculations in Washington. In Vietnam, the United States never lost a battle — but it still lost a war.

Three decades later, NATO relied on a different theory of airpower in the Kosovo conflict. Operation Allied Force, in 1999 — originally planned as a three-day air campaign to hit fifty-one targets in and around the Serbian capital, Belgrade — emphasised precision strikes against Serbian military assets and leadership targets. Western leaders expected a swift, successful campaign. The regime would weaken, if not collapse. Bombs even fell on the residence of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.

Instead, Belgrade ordered 30,000 Serbian troops to sweep into Kosovo, forcing more than a million Kosovar Albanian civilians, half the province’s population, from the territory. That exodus strained European governments and tested the cohesion of the NATO alliance. The United States and NATO lacked the large tactical airpower, much less the ground forces, to put a stop to the devastating ethnic cleansing. For weeks, as Serbian forces drove civilians from Kosovo, NATO debated escalation options. It ultimately mobilised nearly 40,000 ground troops for a major offensive to take Kosovo. Only at this point — and only after 78 days of sustained crisis, diplomatic pressure from Russia (a long-standing Serbian ally), and the threat of NATO invasion — did Milosevic concede.

Kosovo ended successfully for NATO — but not quickly, and not just through the use of precision strikes. Political endurance and alliance management proved decisive. Across both cases — the mass bombardment of Vietnam and the precision strikes on Serbia — airpower shocked and disrupted, but it did not automatically determine political outcomes. Adversaries widened the conflict’s scope or prolonged it by adopting horizontal escalation. Iran now appears to be applying that lesson to the Gulf.

Iran’s retaliation has clear political objectives. First, Tehran wants to puncture perceptions of the Gulf’s invulnerability. Cities such as Dubai and Doha market themselves to the world as secure hubs of finance, tourism, and logistics. When missile alerts interrupt operations at Dubai International Airport — one of the busiest in the world — the reputational cost is far greater than whatever physical damage Iran inflicts. The reported deaths of foreign workers in the United Arab Emirates underscore that civilians are no longer safe in Gulf states. The spectacle of interceptors exploding in the skies above these entrepôts might make investors skittish.

Second, Iran has raised the political cost for Gulf countries of hosting US forces. By striking near American bases at Al Udeid, Al Dhafra, and Prince Sultan, Tehran signalled that alignment with Washington entails exposure to attack. Gulf leaders must balance alliance commitments against domestic and economic stability.

Third, Tehran is shaping a narrative about the regional order. By portraying its actions as resistance to a US–Israeli campaign aimed at regional dominance, Iran seeks to drive a wedge between the Gulf country leaders and their publics — a wedge that could grow depending on how long the conflict persists.

Fourth, Iran is leveraging economic chokepoints. Roughly a fifth of global oil shipments transit the Strait of Hormuz. Early shipping data suggests traffic through the strait has fallen by about 75 per cent since the war began. Even a partial form of lasting disruption — through missile strikes, naval incidents, or rising insurance costs — produces immediate global ripple effects, fuelling concerns about inflation and domestic political pressure in the United States and Europe. None of these objectives require battlefield victories. They just require Iran’s endurance.

Horizontal escalation is not simply about hitting a wider array of targets. Its deeper effect is to change how a foe perceives risks. In a short war, risk is measured in sorties and intercept rates. In a prolonged conflict, risks extend to the political sphere. A protracted conflict forces difficult choices.

If this war drags on, Gulf governments that have quietly expanded security cooperation with Israel might have to make that alignment more visible. That clarity is dangerous. Arab publics remain deeply opposed to Israel’s aggressive military posture in the region. The longer the conflict continues, the harder it becomes for rulers to sustain that partnership with Israel without sacrificing legitimacy at home. Horizontal escalation presses on the soft seams between governments and their societies.

A protracted war would also reshape American politics. A sudden decapitation strike can galvanise support behind the US president, at least temporarily — although polling suggests most Americans are already opposed to the war even just one week in. A grinding regional war marked by energy price spikes, US casualties, and uncertain objectives will cause disquiet at home. Sizable elements of President Donald Trump’s political coalition have been wary of Middle Eastern entanglements and have accused US leaders of simply following Israel’s lead. The longer US military operations continue, the more fractures could widen within Trump’s own base.

Transatlantic strains could follow. European governments are acutely exposed to energy volatility and migration pressures. If Washington escalates while European capitals want to rein in the conflict, the two sides could diverge as Europeans try to keep themselves at arm’s length from the war. As Kosovo demonstrated, alliance unity requires constant political management. The United States would find the challenges of sustained bombing immense if European states decided to constrain use of their territory for logistics and tanker refuelling flights. Britain is already uncomfortable about the long-standing policy of American military aircraft conducting operations from the British possession of Diego Garcia. In exchange for European support in its campaign against Iran, Washington might have to commit more to European military objectives in Ukraine — at the risk of further irking the president’s MAGA base.

Finally, prolonging the war multiplies asymmetric threats. An extended conflict in the Gulf would likely see the involvement of nonstate actors, especially if US ground forces got involved in even a limited fashion. New and existing militant groups seeking to exploit regional anger might target leaders visibly aligned with US operations. What began as interstate missile exchanges could evolve into a wider tableau of violence and upheaval.

If Iran’s strategy is to widen and politicise the conflict, the United States faces a choice. One path is doubling down: the United States could ramp up its airpower campaign by bringing additional air assets into the fight to suppress Iranian launch capabilities and create the conditions for extending aerial control over the skies and surveillance on the ground. As with the imposition of no-fly zones against Iraq in the 1990s, doubling down to re-establish escalation dominance and control can be tantamount to a strategy of permanent aggressive military containment and control over Iranian airspace, one that could last for years.

The adoption of precisely this extended aerial control and surveillance approach with Iraq in the 1990s only set the stage for the 2003 US ground invasion. Permanent aerial occupation does not lead to political control, and without greater political control, Iran will still continue to pose a plausible threat to US interests — especially since its nuclear program persists in some form or another. In this way, an ostensibly restrained policy could actually precipitate greater commitment.

The alternative is ending the military commitment: Washington could declare objectives have been “met” and stand down its tremendous air and naval forces assembled near Iran. In the short term, the Trump administration would face the intense political criticism that it might have left the job unfinished. This policy, however, would allow the administration to move on to other issues, such as addressing economic needs at home, and limit the political blowback of its decision to attack Iran.

Trump is thus on the horns of a dilemma, having to judge whether Washington should deal with short but limited political costs now or more protracted and more uncertain political costs later. There is no golden off-ramp, one that increases the political benefits for Washington. Every option now carries political costs and risks; the initial strike might have solved a tactical problem, but it created a strategic one. Given these realities, the wisest choice might well be for the United States to accept a limited loss now rather than risk compounding losses later.

The strikes that have killed Iran’s leadership demonstrated tactical mastery. Tactical mastery, however, is not strategy. Iran’s retaliation — geographically broad, economically disruptive, and politically calibrated — aims to reshape the conflict’s structure. By widening the theatre and prolonging the war, Tehran is shifting the contest from a battle of military capabilities to one of political endurance.

As in Vietnam, the United States might win most engagements. As in Serbia, it might ultimately prevail after sustained pressure. But in both cases, the decisive arena was not the initial shock of airpower. It was the politics of an expanding war.

The decisive phase of this war began not with the first strike but with the regional crisis that followed — air defences activated across multiple capitals, airports suspended, markets jolted, and alliance politics strained. Whether this conflict is merely a contained episode or it becomes a prolonged strategic setback for the United States will depend not on the next volley of missiles but on whether Washington recognises the enemy’s unfolding strategy — and responds with one of equal clarity. •

This article first appeared in Foreign Affairs. © 2026 Council on Foreign Relations. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

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All this radical and rapid change poses a challenge to politicians, businesses, analysts and journalists trying to figure out the long-term significance of what’s going on. In an end-of-the-year wrap-up story, for instance, The New York Times argued that only a handful of presidents, including Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, had “comparatively momentous first years” and posed the question: “How much of what he has done can be considered irreversible, and will Washington ever be the same?”

It’s not hard to find experts with pessimistic answers to those questions. “The damage Trump has done to NATO is probably irreparable,” said Robert Kagan, foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution. “By the end of Trump’s term … there will be nothing left of the America we knew four years before. All institutions, norms, government, you name it, all of it gone,” Robert Litan, an economist who is also a fellow at Brookings, said. “Trump is also creating structural problems to which there are no solutions,” argued Jonathan V. Last of the Bulwark. The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof offered a nuanced take: “On balance, I think the United States can recover from Trump at home. I’m less confident that the United States can fix the Trumpian mess internationally.”

Such gloom and doom may help stir voters to action by showing the need for an urgent change in course, but we should not lose sight of the fact that most of what Trump has inflicted so far is reversible. He has not spent most of his energy crafting painstaking legislative compromises that produce durable new laws. He has not forged international alliances that want to carry on his foreign policy vision. He has impulsively asserted executive power to satisfy personal indulgences, not pressing needs or public demands, which has weakened the political standing of both him and his party…

Article continues here, at the Washington Monthly

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There are the very specific lists that some completist has taken on as a challenge. (Last week, “List of Phi Alpha Honor Society chapters” was edited 257 times — by only two authors. Or “Deaths in March 1982,” edited 398 times by five authors.)

There are the sports tournaments and reality TV shows that demand moment-to-moment updates. (Last week, there were 268 edits on “2026 Malaysia Open (badminton)” and 605 on “Bigg Boss (Tamil TV series) season 9.”)

There are the biographies of people someone has decided deserve memorialising. (Last week, user Mary Mark Ockerbloom created the article on Quaker abolitionist John Vickers and edited it 161 times. User pigsonthewing did the same for the artist Charles Shepard — best known for making posters for the British travel industry — but edited it only 90 times.)

But the most common Wikipedia genre represented each week is news. When something big happens in the world, some Wikipedian will start an article — and within minutes, editors will descend on it, using news articles as raw material to construct something encyclopaedic. Here’s last week’s top 10 — it’s awfully close to a summary of the week’s front pages:

• 2026 United States strikes in Venezuela (3057 changes by 575 authors)
• 2026 ICE Minneapolis shooting of protestor (1068 changes by 220 authors)
• Killing of Renee Good (1067 changes by 220 authors)
• 2025–2026 Iranian protests (762 changes by 155 authors)
• Nicolás Maduro (647 changes by 242 authors)
• 2026 Crans-Montana bar fire (597 changes by 167 authors)
• 2026 Caracas airstrikes (3058 changes by 575 authors)
• Deaths in 2026 (574 changes by 108 authors)
• Delcy Rodríguez (548 changes by 207 authors)
• International reactions to the 2026 United States strikes in Venezuela (530 changes by 149 authors)

Wikipedia turned twenty-five this week. On 15 January 2001, at 2.27 pm American eastern standard time, Jimmy Wales made the first edit: “This is the new WikiPedia!” (They’ve gotten better since then.)

To celebrate, you can take a “What Wikipedia of the future are you?” quiz. Without even taking the quiz, though, I know which one I am: the Wikipedia That Gets Respect As a Source of News.

The site’s early years were filled with media outrage about a source of “truth” that anyone could edit. And yes, you could right now edit in a claim that Happy Chandler was a lizard person. But the layers of accountability the site has built up over the years would likely reverse your edit within minutes. If those minutes are the cost of creating perhaps humanity’s single greatest source of information, I’m willing to pay it — with apologies to Happy’s descendants. Here are a few things news organizations could learn from it.

News isn’t always what just happened. A few decades into the web, this might seem obvious today. But in 2001, news organisations were still very much constructed around producing daily newspapers and nightly newscasts. The rhythms of production drove everything from story selection to writing style to revenue models. Wikipedia was the first site that gave most journalists a vision of an “article” that is constantly updated, not rewritten with a new lede the next day. If there’s an important new detail in that Swiss bar fire investigation, it’ll be used to make the current Wikipedia article a little bit better — not to have a new unique URL to push out on social.

Whatever questions your journalism answers, people will probably still be asking them tomorrow, and next week, and next year. Wikipedia is optimised for catching people up on news stories they missed the first time around.

Building processes means building culture. Wikipedia succeeds because it has a core set of standards and practices that its editors treat as holy writ. No original research. Neutral point of view. Not every source is equally reliable. No sockpuppetry. Do not disrupt Wikipedia to make a point — but assume good faith. Most (though not all) align perfectly well with the principles of journalism. But they’ve been constructed, a codified set of editorial standards, a collective ethos that guides the whole operation. For Wikipedia to work, there has to be consensus about how things are done, and that requires building a culture among editors. Why have so many other wiki-driven sites failed? They never build the culture that undergirds the processes.

Don’t break links. Unless an article has been taken down entirely, just about every link to a Wikipedia page created in the past quarter-century still works. Its article on Nicolás Maduro is still in the same place it was when first created in 2006, 4493 edits ago. How many news articles published online in 2006 still live at the same address? Vanishingly few. When you start to think of articles as something with permanence, you realise the high cost of breaking a perfectly good URL.

Document your work. Check out one of those newsy Wikipedia articles, like this one on the killing of Renee Good. It’s currently 4559 words. It’s been read nearly 1.4 million times. A total of 331 people have made 2204 edits to it. Its talk page includes more than 1000 signed comments from Wikipedia users arguing for something’s inclusion or exclusion. (Should the page’s title refer to Renee Good or Renée Good, with an accent? Should we note the date the shooter was first publicly identified? Should this article include details about anti-ICE protests after the killing, or should that be in a separate article?) It backs up its claims with 169 footnotes linking to news sources and official statements. And all of this work is available for anyone to see. The back-and-forths on the talk page let the reader see that points of view are being heard and debated. And anyone can click a link to confirm if a source is being accurately reflected.

All that transparency won’t be practical for all journalistic work — but there’s no denying the trust that is built by operating in public. •

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After the trip, he wrote some reflections on his Substack:

Shenzhen is such a dope city. Legit looks like the future more than any city I’ve been to… Huaqiangbei is massive. Honestly I’m thinking about doing a month-long hardware residency there so I can crash course EE by building stuff hands on.

It is crazy how much their society grinds. It’s in their DNA. The work ethic is insane. Shenzhen was dirt and mud forty years ago and now it’s the world’s example of a cyberpunk city.

Reading his words, I felt a familiar pressure — a small internal shift I had sensed accumulating for years. I left China at seventeen, in 2012, arrived in the United States, and absorbed the ambient narratives of American centrality that still held cultural authority then. I spent much of my twenties trying to construct a language that neither flattered nor demonised either country.

But seeing China through Aadil’s eyes forced me to recalibrate. I remember that afternoon by West Lake in Hangzhou, when we did not schedule any tech company visits in order to simply drink tea by the ancient water. I had  been to West Lake a few times growing up, but watching Aadil record his vlog with excitement made the lake — with the weight of all its accumulated history — feel at once familiar and alien.

His China did not arrive through the frameworks I inherited from college professors, journalists or scholars. It came through other channels: viral videos of synchronised drone shows, TikTok montages of Shenzhen’s skyline, tech bloggers’ analysis of DeepSeek’s efficiency, Cantonese rap circulating through global youth culture, hardware tutorials filmed in Hangzhou studios by Chinese tech influencers.

For Aadil, China is more than a geopolitical puzzle. China is modernity itself. It is what the future is supposed to look like. It is, to borrow Kevin Kelly’s phrase, “Cool China”: a China that produces things other people want to imitate, a place people aspire to visit and live in.

I am eight years older than Aadil, which makes me just far enough away to feel like a different generation. I grew up in a time when the United States still radiated a kind of unquestioned allure. Apple’s iPhone 4 was an object of worship in my high school. China was rising, but not yet glamorous. If you told my teenage classmates that American kids in 2025 would look to China for inspiration, they would have laughed. But something has changed. The drift is subtle but undeniable.

Kaiser Kuo captured one strand of this change in his recent essay “The Great Reckoning.” A friend of mine in London, connected to a group of China watchers, even held a reading club for this piece. Similar arguments have appeared across the United States: Rush Doshi’s “The Moment China Proved It Was America’s Equal” and Eric Schmidt and Selina Xu’s “China Is Building the Future,” among others.

Kaiser writes from the perspective of someone who arrived in China in the late eighties. He witnessed the brink of liberation in 1989, the subsequent crackdown, and the poverty and disorder that younger generations can barely register. His generation absorbed Western triumphalism almost by osmosis, and now must dismantle the frameworks that once felt self-evident.

In the piece, his call is for intellectual honesty: “American elites, stop coping. Stop the reflexive yes-but that rushes to minimise Chinese accomplishments before the evidence has even settled.” His message resonates because it names something true: the discomfort many American elites feel when confronted with a world that no longer fits their inherited mental maps.

Over the past few years, though, I have  watched versions of reckoning with China unfold across very different milieus, each shaped by a unique vantage point. For Kaiser’s generation of American intellectuals, the reckoning is slow and psychological. For younger Americans like Aadil, it is almost effortless. In Silicon Valley, it is brisk and utilitarian. And inside China’s own online subcultures, it takes a form so alien to Western discourse that it barely registers as the same phenomenon. We are drifting into parallel, sometimes incompatible, ways of seeing the same country.

For Kaiser’s generation, the reckoning is existential. It requires tearing down the intellectual scaffolding that once organised their understanding of the world. It is painful because the story of American centrality was central to their identity. The polling data he cites confirms the generational break. Younger Americans no longer see China as a rival to be contained. They see it as simply part of the landscape, a sovereign fact of their world. They came of age after the 2008 financial crisis, after Iraq, after the chaos of 6 January 2021, and in an era when American infrastructure could not build a functional train line between two major cities. American exceptionalism was never something they lived. It was something they heard older people talk about.

This is Aadil’s America and China. It is its own form of innocence. Sometimes, such innocence flattens China into a shiny image, ignores contradictions, and overlooks costs. On TikTok and Instagram, China appears as a glittering spectacle: drones forming three-dimensional shapes above Chongqing, maglev trains gliding in slow motion, factories stamping out EV components at impossible speed, street fashion from Chengdu night markets. Sinofuturism, once an art-world concept coined by Lawrence Lek, has mutated into a mass aesthetic. It is now the default visual grammar through which millions of Westerners encounter China.

Yet this admiration of China also grows out of America’s own crisis. A few months ago, at an event in London, I heard economist Daron Acemoglu explain that liberal democracies are shrinking in both number and legitimacy. Young people increasingly doubt the democratic model, and sympathy for authoritarian alternatives has moved from the fringes toward the centre. Antiliberal ideas are gathering force.

In a postindustrial economy reshaped by automation, digital technology, and globalization, America’s sense of loss has made China strangely magnetic. Princeton political scientist Rory Truex put it more starkly: America is experiencing democratic erosion. The current administration is conducting “trial-balloon repression.” The irony is pointed: Truex built his career studying Chinese authoritarianism, and now finds himself analysing similar autocratic patterns at home.

Another version of such “China reckoning” is happening in Silicon Valley. It looks almost nothing like Kaiser’s careful unlearning or Aadil’s intuitive acceptance. In Silicon Valley, the reckoning has already moved into the stage of reverse engineering.

The tech world operates on compressed timelines and instrumental logic. When you are building products or competing in markets, delusion is expensive. This is why Silicon Valley has had little trouble swallowing a bitter fact: in some domains, China has pulled ahead. The result is a growing obsession. For instance, Noah Smith  —  widely read among Silicon Valley elites — recently wrote about the “Electric Tech Stack” that undergirds drones, EVs and power electronics, arguing that China dominates this stack because it has built an industrial system that is faster, denser and more tightly coordinated than anything in the West. His question is blunt: how should the United States respond?

Venture capitalists have undergone their own version of this shift. Essays published by Marc Andreessen’s venture capital firm a16z under the heading of American Dynamism read like memos from a rival civilisation studying an ascendant one. Andreessen’s partners and portfolio companies speak openly about the need for the United States to develop companies like the Chinese BYD or CATL. Ford’s chief executive recently admitted Chinese EVs were shockingly good — a confession that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

The Progress Movement that I am part of as a writing fellow invokes China with a strange mix of envy and admiration. At the annual Progress Conference in October, China became a kind of motivational poster. The founder of California Forever argued that his plan to build a new city on farmland between the Bay Area and Sacramento could be America’s answer to Shenzhen. Naval architects and robotics entrepreneurs spoke reverently about Chinese shipbuilding and humanoid robot production lines. Even when they criticise China’s political system, they treat its industrial capacity as the baseline of what is possible.

What Silicon Valley lacks in philosophical depth, it compensates for in practical comprehension. The builders I meet are studying Chinese manufacturing processes, examining how BYD combines battery production, motor design and vehicle assembly under one roof. They quote Dan Wang’s Breakneck the way earlier generations quoted The Innovator’s Dilemma.

On top of reckoning, Silicon Valley’s China obsession runs in two contradictory directions. In one direction, geopolitical competition provides convenient justification: AI labs invoke the China threat to legitimise spending enormous sums on infrastructure and compute. In this framing, China becomes the rival racing toward artificial general intelligence — a competitor we dare not underestimate, one that must be contained. “Winning the AI race against China” becomes recast as existential necessity.

But in the other direction critics are increasingly asking whether Silicon Valley has become pathologically fixated on China. Rather than fatal competitor, China is Silicon Valley’s obsessive ideal. However, this narcissistic imagining of China as mirror and nemesis, may reveal less about China itself than about Silicon Valley’s own crisis of legitimacy and direction.

Another reckoning story is unfolding alongside the others, and it is the one that always catches outsiders off guard. While Western commentators are trying to see China more clearly through the tools of Western theory, young Chinese netizens have been busy coining vocabularies to say something different. They are learning to see China by stepping outside the Western perspective altogether.

Some of the most imaginative thinking in China today is happening not in universities or policy institutes but in the chaotic, half-serious, half-sardonic corners of the internet. Out of these keyboard politics circles (键政圈)  has emerged a whole mini-universe of homegrown concepts: the Industrial Party with its faith in engineers, ruguan theory (入关学) with its historical allegories, and, most recently, the irreverent and strangely revealing world of yingxue, or winnology (赢学).

The lineage of these ideas starts in the early 2000s, when clusters of patriotic young people on forums like Tianya and Tieba pushed back against the liberal vocabulary that dominated Chinese online debates. A few years later, this impulse hardened into something more coherent. The Industrial Party, a loose collective of engineers and technocrats, believed that the real story of modern China lay in factories, logistics chains and infrastructure, not in moral sermonising. Their heroes were not dissidents or thinkers but people who could build bridges and power grids.

Out of this soil grew something sharper. In 2019, at the height of the US–China trade war, a new idea swept across Zhihu and Weibo: ruguan, the theory of “entering the pass.” Its imagery came from the seventeenth century, when the Manchu forces broke through Shanhaiguan and replaced the Ming dynasty. Ruguan theorists used that moment as a metaphor for the present. In their telling, the United States looked like a late-Ming empire, still formidable but inwardly fraying, while China resembled the rising but still marginal forces waiting outside the frontier.

These theorists argue that China should stop trying to win approval from people who will never grant it. Build strength. Do the work. And when the power balance shifts, the same Western voices that dismiss China today will rush to explain its rise with great solemnity. A popular line captured this mood with a mix of humour and fatalism: after China enters the pass, the great scholars will write our arguments for us (“入关之后，自有大儒为我辩经”).

Winnology takes this impulse and turns it inside out. Its claim is that the difficulty many Chinese intellectuals have in acknowledging China’s successes is psychological. In this account, shaped by young internet theorists and discussed by researchers such as Yu Liang, a kind of invisible caste system has settled into the global imagination after two centuries of Western dominance. Western nations sit near the top by default, their achievements treated as natural extensions of their civilizational essence. Chinese achievements, by contrast, are received with suspicion: if China moves quickly, it must be cutting corners; if it innovates, it must have copied someone; if it wins, it must be winning wrong.

The metaphor is intentionally outrageous, but that is why it works. It names something people feel even if they cannot articulate it. It explains why some Chinese critics instinctively downplay progress at home, and why some Western commentators struggle to see Chinese accomplishments as legitimate. Winnology exaggerates, but its exaggeration has a purpose. It surfaces the hidden rules that shape how people talk about China, rules that have rarely been stated aloud.

Kaiser writes that Chinese intellectuals still hesitate to absorb what China’s success actually means. I see the same hesitation, but with a twist he only gestures at. The people who struggle most are often those who know the West best. They write and think in Western frameworks, and must constantly translate themselves into a language that will be understood abroad.

The result is a kind of double consciousness. To be legible to Western readers, they must speak in Western terms. To be honest to themselves, they must step outside those terms entirely. It is a difficult balancing act, and many fall back into the familiar comfort of Western theories even as they try to question them.

Meanwhile, on the Chinese internet, an entirely different sensibility is taking shape. Young users, unburdened by the need for international approval, play with ideas more freely. They make theories out of memes, stitch together allegories from history and science fiction, and build conceptual worlds that do not seek validation from anyone outside their own circles. Their reckoning is not a continuation of Western thought, nor a rebellion against it. It is a refusal to let Western categories set the terms of their imagination.

There is one more layer I feel compelled to add, a part of China that has never required calibration from me because it has never shifted beneath my feet. It is the China I grew up with, the one that has remained constant beneath all the reckonings I have described. If Kevin Kelly writes of a “Cool China” that Americans are obsessed with, I want to gesture toward something that sits alongside it and often underneath it, something I can only call the “real China.”

I do not mean real in any absolute or lofty sense. I mean real in the way Jia Zhangke’s films are real: the high-tech, the robots, and the glittering skylines are background scenery, while the human beings — their routines, their disappointments, their stubborn joys — occupy the centre of the frame.

This real China is made up of small town strivers and test-takers (小镇做题家), of the dense, improvised life inside urban villages, of the delivery drivers and gig workers who knit the country’s convenience together. For many of them, the cool China that dazzles Silicon Valley and TikTok barely registers.

A recently published memoir, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, has been circulating in Western media. Its author, Hu Anyan, is one of the countless gig workers who embody this quieter, heavier, darker China. He writes about racing through Beijing during heat waves and freezing dawns, about sleeping in cramped rooms without air conditioning to save money, about the fragile economy of hopes he has built around each shift. His voice is innocent, almost childlike, yet what he describes is the most unforgiving edge of the system that produces so many of China’s spectacular surfaces.

When I think of Aadil wandering through Shenzhen in awe, I also think of my own mornings in that city. During that trip, my daily ritual was a 6 yuan latte from Luckin Coffee. That summer, China’s coffee chains were locked in a brutal price war, each company trying to out-subsidise the other. The result was absurdly cheap drinks, delivered to your doorstep. My cup arrived each morning. It came on the back of a scooter, carried by someone not unlike Hu Anyan, someone whose labour made the “cool China” visible to visitors while remaining almost invisible oneself.

If Aadil’s Shenzhen is the city seen from above, then there is also the Shenzhen seen from Hu Anyan’s perspective, built out of exhaustion, improvisation, and quiet endurance. Helen Gao’s recent New York Times piece “The China That the World Sees Is Not the One I Live In” shows such disparity. The state, she argues, presents an image of national confidence and industrial power, yet beneath that polished surface she observes something closer to fatigue: joblessness, shrinking household wealth, a pervasive unease about the future. It is a society that feels, in her words, wai qiang, zhong gan (外强中干): outwardly strong, inwardly brittle.

I nodded as I read her piece, reminded that China has always required a certain tolerance for tension, a willingness to hold several truths at once without flattening them. Perhaps the reckoning is nothing grander than that: a small but deliberate adjustment of the lens, letting a more complicated country come into focus, one that is capable of immense promise and real harm at the same time. Not choosing which China is true, but allowing that all of them are. •

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His main achievements have been to give tax breaks to the rich (again), adding to America’s debt problems; set off a wave of brutal raids on migrants across US cities; and create an arbitrary tariff regime leading to endless trade war negotiations while raising prices for consumers. His international escapades — including a belated and shaky Middle East ceasefire — are of little interest to the American public.

Unsurprisingly, given this record, he is unpopular. His approval rating has dropped to minus 15 per cent, mirroring the fall during his first term. It is negative in thirty-nine states, including all swing states.

Polls aggregation by Nate Silver/Silver Bulletin

Trump’s support has fallen particularly sharply with young people and minorities. Much reporting of last year’s election focused on the “realignment” of these groups away from the Democrats. But they have quickly reverted back. The president’s approval rating on every single issue bar border security is net negative, and is minus 33 per cent on the critical issue of prices and inflation.

This frustration with cost increases led to a dire set of election results for the Republicans at the start of the month. Voters whose main issue was the economy strongly backed the Democrats — a big switch since last year. They won everywhere — taking back the Virginia governorship with a fifteen-point win; defeating attempts to unseat liberal supreme court judges in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania by more than twenty points; and winning their first non-federal statewide election in Georgia since 2006 by the same margin.

This needn’t be existential for the Republicans. It’s not unusual for parties to do badly after winning a presidential election and they tend to start distancing themselves from unpopular presidents, especially second term ones. But with Trump, they’ve gone all in, sacrificing any sense of independence on the MAGA altar. While many have plenty of criticisms of Trump in private they have so far seen the threat of retribution as more dangerous than unpopularity by association.

At the margins we’re starting to see this attitude shift slightly as the midterms come into view. Four House Republicans signed the petition to release the Epstein files, which forced Trump to admit defeat and agree to their publication. One of the signatories — the formerly uber-MAGA Marjorie Taylor Greene — has had a very public falling out with the president, leading to her resigning from Congress. Elsewhere, Republicans in several states are refusing to support efforts to gerrymander seats ahead of the midterms. Indiana is proving particularly resistant, despite a series of escalating threats from the president.

None of this means that Trump’s coalition is about to collapse, or that he won’t be able to do an enormous amount of damage over the coming years. He still has immense loyalty from his base, and people are still scared of him. But a growing numbers of Republicans are realising they’re in serious trouble and frustration is growing. The longer the party is a personality cult, the harder it will be to emerge from his shadow.

In the rest of this article I’ll look at why Trump’s ratings are likely to keep deteriorating; the faultlines this is exposing in his party; what it means for the midterms — including an early look at the key races — and the next presidential election; and why the Republican Party is looking increasingly trapped.

The cost of living problem isn’t going away

At first glance, the level of Americans’ anger over prices seems surprising. Inflation has gone up to 3 per cent from 2.7 per cent at the election last year, after dipping at the start of 2025, but is far lower than the 2022–23 post-Ukraine invasion spike that did for Joe Biden.

Part of the issue is that the earlier inflationary rise is baked in. Prices are going up slower than before but are still rising from what feels like a high base to consumers. Many voters had the impression that Trump would bring prices down, though that was never plausible. Additionally, some critical expenses — including housing — are rising more than the average. Health insurance is also going up well beyond inflation due to rising medical costs.

That’s a particularly critical issue for the Republicans because Obamacare subsidies are about to run out. These help the twenty-four million Americans paying for insurance via that route — and if they disappear premiums will double in cost. The Democrats have made this their big issue, and many Republicans are extremely worried about the political consequences. But so far there isn’t agreement within the party on a plan to extend the subsidies. Nor is there time to replace them with an alternative means of support.

This highlights a broader problem for the GOP. Historically their coalition skewed towards higher-income voters, but that wasn’t true in 2024 — Trump won the poorest third of voters and saw his biggest gains in the counties with the highest rates of poverty. In the past the party could follow its ideological instincts and reduce welfare entitlements to pay for tax cuts without doing too much harm to their own voters. That’s no longer true.

We saw this when food assistance for forty-two million Americans (known as SNAP) was temporarily halted during the recent government shutdown. Despite Trump’s assertion that it was a Democrat problem, he was hurting a lot of his own voters. Though these benefits have restarted there will be long-term damage from the party’s willingness to let families go hungry.

On top of this the US economy is suffering from the twin effects of Trump’s tariffs and crackdown on immigration. So far estimates suggest tariffs have added around half a point to inflation but this could rise as suppliers’ stockpiles of pre-tariff imports diminish and more of the cost increase is passed on to consumers. Concern amongst Republicans about the impact led to Trump removing tariffs from 100 food products — most of which can’t be grown at scale in the US — but notably included beef, which has rocketed in price this year.

Reductions in immigration risk a potentially even bigger hit to the economy. One study estimates reduced inflow and disruptions from fear of ICE will reduce GDP growth by half a point this year. The long-term effects could be much greater. Because undocumented migrants are so important to the agricultural and construction sectors, ICE causing extreme disruption in places it’s focusing on. Another study from California found a “20–40 per cent reduction in the agricultural workforce, leading to $3–7 billion in crop losses and a 5–12 per cent increase in produce prices” following ICE raids. Meanwhile, international enrolment at US universities has fallen by 17 per cent.

Alongside these policies that are deliberately harming the economy there is the question of whether the US’s AI-driven growth will continue. The rise in US stocks since 2022 has come almost entirely from tech companies, with spending on data centres and other infrastructure has offset falls in investment elsewhere. If, as many think, we’re looking at a bubble not far off bursting that could have a very serious impact on the economy (not just in the US). Either way it’s hard to see a resolution to Americans concerns about living costs, and easy to see plenty of ways things could get worse.

Faultlines

It’s the economy that’s causing the Republicans problems for now. There are, though, other faultlines in their coalition. They’ve always been there but have been submerged beneath the Trump personality cult. His unique ideological flexibility allowed him to manage disagreements and the need to show fealty meant people largely followed whatever line he picked. As his power slowly starts to fade they will become more prominent.

One obvious split is around the US’s international role. True “America Firsters” like Taylor Greene are frustrated by Trump’s focus on international diplomacy and deals rather than domestic concerns. Notably, quite a few congressmen and women went on the record after this month’s elections to suggest, cautiously, that the White House might want to pay more attention to the cost of living. J.D. Vance released a similar statement, carefully praising his boss’s achievements while adding that “we need to focus on the home front.”

Trump isn’t going to change his behaviour — dealmaking (or the illusion of such) is what he enjoys most about the job and he’s been meeting a stream of foreign leaders over the past few weeks as well as trying to restart negotiations with Russia and Ukraine. As the party looks beyond him for 2028 candidates, though, it’s likely to prove a divisive topic. Plenty of senators and grandees still see the US’s ability to project international power as critical (as debates about the proposed Ukraine plan have highlighted in the past week). One can imagine the issue being important in, say, a Vance versus Marco Rubio contest for the nomination.

Then there’s the growing rift between the more culturally extreme elements of the MAGA coalition and those who still have some sense of where the mainstream might be. The problem was exposed recently when Tucker Carlson gave a softball interview to Nick Fuentes, an avowed racist and antisemite who regularly attacks “organised Jewry.” While the bulk of the GOP have been content to let by all sorts of racist behaviour, overt antisemitism is a step too far for some. One of the main conservative think-tanks — Heritage Foundation — found itself in the middle of a noisy row after its president recorded a video defending Carlson and Fuentes.

This isn’t a minor issue. Fuentes is the leader of the “groyper” faction on the right (the name comes from a cartoon about an overweight frog). This is essentially the latest manifestation of the online alt-right that emerged out of 4chan and gamergate in the 2010s, aided by Steve Bannon with a view to helping Trump. It’s prominent among young male Republicans — as revealed by leaked WhatsApp group chats — and is characterised by extreme language and offensiveness, done with so many layers of intent and irony that even the groypers seem unsure what they really mean.

Politically it’s a complete dead-end for the Republicans — a vicious and nihilistic cult that has no meaningful purpose. There has been something of a backlash from conservative figures, but Trump has refused to condemn Carlson and other senior figures have opposed the backlash. It’s a divide that has potential to seriously derail future political campaigns. One can easily imagine Carlson launching a presidential bid, and even Trump endorsing him if he felt it was in his interests. It’s certainly no more ridiculous than a Trump bid seemed back in 2014.

This is all part of the Republicans’ wider problem — one that’s shared with radical right parties around the world. They have defined themselves in opposition to social liberalism but have no ideological coherence, or project, beyond that. That often makes them dependent on a strongman leader, leading to serious problems when he (or she) loses popularity or ages out of office.

Different interest groups who share an aversion to the “professional managerial class” and “woke” are all jumbled together. They’re caught between economic liberalism and autarkic nationalism; ultra-hostility to foreigners and the need for immigrants to power tech industries; AI accelerationists and those wanting to regulate; America First-ism and a desire to exert soft and hard power; groyper inanity and sober religiosity. Without the Trump cult to hold it all together it’s hard to know what’s going to emerge from that mess. And it’s not at all clear that party leaders will be able to hold in check the darkest forces they have allow to fester in their movement.

The midterms

Next year’s elections may well surface more of these tensions. Trump’s low approval ratings mean the Democrats are favourites to take the House next November. In generic party polling they are leading by somewhere between five and fourteen points, depending on which poll you believe. Given how narrow the Republican majority is, it’s not impossible that they’ll lose it before we even get to the elections if a couple more representatives in competitive seats resign or die.

The Republicans have responded to the threat by attempting to gerrymander seats in states they control to maximise their midterms total by shifting strongly Republican areas into seats that are currently Democrat or toss-ups. So far they’ve made limited progress, both because the Democrats have done the same in California (and will likely do so in Virginia) and due to recalcitrant state party officials. A federal court in Texas recently ruled the gerrymander there illegal on the grounds that it was partly done on the basis of race. This will be appealed and may well be overturned but if it isn’t the Republicans will likely be in net negative territory when it comes to re-districting.

A House victory would be enough to cause Trump serious problems. His administration would be flooded with subpoenas and investigations. Legislation would become exceptionally hard. If the Democrats were to take the Senate too, he would also find it much more difficult to make appointments (which are only signed off by that chamber) — something that would be particularly critical if a Supreme Court vacancy were to appear.

But taking the Senate remains a tall order for the Democrats, despite the positive national picture for them. To do so they need to hold all their current seats — including some tricky defences in Georgia, Michigan and New Hampshire — and flip another four. They have two good, albeit by no means certain, chances in North Carolina and Maine. Finding another two will be a challenge.

Trump’s approval, though, has dropped to the point that a bunch of seats are at least contestable, including in Texas, Florida, Ohio, Iowa and Alaska. Early polling in Alaska is particularly promising and the Latino shift away from Trump should help in Texas (though Democrats have been hoping and failing to win there for a long time).

At the moment the Republicans remain favourites to hold the Senate. But if they continue to struggle on the economy and start arguing more among themselves a dramatic loss is plausible. If the Democrats can’t win then they should at least be able to get to forty-nine seats, which would give them a good shot at taking control in 2028, when there will be further winnable contests in North Carolina and Wisconsin.

Beyond the midterms

If the Democrats do win the House then the sense of decline and chaos around Trump will only increase as he gets embroiled in any number of investigations. Discussion will quickly move to prospective presidential candidates.

Normally there would be little a president could do to stop this shift of attention. But because Trump has been so willing to act unconstitutionally, he can use the prospect of running for a third term in an attempt to avoid becoming a lame duck. Given his desperate need to be the centre of attention, it’s hard to believe he will happily accept diminishing power and interest.

As I explained in a recent Q+A, I don’t think he is, ultimately, going to try to run again, and if he did he wouldn’t succeed. Until he rules out the prospect, though, he will make it extremely hard for the Republicans to run a normal selection process because prospective candidates will be nervous about looking like they’re undermining him, and will want his endorsement. At very least he will hold back that endorsement as long as possible — when asked in interviews he tends to talk about there being lots of suitable candidates.

This is problematic for the GOP because a rushed or chaotic contest will be easier for a more extreme candidate to hijack, and will make it harder for potential successors to build their own brand free of Trump. Vance is the strong favourite, partly because there are so few viable candidates. (Rubio is second favourite at 20/1, and Donald Trump Jr is third, which gives a sense of the dearth of options.) But Vance’s approval rating, while not as bad as Trump’s, is negative too. And among Trump’s voters support for him is hardly overwhelming. A recent Politico poll found 35 per cent wanted the vice-president to run in 2028, while 28 per cent said they wanted Trump for a third term. Vance would also have to run on his administration’s economic record.

Whoever is the candidate, they’re going to find it very difficult to manage the ideological conflicts within the party without Trump’s cult, his ability to deflect with humour, or his willingness to shift positions as required — and with the president making life difficult for them whenever it suits him to do so. In all three of his elections Trump has outperformed polling thanks to a pool of supporters who rarely vote and don’t respond to polls. But other Republicans have not benefited from the same boost. Like many of his fellow Senate candidates, Vance underperformed the polls when he narrowly won in Ohio in 2022. There is good reason to think Trump can access a crucial sliver of the electorate that no one else in his party can reach, while alienating wealthier voters they’ve historically relied on.

Given this, and if things keep going badly for the Republicans, there will be growing speculation about how they could rig or steal future elections. I continue to think this is low likelihood. Not because they wouldn’t want to — we know Trump would have no qualms — but because there are no obvious way to do so beyond a full-blown coup, or the Supreme Court deciding to explicitly ignore the direct wording of the constitution.

There will, no doubt, be further attempts to find advantage within the existing system, as per current redistricting efforts, and if results are very close things could get messy. But it is likely elections will be free and fair enough to punish the Republicans for their failure to put up any fight against the Trump cult when they had the chance. •

The post MAGA meltdown? appeared first on Inside Story.

But when you talk to ordinary Chinese people about what their lives or their families’ lives are like these days, a less rosy picture emerges. In Beijing, Helen Gao writes:

Behind the orderliness of everyday life, a quiet desperation simmers. On social media and in private conversations, there is a common refrain: worry over joblessness, wage cuts and making ends meet…

Internationally, China looks strong… That muscular facade is punctured here in China, where despair about dimming economic and personal prospects is pervasive. This contrast between a confident state and its weary population is captured in a phrase Chinese people are using to describe their country: “wai qiang, zhong gan,” roughly translated as “outwardly strong, inwardly brittle.”…

Many now feel the very state policies that have made China appear strong overseas are hurting them. They see a government more concerned with building global influence and dominating export markets than in addressing the challenges of their households… These days, there is a sense of bitter anger among the people at being the voiceless victims of the state’s obsession with world power and beating the United States…

The government recently began cracking down on social media content it considered “excessively pessimistic” — a clear sign it is concerned about this public unease undercutting its agenda.

For even more direct insight, I recommend Reading the China Dream blog, which translates Chinese writing and online commentary. It has a good translation of a recent report from a Chinese marketing company on morale among the youth. Here are some excerpts from the bloggers’ summary:

The text translated here is [the] last of a series meant to sum up 2024 and preview 2025… [T]he tone of the text is unsparingly bleak: the China Dream has stalled and no one knows what to do about it… Chinese young people inherited great expectations from China’s phenomenal economic rise, which began to slow in the 2010s, and from the democratisation of China’s higher educational system… This ringing success has fallen flat because the job market has not kept up with university expansion. Consequently, China’s vulnerable generation… find themselves in a limbo defined by a flat job market, stagnant salaries, and high prices, especially for real estate… This appears to be where China is now: school is a marathon, but nobody wins.

And this is from the translated report itself:

The number of young people who are depressed or anxious continues to rise, and young people have the worst emotional state of all age groups. The China National Mental Health Report (2019–2020) shows that young people aged eighteen to thirty-four have the highest anxiety level; at the same time, people’s mental health level has dropped significantly compared with ten years ago.

Young people’s emotional problems are becoming more and more serious, especially in the context of fierce competition in education… As a result, emotional problems tend to emerge at a younger age. Through longitudinal comparison, the China Youth Research Center found that between 2015 and 2020, the sense of hope of primary and secondary school students decreased by 11.8 percentage points.

This all fits with everything my Chinese expat friends tell me about how their relatives are faring back home. It also fits with the descriptions of young Chinese people’s disillusionment in Dan Wang’s recent book Breakneck.

Essentially, it seems as if Chinese people — especially young people — are stuck on a treadmill. China’s young people are studying hard, getting a college education, and putting in gruellingly long work hours. And yet youth unemployment rates are rising relentlessly, many college graduates can’t find the kind of white-collar work they trained for, and wage growth is sluggish. To a huge number of Chinese people, the modern Chinese economy is less of a “Chinese Dream” than a Sisyphean nightmare.

In fact, the word “treadmill” also hearkens back to where China’s problems began. Way back in 2010, hedge fund manager Jim Chanos declared that China’s real estate market was on a “treadmill to hell.” That prediction was way too early — the real estate market probably didn’t become a bubble until the late 2010s, and didn’t begin to crash until near the end of 2021.

But crash it eventually did, and four years later it’s still in a protracted state of collapse. Despite government support, Chinese property prices are still falling:

China’s home-price slump worsened in October, ending a traditionally peak sales season with a weak reading as recent loosening measures failed to revive the moribund market… New-home prices in seventy cities, excluding state-subsidised housing, dropped 0.45 per cent from September, the steepest decline in a year, National Bureau of Statistics figures showed Friday. Resale home values fell 0.66 per cent, the fastest slide in thirteen months.

This price decline is a catastrophe for regular Chinese households. Even more than in most countries, Chinese households have their wealth concentrated in real estate. The stockmarket is underdeveloped, and bonds have crappy interest rates (partly due to China’s strategy of keeping interest rates low in order to make it cheap for businesses to borrow), so people save money by buying houses or housing-linked bonds. As real estate prices go down, Chinese people are getting poorer and poorer, despite working hard and living frugal lives.

The property bust is also weighing on the macroeconomy. Property investment is down almost 15 per cent on a year ago. This is a big reason why unemployment is rising, wages are stagnant, and lots of college grads can’t find jobs commensurate with their skills.

For a while, China used manufacturing investment to fill the economic hole left by real estate. The country embarked on the greatest industrial policy push in human history, spending an estimated 4.4 per cent of GDP on manufacturing subsidies of various kinds. Industrial lending and output surged, keeping GDP growth from collapsing even as the real estate sector floundered.

But this strategy also hit its limits. It turns out that if you pay a whole bunch of companies to make the same products, they end up competing viciously with each other, and their profits evaporate. Here are some excerpts from a recent story in the Atlantic about China’s EV industry, which is both beating the world and floundering financially at the same time:

The Chinese electric car has become a symbol of the country’s seemingly unstoppable rise on the world stage… [But] bloated by excessive investment, distorted by government intervention, and plagued by heavy losses, China’s EV industry appears destined for a crash. EV companies are locked in a cutthroat struggle for survival. Wei Jianjun, the chairman of the Chinese automaker Great Wall Motor, warned in May that China’s car industry could tumble into a financial crisis; it “just hasn’t erupted yet.”…

Dunne Insights, a California-based consulting firm focused on the EV industry, counts forty-six domestic and international automakers producing EVs in China, far too many for even the world’s second-largest economy to sustain… In most economies, the market would sort out this mess by culling the weakest players… In China, state support or ownership of automakers extends the life of struggling businesses. Local governments are also reluctant to lose the jobs they bring, so officials prop up unprofitable companies. The city of Wenzhou recently helped arrange financing for an EV maker called WM Motor to get the company’s local factory humming again. The city of Hefei rescued the EV start-up Nio in 2020, but the publicly listed company continues to lose money — $1.6 billion in the first half of this year.

This so-called “involution” results in misallocation of capital, reducing productivity growth and ultimately slowing GDP growth. By destroying profit margins for even the best-run Chinese companies, involution damages their ability to invest for the future.

The excessive corporate competition from involution also contributes to China’s overwork problem by giving companies an incentive to work their employees to the bone in order to get a competitive edge. And worst of all, involution drives down prices, causing deflation that exacerbates the value of the debt left over from the property bubble.

So China’s leaders are going on an “anti-involution” campaign. It’s not clear what this means — the details of the policy are mostly out of the public eye — but if it’s anything like what Japan’s industrial policy bureaucrats did to stop “excessive competition” in the 1970s, it will probably involve telling Chinese companies to get together and all raise their prices at the same time.

That’s going to mean slower growth. Why? Because demand curves slope down. If Chinese car companies all raise their prices, fewer cars will be sold. Another way of saying the same thing is that the easiest way to raise prices is to curb production. Either way, this means less investment, because Chinese companies won’t need to build as many factories. And less investment means slower GDP growth in the short run.

In fact, this might already be happening. China’s fixed-asset investment has begun to fall in the last few months, right around the time the anti-involution campaign began. Bloomberg reports:

China’s economic activity cooled more than expected at the start of the fourth quarter… Fixed-asset investment shrank 1.7 per cent in the first ten months of the year… according to data released by [China’s] National Bureau of Statistics… Bloomberg Economics estimates investment dropped as much as 12 per cent in October, extending its streak of declines into a fifth straight month.

And here’s a chart:

Source: Brad Setser

This investment drop is a bit statistically weird, since it contradicts some other data sources. Data quality in this area is notoriously bad. But it seems to fit with some other pieces of data, such as slowing loan growth — especially industrial loans — and rising unemployment.

It also fits with the generally pessimistic mood Chinese people express about their economy:

Chinese households became more pessimistic last quarter and their view of the jobs market fell to the worst ever, according to a survey by the central bank…Consumers turned increasingly negative about income, employment, and prices in April–June, the poll showed…

The data also revealed that people’s willingness to consume dropped to the weakest since the outbreak of the pandemic, with almost two-thirds of respondents saying they want to save more, while an employment index fell to a record low… The data also showed a shrinking percentage of respondents expecting consumer and housing prices to rise.

Put this all together, and it makes perfect sense that Chinese people — especially young people — would be feeling futile and pessimistic. They’ve been hit with a bunch of huge negative shocks, all within a short space of time:

• A real estate bust that destroyed a significant portion of their wealth, as well as their hopes of asset appreciation in the near future

• An economic slowdown that destroyed expectations of constantly rising living standards, made it hard for people to find jobs, and meant that lots of college degrees are going to waste

• A government industrial policy that encouraged “involution,” made a lot of people work hard for little gain, and exacerbated the hangover from the property crash.

These negative shocks would be brutal for any country. But for China, which has known nothing but skyrocketing living standards for more than three decades, it’s especially galling to be suddenly thrust into a world where you have to run flat-out just to stay in place.

Ten years ago, Chinese people worked hard because they knew that tomorrow would be much better than today; now, they work hard because they know that if they don’t, tomorrow will be much worse than today. Their dream has suddenly flipped from aspiration to survival.

All of this raises the question of who, exactly, the modern Chinese nation-state is built for. In many ways, China is the greatest nation on Earth — it has endless miles of high-speed rail, futuristic technological marvels, vast productive power, sprawling malls and highways and forests of towering apartment blocks. Its cities sparkle with light, drones zip through its skies, and robots crawl along its streets. And yet many of its people now toil in quiet desperation. It feels like a nation built for the glory and greatness of its leaders and owners, rather than for the happiness of its regular people.

This was not always true, of course. Under Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao, China vanquished poverty, created a vast middle class and made a concerted effort to spread its new prosperity all across the nation. That was always the deal — prosperity for political quiescence. Now, under Xi Jinping, the deal has been altered. China’s people are basically being told “Let them eat national greatness.” •

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And yet he’s losing his MAGA base over attorney-general Pam Bondi’s abrupt closure of the Jeffrey Epstein case. After leading his followers along that his administration would investigate and release information about the man who purportedly committed suicide in prison while awaiting prosecution for sex trafficking, Trump has tried to shut it all down and yelled at anyone focusing on what he termed old news. His base feels angry and betrayed, condemning Trump on his own social media site. Even inside the administration, figures from the podcast world like Dan Bongino are furious.

Democrats, who have mostly ignored Epstein for the past several years, are finally starting to raise the litany of Epstein–Trump connections in speeches. But it feels like their now-standard second-term tactic of using whatever’s available to get under Trump’s skin, without really grappling with the underlying policy issue.

Yes, I said policy issue.

There’s an incorrect belief that the Epstein case is somehow separate from the real concerns facing America, a conspiracist concoction untethered to reality. But it’s actually about the policy issue I’ve probably spent more time writing on than any other in my career in journalism: the two-tiered system of justice and accountability in America, and the impunity we afford the nation’s elites.

For a scandal that’s supposed to be shrouded in mystery, the details of the Epstein case are pretty well known. With the help of associate Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein procured young girls as high-class prostitutes for a fairly broad cross section of US and global elites. We have Epstein’s black book, which includes nearly 2000 names of associates and clients. We have the flight logs of his private jet and its passengers. We have searing documentary testimony from the young women who were pushed into servitude at his pleasure. We know that Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Larry Summers, Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, former Disney CEO Mike Ovitz, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and many, many more either had meetings with Epstein, visits to Epstein’s private island, or have been subpoenaed for information about either or both.

And we know that among Epstein’s associates was his neighbour Donald Trump. There are pictures and videos from parties, seven trips on Epstein’s private jet, numerous comments by Trump on how fun it was to hang out with Epstein and his coterie of young girls, connections between girls allegedly put into service by Epstein and their employment at Mar-a-Lago, and even direct testimony from Epstein himself. Audiotape released last year reveals Epstein saying that he was Donald’s “closest friend for ten years.”

Even things we supposedly don’t know, like the source of Epstein’s wealth, are also pretty clear. He obtained power of attorney over the estate of The Limited and Victoria’s Secret founder Les Wexner in the late 1980s, from which he appropriated bunches of money for himself. He was paid hundreds of millions more by Apollo’s Leon Black.

In other words, a set of crimes perpetrated by a wealthy guy reached into the heights of the political and economic stratosphere, and went largely unpunished for decades. Yet another Trump connection, his original labour secretary in the first term, Alex Acosta, issued a secret non-prosecution agreement to Epstein in 2008 when he was a US attorney, which allowed Epstein to enter guilty pleas for state charges and avoid federal charges or jail time.

Epstein was thereby able to continue his activities for another decade. But the year 2008 featured unpunished crimes of a different kind. It was the year of financial crisis, after banks committed industrial-scale fraud to collapse the world economy. Once the fallout hit and defaults of mortgages spiked, the banks covered up their crimes with millions of fraudulent documents to cure fatal defects in foreclosure cases. Nobody went to jail.

That same year, 2008, Barack Obama was elected president and adopted a policy of looking forward, not backward, at the numerous instances of illegal torture committed by the Bush administration. Nobody went to jail.

As Chris Hayes recounted in Twilight of the Elites, this was just part of an emerging loss of faith in institutions, whether byproducts of the failure to stop 9/11, the bogus rationales for war with Iraq over weapons of mass destruction, or the overwhelming evidence of paedophilia in the Catholic Church. And  this “rot at the heart of our democracy,” as I put it in my 2016 book Chain of Title, was the thoroughgoing lack of accountability for any of these failures. Powerful people simply were held to a different standard than someone stealing ten bucks’ worth of candy at a convenience store or selling dime bags of pot in the streets. Who you were mattered more than what you did.

Everything about the Epstein case mirrors this. Everything about the failure to sanction Donald Trump for violations of law and the attempted overthrow of a free and fair election in 2020 also mirrors this. It’s a failure of both parties to hold anyone responsible who has a certain degree of power and authority. That goes for Epstein and even more so for Epstein’s clients.

Trump’s true believers thought for some reason he would be different, that he would blow up the system and leave no sacred cows. Entire industries like QAnon were created to enable this categorical error of faith. But it was pitifully easy to see in advance that Trump was never going to release information about Epstein. When asked directly before the 2024 election if he would, Trump hesitated, and even when he said he would, he was clearly choosing his words carefully. When Maxwell was convicted of sex trafficking, Trump’s biographer said he considered a pardon out of fear for what she would reveal, potentially about him.

Everything that happened next flowed from this. When the raw tape showing Epstein’s prison cell the night before his death was finally released, metadata of the video file showed it was not raw but modified in some undefined way. Bondi claimed there was no client list, after earlier saying the client list was sitting on her desk.

You don’t even have to believe that Trump is hiding some sort of self-incrimination, though it certainly feels that way, to understand MAGA’s disappointment. They wrongly built up Trump as someone other than just another politician. They failed to understand that there’s a big difference between accountability and revenge, and that Trump is only interested in the latter. Accountability suggests a punishment that fits the crime, and in twenty-first-century America we have never seen such a thing.

Elite impunity is actually one of the biggest problems facing society. It turns people away from a system that fails them, sends them into the arms of demagogues who promise to make it all right. That the demagogue also was a charter member of the elite, who demanded impunity for himself and his comrades, may swing the pendulum temporarily back to the opposite party. And Democrats are right politically and substantively to call for the release of more information on Epstein, even to set up potential votes on it. But only when someone is actually held accountable for their actions will this sorry cycle be broken.

Certainly, MAGA overhype built the Epstein scandal into a key unlocking an understanding of the entire world, which it probably isn’t. A lot of liars and conspiracists used Epstein to channel rage about globalists and liberals, when in reality he was a scummy guy who didn’t serve any political party. That’s why it’s a harder fall now; it tears apart the entire moral system these people built for themselves. (That Trump is betraying MAGA on other issues, like Ukraine, becomes more noticeable and damaging amid the Epstein disappointment.)

But the larger policy issue tarnishes both parties, rooted in their protecting the powerful from having to answer for themselves. So much of the past fifty years, from the Nixon pardon to Chappaquiddick, from the Lewinsky scandal to Bandar Bush, is explained by this simple truth, that power sees itself as above the law. The public is sick and tired of this disparity, which rings as deep and loud as economic inequality and oligarchy. In fact, it signals the true flourishing of inequality and oligarchy: that the wealthy and powerful are out of the reach of the legal system. •

This article originally appeared in the American Prospect, an independent Washington-based magazine. You can sign up for their newsletters here.

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Here are a few takes on what happened:

The polls beat the pundits: Nobody should have been surprised that Democrats had a very good night. These elections were, as expected, largely a referendum on Donald Trump, and polling says that Trump is very, very unpopular. Even if you dismissed Trump’s dismal approval rating as fake news, there were plenty of other indications that Trump would drag his party down. The second No Kings Day was the largest one-day demonstration since Earth Day in 1970. Democrats have been outperforming by something like fifteen points in special elections. And polling averages favoured Democrats in key races.

So everything pointed to big Dem gains, although the scale of the victories was a surprise. There had been a steady drumbeat of warnings that Mikie Sherrill [Democratic candidate for New Jersey governor], in particular, might be in trouble. Instead she won in a thirteen-point landslide.

Yet for the past few months the punditocracy has been obsessed with the narrative that Democrats are in big trouble, out of touch with Real Americans™. I’d like to see some soul-searching among those pushing that narrative — the same kind of soul-searching they’ve been demanding from Democrats. But I won’t be holding my breath.

It’s still (largely) the economy, stupid: The 2024 election was mainly about economics. There was a big run-up in prices in 2021–22, as the world economy, recovering from Covid, experienced a lot of supply-chain bottlenecks. This price surge, coming after decades of low inflation, upset voters.

Biden administration officials could and did point out that it was a one-time price hike, that inflation — the rate of change of prices — fell rapidly from its 2022 peak, and was back to more or less normal levels by 2024. They could also point out that America’s inflation experience was very similar to the experiences of other nations, eg. in Europe, indicating that global factors rather than Democratic policies were the main culprit.

But voters were unmoved by these arguments, if they heard about them at all. What they did hear was Donald Trump promising not just to reduce inflation but to bring prices way back down. And many of them believed him.

Of course, Trump didn’t have a plan, or even a concept of a plan, about how to accomplish this. Instead he imposed tariffs and began deporting immigrant workers, both of which raised prices.

So prices haven’t come down; instead, inflation has accelerated. And the job market has gotten worse. Thanks to the shutdown, we’re not getting official employment numbers, but I’ve been looking at private surveys. One number I find especially striking is the Conference Board’s “labour market differential,” the difference between the percentage of Americans who say jobs are “plentiful” and those who say jobs are “hard to get.” This number is way down, which says that ordinary Americans perceive a very tough job market.

Pretty clearly, many Americans now believe that they were lied to. My guess (we’ll know more in a few days) is that this is especially true for Hispanic voters, who swung to Trump believing that he would deliver prosperity and are swinging hard back to Democrats now that he hasn’t.

It also surely doesn’t help that Trump and his minions keep insisting that everything is great, that there is no inflation and the economy is booming. This doesn’t persuade anyone not in the cult and just makes them look out of touch. Which they are.

Which party is out of touch, again? Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York, in the face of hysterical opposition from the big money, has grabbed many of the headlines, which I understand — it’s an amazing story. And I wonder what the right-wing tech bros are thinking: if Wall Street couldn’t buy New York, can they really buy America?

But Mamdani’s win doesn’t tell us much about national politics: New York City is just very different from the rest of the country.

I’m seeing some commentators argue that Mamdani will be a problem for Democrats, allowing Republicans to paint them as extremists who are out of touch with America. But Republicans would do that anyway. For what it’s worth, Mamdani may be on the left, but all indications are that he’s a pragmatist who will get along fine with the rest of his party.

Meanwhile, you know which party is out of touch and riddled with extremists? The Republican Party.

If you look at recent Republican campaigns and positioning, it’s striking how much energy they’re putting into issues that just don’t matter much to ordinary Americans. Republicans may be obsessed with trans athletes, but most people aren’t. Polls and Tuesday’s elections suggest that rants about the menace of illegal aliens have a lot less traction with the public than party apparatchiks imagine — and that Americans don’t like the spectacle of masked ICE agents grabbing people off the street.

This disconnect between party priorities and what matters to ordinary people seems to me like a much bigger deal than Democratic “wokeness,” which was always exaggerated anyway.

And if we’re talking about extremists within the party, well, Democrats have people like Mamdani, a mild-mannered guy who says he’s a socialist but really isn’t. The Republican Party, by contrast, has been largely taken over by outright fascists and is facing a major outbreak of old-fashioned antisemitism.

Now what? Tuesday’s blue wave won’t stop MAGA’s attempt to consolidate authoritarian rule in America. If anything, they’ll redouble efforts to rig the 2026 midterms, although California, by approving a major redistricting, has largely neutralised their gerrymandering plot.

A couple of months ago I noted that previous examples of autocrats who consolidated power after winning an election, from Hitler to Viktor Orbán, did so while they were still popular. I asked whether a despised autocrat could do the same. After yesterday, it’s clear that Trump really is despised. Can he still end our democracy? I guess we’ll find out. •

This article first appeared in Paul Krugman’s Substack newsletter.

The post Which party is in trouble, again? appeared first on Inside Story.

I think if you work as a radiologist, you are like the coyote that’s already over the edge of the cliff but hasn’t yet looked down… People should stop training radiologists now. It’s just completely obvious within five years deep learning is going to do better than radiologists… It might be ten years, but we’ve got plenty of radiologists already.

ChatGPT hadn’t yet been invented, but the AI systems of 2016 were already pretty good at reading medical imaging. Hinton felt that he could see the writing on the wall.

And yet here we are, nine years later, and the radiology profession is doing just fine. Deena Mousa recently wrote about this in an excellent Works in Progress article:

Radiology is a field optimised for human replacement, where digital inputs, pattern recognition tasks, and clear benchmarks predominate… But demand for human labour is higher than ever. In 2025, American diagnostic radiology residency programs offered a record 1208 positions across all radiology specialties, a 4 per cent increase from 2024, and the field’s vacancy rates are at all-time highs. In 2025, radiology was the second-highest-paid medical specialty in the country, with an average income of $520,000, over 48 per cent higher than the average salary in 2015.

As Mousa notes, some of the reasons for this are pedestrian. AI models don’t perform nearly as well once they get out in the real world and have to go far beyond their training data. And humans don’t trust the AI, so regulators and health insurers sometimes insist on human radiologists.

But there are other reasons for the persistence of the radiology profession that are even more profound — and that should serve as important reminders about how little we know about the economic effect of AI.

First, AI model makers don’t actually know what radiologists do. They know radiologists read scans, but they don’t know all the other stuff they do:

Radiologists are useful for more than reading scans; a study that followed staff radiologists in three different hospitals in 2012 found that only 36 per cent of their time was dedicated to direct image interpretation. More time is spent on overseeing imaging examinations, communicating results and recommendations to the treating clinicians and occasionally directly to patients, teaching radiology residents and technologists who conduct the scans, and reviewing imaging orders and changing scanning protocols. This means that, if AI were to get better at interpreting scans, radiologists may simply shift their time toward other tasks. This would reduce the substitution effect of AI.

Because AI engineers don’t really understand all the things radiologists do, they will be slow to design AI systems that address all of these tasks. And even when someone does get around to addressing this problem, it’s not clear when we’ll get AI that’s as good at humans at all of these tasks. Humans may remain in the loop.

Finally, AI increases productivity, which reduces cost, which increases the number of patients who can be served. This increases the demand for radiologists’ labour:

As tasks get faster or cheaper to perform, we may also do more of them. In some cases, especially if lower costs or faster turnaround times open the door to new uses, the increase in demand can outweigh the increase in efficiency, a phenomenon known as Jevons paradox. This has historical precedent in the field: in the early 2000s hospitals swapped film jackets for digital systems. Hospitals that digitised improved radiologist productivity, and time to read an individual scan went down. A study at Vancouver General found that the switch boosted radiologist productivity 27 per cent for plain radiography and 98 per cent for CT within a year of going filmless. This occurred alongside other advancements in imaging technology that made scans faster to execute. Yet, no radiologists were laid off.

Instead, the overall American utilisation rate per 1000 insured patients for all imaging increased by 60 per cent from 2000 to 2008. This is not explained by a commensurate increase in physician visits. Instead, each visit was associated with more imaging on average.

AI engineers, who look mainly at their models’ capabilities, don’t generally think a lot about this overall economic ecosystem. They’ve seen their creations up close, and they know their capabilities better than anyone else, but that doesn’t mean they know what a radiologist does at work. And they don’t know whether AI will simply change how radiologists spend their time at work while also improving their productivity. Hinton might someday be right, but as of right now he was wrong. •

The post Why do we still have so many radiologists? appeared first on Inside Story.

Yet the economic consequences of the radically self-destructive turn in US trade policy have been matched, perhaps even overshadowed, by a development that has nothing to do with policy: an enormous surge in spending on “AI.” Scare quotes because ChatGPT and its rivals aren’t really artificial intelligence. But they are impressive, routinely doing things that would have seemed impossible just a few years ago.

And the surge in AI investment — a tech boom the likes of which we haven’t seen since the 1990s — has buoyed the economy in the short run, offsetting the drag from Trump’s tariffs. Without the data-centre boom, we’d probably be in a recession. But hundreds of billions in spending on data centres have boosted investment, while soaring stock prices have supported consumer spending by the wealthy even as demand from lower and middle-income Americans weakens.

Unlike the tech boom of the 1990s, however, the current AI boom isn’t translating into widespread economic optimism. In fact, Americans are remarkably downbeat about the economy and the future in general. And I think it’s worth trying to understand why.

This article isn’t about the long-run consequences of AI for things like jobs and economic growth, as well as whether we’ll soon create superintelligences that decide to kill us all. I want to focus for now on how hopes about profits to be made from AI — and fear of missing out, or FOMO — have led to huge business outlays, largely on those data centres. By the second quarter of this year spending on information-processing equipment and software, as a percentage of GDP, had already matched its peak in 1999, the height of the internet bubble. There’s every indication that it’s going to go even higher, maybe much higher.

Source: St Louis Federal Reserve. Note: Ignore the numbers for the early 2020s, which, like so many other things, were greatly distorted by Covid.

The current AI boom resembles the 1990s tech boom in other ways besides the tidal wave of spending. To those of us of a certain age, the hype — This will change everything! — is distinctly familiar. Now, as then, the feverishness is a good reason to suspect that we’re in the midst of a huge speculative bubble. Reinforcing this suspicion is the fact that big tech companies, which generate billions in cash flow, are spending more on AI than their gushers of dollars can support. So now they’re taking on lots of debt.

While the 1990s and today are alike in their bubble mentality, however, they differ in an important way: today we lack the pervasive optimism of the late 1990s. It’s hard to convey to people under the age of fifty just how upbeat Americans in the late 1990s were feeling about the economy and the future in general. In fact, I believe the Bill Clinton–era boom led Americans to take prosperity for granted, resulting in their willingness to switch their presidential votes to a Republican — the ill-fated George W. Bush.

Today corporations are, once again, pouring vast sums into technology, but they’re doing it against a background of extraordinary pessimism. And the question I want to ask is why we’re seeing 90s-type hype without a return of 90s-type hope. Why aren’t we partying like it’s 1999?

You can see the difference in how people feel about the economy by looking at consumer sentiment, which was very high at the end of the 1990s but is now about where it was during the depths of the global financial crisis:

You can also see the difference between now and then in more general polling. In 1999 around 60 per cent of Americans were satisfied with the way things were going in the country; these days it’s half that. You can see it in presidential approval ratings: In March 1999, 78 per cent (!) of Americans said they approved of Bill Clinton’s handling of the economy. Polls show Trump with less than half that much approval for his economic policies, with those disapproving exceeding those approving by around fifteen points.

So why are we all feeling so grim even as businesses place huge bets on an impressive and possibly transformative new technology? I’d give three answers.

First, the US economy under Trump is doing worse than the standard measures indicate. It’s true that we haven’t had a recession — largely because that huge spending on data centres has compensated for the economic drag caused by tariffs. It’s also true that unemployment remains fairly low — in fact, the current unemployment rate is similar to the unemployment rate in 1999.

But while we haven’t (yet?) seen mass layoffs, the labour market is weirdly frozen, probably because of uncertainty created by Trump’s erratic policies. The hiring rate — the rate at which employers are taking on new workers — is very low by historical standards. So is the quit rate, the rate at which workers are voluntarily leaving jobs, normally an indication that workers fear they won’t be able to get a new job if they leave their current employment.

Unfortunately, these data don’t go all the way back to 1999. But here’s a striking comparison. The Conference Board [a business-oriented think tank] conducts a monthly survey of consumer confidence that among other things asks whether respondents consider jobs “plentiful” or “hard to get”. In April 1999 people were very upbeat about job-finding: 47.4 per cent said jobs were plentiful, while only 12.5 per cent said they were hard to get. In August 2025 those numbers were 26.9 per cent and 19.1 per cent respectively, a far more pessimistic view. In other words, not many Americans have been laid off, but many of them are very worried about what will happen if they do lose their job.

Which brings me to my second point. As best I can remember, people were excited about the rise of the internet but not, for the most part, frightened. They saw new possibilities opening up, but few Americans saw these new possibilities putting their jobs or their society at risk. In retrospect we should have been worried: social media in particular have done an immense amount of social and psychological damage. But we weren’t thinking about those risks.

By contrast, it’s hard to find people who aren’t worried about AI. It’s common to hear warnings that AI will eliminate large categories of jobs, and maybe even lead to mass unemployment. I take the first prospect seriously — past technological change has taken away most of the jobs in major occupations, from coal-miners to longshoremen. As a card-carrying economist, I’m sceptical about the second: people have been predicting mass unemployment caused by automation since the 1930s, and it keeps not happening. But the point is that AI is creating widespread anxiety even as it boosts GDP in the short run.

Finally, although this is hard to prove, I believe the political situation is bleeding into economic perceptions. People like me see a terrifying autocratic power grab in progress. While Trump and his minions claim that this is the BEST ECONOMY EVER, they also claim that our major cities are war zones overrun by dangerous leftists, which kind of interferes with the attempt to project sunny optimism.

My guess is that the current tech boom, like the 90s boom, will end in a painful bust. While Trump keeps insisting that the economy is great, his minions have taken to promising that it will get much better next year. Given how bad people are feeling about an economy currently propped up by an unsustainable tech boom, I wouldn’t bet on it. •

This article first appeared in Paul Krugman’s Substack newsletter.

The post Why aren’t Americans partying like it’s 1999? appeared first on Inside Story.

Meanwhile, my eldest daughter has been captivated by the overthrow of the Nepalese prime minister, K.P. Sharma Oli, and his replacement by former Supreme Court judge Sushila Karki. Not only did she know about this from watching TikTok videos but the revolution itself was driven on the streaming site by young people barely older than her.

The immediate trigger for the protests was the government’s decision to shut down dozens of social media sites including Facebook, X and YouTube. Ministers claimed the sites were failing to abide by new regulations but the “Gen Z” protestors believed the real reason was to stop the spread of viral memes about nepotism that showed politicians’ children living in luxury. Protests quickly descended into violence and the resignation of ministers. Incredibly, the new prime minister was chosen via a vote on Discord, another social media platform.

Though Nepal is one of the most dramatic examples of this type of protest it is not unique. Last year the Bangladeshi government was overthrown by a similar demographic, and in Nairobi mass protests against new taxes have been organised over TikTok and other platforms. In August, the Indonesian government found itself facing violent protests over salary boosts for politicians. Tellingly, one of their countermeasures was to ask TikTok to stop live streaming.

The average age in all of these countries is thirty or below (twenty-five in Nepal and just twenty in Kenya), compared to forty-one in Britain and thirty-eight in Australia. That magnifies both the effect of disenchantment with lack of employment opportunities but also the power of new forms of politics.

While all this has been going on the United States and China have been negotiating a deal over TikTok’s future in America. That a video streaming website would be at the heart of a complex trade deal with global consequences is an indication of how important it has become. Trump has been personally involved, discussing the issue with Xi Jinping, because he knows how critical the site is for boosting his support. TikTok users who get their news from the site were one of the groups that swung most away from Joe Biden in last year’s election.

In Britain, TikTok is already the biggest source of news for twelve- to fifteen-year-olds and rising up the rankings fast for older teenagers and those in their twenties and thirties. Among all adults it’s now as big a news source as ITV, Channel 4 and the Daily Mail. It’s by far the fastest growing social media platform globally, with more than a billion monthly users. Critically users spend far more time on the site than on others.

So why has it been so successful? What are the risks, both geopolitically and in terms of domestic politics? How is it going to change political engagement? And can a generation of politicians brought up on older forms of media make it work for them?

TikTok’s success is driven by its “for you” feed, which is what one first encounters when joining the site. Unlike X, Bluesky or Instagram, which can feel offputtingly empty on arrival, content is immediately fired at users. Initially it’s a scattergun mix of celebrities, influencers, memes and news but as you start watching some videos, flicking past others, and following other accounts, it quickly refines to a bespoke feed.

Where TikTok’s algorithm really differs from others is in the way it continues to feed in more experimental content alongside things it’s figured out a user will like, which allows it to constantly refine and makes it much easier for new trends to develop. If you make a video on the site it is guaranteed to appear in some peoples’ feeds even if you have no followers. If it’s watched by them it will be sent to more people, allowing complete unknowns to go viral in a way that is much harder on YouTube or other sites.

While platforms like X and Facebook have been undermining the traditional “gatekeeping” role of newspapers and broadcasters for some time, this approach makes TikTok even more democratic and messy. On older sites, feeds tend to be dominated by big players and users can assess whether to trust them or not. On TikTok there’s a constant stream of information from random people with no sense of whether it’s true or not. There are also vast numbers of AI videos with no indication they are not real.

Speed is also important. Videos can run for up to an hour — though those made using tools on the site have a limit of ten minutes. But the vast majority are much shorter, most under a minute, many just a few seconds. They require no attention span, which is why users spend so long scrolling.

As the culture writer Ted Gioia wrote last year, this is all part of a greater shift:

The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction. Or call it scrolling or swiping or wasting time or whatever you want. But it’s not art or entertainment, just ceaseless activity. The key is that each stimulus only lasts a few seconds, and must be repeated.

As Gioia explains, this endless search for distraction has potentially ugly consequences:

The more addicts rely on these stimuli, the less pleasure they receive. At a certain point, this cycle creates anhedonia — the complete absence of enjoyment in an experience supposedly pursued for pleasure… At a certain point, addicts still pursue the stimulus, but more to avoid the pain of dopamine deprivation.

Regardless of the impact on mental health, the dopamine culture approach to content certainly changes the way people think about politics. Simple, emotive and extreme messages work best to grab attention quickly. A while ago I set up an account and only followed mainstream news sites, and yet most of my feed quickly became highly polarised — with lots of Jeremy Corbyn and left-wing content as well as plenty of Nigel Farage, Tommy Robinson’s “Advance UK” party and random anti-immigration content. As polling analyst James Kanagasooriam puts it, “The lack of honest trade-offs is a distinct feature of an attention-scarce society.”

Such an attention-grabbing, addictive and unfiltered form of social media offers huge opportunities for organised misinformation. Of course, governments have been trying to interfere in other countries’ elections for a long time using all sorts of methods. Social media came to the fore during Brexit and Trump’s first win when there was lots of excitement about Russian interference. There undoubtedly was some, but it doesn’t seem to have been very successful and there’s no evidence it changed the results.

TikTok, though, is a more powerful tool than fake-troll armies posting on Twitter. Last year’s Romanian election highlighted the potential. The far-right candidate for president, Calin Georgescu, came from nowhere to win the first round before being barred from running by the Supreme Court. He is currently on trial for disrupting national security by colluding with Russia. TikTok was critical to his late surge in the polls.

Those organising the campaign used two main tricks. First, they paid one hundred influencers via a third party company to describe what they wanted in a candidate using a series of key words like “patriot” and “stability.” Then they gamed the algorithm by posting thousands of supportive comments about Georgescu below. TikTok removed more than 27,000 fictitious accounts, but far more than that were created. We saw similar attempts at interference during elections in Georgia and Moldova.

Western Europe isn’t immune either, though attempts to manipulate the algorithm are driven less by Russia and more by home-grown actors. In Germany, both the radical right AfD and left-wing Die Linke have been boosted by the platform at the expense of parties in the centre. The AfD has been particularly successful, racking up almost half a million views per video from their parliamentarians compared to 75,000 for those from the centre-left SPD. One study found that searches for political parties or parliamentarians in the run-up to the elections were significantly more likely to lead to suggested AfD content. This may well just be because of the way the site works rather than any deliberate manipulation, but it skews the user experience towards the extremes.

In Britain, the right’s Nigel Farage is the most followed politician by far (1.3 million followers) with the left’s Zarah Sultana (450,000) in second place. Farage’s Reform party’s videos get fourteen times the engagement of those from other political parties. As yet this is not showing up much in voting intention polls among younger people. Britain is unusual in its degree of age polarisation, with Reform and the Tories doing far better with older people.

But polling of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, which is tricky to do and should be treated with caution, does suggest polarisation around Reform and the as-yet-unnamed left-wing vehicle proposed by Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn (though this appears to have fallen apart before it even managed to launch). With sixteen-year-olds able to vote at the next election, the current twelve-to-fifteen age group, who are most likely to use TikTok for news, will have a say too.

Beyond Europe, a big question is the extent to which China might seek to manipulate the algorithm given the state’s role in running the company. The government has a “golden share” in Bytedance, the company that owns TikTok, which gives it board representation and veto power over key business decisions. Just last week it banned the company from buying chips from the US firm Nvidia. Bytedance is also legally required to respond to government requests for data, which is one reason the US and European governments have serious security concerns. The company insists data is stored outside China, but there is scepticism about its safety.

Because TikTok’s algorithm is “black box” — we can’t see exactly how it’s tweaked to drive behaviour — it is impossible to be sure if there is any direct manipulation by China to drive desired political outcomes. There is, though, strong suggestive evidence. One study from Taiwan published earlier this year found a strong correlation between the amount of time spent on TikTok and pro-Chinese views. For instance, 26.8 per cent of those supporting Taiwan’s ruling party, the DPP, thought it was acceptable to give up Taiwan’s democratic system “for the sake of cross-strait peace” — ten points higher than for non-users.

A 2023 study from Rutgers University found similar effects on US users:

TikTok screentime positively and uniquely predicted favourability towards China’s human rights record. Notably, heavy users of TikTok (i.e., those with >3 hours of daily screentime) demonstrated a roughly 50 per cent increase in pro-China attitudes compared to non-users.

It also found evidence that anti-China content is suppressed: “The views-to-likes ratio for anti-China content on TikTok was 87 per cent lower than pro-China content even though the content was liked nearly twice as much.”

So how can governments, and politicians, adapt to this rapidly changing environment?

One option is regulation to mitigate risks around security and misinformation. The US government’s proposal to set up a separate American TikTok has not yet been finalised but it looks like it will be owned by a group of Trump-friendly Silicon Valley tycoons including Oracle’s Larry Ellison, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and the Murdochs, with Oracle hosting the US data. But critically it seems the new company will use the same algorithm as the global one, which would rather undermine the endeavour given that’s what really gives the owners power. It’s also not obvious that if the algorithm was handed over to a bunch of politically aligned plutocrats in the US that the risk of manipulation would be any lower, given Trump’s increasingly overt attempts to censor more traditional media and Elon Musk’s manipulation of X’s algorithm.

The European Union has taken a more conventional, and inevitably slower, approach to regulation via the Digital Services Act, or DSA, passed in 2022, that seeks to force large social media sites into increasing transparency. In May, a preliminary judgement concluded that TikTok is in breach of the DSA for failing to allow proper scrutiny of online advertising. If this holds they could be fined up to 6 per cent of their worldwide income. Investigations under DSA are also examining TikTok’s algorithm and interference in the Romanian election. Separately, the Irish Data Protection Commission fined TikTok €530 million for sending users’ data to China in breach of European rules. In Britain, Ofcom handed out a £12.7 million fine for TikTok’s failure to stop under-thirteens joining the platform.

But all of this is either being appealed or will be absorbed by the company as a business cost. Old-school models of regulation, while worth trying, feel too slow to deal with a threat of this nature. Even banning the app, which would have serious free speech implications, wouldn’t solve the broader problem. India did so in 2020 after border clashes with China, and users just moved to Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, which are products designed to replicate the same distraction techniques that TikTok has perfected. Meta and Google, who own these sites, are continuing to shift more in that direction under pressure to stay on top of the attention economy.

So even if some of the security issues can be dealt with via regulation, politicians are going to have to find a way to adapt how they communicate to this new era. This is a big problem for anyone with standard media training, which aims for the exact opposite of attention-seeking. Politicians have been told for decades to ignore the questions they’re asked, have a set of pre-determined talking points, and repeat them relentlessly, the aim being to avoid saying anything unintentionally newsworthy while hoping your message sticks in the viewer’s mind. This approach worked when politics was covered primarily by traditional broadcasters. But it is mind-numbingly dull to watch, which is why, now there are alternatives, almost no one under forty does anymore.

It’s been clear for some time that voters are increasingly looking for spontaneity in political communications, and some sense of an authentic set of beliefs, even if they don’t necessarily agree with them. Trump and Farage are often dishonest but they also disarmingly blunt, as are many of the most effective modern communicators on the left. A lot of supposedly negative content about Farage on TikTok ends up highlighting this (for example, videos of him being paid to say daft things by users of Cameo, a platform that facilitates personalised celebrity messages for a fee). Many of the most successful politicians on the platform barely talk about politics at all, instead chatting about clothes or food.

It’s an approach pioneered in Asia, where TikTok grew fastest and where the average voter is younger. One example was Prabowo Subianto’s successful campaign for the Indonesian presidency last year. As Fulcrum reported:

Prabowo’s campaign utilised TikTok to showcase a more relatable side of the often-stern defence minister. Viral videos captured him dancing, interacting with children, playing with his cat, and engaging in light-hearted activities. These efforts successfully softened his image, leading to the rise of the term gemoy (cute) to describe this new persona; this was indeed a stark departure from the rigid and authoritarian figure he was once perceived as.

Bongbong Marcos used a similar approach in his successful 2022 campaign for the Philippines presidency, playing down his own scandals and his family’s controversial history.

But even in the unlikely event that British PM Keir Starmer or Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch were able to adopt this kind of approach, this doesn’t feel like a sustainable way of doing politics. After all, Indonesia is one of the countries that has seen widespread Gen Z protests. If distraction is all there is then voters will quickly get distracted by the next trend.

Sometimes the effects of this trend-driven politics might be positive. I can’t claim vast knowledge of Nepalese politics but the new prime minister chosen over Discord seems like an improvement. But the trend is profoundly volatile and hardly conducive to stable liberal democracy.

Ultimately, as I discussed earlier this year, democracy relies on literacy:

Commentators in the soft-left to centre-right section of the political spectrum tend to prefer to make arguments in traditional written form. It better suits their somewhat earnest form of politics. If fewer people — including graduates — are reading and more political content is both visual and being driven algorithmically that is going to become an ever bigger problem. And even if progressives and centrists get better at providing content in that form it could only be by sacrificing their arguments… Reasoning is not very important to the impact of a thirty-second video.

In that post I emphasised the importance of education and a focus on reading in schools as one way of trying to deal with this, something Britain is doing relatively well at compared to other countries. We should also do more to teach young people (and ideally adults too) about how to spot misinformation.

In the end, though, the only thing that can defeat distraction culture is a backlash: a gradual understanding among users that addiction to dopamine hits isn’t making them any happier. There is some evidence that this is starting to be understood. In 2024, 48 per cent of US teens said social media harms people their age, up from 32 per cent in 2022. Forty-five per cent said they spend too much time on it, up from 36 per cent. A British survey of school pupils found 71 per cent saying they’d taken temporary digital detoxes. Parents are even more worried, with growing pressure on governments round the world to legislate on smartphone use.

Yet there is no sign of the growth in platforms like TikTok slowing down, and their impact on politics is increasing all the time. One of the defining battles of the coming years will be between our collective willpower and the commercial value of distraction to the most valuable companies on the planet. •

The post TikTok and the future of politics appeared first on Inside Story.

An early head-scratching move was Biden’s decision in March 2021 to tap his vice-president to lead a diplomatic effort with foreign leaders to address “root causes” of immigration from Mexico and Central America. Immigration policy is a chronically thorny challenge, so the assignment was fraught with political danger. White House aides tried to convey to reporters that Harris wasn’t being asked to own the entire issue, but that didn’t stop the media saying she was now the “point person” on immigration, with conservative outlets glomming on to the notion that she was the “Border Czar.”

Right after Biden was elected in November 2020, I speculated that Harris would spend an inordinate amount of time on Rust Belt factory floors. This struck me as obvious political logic. Biden wasn’t likely to run in 2024 and Harris is the heir apparent. But, as a woman of colour from the Bay Area, she didn’t have the bond with swing-state working-class whites that Biden had cultivated over decades in office. What better way to use the next few years than to follow in Biden’s footsteps, forge those bonds, and expand her support? And what worse way than getting tangled up in the immigration thicket?

Still, I didn’t jump to cynical conclusions when the immigration position was created for Harris. Writing in late 2021 about the harsh media coverage Harris had received, I charitably offered the following:

Today, some political observers consider Harris’s big policy assignments — voting rights and immigration — as political lemons. “Is Biden Setting Up Harris to Fail?” posed a June headline from Slate. Biden has no incentive to do so. He and she simply are stuck with a political dilemma: any policy assignment puts Harris in a politically awkward position.

In 107 Days, Harris comes pretty darn close to saying she was set up to fail. Before recounting her experience with the migration portfolio, she writes, “When the stories were unfair or inaccurate, the president’s inner circle seemed fine with it. Indeed, it seemed as if they decided I should be knocked down a little bit more.” After tallying up her successes (which I had contemporaneously reported on for the Washington Monthly), Harris shares her frustrations:

When Republicans mischaracterised my role as “border czar,” no one in the White House comms team helped me to effectively push back and explain what I had really been tasked to do, nor to highlight any of the progress I had achieved… I wanted to get that good news out. But White House staff stalled. “Not yet. We need more data.” The story remained untold. Instead, I shouldered the blame for the porous border, an issue that had proved intractable for Democratic and Republican administrations alike.

Harris laments, “No one around the president advocated, Give her something she can win with. Then the Dobbs decision [on abortion] came down. Here was a huge issue on which the president was not seeking to lead. Joe struggled to talk about reproductive rights in a way that met the gravity of the moment. He ceded that leadership to me.”

She also claims that when she “gave a strong speech on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza” at a time when Biden was “taking on water for his perceived blank check to Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza,” even though the speech was vetted she got “castigated” by West Wing aides “for, apparently, delivering it too well.”

She concludes that West Wing “thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well.” I see a different glaring political omission; the West Wing didn’t construct a four-year strategy to strengthen her standing in Middle America. Deploying her to defend reproductive rights and chide Netanyahu underlined her progressive bona fides, but didn’t do anything to help her connect with the swing voters necessary for electoral success.

Now, maybe Harris’s side of the story isn’t the entire story. Maybe there was a legitimate reason to be cautious about overselling early migration data. Maybe she’s exaggerating the internal upset over her Gaza speech. But litigating such fine points is not necessary to draw a significant conclusion: by putting Harris in the position to have to shoulder an outsized portion of the immigration challenge from the outset of his administration, Biden’s political team implicitly revealed they never intended to pass the baton in 2024.

“I don’t think anybody’s more qualified to be president or win this race than me,” Biden told ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos after his politically fatal debate with Donald Trump. A few days earlier, Biden’s closest ally in the Senate, Delaware’s Chris Coons, said, “I think he’s the only Democrat who can beat Donald Trump.” In retrospect, these self-serving arguments don’t look like hastily concocted Hail Marys but part of a longstanding game plan to justify running for a second term.

Biden surely had to know that Harris retained presidential ambitions when he picked her. Perhaps the flip side is that the rest of us should have known that Biden wouldn’t give up his own decades-long presidential ambitions so easily. After all, this was a guy who ran twice before.

Barack Obama picked him to be vice-president with the implicit understanding that he was too old to be the successor and Obama would not have to be looking over his shoulder. But Biden’s burning desire to carve out a name for himself sometimes bubbled over, like in 2012 when he publicly supported legalising same-sex marriages ahead of Obama. Biden seriously considered upending the 2016 presidential primary, only backing out under pressure from Obama, pressure for which reportedly Biden retains resentment.

In many ways, Biden’s enormous ambition and decades of perseverance served him and the country well. That he was uniquely positioned and prepared to defeat Trump in 2020 is true, having exponentially more experience than anyone navigating highly charged, polarised electorates. But his blinkered inner circle had difficulty seeing how fast times can change.

“Just remember, Joe Biden got eighty-one million votes” in 2020, Hunter Biden recently complained on a podcast. “And it wasn’t because of Donald Trump that Joe Biden got eighty-one million votes. Joe Biden got more votes than anybody that’s ever run for president in the United States before by a large margin.” This is very sloppy thinking. Turnout was unusually high in 2020 because the pandemic prompted widespread early voting and mail voting. Biden’s 51 per cent of the popular vote was pretty good considering the politically divided era he was running in, but far from record-breaking. That Donald Trump had nothing to do with Biden’s victory totally defies logic. And an electoral performance in 2020 does not guarantee a repeat performance in 2024.

I have written extensively against ageism and do not believe politicians and their accumulated wisdom should be prematurely kicked to the curb at a fixed age. But succession always has to be on the mind of any leader of an advanced age. The pick almost invariably viewed as a successor, and a president needs to put them into a position where they can succeed.

Critics of Harris can still point to various mistakes for which she must take responsibility, but no politician ever plays error-free ball — certainly not Joe “Gaffe Machine” Biden — and she shouldn’t be judged by unfair double standards. The clearer conclusion is that Biden expected to run for a second term, which informed his first-term strategy.

I wrote in 2021 that Biden had “no incentive” to set Harris up to fail, but I had presumed he understood his legacy was tied to being succeeded by Harris, playing a role in ushering in both the first person of colour and the first woman of colour into the presidency. Accusing him of outright wanting Harris to fail still strikes me as excessive and implausible, but I can no longer hold the presumption that Biden was primarily motivated by setting up Harris for success. And the consequences of his ego-driven approach to the presidency proved severe. •

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Incident 1: On Thursday a number of tech billionaires had dinner with Donald Trump. They were nauseatingly obsequious — and completely insincere. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg was asked how much money he plans to invest in the US and replied $600 billion. Shortly afterward, he was caught on a hot mic telling Trump “Sorry, I wasn’t ready… I wasn’t sure what number you wanted to go with.”

Incident 2: On Sunday Trump attended the US Open. When his face appeared on the Jumbotron, “fans unleashed a loud round of mostly boos,” the New York Times reported.

OK, this was in New York, not exactly MAGA country, but it wasn’t that much of an outlier. As G. Elliott Morris points out in Strength in Numbers, what stands out in Trump’s polling isn’t just that a majority of Americans disapprove of Trump, but that almost half the country strongly disapproves:

The Trump administration is obviously attempting to follow the familiar playbook by which autocracies consolidate their power, effectively turning America into a one-party state where almost everyone accepts that resistance to the regime is futile and is afraid to show any signs of opposition.

And by and large America’s elites have offered no more resistance to authoritarian consolidation than a wet Kleenex. But historically, anti-democratic parties that establish lasting autocracies have done so with considerable initial support from the broader public. At least at first, they’re actually popular, especially because they deliver, or seem to deliver, major economic gains.

That’s not happening for Trump, at all. And the big question — to which I don’t know the answer — is whether a regime that inherited a good economy but ruined it and whose non-economic policies are deeply unpopular can still consolidate autocratic rule.

Let’s consider a couple of historical examples.

Adolf Hitler came to power in large part because the previous government insisted on following orthodox, deflationary economic policies in the face of the Great Depression. Hitler’s willingness to embrace heterodox policies helped Germany stage a strong recovery:

As a result, the Nazi regime was probably quite popular in its early years, when a public backlash might still have mattered.

Fast forward to 2010, when Viktor Orban took power in Hungary. At the time, the Hungarian economy was deeply depressed, in part because of austerity measures imposed by the International Monetary Fund. Orban sent the IMF packing, and was able to preside over rapid economic improvement, with unemployment falling quickly:

By contrast, Trump inherited an economy in good shape — even if the vibes were bad — and appears to be running it into the ground. Here’s the three-month average rate of job creation (which will probably look worse after this week’s regularly scheduled annual revision):

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

And all indications are that consumers will soon begin to see large price increases caused by Trump’s tariffs and, eventually, deportations.

Greg Sargent reports about one recent poll that asked likely voters how tariffs have affected their personal economic situation: 48 per cent say that they have hurt, while only 8 per cent say they have helped.

Can Trump compensate for the public’s dismal view of his economic policies by playing up culture-war issues like hostility to immigrants and anti-vaccine sentiment? Alas for Trump, these issues actually work against him. Belief that immigration is a good thing for America has hit a record high:

And anti-vax policies are wildly unpopular:

Roughly speaking, the American public doesn’t support anything Trump is doing. Yet he has been governing as if he has an overwhelming mandate to do whatever he wants, and to a large extent has been getting away with it. How is he managing that?

Part of the answer is anticipatory compliance on the part of members of the elite, from corporate CEOs to university presidents to law partners. Many of our institutions have been giving in to demands that Trump clearly has no legal right to make, out of fear of the consequences if they don’t.

Part of the answer is that Trump keeps declaring various kinds of emergency and then claiming that he has extraordinary powers to respond to these supposed emergencies.

Lower courts keep ruling against these claimed powers. For example, two courts have now declared Trump’s invocation of the International Economic Emergency Powers Act — the basis for 70 per cent of Trump’s tariffs — illegal. But the Supreme Court keeps overturning these lower-court rulings, as it just did in allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to resume indiscriminate stops in Los Angeles based on nothing more than ethnicity.

But are cowardly elites and a compliant Supreme Court that keeps granting emergency powers enough to let a president who has not yet established a widespread climate of fear, who has low and declining public support, consolidate his position as autocrat?

Honestly, I have no idea. But I guess we’re going to find out. •

This article first appeared in Paul Krugman’s Substack newsletter.

The post Trump is losing the public. Will that matter? appeared first on Inside Story.

There’s only one thing I wish for. That that Nobel committee finally gets its act together and realises that you are the single finest candidate since the Nobel Peace award was ever talked about, to receive that award. Your success is game changing out in the world today and I hope everybody wakes up one day and realises that.

Even for Steve Witkoff, this may seem a bit much. But political science suggests that there are reasons why people like Witkoff say things like this. Personality cults lead, with some predictability, to the inflation of ludicrous compliments.

Xavier Marquez gives many examples of flattery inflation in authoritarian regimes:

Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was routinely called “the Giant of the Carpathians,” “the Source of Our Light,” “the Treasure of Wisdom and Charisma,” “the Great Architect,” “the Celestial Body” and “the New Morning Star” by major public figures, and “court poets” wrote embarrassing encomiums to his rule… In Zaire in 1975, Mobutu Sese Seko was hailed as a new “Prophet” and “Messiah,” and his interior minister at the time even proposed replacing crucifixes in schools with Mobutu’s image.

As Marquez points out, this is all pretty weird if you think about it. Why would anyone want to make such obviously ridiculous claims and comparisons?

These forms of flattery seem sometimes humorous or bizarre. Yet they are puzzling, disproportionate to the achievements or charisma of their object: who could possibly believe that Hafiz al-Assad was indeed Syria’s premier pharmacist, and what could possibly be the point of publicising this ridiculous claim?

Part of the answer is that encouraging a cult of the leader goes hand-in-hand with personalist politics:

[D]irect cult production activities may increase the legitimacy of the leader rather than that of the state or the ruling organisation as such, they will tend to be associated with the consolidation of personal power within a regime… Thus, the emergence of the Stalin cult was not only associated with the collectivisation crisis, but also with the consolidation of Stalin’s personal power within the Politburo; and similarly the Franco cult was at its height while he was consolidating his power during and immediately after the civil war years.

Hence, personal vanity blends with the logic of the state.

In Trujillo’s Dominican republic, for example, it became common knowledge that painters who created flattering representations of Trujillo were well-rewarded, while newspaper columnists who failed to mention his achievements were often the object of vilification through anonymous letters (sometimes written by Trujillo himself). In these circumstances, it is unsurprising that sycophants prospered, and cult content became highly exaggerated, with comparisons between Trujillo and God becoming quite common.

All this helps explain how the Republican party has become an organisational technology ad maiorem gloriam Trumpis. But still, it doesn’t explain why the praise is so bizarrely over the top. Does Steve Witkoff really believe that Trump is the Finest Candidate Ever for the Nobel Peace Prize?

Very likely not. Marquez suggests that flattery becomes increasingly ridiculous when competition for rewards intersects with the dynamics of signalling personal loyalty.

[L]oyalty signalling typically emerges when there is common knowledge that there are rewards or punishments arising from credibly and publicly recognising (or failing to recognise) the leader’s exceptional qualities.

If you are in a cult of personality centred on someone who has power, you want to reap the benefits of connection rather than suffering the penalties of disfavour. So how do you show your loyalty? By paying the costs of humiliation. The more grotesquely over the top your praise, the more credible it is as a signal of support for Dear Leader.

Voluntarily engaging in behaviours that incur peer disapproval or loss of dignity can credibly indicate one’s loyalty, as when people repeat obviously absurd flattery of the leader in public.

Apparatchiks’ willingness to degrade themselves will hurt their reputation with other people. But for exactly that reason, it serves as proof of loyalty to the one man who counts, Donald Trump. The more appalling the self-abasement, the more effectively it will serve this purpose.

The bad news is that flattery inflation tends to feed on itself. If there are many courtiers vying for attention, they will repeatedly up the ante in their efforts to out-compete each other. Merely unctuous flattery may give way to truly “nauseating displays of loyalty” as officials compete to win favour.

For example, Marquez describes how Kim Jong-il’s toadies and catchfarts were willing to claim in public that he “had mastered teleportation to avoid being tracked by American satellites.” I’ve not seen anything as ostentatiously ridiculous being said by Trump’s cabinet members. In fairness though, we’re only seven months in. •

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Many observers have interpreted Hamas’s immediate endorsement as a sign of weakness, if not desperation. In this reading, after nearly two years of unremitting Israeli bombardment and siege of Gaza, the assassination of Hamas’s top leaders, and devastating attacks on the group’s allies around the region, including Iran and Hezbollah, Hamas has few options left.

But Hamas’s rapid acceptance of the deal may be as much a strategic ploy as a symptom of duress. After nearly two years of war, Hamas’s political organization has suffered severe blows and its remit over war-torn Gaza is tenuous. Yet despite the growing devastation of Gaza, Hamas’s fighters have shown continued strength. Since the spring of 2025, they have stepped up offensive attacks on Israeli forces across the strip, including a large-scale assault on an Israeli base on 20 August, and other operations in June and July in which multiple Israeli soldiers were killed.

At the same time, Hamas has increased coordination with other armed groups in Gaza and replenished its ranks, even amid the widespread starvation of the population. Behind its resilience is an evolution in its approach to the war that has further raised the stakes and that could make Israel’s controversial new campaign to seize Gaza City a military, as well as humanitarian, disaster.

To understand Hamas’s survival strategy, it is crucial to trace the way its aims have evolved. When it launched its 7 October attacks, Hamas’s Gaza leadership assumed that the operation would quickly draw in allies across the region, and cause Palestinians and even the Arab public to collectively rise up. In essence, it expected a replay of May 2021, when Israel’s confiscation of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem provoked an unprecedented collective response: Palestinians rose up across the West Bank and in Israeli cities, Hezbollah and other allied groups fired rockets from Lebanon and Syria, and Hamas itself launched an intense barrage of rockets from Gaza. October 7 was intended to replicate this joining of the fronts but on a much larger scale.

After nearly 700 days of war, those aims have dramatically failed. Following Hamas’s unilateral attack from Gaza, Palestinians in Israel did not mobilise, while those in the West Bank found themselves surrounded by an intense Israeli crackdown. Most of Hamas’s regional allies remained on the sidelines. Despite its formidable arsenal in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah sought to contain rather than expand the conflict; then, in September 2024, it succumbed to Israel’s pager operation and decapitation of its leadership. In December, the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime closed off crucial military supply routes.

The collapse of these external fronts was compounded by the difficulties Hamas faced in Gaza. After breaking the ceasefire in March 2025, Israel initially focused on aerial bombardments, keeping ground incursions strictly limited. The lack of fighting in urban centres prevented Hamas from taking the initiative, often leaving it a passive bystander to the massacres of Palestinians. Meanwhile, Israeli forces reoccupied large parts of the strip. Combined with the Israeli cut-off of all aid in March, the new offensive greatly increased the ordeal in Gaza and Gazans began to publicly protest against Hamas.

Hamas’s forces in Gaza began to change their approach. On 20 April a small group of fighters staged an ambush from a tunnel in Beit Hanoun, an Israeli-held “buffer zone.” Using rocket-propelled grenades and roadside bombs, they overturned an Israeli military vehicle, killed an Israel soldier, and left several others wounded. Since then, groups of fighters have been ramping up similar actions across Gaza. On 24 June, fighters from the al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing, killed seven Israeli soldiers in Khan Younis. On 7 July, again in Beit Hanoun, a group of fighters assaulted a convoy of tanks just a few metres from the border, killing five soldiers and wounding fourteen others. On 15 July, in the northern enclave of Jabaliya, three more soldiers were killed in an ambush targeting an Israeli engineering team that had been sent to clear roads for Israeli forces. On 22 July, in Deir al-Balah, in the centre of the strip, a Hamas operation targeted an Israeli military convoy and a Merkava tank.

In recent weeks, these pressure attacks have become bolder. By mid-August, when the Israeli army resumed its incursions in into residential areas, Hamas’s offensive operations were multiplying in eastern Gaza City, especially in the neighbourhoods of Tuffah, Zaytoun and Shujaiyya. The al-Qassam Brigades have also been active in the south, as the unusual 20 August attack on an Israeli military encampment in Khan Younis attests: no fewer than eighteen fighters attacked the base with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns at close range. Such a large-scale operation, which Israeli officials concluded may have been an attempt to capture new soldiers, would have required significant preparation, coordination, and intelligence.

In fact, these operations are part of a tactical reassessment by Hamas, which has sought to turn Israel’s expanded war aims to its own advantage. Despite Israel’s overwhelmingly stronger military resources, Hamas has drawn on the potential of asymmetrical warfare and the singular determination of its fighters. When Israeli soldiers began to limit ground incursions in urban areas, Hamas fighters began to seek out and target them in the “buffer zones.” As Israeli officials have acknowledged, Hamas was able to adapt and rebuild its forces in areas that Israeli forces had previously “cleared.”

Now, as the Israeli government has set out to seize and control large parts of Gaza City, Israeli forces must contend with urban guerrilla warfare in a terrain that Hamas knows by heart. These tactics could prove especially effective in the labyrinthine ruins of Gaza City, where Hamas is believed to still have a significant network and where Israeli forces have until now mostly avoided major incursions.

Even as Hamas has been cut off from external support and come under growing pressure in Gaza, its fighters have shown surprising strength. Hamas’s ability to renew its manpower has long been a defining feature of the group, which has for years managed to maintain a very strong foothold in Palestinian society even after severe setbacks. The current war is no exception. The loss of a significant number of top leaders — including Yahya Sinwar, the overall leader of Hamas in Gaza and mastermind of the 7 October attacks, Mohammed Deif, the leader of Hamas’s armed wing, and Marwan Issa, the deputy commander of Hamas’s military wing — has had little visible effect on its capacity to fight.

The overall manpower of Hamas’s brigades remains unclear. In the summer of 2024, Israeli sources claimed that some 17,000 Hamas militants had been killed since October 2023, including “half of the leadership” of Hamas’s military. But as of May 2025, Israeli intelligence officials assessed that just 8900 named fighters from Hamas and Islamic Jihad had been killed, according to a classified database newly revealed by the Guardian and the Israeli-Palestinian news organization +972 Magazine. US intelligence officials concluded in January that Hamas may have added as many as 15,000 additional fighters since the war began. Gazan officials and the United Nations do not distinguish between civilians and fighters in their total count of fatalities, but if the Israeli database is correct, it would mean that more than 80 per cent of the 53,000 believed to have been killed as of May 2025 were civilians.

Paradoxically, Israel’s relentless escalation may be fuelling Hamas’s resilience. To an extent, the growing desperation of Gaza’s civilians has fed public opposition to Hamas. After Israel’s total aid blockade began in March, Gazans began staging anti-Hamas protests in the northern part of the strip, calling for the immediate entry of aid and for Hamas to relinquish power. Hamas’s response fluctuated between allowing discontent and repressing the demonstrations. Although Hamas has always faced significant opposition to its rule in Gaza, public protests have previously been rare. Their appearance in March appears to be a direct response to the extremity of the situation in Gaza amid the Israeli cut-off of aid.

Opposition to Hamas has also been encouraged by Fatah, which controls the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah and has tried to exploit Gazan anger and position itself to govern postwar Gaza. Meanwhile, Israel has advanced its own strategy to fragment the social fabric, including by backing and arming an anti-Hamas militia in Rafah controlled by Yasser Abu Shabab, a strongman and drug trafficker who escaped from a Hamas prison in October 2023 and who also has ties to Fatah. According to UN officials and international aid workers, the Abu Shabab militia has been looting aid convoys.

The strategy appears to be aimed at making Gazans believe that Hamas is stealing their food — as Israeli officials have long claimed, without furnishing evidence — and to sow chaos. For Israel, it also may be a way to impose the idea that it can place its own men in a position of control and power in the enclave, in preparation for the “day after” in Gaza. After Israel’s arming of the militia was revealed in early June, Netanyahu publicly defended the practice. (“What’s wrong with this? It saves IDF soldiers’ lives,” he said.)

Yet this divide-and-conquer approach, combined with the relentless attacks on civilians, has also entrenched resistance among ordinary Gazans, who now perceive Israel as undertaking a war of extermination. In southern Gaza, the Abu Shabab militia is widely reviled, and Abu Shabab’s own family has disassociated itself from him and called for his death. Meanwhile, there are indications, including on social media, that growing numbers of young Palestinians with no prior training have been joining the al-Qassam Brigades and carrying out guerrilla actions. Although the intensive bombardments and the territorial division of almost the entire Gaza Strip has weakened the coordination between the groups of fighters, who are acting increasingly autonomously, it has not buried their capacity for action.

Another crucial factor in Hamas’s staying power is its tunnel network. Even now, after months of intense bombardment and the use of advanced technologies, Israeli forces have been unable to destroy significant parts of this underground city, allowing Hamas to continue to hide the remaining hostages and prisoners, protect its fighters, and provide bases for watching and attacking Israeli forces.

Israel’s inability to control the depths of the earth highlights the asymmetrical nature of the conflict, which increasingly pits sophisticated and highly expensive weapons systems, many of them acquired from Western countries, against ersatz, locally made rockets, explosives, and tunnels.

The recent Hamas ambushes have also raised growing concerns among Israeli military officials that more soldiers could be captured. In July, the army implemented the so-called Hannibal directive, which requires the military to use all means necessary to prevent soldiers from being taken by the enemy, even if such use of force leads to soldiers’ death. Indeed, out of the 205 hostages and prisoners that have been released since the war began, only eight have been freed as a result of Israeli–American rescue operations — and these six were in buildings above ground and not in underground tunnels. On 8 June, an Israeli military operation to rescue four hostages from a building in the Nusseirat refugee camp in central Gaza led to the massacre of 274 civilians, among them sixty children.

Israel’s inability to destroy Hamas’s tunnels has led increasingly to efforts to obliterate everything above ground in Gaza. As early as October 2023, Israel began targeting displacement camps, schools and hospitals with the aim of turning the population against Hamas and forcing surrender. Although that objective failed, the Israeli government has doubled down on this strategy since resuming the war in March, enforcing a total cut-off of aid for eleven weeks, and then, starting in late May, taking effective control of aid delivery through the establishment of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has led to hundreds of Gazans being killed by Israeli forces at humanitarian distribution points, one of which an IDF soldier described to Israeli newspaper Haaretz in June as a “killing field.”

Hamas has long emphasised the sacrificial dimension of its liberation project, which has helped it push Gaza back to the centre of the Palestinian cause. Unlike their counterparts in other Palestinian regions, Gazans are primarily attached to their land not because of their historical presence there but because of its status as a place of refuge. Almost all Gazans are descendants of refugees from 1948, when some 250,000 Palestinians were expelled to Gaza from their towns and villages during Israel’s founding, and they have passed down stories of past massacres and dispossessions. Hamas sees the current war as part of that tradition.

In light of the extraordinary privations and mass killing of Gaza’s civilian population in the current war, Hamas’s external leader, Khaled Meshaal, has likened Gaza to Algeria, where independence was achieved only after the death of more than a million civilians.

Although Hamas’s leaders counted on regional allies joining with them in the war after 7 October, from the outset they viewed Hamas’s Gaza organisation as autonomous. It did not share the specific planning and details of the 7 October attacks with other members of the axis and it was the sole instigator. In compensation, Hamas’s brigades have relied on — and increased — ties to other militant groups within Gaza, some of which were already established before 7 October.

Particularly important has been Hamas’s longstanding entente with Islamic Jihad. In 2022, Israel sought to divide the two groups by launching a heavy campaign exclusively against Islamic Jihad. At the time, the strategy appeared to work, with Hamas lying low and many Israeli officials concluding that it was weak. In retrospect, Hamas’s decision to stay out of the 2022 confrontation appears to have been a division of labour agreed upon with Islamic Jihad — one that allowed Hamas more freedom to prepare for the 7 October attacks.

Since the war began, Hamas has remained closely allied with Islamic Jihad, which as of this summer continued to hold one of the remaining Israeli captives, Rom Braslavski. Coordination between the groups’ armed wings has also grown, including in a number of recent joint attacks in Khan Yunis. These attacks have in part been orchestrated by the joint operations room, an organization created by Hamas and Islamic Jihad back in 2006, but which officially emerged years later, during the 2018 Great March of Return, a series of popular protests by Gazans on the Gazan–Israeli border. Today, the joint operations room brings together twelve Palestinian armed factions — including, alongside Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Saraya al-Quds, al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, Mujahideen Brigades, and Omar al-Qasim Brigades — and has become the place where many decisions about the war and negotiations are made.

In recent weeks, there are signs that this broader front may be crumbling. Members of the joint operations room have called on Hamas to end the war. During a meeting with the head of Egyptian intelligence, some of these factions also criticised Hamas’s procrastination on reaching a ceasefire — which may account for Hamas’s immediate approval of the 18 August proposal without amendments. Still, these cracks in the coalition have not caused a shift in the brigades’ determination to fight. There is actually a consensus among the factions that surrender or capitulation is unthinkable.

As the core members of the Qassam Brigades see it, only continued attacks on Israeli troops will force Netanyahu to agree to another ceasefire and end the siege. In their view, it was military pressure by Hamas — including significant setbacks for Israel in Rafah and in Jabaliyya in November and December of 2024, as well as knife attacks in both Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun that caused the deaths of several soldiers in January 2025 — that finally led Netanyahu to sign the US-backed ceasefire in mid-January. By continuing to launch major operations, the Qassam Brigades hope to increase the pressure on Netanyahu, including from his own military. One such case was the 7 July killing of the five Israeli soldiers in Beit Hanoun, which caused some Israeli military and political figures, both on the right and in the opposition, to press the government to allow soldiers to return to their camps and to accelerate efforts to reach a ceasefire.

After nearly two years of war, the strengths and weaknesses of Hamas are almost the inverse of Israel’s. Where Israel has extraordinary military resources but has struggled to find the tens of thousands of additional troops it needs for its massive Gaza City invasion, Hamas, despite huge losses of forces, continues to recruit new fighters. Meanwhile, as Hamas expands operations, Israel is also losing more soldiers on the ground. It also faces increasing difficulty in getting reservists to show up for duty.

The 18 August ceasefire proposal is not new. Based on a previous proposal put forward by US president Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff, it calls for the total withdrawal of Israeli troops, and, like the January ceasefire, allows Israel to resume its war against Gaza at the end of the sixty-day period. Hamas had accepted earlier versions of this proposal even before its response to the new one on 18 August. Netanyahu has approached the ceasefire proposals not as negotiations, but as a way to achieve what Israel has been unable to through force. In late August, he and other Israeli government officials called instead for an all-or-nothing deal that negotiators have said is unreachable.

Netanyahu is now trying to push Israeli forces into the tunnels of Gaza City, despite strong opposition from the Israeli military. The army has said a takeover could take more than a year to complete and would be highly dangerous, and that it prefers to use every possibility to negotiate before undertaking such an assault. In 2024, Netanyahu and the military establishment sought to vanquish Hamas’s regional allies, particularly Hezbollah in Lebanon. But now, with the military’s continued failure to achieve its stated objectives against Hamas itself, it has stepped up attacks in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. By promoting its actions on these other fronts, including against Iran in June, the government can downplay the actual situation in Gaza. Increasingly, an enormous gap has emerged between the image of the conflict the Israeli government is trying to convey and the reality on the ground. •

This article first appeared in Foreign Affairs. © 2025 Council on Foreign Relations. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency

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Pilates died in 1967, and I am grateful to have missed the opportunity to train with the master. There was the showering thing, for example: according to John Howard Steel, a devoted pupil who wrote a fair-minded and helpful book about him, Caged Lion, Joe (everyone called him Joe) insisted that immediately after a session students leap into a cold shower, where he would occasionally make an unannounced appearance, scrubbing them down vigorously, front and back, with a stiff brush. There was, in the studio, his prim, unsmiling wife, Clara, dressed in a white nurse-like uniform. There were the endlessly repeated stories he told about his youth in Germany as a boxer and his years in an internment camp for German nationals in northern England, where he devised his machines using springs from the beds for inmates with tuberculosis and other diseases — stories that are hard to prove but that some of his followers stand by.

A compulsive self-mythologiser, Pilates said he was born in 1880, though he was actually three years younger. He said he had developed his technique in order to help wounded soldiers in the first world war. There is no evidence that this is so. He said he was of Greek background, a direct descendant of Pontius Pilate, and a victim of bullying because of that traitorous origin. Again, some of his most devoted followers have tried and failed to find the evidence for this, as we learn in books like Hubertus Joseph Pilates by an obsessive Spanish couple, Javier Pérez Pont and Esperanza Aparicio Romero. Pilates trainers themselves, they treat us to the untos and begats not only of the Pilates family but of Joe’s in-laws and even several of his collaborators, all the way back to the seventeenth century.

Pérez Pont and Aparicio Romero give us a meticulous description of an English internment camp for Germans during the first world war, only to learn that it is not the camp where Pilates spent four and a half years. There’s a technical description of a tank, even though he was never a soldier, and so forth. And it’s no use skipping around in the book, because buried somewhere in that mass of facts we find the date of his marriage to his first wife and entire chapters of useful and carefully sourced information.

According to Pérez Pont and Aparicio Romero, Hubertus Joseph Pilates was born into a typical German working-class family in the small town of Mönchengladbach. His father was a locksmith, his mother a housewife. The family moved from apartment to apartment, always in the same neighbourhood, whenever they were unable to scratch up enough money for the rent. The elder Pilates obtained a membership at the local turnverein, or community health club — a great German invention — and soon his firstborn son, who was weakly and asthmatic, was training compulsively there. Josef, as he liked to call himself until he immigrated to the United States, worked for some time as a brewer in the local beer factory. He married, had a child, became a widower, married again and had another child, and displayed a strange ability to move between worlds.

In 1913 or so, looking for opportunity and sensing his country’s gradual collapse into war, he moved to London. It would appear that he did some boxing there and also performed what was then a popular circus act, dusting himself with flour and striking “Greek poses” to show off his muscled physique. This adventure lasted six months. He spent the war years on the Isle of Man in an overcrowded and sordid internment camp.

Pilates may or may not have saved thousands of his fellow prisoners from the Spanish flu, as he claimed. Pérez Pont and Aparicio Romero point out that the absence of flu in the camp was more likely owing to its remoteness. There is no question, though, that Pilates was already thinking about machine-aided exercise during that time. Back in Germany after the war he tried to find success, first in staged boxing exhibitions and then as a match promoter. Simultaneously he started identifying himself as a Heilkundiger, which Pérez Pont and Aparicio Romero translate as an “expert in the science of natural healing,” and he landed a job as a physical education instructor with the Hanover police.

Meanwhile, he was busy designing strange little apparatuses — a metal hoop with inner leather rests for the hands or feet that he called a Magic Circle; the Wunda Chair, with a pedal supported by springs; the Reformer, a movable bed, or platform, attached by means of leather straps to a low steel frame — and applying for patents for each one in Germany and then in the United States, Great Britain, and France. According to Pérez Pont and Aparicio Romero, the choreographer and movement notator Rudolf Laban came to his studio and was impressed. So was the avant-garde choreographer Mary Wigman, maybe.

Pilates saved a little money and travelled to the United States, where he visited a brother and an uncle who had immigrated to Nebraska. In the mid-1920s, when it was clear to him that Germany was headed for a second economic and political collapse, he left behind his German life — wife, children, police academy gig, arty connections — and boarded a ship to New York. Mid-Atlantic he met a frail nurse named Clara, who became his helpmeet and lifelong companion. They had no children, but for a few years one of his nieces, Mary, came to New York and trained with him.

He landed in New York in 1926, no longer a young man, armed with only a prestigious but very small reputation back in his native Germany as an unusually creative physiotherapist. Squarely built, not tall, blue-eyed — his right eye was slightly crossed and sightless — he was by most accounts neither socially graceful nor articulate. He was possessed, though, of a lifelong boundless faith in himself and in the machines he began to build with his stateside brother to his own exacting specifications. He was convinced that his machines, exercises, and principles of Healthy Living and Good Hygiene would help the United States fulfill its promise of greatness and make him world-famous in the bargain.

It was sheer luck that an obscure trainer from interwar Germany happened to share the great American obsession with healthy living and good hygiene at just the right moment. There were already many insane diets, health foods (Corn Flakes!), gut regulators (Grape-Nuts!), and laxatives (enemas!) on the market, and breathing techniques and exercises and machines not unlike the Reformer and the Wunda Chair that were in use back in the turnvereins of Joe’s youth. (German immigrants to the Midwest brought the turnvereins with them, and they evolved into America’s first health clubs.) The loopy Bernarr Macfadden, the founder of Physical Culture magazine and proponent of the starvation diet, had been wildly successful for a time. A Macfadden protégé, bodybuilder and all-American he-man, Charles Atlas (born Angelo Siciliano), was Joe’s contemporary. Unlike them, Pilates offered both a radical innovation — the machines — and his uncanny, intuitive understanding of muscles and how they work.

The first studio where Joe offered training using his patented machines in what he always called Contrology was open by 1934 in Hell’s Kitchen. The years following his arrival in New York must have been tough, what with the Great Depression and his lack of English. Yet the studio’s dodgy neighbourhood turned out to be perfect: several dance companies would eventually have their studios nearby, notably George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein’s fledgling group, Ballet Society, which was adopted by City Center as a resident company; Lincoln Center would later rise a few blocks away. The rent was cheap; the space was large. The studio must have come as a great relief, both a grounding and the beginning of the dream; he and Clara moved down the hall and lived there until the day he died. Love All Around, a biography of his most important disciple, Romana Kryzanowska, describes Joe, a cigar in one hand, a glass of whiskey in the other (healthy living indeed!), coaching new students while demure Clara kept a perceptive eye on the rest.

Kryzanowska was an aspiring ballet dancer of Polish, Ukrainian and Quaker descent who was cursed with weak ankles. Balanchine (who used to train occasionally at Joe’s studio and never had to sign in) sent her to Joe to see what he could do. “Always people touch their toes,” the brilliant dancer Allegra Kent quotes the great Russian choreographer as saying. “But Joe is more serious, more intense. He understands human body.” On her first visit, Kryzanowska walked into a crowded room filled with hairy, sweaty men working out on the bizarre machines and met Joe, who was wearing his usual skintight shorts, chatting, and making occasional corrections. There were Oriental rugs on the floor and plants on the windowsills and, on one long wall, framed photos of Joe, letters of endorsement, and anatomy charts.

Kryzanowska proved to be an unusually perceptive and receptive student, and she spent many months training under Joe’s enthusiastic supervision, eventually teaching classes at his studio under his guidance. She left ballet, and Joe’s studio, when she met and married a wealthy Peruvian businessman and went to live with him for a few years in Lima. Following the master’s death decades later, several of his well-off devotees provided the financial backing and encouragement for the studio to continue under her direction. Kryzanowska went on to become the teacher most responsible for ensuring that Joe’s machines, his technique, and his great discoveries about the human body all survived him.

The studio prospered for decades, but that was never Joe’s ultimate goal. Late in life he went on a fruitless campaign to contact President Kennedy or his wife: he wanted Pilates conditioning to be taught in public schools. He never got an answer from the White House, and his eccentric manner must have contributed to the studio’s decline. By 1962 there were only one or two people there at a time.

And yet the technique had already had a serious impact on every kind of movement training. Suki Schorer, for example, a former principal dancer at New York City Ballet and now a senior teacher at the company’s school, told me she’s still working out on her own machine:

I’ve had lots of injuries, and Pilates has always pulled me back. Dancers who wanted to get strong went to do Pilates. Mr. B [Balanchine] wanted everything bigger, faster, more powerful. I didn’t have a great extension and it got better. My jump got much better. Pilates makes you stronger, gives you more turnout, more elevation.

These days there’s even a room with Pilates equipment at the David H. Koch Theater for the company. Dancers everywhere rely on the training, and wherever I have managed to find a serious Pilates studio in the United States, some lunky athlete has eventually shown up to settle his large body obediently into the sliding carriage of the Reformer.

A handful of Joe’s devotees struggled to reproduce what they had learned in studios of their own, and it is thanks to them that Pilates technique exists today. Among them was Robert Fitzgerald, who trained grateful dancers and movie stars and worked for years with the aging Martha Graham. The first time I walked into Fitzgerald’s studio on West 56th Street, Faye Dunaway was just leaving, cheekbones clearing the way, and I wondered what I had gotten myself into.

Behind her was an assortment of metal-tube-and-leather contraptions that vaguely resembled modern furniture or instruments of torture — or, as someone said years later at another studio, wondering if he could rent it from midnight on, the setup at a highly imaginative sex club. Fitzgerald, slender, upright, and cool, was unforgettable, with a circus acrobat’s body and shoulder-length blond hair; in profile he resembled the two elegant Afghan dogs that went everywhere with him.

I was a reasonably trained aspiring young dancer making the rounds of the various dance company studios. If anyone had asked me, I would have said that in the course of all this practice every muscle in my body had been worked. Not enough, maybe, not to their full capacity, not beyond that capacity, surely, but quite a bit. I got through the catatonically boring first session of Pilates as all first-timers have done since Joe created his machines and set the initial sequence of movements: lying face up on the Reformer, learning first how to breathe while making the Mushroom (lower abdominal muscles zipped up tightly to make the stem, and the rib cage expanded sideways to form the cap), taking in as much oxygen as possible and releasing it without letting the abs relax so much as a fraction.

This maddening effort was followed by a few minutes in which Fitzgerald used his hands to make careful adjustments to my feet and knees until I was in the exact “relaxed” first-position plié, toes resting on the Reformer’s foot bar at a forty-five-degree angle, knees precisely in line with toes. Now, holding the Mushroom in place — Fitzgerald kept a stern finger on my navel — I pushed against the bar into a straight-leg first position and then flexed my knees into plié once more while inhaling and exhaling methodically and keeping my lower abdomen perfectly still.

There followed something called the Hundreds, complicated to explain but also boring, and then the leg extensions: one leg straight, foot down against the bar, the other leg straight up in the air, foot in a loop attached to a spring, now bring that leg down, slowly, against the spring’s resistance, and raise it again. Ten times each side, please. Ten or so simple exercises — not difficult at all but challenging when holding the Mushroom in place, I admitted — all coordinated with inhales and exhales, and I was done.

Two days after that first class I found myself hobbling home on a bright spring day, too sore to take steps of more than a few inches. My adductor brevis, longus and magnus muscles, and oh my god, the obturator externus, not to mention the pectineus, psoas, subscapularis, serratus anterior, transversus abdominis, and let’s not forget the gracilis, were screeching in unison at me to please stop, to not move an inch farther, because they were about to die of breathtaking pain. I shuffled on, across Washington Square and all the way home, inhaling and exhaling the Mushroom while doing grim sums in my head to see how I would ever pay for an indispensable lifetime of classes with Robert Fitzgerald.

In a matter of months at his studio all my chronic aches and pains disappeared, and I saw my body become stronger, more flexible, longer, different. I was a better dancer, more in command of my movements, able to take greater physical risks with increased self-assurance. Above all, there was the new distance between the top of my pelvic bones and the bottom of my lowermost ribs: I had acquired the characteristic Pilates body, in which the ribs appear to float weightlessly atop what is now called not the Mushroom but the “core.”

This was back in the 1970s, when the American obsession with healthy, muscled bodies was in abeyance. Pilates studios, few and far between, survived but hardly increased in number. In the 1980s came Jane Fonda, who introduced aerobics to the public at large and retained many of the exercises and principles of Pilates floorwork to strengthen the core — the abdominal muscles. There were other doyens of the VCR and television, like Richard Simmons, who wore not Joe’s embarrassing black trunks but glittery hot pants and was determined to make you Tone and Sweat — that was his mantra. What all these promoters had in common — what guaranteed their success — was that they didn’t require you to pay the slightest attention to what you were doing.

But sometime in the 1990s the significant cross-section of the US population that believes in staying fit — gym rats, runners, physicians and physiotherapists, women wanting to look good in a bathing suit, and men, too — finally got the whole Pilates thing: the silence, the concentration, the lack of competitiveness, the quasi-maniacal attention to detail, and the magical transformation of the body. Today there are Pilates studios in all fifty states and in cities around the world: Medellín and Bangkok have Pilates instructors, people who take the classes no longer need to know anything about the founder, and I am certain that the technique must have already received the ultimate enshrinement as a prestige tag in rom-coms.

Proof of the training’s continuing vitality is its ability to change. I asked Gonzalo Garcia, a former principal dancer with New York City Ballet who was recently appointed the new artistic director of Miami City Ballet, what the Pilates machines and exercises had contributed to his own impeccable technique, and he laughed. “The legs, the feet, the core. Everything, really.” Had it, then, single-handedly contributed to the great leap forward in dancers’ physical strength — the ear-high developpés, the splits à la seconde for men and the Wonder Woman arms for women that are now standard for dancers around the world? Not quite, García clarified:

There seems to be a change, an advance in the [dance] technique every ten, fifteen years or so. So now it is very athletic, gymnastic almost, and this has some good things and some things not so good at all. But then, the Pilates technique must be changing as well: many more teachers are working with Pilates, and so there is an accumulation of other knowledge about the body. There is the root and the tree, and that is very beautiful, but from that tree also come many branches.

Joe Pilates did not live to see any of this. He died a bitter and eccentric old man, raging at US society for failing to recognise the pure intuitive genius of what he had accomplished. His gigantic contribution to the strength and health of the body would be recognised only after he was dead, he announced angrily and often, and he was right. •

Caged Lion: Joseph Pilates and His Legacy
By John Howard Steel | Last Leaf | $26.99 | 195 pages

Hubertus Joseph Pilates: The Biography
By Javier Pérez Pont and Esperanza Aparicio Romero | HakaBooks | $82.60 | 518 pages

Love All Around: The Romana Kryzanowska Biography
By Cathy Strack and Carol J. Craig | C and C Projects | $35 | 289 pages

The post Bodies by Joe appeared first on Inside Story.

Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin shared the prize in 1978 for agreeing a treaty, urged on by US president Jimmy Carter. This treaty lasted, although Sadat was assassinated for his troubles in 1981. But to get Begin to agree Sadat had to set the Palestinian issue aside.

Sorting out the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip then became the main challenge. There was an apparent breakthrough in the early 1990s, based on the Oslo peace accords, leading in 1994 to another peace prize. It was shared by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin for agreeing a road map to a two-state solution in 1994.

The next year Rabin was assassinated, and the prospects never looked quite so bright again, although Bill Clinton put a substantial effort into coming up with a comprehensive solution at the dog end of his presidency in 2000. Attempts to find a way for Israelis and Palestinians to co-exist that have ended in failure, disappointment and disillusion. Many ceasefires have been agreed but their number only reflects the regular resort to violence.

Meanwhile, the effort to forge relations between Israel and the Arab states that for decades have refused to acknowledge its existence has been more successful. Trump believed that his success in getting a number to sign up to peace treaties with Israel in 2020 — the Abraham Accords — was another good reason for him to get the Peace Prize. Saudi Arabia is the most important country yet to sign up, and that is conditional on progress on the Palestinian issue.

Another reason why it could seem timely to address this issue is that over the past twelve months, Israel has also seen its most deadly enemies of recent years — Iran and Hezbollah — knocked back and an old enemy — Syria — under new management. Its security environment in principle is more benign than ever before.

This assessment could even be extended to Gaza, where Hamas as a military force is a shadow of its former self. If Netanyahu had chosen to cash in his winnings he could have offered Israel a more hopeful, and more peaceful, future. But he has spent his political career doing his best to thwart such a deal, and he is now in coalition with extremists whose “solution” to this problem would be to see Palestinians expelled from all the occupied territories to make room for more settlers.

The result of the path he has chosen has been to create conditions that make it easier for Hamas to survive and are steadily turning Israel into an international pariah. The idea of a separate Palestinian state is now being embraced by countries, including Britain, that until recently accepted it only as a pleasant but unrealistic idea.

I wrote last year explaining my scepticism about a two-state solution — not because this would be an undesirable outcome but because there was no plausible way to get there. I saw the most important and immediate task as addressing the dire conditions in Gaza, establishing effective governance in the Strip, and making progress on reconstruction. Since I wrote that, however, the situation inside Gaza has deteriorated further, and recognition of a Palestinian state, as a political project if not yet a functioning entity, is now firmly on the international agenda, presented as the only route to a lasting peace.

There are still grounds for scepticism. This is not going to lead to a Palestinian state any time soon, yet the immediate needs of Gaza require urgent attention. But the idea of a Palestinian state, which was accepted by past Israeli governments, has now become a way of warning the current government about the extent of its international isolation.

This is a symptom of a fundamental crisis in Israeli strategy. Netanyahu’s government has set itself objectives it cannot reach while ruling out any political role for Palestinian representatives. But without negotiations it lacks a means of stabilising the situation, let alone getting its hostages back. So long as it has American support the government may take the view that it can resist any pressure to change course. It is unclear whether Trump will back the Israelis in its current strategy for much longer. But what should be of even more concern for Israel is what support it will get following Trump.

At the start of 2025 there were grounds for optimism that the war would soon end. A deal was reached just before Trump’s inauguration, and Israel and Hamas began to swap hostages for prisoners. This process lasted for two months. For each of the thirty-three hostages returned from captivity some fifty Palestinians were released from Israeli prisons. Humanitarian aid was allowed to enter Gaza to enable displaced Palestinians to return to their homes. There were supposed to be talks leading to a permanent ceasefire, which in turn was supposed to set the conditions for a second stage in which all the remaining living hostages, military as well as civilian, would be exchanged for yet more prisoners. The third stage would see the remains of the deceased hostages released.

But allegations of non-compliance went back and forth from the start. In mid-February Hamas briefly suspended the release of hostages because of continued Israeli military action and a lack of sufficient aid. The process resumed but with constant accusations of bad faith.

On 1 March, when the first phase was due to end, Israel proposed that it should simply be extended, but Hamas rejected this because it wanted to move to the second stage which would see the war come to a complete end. Netanyahu wanted to retain the option of resuming military operations. When Hamas refused to accept his proposal, Israel blocked the entry of aid to Gaza and also the supply of electricity. On 18 March, it resumed airstrikes on Gaza.

In May, Israel began another military offensive, this one named Gideon’s Chariots. The plan pointed towards occupying all of Gaza, with the declared twin aim of defeating Hamas and releasing the hostages. A push would concentrate the population in the south and then deny Hamas leverage over the population by controlling the supplies of humanitarian aid. Two months on, this offensive is being wound down. Hamas has not been defeated, the hostages have not been released, the population is more or less where it was before, and the distribution of food and other assistance has been a complete and catastrophic shambles leading to famine conditions in Gaza.

The backlash against Israeli policies has left it isolated internationally. It is running out of options. The hardliners want to continue to occupy all of Gaza, even if this means sacrificing the hostages, and the government has decided to proceed along this path with yet another offensive, making the same claim as before that this will produce total victory.

One reason why Hamas is feeling stronger is because of the anger that has been directed at Israel as the Palestinian population suffers. The problem Israel sought to solve (and how much of a problem it actually was has been questioned) was Hamas’s ability to steal from international agencies as food was being delivered, and then to use this to gain influence over Gaza’s population. Israel’s alternative approach limited the amount of aid going into Gaza and changed the method of distribution. This involved an organisation called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, apparently designed for the situation but evidently not fit for purpose. The idea was to distribute aid directly to Palestinians at four sites — three in south Gaza (to where Israel wanted people to relocate) and one more centrally, instead of moving the aid to where it was needed.

The scheme has been described, including in the Israeli press, as a colossal failure, with desperate scenes as Palestinians scramble for whatever sustenance they can find, malnourished children, shootings close to the distribution sites, and still no practical means of checking whether Hamas operatives were taking advantage.

Israel blames Hamas for the famine conditions, moans about fake videos and wilful exaggerations, but it is complaining largely to itself. As the occupying power it is responsible and it adopted what was widely recognised to be a scheme that was ineffective and harmful. Statements by Israeli ministers suggested a coercive element as well as incompetence. National security minister Itmar Ben-Gvir declared, “The only way to win the war and bring back the hostages is to completely stop the ‘humanitarian’ aid, conquer the entire Gaza Strip, and encourage voluntary migration.”

The Israeli government has belatedly appreciated the political damage caused by images of a starving population. The aid is moving again, and the UN is once again involved, although the levels are still too small. Tellingly, the Economist observed that:

Mr Netanyahu promised in a statement in English that Israel “will continue to work with international agencies” and “ensure that large amounts of humanitarian aid flows into the Gaza Strip.” In Hebrew he was much less emollient, promising his base that “in Gaza we are continuing to fight” and that “we will achieve our aim of destroying Hamas.” The aid entering Gaza, he said, would be “minimal.”

The humanitarian crisis, along with moves, led by militant settlers, to take more territory from Palestinians in the West Bank, and talk of annexations, put European governments under enormous domestic political pressure to denounce Israel’s actions and urge it to reverse course. This is what led to the push for a Palestinian state, starting with French president Macron with others, including the British government, following behind.

Israel complains that international moves to recognise a Palestinian state reward Hamas. That was not, in fact, one of Hamas’s objectives when it rampaged into southern Israel on 7 October 2023. It then had a variety of possible motives: inflicting pain on Israelis as an act of “resistance”; responding to settler activity in the West Bank and Jerusalem; demonstrating that it was putting up more of a fight than the hapless Palestinian Authority leadership in Ramallah; obstructing the proposed “normalisation” of Israeli–Saudi relations; and, high up on the list, taking as many hostages as possible to swap for Palestinian militants stuck in Israeli jails. There was no demand to adopt a “two-state” solution because that was not its policy.

It has on occasion said that it would not oppose a separate Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza but its own demand is for all of Israel and not just the occupied bits. That is what the chant of “from the river to the sea” is all about. For Netanyahu, this lack of interest in a separate Palestinian state was one of Hamas’s most attractive features. It was why he was content to leave it in charge in Gaza, assuming that there was little harm it could do other than send an occasional barrage of missiles into Israel. It kept the Palestinians divided and rendered negotiations impractical.

In the aftermath of the attacks, which disqualified Hamas from running Gaza in the future, Netanyahu went out of his way to avoid addressing the question of who would replace it. Any serious non-Hamas, non-Israeli arrangement is bound to involve Palestinians and would be unpopular among the hardline elements of his own coalition. These elements still hanker to expel the Palestinians altogether, or squeeze them into a small enclave, to enable them to resettle the abandoned land.

The Israeli government is now discussing yet another new offensive, this time one that would have the IDF push into the remaining 25 per cent of the territory to seek out and destroy the remaining pockets of Hamas’s strength. This would be done without regard for the hostages, the humanitarian situation, and the even stronger international objections that would result.

The UN is already warning about “catastrophic consequences.” Of more concern to the government are the well-publicised objections of IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir that not only will an attempt at full occupation endanger the remaining hostages, as fighting moves close to where they are held, but it will also stretch further the IDF, already exhausted after almost two years of fighting. The alternative military option is not exactly promising. Encircling Hamas-held areas without entering them in force would likely lead to an attritional guerrilla war. The prospect either way is of a forever war without any obvious conclusion.

Because Netanyahu has no credible policy of his own for the long-term it is not surprising that the gap is being filled by the only political option that commands widespread international support. Recognising a Palestinian state can be dismissed as little more than a gesture as there is little there to be recognised. For now it is best seen as a protest against a reckless and self-defeating Israeli policy. If nothing else it tells the Israelis how much they have lost the “narrative battle” in Europe, having already lost it in much of the southern hemisphere a long time ago. Already, 147 states are signed up to recognition.

The difference Britain and France make is that they are both permanent members of the Security Council. If they supported a resolution backing a Palestinian state then it would leave the United States exercising its veto. This Trump would probably do. Unlike Biden, who supported the two-state policy, he does not. Nor is he influenced by the same considerations as Europeans, such as appeals to international law and human rights. When Canada joined proposals to recognise a Palestinian state he claimed this as justification to raise tariffs.

His view of the Middle East is, however, different from that of Netanyahu. He has not bothered to align other policies with Israel — on the Houthis or the ending of the war with Iran, and he has taken different stances on Turkey and Syria. He puts a high priority on his relations with the Gulf monarchies. And most of all he dislikes wars that go on forever and cannot be concluded quickly. He may not want to break with Israel over Gaza but he does not appear to be impressed and has expressed concern about the humanitarian situation.

If he really wants to take an initiative he has been handed an opportunity by Arab countries. At a UN conference on a two-state solution, which the United States did not attend, the twenty-two members of the Arab League unanimously supported a declaration, signed also by Britain and members of the European Union, that called for Hamas to lay down its weapons, release all hostages and end its rule of the Gaza Strip, as essential pre-conditions for the establishment of a Palestinian state.

“In the context of ending the war in Gaza,” it read, “Hamas must end its rule in Gaza and hand over its weapons to the Palestinian Authority, with international engagement and support, in line with the objectives of a sovereign and independent Palestinian state.”

As important, the declaration also called for the deployment of “a temporary international stabilisation mission,” invited by the Palestinian Authority, and ‘under the aegis of the United Nations.”

Israel made its customary denunciation of calls for a Palestinian state as supporting Hamas, although Hamas was none too pleased by the document’s boost to the Palestinian Authority, based in the West Bank, let alone the demands that it disarm. The document’s call to normalise relations with Israel elicited from Hamas a mirror image of Israel’s complaints about calls for a Palestinian state: “Talk about integrating the Zionist entity into the region is a reward to the enemy for its crimes.”

US negotiator Steve Witkoff reportedly told hostage families that the United States is developing a new position involving an ultimatum to Hamas to release all the hostages at once, in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, followed by complete disarmament in return for the end of Israel’s military operation. If it refused the Israeli campaign would continue. Hamas has long said it will not disarm (and even if it did it is not clear how this could be implemented and monitored) and has now added that it would only do so if a Palestinian state were established. (Its language could be taken to mean that it was still after all of Israel and not just the occupied territories.)

For Israel this just shows how Hamas is exploiting the Europeans naivete in recognising a Palestinian state. Hamas is undoubtedly being opportunistic, but it is Netanyahu that has given them the opportunity. His insistence on a total victory over Hamas mean that all Hamas needs to do to claim its own victory is to survive while using the distressed state of the population as a weapon against Israel. Without serious governance arrangements in Gaza the situation there will remain violent and anarchic, allowing Hamas to keep going. But any new arrangements will involve Arab and European states, as well as the Palestinian Authority, and will nod in the direction of a future Palestine state.

As before, except now in much more desperate circumstances, the rejectionist policies of Hamas and the Israeli government feed off one another, providing each with an excuse not to make concessions.

Within Israel opposition to the government’s policies is growing, especially among the diplomatic and security community, who can see no credible end game and worry about Israel’s increasing international isolation. The generation in the US and Europe that saw Israel as the underdog — a small, beleaguered state in a sea of hostility — has been replaced by one that sees it as cruel and heartless.

Whatever position Trump decides to adopt, support for Israel has been haemorrhaging on both the left and right of American politics, and that will influence the policies of his successor. A Pew poll in April found that about 53 per cent of US adults now express an unfavourable opinion of Israel, up from 42 per cent before the Hamas attack. Another Pew poll, conducted in June found that in twenty of twenty-four countries surveyed, half or more of adults had an unfavourable view of Israel. The figures are higher among younger people. One of the largest gaps in the United States is between young and old. There, alienation from Israel is also becoming apparent in the Jewish community.

Taking a long view, peace diplomacy, in all its forms, has by and large served Israel well. It can claim that it has demonstrated the benefits of peace through strength. By showing resilience and military prowess, it convinced past enemies that there was no point in preparing for a war none wished to fight. Now it has put itself in an even better position by coming out on top in its recent battles with Iran and its proxies. Yet it simply does not know what to do with Gaza.

Israel does not have a sure military route to free the hostages. They are the last serious bargaining card that Hamas has and they will not play it until Israeli military operations stop. Yet Israel does not need Hamas to make a push to ease the humanitarian distress in Gaza, and nor does it need Hamas to agree a plan for Gaza’s future governance and reconstruction. For that it will have willing partners in the Gulf and Europe. These measures will undercut Hamas more than yet another offensive, for they will weaken its political base and not just its military base.

It is important not to underestimate the challenge of developing new governance and security structures in a situation, full of trauma and suspicion, involving many external actors with their own agendas. Nor can we expect Netanyahu to embrace the challenge, not least because to do so would be to break his coalition. But continuing with the current policies requires Israel to accept responsibility for the progressive immiseration of the Palestinian people without it ever being sure that it has truly eliminated Hamas, while further straining relations not only with its old friends in the West but its new friends in the Arab world.

Trump’s most recent comments don’t offer a ringing endorsement of Israeli strategy. He wants the United States to take bigger role in handling the humanitarian aspects of the crisis. The Gazans, “are obviously not doing too well with the food,” he has noted, adding that “Israel is going to help us with that in terms of distribution and also money.” That is his focus. “As far as the rest of it, I really can’t say, that’s going to be pretty much up to Israel.”

Whether or not this will get him his Nobel Prize, if he is really concerned to preserve and extend the Abraham Accords as well as prevent the humanitarian situation getting even worse, then Israel’s next steps should concern him greatly. Israel is divided on its next steps. Netanyahu needs the extremists to keep him in power but they do not offer a tenable prospectus. A forever war means constant insecurity and increasing isolation. Many Israelis, including in the IDF and the intelligence agencies, know this and are pushing back. Trump would do well to join them. •

The post Israel’s forever war appeared first on Inside Story.

Segal suggests, at the very least by inference, that antisemitism is the most dangerous form of racism in contemporary Australia. Accordingly, her report calls for action against antisemitism in ways that go beyond any protections offered any other group. This “privileging” of antisemitism is absurd. The most dangerous form of racism in Australian history and in contemporary Australia is anti-Indigenous racism, something one still reads about every day.

The settlement of Australia involved the near-destruction of Aboriginal society. By contrast there is probably no country in the world — including even the United States — where Jews have been treated more justly and equally than Australia. Isaac Isaacs, a Jew, was one of the original High Court judges. Later he became Australian governor-general. Our most revered soldier is probably John Monash, a Jew. Shortly before the outbreak of the second world war, following the vicious anti-Jewish action in Germany, “Kristallnacht,” and the German annexation of Austria, Australia offered refuge for up to 15,000 refugees from Germany and Austria. The chief sponsor of this offer was the Australian high commissioner in London, the former old-fashioned “liberal” prime minister, Stanley Bruce. Both my parents, who met in Australia, were beneficiaries.

If I might speak personally, even though I was involved in two controversies that concerned Australia and the Jews — the Helen Demidenko Affair and the question of the Hawke Government’s war crimes legislation — I have experienced antisemitic attacks in my life only twice.

The first occurred when, in my late teens, I part-owned a rental house. One of the tenants, who was a criminal, called me a “Jewboy” when I came around to collect unpaid rent.

The second occasion occurred in 1989 when I was co-editor of Quadrant. After I wrote “Left of the Urals,” a short article opposing the Hawke government’s war crimes legislation, principally on the grounds that Japanese war criminals were excluded, I was accused of being a (Jewish) antisemite by Isi Leibler, the most powerful figure in the Jewish community at that time.

I know from talking to Jewish friends that others’ experience of antisemitism was greater than mine. Nonetheless I’m sure that the antisemitic-free air I have breathed in throughout my life in Australia was by no means unique. The most reliable index of social attitudes in Australia — the Scanlon Report — shows that following 7 October and its aftermath negative images of Jews have risen from 9 per cent to 13 per cent.

It is obviously true, as the Segal report suggests, that over the past twenty months there has been a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents. The putatively most important instance of them was a hoax. The two other important actions so far have been two arson attacks on synagogues. Thankfully, so far as I am aware, there has not been even one case of a physical attack on a Jew. What is however remarkable about the Segal report is that in its entirety there is not one word about the cause of this rise in antisemitic incidents following the Israeli response to the vicious Hamas-led attack on Israelis of 7 October 2023.

On that day, 1200 Israeli Jews were murdered and 250 taken as hostages. In response the Israeli armed forces have slaughtered at least 60,000 Gazan Palestinians, and more likely 100,000, the majority of whom were entirely innocent women and children and also men. More than double that number have been seriously wounded with only the slimmest hope of medical aid. The modus operandi of the Israeli armed forces, the self-congratulatory supposed “most moral army” in the world, has seen ratios of up to fifty innocent Gazans killed, as regrettable “collateral damage,” in pursuit of one member of Hamas. Food, fuel, water, medical supplies have been cut off for significant periods of time. Seventy per cent of buildings in Gaza, including hospitals, universities, schools and administrative facilities have been systematically reduced to rubble.

Australians have been able to observe what Israel has done to Gaza on social media and on their television screens, even though journalists are forbidden entry into Gaza, for their protection of course. The more politically engaged or savvy among them will have noticed that not one of the many powerful Jewish organisations in Australia — including the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, on whose board Jillian Segal once served as president — has condemned or even questioned the almost unbelievably pitiless brutality of the post–7 October Israeli destruction of Gaza.

Having failed to mention the self-evident cause of the relatively modest rise in antisemitic feeling, antisemitism is treated in Segal’s report as the most dangerous and insidious form of racism in contemporary Australia. Accordingly, the Segal report suggests measures whose censoriousness goes beyond anything in Australian legal history.

Australian law outlines powerful and once controversial protection against all forms of hate speech in article 18c of the Racial Discrimination Act. This is not sufficient protection, according to Segal. What she proposes is not only individual but also organisational responsibility for any antisemitism in speech or action discovered on their turf. According to her proposal some unidentified body, perhaps made up of members of the Jewish community, should monitor both public broadcasters, the ABC and SBS, and every university and cultural institution in Australia, for any instance of antisemitism. Segal proposes that some of their government funding be taken away from public broadcasters or universities (including protests) or cultural institutions if some so far unidentified body decides that in action or speech such an incident has occurred.

So far as I am aware, nothing like this has ever before been proposed in Australian history. It comes straight from the contemporary playbook of president Donald Trump.

There is no suggestion in the Segal report that government funding should also be stripped from universities, public broadcasters and cultural institutions if instances of First Nations racism, Islamophobia, misogyny or homophobia are discovered there. The choice Segal offers is stark. Either the only form of bigotry to be monitored and punished in universities, public broadcasters and cultural institutions by loss of government funds is antisemitism, or bigotry directed against indigenous Australians, Muslims, women and gays should also be monitored in publicly funded institutions and where appropriate punished. According to Segal either antisemitism is the only truly serious form of bigotry in Australia, or universities, public broadcasters and cultural institutions will become subject to a regime of censoriousness without parallel in Australian history.

As we have recently discovered because of the investigative journalism of the independent online media platform, the Klaxon, the man to whom Jillian Segal is married is the partner with his brother of a trust that in 2023 and 2024 donated $50,000 to “Advance,” the most significant mainstream far right movement in Australia, that led the campaign against the indigenous Voice to Parliament and that has described Prime Minister Albanese as “weak, woke and broke.” Taking cover behind political correctness, Segal has claimed she had nothing to do with her husband’s political activities or he with hers, and that it was outrageous to suggest otherwise. She refused to tell the Guardian whether she knew about the $50,000 donation or what she thinks about “Advance.”

Segal’s thoughts about “Advance” and her husband’s $50,000 donation matter. Segal’s desire to monitor the ABC and SBS and to strip them of funds if they are found to have allowed antisemitic content onto their programs is consistent with one of the most conspicuous perennial demands of the mainstream far right in Australia, the attack on the ABC. I am now a devoted listener to the most politically sophisticated arm of the ABC, Radio National. In several years I have not even once encountered a program that could even remotely be regarded as antisemitic.

How will the existence of antisemitic content be discovered? Here we arrive at another novel and extraordinary suggestion. Segal believes that a 2016 definition of antisemitism, developed at a conference in Bucharest — “the IHRA non-legally binding definition of antisemitism” — should become mandatory for all individuals and organisations in Australia. So far as I am aware we do not live in a totalitarian country. Accordingly, we are free to decide for ourselves our own definition of what constitutes antisemitism and even to decide that definitions are not the best way of deciding whether an antisemitic incident in speech or action has occurred.

As it happens, the IHRA definition, which was drafted six years before 7 October and its aftermath, is replete with references to the relation of antisemitism and Israel. The definition concedes that “criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.” However it then asserts that it is antisemitic to claim that Israel invents or exaggerates the Holocaust; that it is antisemitic to claim that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the country where they live; that it is antisemitic to compare the actions of Israel to the actions of the Nazis; and that it is antisemitic to deny “the Jewish people their right to self-determination e.g. by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.”

In general, I agree with these claims and the other parts of the definition. However, I believe that it is wrong to make such a definition mandatory on individuals and organisations and to go beyond the 2016 Bucharest conference participants by rendering the definition “legally binding.” There is more than enough wriggle room in the IHRA definition to allow a clever lawyer to present a case that an entirely legitimate discussion about Israel in general and, in particular, Israel-in-Gaza is antisemitic.

Let one example suffice. There are scores of genocide scholars who believe, as I do, that since the Hamas atrocity of 7 October 2023 Israel has been carrying out policies of both ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Palestinian peoples of Gaza.

By slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children; by withholding altogether or restricting radically supplies of food, water, fuel, medicines and medical supplies; by reducing to rubble most of the buildings in Gaza — what Israel is telling the Palestinians of Gaza by its unmistakable action is: you have no future in Gaza. President Trump’s fleeting fancy about transforming Gaza into the Middle Eastern Riviera was music to Israeli ears. The current ethnic-cleansing fantasy action plan is to collect all the Palestinian people of Gaza inside a massive tent city on the ruins of Rafah where they might find food and medicine and freedom from bomb attack but from where, until transported to another country, they would not be permitted to leave.

Even as it pulverises Gaza, Israel prides itself on having the world’s “most moral army.” In a rare example of black humour, Israel’s great oppositional newspaper, Ha’aretz, recently described this latest means for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza as “the world’s most moral concentration camp.”

The second half of this claim — the overlapping claim of genocide — is also strong. According to the international convention, the crime of genocide occurs when a state attempts to eliminate or destroy a nation, race, ethnicity or religion “in whole or in part.” The Palestinian nation is principally concentrated in two localities — in Gaza and on the West Bank. To eliminate Palestinian existence in Gaza involves the destruction of the Palestinian people “in part.”

Unlike ethnic cleansing, the charge of genocide relies on intentions as well as actions. For the crime of genocide to be proven what must be demonstrated is that beyond the actions taken to ethnically cleanse Gaza the intention to destroy the Palestinian people in whole or in part can be found. Especially in the early days, following 7 October, president Isaac Herzog, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, defence minister Yoav Gallant, and two far-right members of cabinet, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, all spoke in ways that unambiguously suggested genocidal intent, as did scores of Israeli commentators. The Israeli public was now frequently reminded that God had required his people to exterminate the enemy of the Israelites, the Amalekites.

Because concentration camps and genocide are (wrongly) associated in the public mind almost exclusively with the Holocaust, I believe a clever lawyer would be able to use one detail of the mandatory IHRA definition — “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” — to “prove” that anyone who argues that Israel is establishing concentration camps in preparation for ethnic cleansing in Gaza or that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza is an antisemite.

Another kind of discussion, one concerned not with the IHRA definition but with the difficult issue of “balance,” might lead to a similar outcome. During the debate about climate change a seminal article showed how “balance” could be “bias.” Similarly in a discussion of, say, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, balance does not mean putting the case for Russia and for Ukraine in equal measure. It involves condemnation of the unprovoked Russian invasion. Balance does not rest on false equivalences but on judgment.

In my judgement, any discussion of 7 October and its aftermath that denied the evil of the Hamas attack on the Israeli Jews and concentrated exclusively on the Israeli actions since the Hamas atrocity could reasonably be said to lack balance and even be open to the charge of antisemitism. However, an unvarnished discussion of the evil that Israel has done to the innocent people of Gaza following but also preceding the horror of 7 October is not antisemitic but the truth. These include the occupation policies of 1967 to 2005; the short military interventions that Israelis call “mowing the grass” after their supposed departure in 2005; and the ethnic cleansing and the genocide post–October 2023 in the war/slaughter against Hamas. It is the evil of these policies that climaxed following the horror of 7 October that Jillian Segal’s report into combating antisemitism is trying to deny, with the apparent support of most of the organised Jewish community in Australia. If her report is adopted by the Albanese government, it will not only strike the most serious blow against both freedom of speech and academic freedom in Australia in recent decades. It will also almost certainly strengthen rather than combat the post–7 October growth of antisemitism in Australia.

Hannah Arendt once confessed that the crimes and mistakes of her own people, the Jews, were more painful to her than the crimes and mistakes of others. That is how I feel. The former prime minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, who is certainly no dove, recently wrote that the actions of Israel-in-Gaza caused him to feel “heart-broken and ashamed.” That is also precisely how I feel. •

This article first appeared in Robert Manne’s Substack, Thermidor: Cultural Counter-Revolution in the Age of Trump.

The post The wrong way to respond to antisemitism appeared first on Inside Story.

It was a peculiar and disturbing speech, in part because it bore no relationship to reality. Then as now, America had many problems. But runaway urban crime wasn’t one of them. In fact, Trump chose to proclaim urban carnage after a remarkable generation-long run of plunging crime in our major cities. New York, for example, had only 335 murders in 2016, down from 2262 in 1990.

So what was that about?

At the time, I thought it was mostly about sadism. Trump clearly loves punishing people, so he was eager to portray a nation full of people who needed punishing. And it remains true, as Adam Serwer pointed out back in 2018, that for Trump and many of his supporters cruelty is a goal in itself, that they rejoice in the suffering of those they hate and fear.

But the events unfolding in Los Angeles as you read this and, I fear, the events likely to unfold across much of America soon, quite possibly this weekend, suggest that the motivations of Trump and his cronies go deeper than mere (mere!) sadism. They want to use false claims of chaos to justify a power grab that, if successful, would mark the end of the American experiment.

As I assume everyone knows by now, last Friday heavily armed — and masked — Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents began raiding workplaces in and around Los Angeles, seeking to arrest people they claimed were illegal immigrants. Crowds quickly gathered to protest. After all, ICE wasn’t rounding up members of violent gangs. It was scooping up ordinary people doing ordinary jobs, many of whom had friends and relatives in the neighbourhood.

The protests were relatively peaceful, although there were some scuffles, objects thrown and vandalism. Los Angeles has experienced real riots in the past. This didn’t even come close. But ICE and some other law enforcement personnel responded with heavy application of force — not lethal weapons, at least not yet, but lots of tear gas, rubber bullets, and so on.

Until ICE moved in Los Angeles was, in fact, remarkably peaceful. Like other major American cities, LA experienced a significant but not huge crime wave in the aftermath of Covid but has since seen that wave more than completely recede:

Source: Real Time Crime Index.

Los Angeles right now is probably as safe as it has ever been.

But if you read Trump, which you should to get past the sanewashing, the City of Angels sounds like a scene from Fallout:

Source: Truth Social

And Trump’s homeland secretary Kristi Noem has called LA a “city of criminals.”

As a New Yorker, I’m accustomed to seeing my quite liveable city portrayed as a hellscape. Still, there are thirteen million people living in Greater Los Angeles who can testify that it has not, in fact, been invaded and occupied, let alone taken over by insurrectionist mobs.

Oh, and let’s not forget that an actual insurrectionist mob tried to overturn the 2020 election — and Trump has pardoned its members.

But no matter. Trump wanted an excuse to mobilise the National Guard, even though the governor of California not only didn’t request it, but has sued Trump to demand that he rescind the order.

When did a president last federalise the Guard against a governor’s wishes? Sixty years ago, when Lyndon Johnson mobilised the Alabama National Guard against the wishes of George Wallace, so that it could protect civil rights marchers.

I’m still seeing some news analyses portraying what’s happening as a confrontation over immigration. And there are definitely people in the administration, led by Stephen Miller, who simply hate immigrants — legal or not, it doesn’t much matter. White South Africans seem to be the only exception.

But this looks bigger even than a play by an administration that has been finding, to its horror, that mass deportation is a lot harder than it sounds — especially if you make any effort at all to follow due process. What it looks like is an attempt to create confrontations that can be used to impose something that, for practical purposes, amounts to martial law.

And if that’s what it’s really about, what’s happening in Los Angeles is just the beginning.

Most immediately, what is going to happen this Saturday? The government is going to hold a costly military parade in Washington, even though we aren’t celebrating any recent victories I’m aware of. This is the kind of thing one expects to see in Red Square, not the capital of a democracy. And guess what: the parade will also fall on Donald Trump’s birthday.

Many pro-democracy groups have teamed up to organise protests against the parade. There will be “No Kings Day” demonstrations all across the country. I don’t know whether there will be any violent incidents. But I’m quite sure that Trump and his allies will claim that violent incidents are happening and seek excuses to use force against the protestors.

So it’s important to understand what is happening here. Trump isn’t reacting to any real threat of disorder in California. And while anti-immigrant bigotry is certainly an important factor, it’s not the whole story.

No, this is all about finding excuses to use force against Trump’s critics and opponents and justify an anti-democratic power grab. •

This article first appeared in Paul Krugman’s Substack newsletter.

The post We finally know what “American carnage” was about appeared first on Inside Story.

From the political centre, former prime minister Ehud Olmert wrote an essay in the newspaper Haaretz in which he pulled no punches against prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition.

“The government of Israel is currently waging a war without purpose, without goals or clear planning and with no chances of success,” Olmert argued. “What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of extermination: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians.” His conclusion: “Yes, Israel is committing war crimes.”

From the right, you have the likes of Amit Halevi, a member of Netanyahu’s own right-wing Likud party, who is staunchly pro-war but thinks its execution has been bungled. Halevi had his membership on the Knesset’s foreign affairs and defence committee suspended by Netanyahu’s coalition after he voted against a proposal to extend the government’s ability to issue emergency call-up orders for Israeli reservists. In an interview with the newspaper Yediot Ahronot following his dismissal, Halevi said, “This war is a deception. They lied to us about its achievements.” Israel has “been fighting a war for twenty months with failed plans,” and it “is not succeeding in destroying Hamas.”

And from the left, Yair Golan, the leader of Israel’s liberal alliance, the Democrats, stated in an interview with Israel Radio: “Israel is on the way to becoming a pariah state, like South Africa was, if we don’t return to acting like a sane country. A sane country does not fight against civilians, does not kill babies as a hobby, and does not set itself the aim of expelling populations.”

After the “hobby” comment drew an outcry, Golan, himself a Gaza war hero, clarified that he was not blaming the military but rather the politicians who were extending the war for reasons that no longer have anything to do with Israel’s national security needs.

While Golan probably should have used a different word so as not to give Israeli rightists an easy way to discredit him, the truth is this: virtually no independent foreign journalists have been allowed to report first-hand from Gaza. When this war is over and Gaza is saturated with international reporters and photographers free to roam, the level of death and destruction is going to be fully reported and pictured — and that is going to be a very bad time for Israel and world Jewry.

So Golan was right to warn his nation — bluntly — to stop now, forge a ceasefire, get the hostages back, get an international and Arab force into Gaza, and deal with the remnants of Hamas later. When you are in a hole, stop digging.

Unfortunately, Netanyahu has insisted on continuing to dig, claiming that he can bomb Hamas into giving up its remaining twenty or so living Israeli hostages — and because the religious-nationalist members of his coalition have essentially told him that if he stops the war, they will topple him. So the Israeli military is going after more and more secondary targets, and the result is Gaza civilians being killed every day.

Amos Harel, the military analyst for Haaretz, explained why: “Many bombing runs are actually assassination attempts against Hamas leaders, often when they’re with their families. And these officials no longer live in private houses or apartment buildings — they’re usually in the crowded tent camps with thousands of civilians. Even when the army declares multiple steps of caution, these attacks result in massive killing.”

It is not only, and indeed not even mostly, the rise in Gaza civilian casualties that is turning more and more Israelis against the war. It’s simply that the war has worn down the whole society. The signs, Harel notes, are everything from “an increasing number of suicides (which the army doesn’t report) to families that are breaking up and businesses that are collapsing. The government conveniently ignores these developments and scatters promises of victory instead.”

If many Israelis feel trapped by their own leaders, many people in Gaza clearly feel the same. Polling in Gaza is obviously difficult, but the antiwar movement there seems to be stirring as well — although there you can get killed by Hamas for protesting. A survey by the independent, Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research of people across the Gaza Strip found that 48 per cent supported the anti-Hamas demonstrations that erupted in several places in recent weeks.

Indeed, be assured that it’s not only some Israeli leaders who will face a reckoning when the guns of Gaza finally fall silent. Hamas’s leaders will live in infamy. They attacked Israeli border communities on 7 October 2023 and, when Israel predictably retaliated, they essentially offered up Gaza’s civilians as a collective human sacrifice to win global sympathy for their cause — while Hamas leaders hid in tunnels and abroad. Hamas is still operating, but now Gaza is unliveable. Yet Hamas’s leadership is still stubbornly saying it will not turn over all its remaining live hostages unless Israel agrees to leave Gaza and return to an open-ended ceasefire.

Really? Israel should leave all of Gaza and accept a ceasefire? What a great idea. If Hamas achieved that “victory,” it would mean that Hamas fought this entire war — losing tens of thousands of fighters and civilians and having few buildings in Gaza left intact — in order to get back to exactly what it had on 6 October 2023: a ceasefire and Israel out of Gaza.

For this alone, history will remember Hamas leaders as mendacious fools. They thought they were unleashing an apocalypse on Israel and instead unleashed an apocalypse on their own people that also ended up giving licence to Netanyahu to destroy their ally, Hezbollah, in Lebanon and Syria, which weakened Iran’s grip on both of those nations, as well as on Iraq, and helped drive Russia out of Syria. It was a rout of the Iran-led “resistance network.”

But here’s the rub. As a result of Netanyahu’s military operations, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah — not to mention Saudi Arabia — are all now much freer to join the Abraham Accords and normalize relations with Israel to a degree they never were when Iran’s regional mercenary network was so powerful.

Yes, Netanyahu made that happen! But he also never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity for peace. Netanyahu today staunchly refuses to harvest what Netanyahu has sown. He will not do the one thing that would unlock the politics of the whole region: open a road, no matter how long, to a two-state solution with a reformed Palestinian Authority.

No wonder Donald Trump doesn’t want to waste time with him — he can’t make any money from him, and he won’t allow Trump to make any history with him.

The more I would argue to Israelis that Netanyahu is making a historic mistake — trading peace with Saudi Arabia for peace with the far-right extremists who keep him in power — the more they would ask me “Do you think Trump can save us?” That question is the ultimate sign that your democracy is in trouble.

I had to explain that Trump goes to countries that give him things — cash, 747s, $Trump meme coin and Official Melania Meme sales, arms purchases, hotel deals, golf courses, AI data centres — and not countries that ask him for things, like Israel.

In fairness to Trump, he probably has no idea how much Israel has internally changed. Even many American Jews don’t understand how big and powerful the ultra-Orthodox and religious-settler-nationalist community in Israel has grown and how much it sees Gaza as a religious war.

“Bibi is actually their pawn, not the real player,” explained Avrum Burg, a former speaker of the Knesset, referring to the religious-nationalist-settler right in Israel. “You tell them Israel could have peace with Saudi Arabia and they will shrug and tell you that they are waiting for the Messiah. You tell them they could have peace with Syria, and they will tell you the Jewish people already own Syria — it’s part of Greater Israel. You tell them about international law, they will tell you biblical law. You will tell them Hamas, they will tell you Amalek [a biblical enemy of the Israelites].”

The real divide in Israel today, concluded Burg, who teaches about relations between religion and state, is not between conservatives and progressives. “It’s between the Jewish tribe and the democratic tribe. And the Jewish tribe is now winning. If Zionism was originally the triumph of secular nationalism over religious Judaism, what is happening to today is the resurgence of religious-nationalist Judaism over democracy.”

And so, after a week, I flew home from off-Broadway — Israel — only to discover that the same play, only bigger, is running on Broadway, in America. It is eerie to watch how Trump and Netanyahu are using a similar playbook to undermine their respective democracies. My only question is whose authoritarian impulses will trigger a full-blown constitutional crisis first.

Each leader stands accused of trying to undermine his country’s courts and the “deep state’’ — i.e., all the institutions that uphold the rule of law. In Trump’s case, it’s effectively to enrich himself personally and shift wealth in the country from the least privileged to the most privileged. In Netanyahu’s case, it’s effectively to escape the many corruption charges against him and shift power and money away from the democratic, moderate Israeli centre to the settlers and the ultra-Orthodox. That group will keep Netanyahu’s coalition in office as long as he excuses the ultra-Orthodox from fighting in Gaza and allows the settlers to continue their march to annex the West Bank today and Gaza tomorrow.

When Netanyahu was elected in November 2022 and began forming his Jewish supremacist coalition, I wrote a column the next morning headlined “The Israel We Knew Is Gone.’’ I hope I was premature — but I hope even more that I won’t soon have to write the same column about America.

The year 2026 will have a lot to say about whether the Netanyahu and Trump cults can be contained. That year, Netanyahu will have to hold national elections, and Trump will have to face the midterms. Those committed to democracy and decency in both countries have one job between now and then: organise, organise, organise to win power.

Nothing else matters. And everything is riding on it. •

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

The post The flashing signals I saw in Israel appeared first on Inside Story.

In my experience, these discussions are usually pretty vague and confused, jumping back and forth between architecture, transportation, consumer technology, production technology, art, pop culture, soft power, urban design, and a bunch of other topics. That doesn’t mean I think the topic is worthless; vague and confused discussions can be fun! But I thought I’d try to think about Sinofuturism a little more systematically.

As far as I can tell, the recent burst of Sinofuturism seems to come from four main sources:

• China’s new high-tech industrial model
• The legacy of China’s real estate boom
• A charm offensive by China
• The election of Donald Trump

In the early 2020s, the economic model that had sustained Chinese economic growth since 2008 basically collapsed. This model was based on massive real estate investment — the biggest development boom in the history of the world. Real estate sales funded local governments, so local governments basically approved and supported any and all development that would increase the value of land. Meanwhile the Chinese central government encouraged banks to lend to developers as a way of sustaining the macroeconomy through a series of shocks. This predictably led to an eventual financial bubble and crash when the loans used to finance this incredible development boom outran the ability of real estate to generate economic returns. There was a big bust in 2021–23, and growth slowed down.

China’s leadership responded to this slowdown by going all-in on high-tech manufacturing. At Xi Jinping’s behest, the country’s banks poured untold amounts of money into sectors like autos, semiconductors, machine tools, robots, electronics, batteries, aircraft and all kinds of other stuff. The government supported the boom with subsidies as well, though I think we often tend to overemphasise its role relative to the private initiative of companies like BYD, Xiaomi and DJI.

That lending boom has since cooled off a bit, but it was enormous during 2021–23, and industrial loans continue to grow at a fairly rapid clip. All that lending fuelled a wave of investment in the “technologies of the future.” Many of those were production technologies — the machine tools and robots in the highly automated Chinese factories that you can see in videos like this one. And some are consumption technologies, like the high-speed rail network that’s bigger than all the networks in the rest of the world combined.

This tech boom won’t be enough to return the country to pre-Covid levels of growth. But it has transformed Chinese cities, filling them with futuristic stuff like delivery drones, drone shows, delivery robots, air taxis, high-speed trains, face-recognition payment systems, electric cars with fancy screens inside, skyscraper-building machines and so on.

China’s lax regulatory climate — partly a result of cosy relations between local government and corporations, partly an intentional result of the central government’s high-tech push — has made the rollouts of these technologies faster and more widespread than in developed countries, where things like noise complaints and safety concerns predominate.

The electronics manufacturing boom (which actually predates the more recent high-tech push) has also resulted in a glut of cheap LEDs, which many Chinese developers have plastered all over their high-rise buildings and malls. This might be partly cultural and aesthetic, but it’s largely an attempt by cities and companies to advertise themselves to businesses and consumers both at home and overseas. Videos of these “cyberpunk” nighttime cityscapes have proliferated across the internet.

The second big reason for the boom in Sinofuturism is a government charm offensive. A number of aggressive Chinese actions in the late 2010s and early 2020s — the claiming of the South China Sea and pieces of Indian territory, the crushing of Hong Kong, the rise of “wolf warrior” diplomats, China’s soft support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine — led to a rise in negative perceptions of China throughout the world, in both developed and developing countries. This probably contributed to a massive exodus of foreign capital from the country, as multinational corporations scrambled to diversify and de-risk themselves.

China’s government has responded with a series of “charm offensives” to increase the country’s “soft power” around the world. Part of the message is that China is a positive force in the global economy, promoting free trade, fighting climate change, spreading high technology and offering infrastructure investment to developing nations. And part of the message is that China is the country of the future — a technological and economic powerhouse whose rise is inevitable and should be admired rather than resisted.

This charm offensive is now getting a boost from a flood of pro-China content by Western influencers. Fewer foreigners are living in China and the number of tourists visiting the country has returned to near its pre-pandemic level. Yet there has been a massive proliferation of videos, mostly by foreigners, saying “I visited China, and it wasn’t what I expected at all!” or “I visited China, and America is COOKED!” The most famous of these, by far, is the recent series of videos by the popular internet personality Darren Watkins, better known as iShowSpeed.

An obvious question is whether these folks are getting paid by the Chinese government to make videos that support a Sinofuturist narrative. In fact, some are, especially the ones made by Western expats living in China. The New York Times reported on this phenomenon back in 2021:

The videos have a casual, homespun feel. But on the other side of the camera often stands a large apparatus of government organisers, state-controlled news media and other official amplifiers… State-run news outlets and local governments have organised and funded pro-Beijing influencers’ travel, according to government documents and the creators themselves. They have paid or offered to pay the creators. They have generated lucrative traffic for the influencers by sharing videos with millions of followers on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook… With official media outlets’ backing, the creators can visit and film in parts of China where the authorities have obstructed foreign journalists’ reporting.

In addition, it’s possible that China is using its control of the TikTok algorithm to promote videos like this — or, more likely, that would-be influencers hoping to go viral simply think TikTok will promote them if they spout a bunch of wide-eyed Sinofuturism.

But government propaganda is highly unlikely to explain all, or even most, of the boom in Sinofuturist videos. It’s likely that these videos are just a meme, much like travel to Japan became a meme in the 2010s.

China’s big tech push helps the meme, since all those futuristic cars and robots and drones give foreigners more to fawn over. But the sudden perception of China as the “country of the future” probably owes even more to the property and infrastructure booms that just ended. Neither the forests of LED-covered skyscrapers, nor the endless miles of high-speed rail, nor the vast shiny new malls that dot China’s city centres would exist if China’s banks hadn’t gone on the mother of all lending binges after 2008. Robots and drones are cool, but the built environment is what dominates travellers’ impressions of any country.

In other words, China’s real estate era may have ended in tears for some developers and local governments but it left behind the physical edifice of a very futuristic-looking country. When people go to China and see the future, what they’re really seeing is the country’s recent past.

The final tailwind for Sinofuturism is the election of Donald Trump, and the geopolitical ructions that have resulted. Trump has very loudly and flamboyantly turned America against Europe — bashing European countries in his rhetoric, hitting them with tariffs and tariff threats, threatening to pull out of NATO, supporting right-wing opposition parties, cosying up to Russia, and so on.

A few European leaders have responded by trying to get closer to China instead, but most are still too wary of the Communist Party. But European intellectuals are a different story. Some European thinkers resent the smug American superiority that resulted from decades of cold war patronage, and are overjoyed to see America eclipsed. That geopolitical backdrop can easily colour perceptions of a country, making even the pedestrian seem sublime.

In turbulent and troubling times, people instinctively grasp for some sort of future to believe in — some positive vision to hold on to. The United States and Europe right now don’t have much of a futuristic vision to offer; America continues to inflict wound after wound on itself due to its intractable cultural and partisan divides, while Europe is mired in economic stagnation and is struggling to defend itself against a much smaller, poorer Russia. Sinofuturism might not have been Western intellectuals’ first choice for an alternative, but if it’s a choice between Sinofuturism and bleak nihilism/pessimism, some will choose the former.

But what will this Chinese future actually look like, two decades or four decades from now? Here, I think there’s less than meets the eye.

First, let’s talk about Chinese urbanism. Westerners who go to Asia and see a lot of high-rises and electric signs often simply assume that all Asian cities are basically the same. But the way China builds its cities is very different from how Japan does it. Japan’s cities are hyper-agglomerations of dense mixed-use neighbourhoods packed with small businesses. China’s cities sprawl much more. Here’s what urban designer Peter Calthorpe wrote in 2016, when China was still in the middle of its massive building spree:

One thinks of the high-rise, high-density buildings in many Chinese cities as inherently urban, but they are not. Smart growth and urbanism is more about connections, human scale, walkability and mixed uses than it is about gross density. China’s pattern of gated superblocks (often over forty acres, or sixteen hectares, each) and isolated uses is actually a high-rise version of the American suburb…

In China, single-use residential blocks of largely identical units are clustered in superblocks surrounded by major arterial roads. Vast distances separate everyday destinations and create environments hostile to pedestrians. Sidewalks rarely are lined with useful services, and crossing the street is death-defying. Job centres are distant and commutes are long, especially for lower-income groups. In major Chinese cities, the gridlock expands to all hours of the day…

In the last five years, China has built more than 30,000 kilometres of expressways… China’s love affair with the car has blossomed into a torrid romance… [L]ike the US cities of the 1950s and 1960s, Chinese cities are working to accommodate the explosive growth of automobile travel by building more highways, ring roads and parking lots.

And here’s how Dwarkesh Patel put it after a recent trip:

Outside of Beijing and Shanghai (and sometimes even within), you can tell that these skyscrapers were put up by a country with a GDP per capita of $10,000… These endless rows of skyscrapers, put up in the construction frenzy of the last few decades, are ugly — boxes of mostly concrete with visible blight and discolouration all over them. If the great construction binge is indeed over, it’ll be a shame that China’s infrastructure was built out during a period of particularly uninspired architecture… The city is dominated by these enormous apartment complexes — blocks of ten adjacent thirty-storey buildings demarcated by eight-lane roads… This layout seems designed partly for social control.

A recent article by the ever-excellent Alfred Twu explains China’s urban layout in more detail:

Despite their strong visual dissimilarities, new construction in China and the US share one basic feature: they each support roughly the same population density, as their floor area ratio is similar.

… In contrast to the mid-rises that abound in US cities today, Chinese cities favour what is known as the 小区 (xiaoqu) or microdistrict. These tower-in-the-park-style residential developments comprise several high-rises on roughly fifteen to twenty acres, surrounded by wide arterial roads… [X]iaoqus are built as gated communities. While primarily residential, the microdistricts also provide stores and services for residents, including schools… However, they do not contain offices or industry, and retail is limited to neighbourhood-serving services, such as convenience stores and restaurants…

The sunlight requirement results in large spaces between buildings, limiting the floor area ratio to around 2.0 to 4.0, even for high-rises… closer to 2.0 than to 4.0 once internal roads are factored in… [T]hese buildings are unique to the People’s Republic.

Twu points out that since this urban form is the result of regulation rather than culture, China could theoretically revamp its cities into something denser, more mixed-use and more walkable, like Tokyo, Hong Kong or Singapore. (We know it’s not culture because China’s unregulated “urban villages” and Chinese-descended places like Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore all build much higher density and much more mixed-use spaces, while relying less on cars.) But since the big real estate boom is over, the financing or political will for such redevelopment is unlikely to appear. China has already built itself. And even more than the United States, China has built itself into a highly suboptimal configuration.

America’s sprawling suburbs are the target of much derision from urbanists worldwide, but they have a charm that’s all their own — huge luxurious houses serve as social gathering places, cars provide mobility, lawns and parks provide the illusion of living close to nature. That lifestyle exerts a magnetic pull; Americans of all races and social classes still want to move (and are actually moving) out to the ’burbs. And this pull is worldwide — newly developed outlying areas of Europe, Asia, the Middle East and everywhere else look a lot more like American suburbs than they look like Tokyo or Paris. Like it or not, twentieth-century America invented an urban future that came to dominate the world.

But China will not do the same. Who wants to live in a xiaoqu? You live in a smallish apartment, like you would in New York or Tokyo, but instead of being within walking distance of some of the world’s most vibrant shopping and entertainment districts, you’re in a gated community. The only things close to you are a sanitised communal lawn and a couple of boring stores for basic necessities. To get to anything remotely interesting — which in China generally just means a shopping mall — requires walking long distances over huge arterial roads to a train station, or taking your car. You get all of the isolation of the American suburbs with none of the luxury. You’re basically in Cabrini-Green but without the crime.

I suspect that very few people around the world are going to want to live in Chinese-style microdistricts. And I suspect that in twenty years or so the children of the current Chinese generation will see this urban form as sterile, cramped and confining. Except it will be very hard to rebuild Chinese cities into either the American or the Japanese model.

As for the spectacular beauty of Chinese downtowns, I suspect that Chinese people themselves are going to get tired of the light pollution that wows the tourists. Already, residents of Shanghai, Chongqing and other cities have begun to express a preference for fewer gratuitous displays of garish illumination.

China’s building boom will certainly leave behind plenty of interesting structures. But because the boom was driven by overabundant capital, many of these designs were created more as advertisements for the developers than as places that are actually nice to walk around in.

And the buildings themselves won’t always look as nice as they do now, either. I’m no Brian Potter, but even I know that over the course of about thirty or forty years, reinforced concrete tends to weather, crack and spall. Most of urban China is very humid and pollution levels are still fairly high; this will damage many of the nice new surfaces of China’s buildings, most of which were built in the last two decades. Buildings that turn out to have been built with substandard materials — and there are some of those out there — will go downhill earlier.

At that point, China will have to choose between (a) expensive upkeep and redevelopment to keep cities looking new, or (b) patching up and painting over old buildings to save money. Japan actually chooses the former, which is why it still looks nice — but this eternal construction and beautification costs a lot of society’s resources. Hong Kong and Taiwan have chosen the latter, and as a result, people gush a lot less about the built environment when they visit those cities these days.

I know it’s fun to go to a foreign city, look around at the buildings, and make grand sweeping judgements about the relative strength of civilisations over the next thousand years. But next time you find yourself gaping at a sparkling new high-rise in Shenzhen or Chongqing or Dubai, remind yourself: “This too shall spall.” (China’s massive high-speed rail network will also be an incredible challenge to maintain — read this Casey Handmer blog post to understand the details. Unless ridership stays very, very high even on the secondary lines, China’s HSR will probably end up being a significant fiscal drag.)

As for transforming global culture — a key part of soft power — China has yet to really do this. Its censorship regime — an inescapable part of their authoritarian system — is constantly hamstringing or deterring Chinese creatives. As China gets richer, its people will spend more on entertainment, and entertainment industries will emerge. But I suspect this censoriousness will hamper the emergence not only of truly deep and creative works of art, but also of creative new forms of popular entertainment.

Twentieth-century America invented 3D animated children’s movies and third-person action-adventure video games; China’s two most celebrated hit cultural products over the past few years have been a 3D animated children’s movie and a third-person action-adventure video game. And so far, global appeal has been elusive; Sinofuturists who trumpeted the fact that Ne Zha 2 earned more at the box office than any Disney movie failed to mention that over 98 per cent of that revenue was earned inside China.

As for China’s technological futurism, there I have more confidence. China’s mastery of the core technologies of the electrical age — batteries and motors — will continue to produce wonders, especially because America has voluntarily forfeited leadership in these technologies for cultural reasons. Personal air taxis, ultra-fast car chargers and humanoid robots that can do flips are not the last whiz-bang gadgets you’ll see come out of China. Nor will China’s innovation be limited to the electrical sphere. And China’s massive research spending spree, together with Trump’s deep cuts to American science funding, mean that the future has never looked brighter for Chinese scientific supremacy.

But here, too, I would be cautious about projecting out more than a decade or two. To the degree that scientific progress relies on human capital, China is going to start having a tough time in the late 2040s. After the big “Alpha” generation works its way through the system, population will relentlessly decline. (Of course, AI researchers may replace human ones, but at that point China’s fundamental advantage — its incredibly huge population of talented engineers and scientists — starts to become less important.)

Also, much of China’s technological leadership has a darker side. All the tourists love the electric cars and the high-speed trains. But China is also the global leader in electronic surveillance, to the point where they’ve basically turned their whole country into a panopticon. China uses the internet to repress dissent, and AI will make that task easier. China’s government has also shown an eagerness to use the internet to spread dissension and stir up hatred in other societies around the world, I expect AI to make that much easier as well.

Is that a future worth putting our hopes in? Would we really trade our right to dissent and our last shreds of privacy for a ride in an air taxi and a delivery robot at our door? Why should we look forward to the march of science and technology if it doesn’t promise to empower the mass of humanity to live their lives as they see fit? Technological contrivances whose purpose is to enslave me, my family and my friends do admittedly inspire a certain kind of dreadful awe, but I would rather read that science fiction novel than live in it.

This, ultimately, is what Sinofuturism is lacking — the promise of ennoblement. People now make fun of the American suburbs of the 1950s, or use them as an object of misplaced nostalgia. But if you were to look at that lifestyle — the house, the car, the TV, the telephone — you could see the seed of a way of life so appealing and so free that it would eventually become the global standard. Right now, China is a beautiful place to visit, but the Sinofuturists who gush about its neon cities and its magnificent technology demonstrate a notable reluctance to move there. •

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That was always incredibly unlikely to be true. If it were, we’d probably see stockmarkets up since Trump’s election instead of down, since stockmarkets are forward-looking. As I explained recently, broad-based tariffs are simply incredibly unlikely to reindustrialise America, now or ever.

Evidence shows how this tends to be the case. You can just look at cases where countries raise tariffs by a substantial amount, and see what happens to their economies. This is what economist Davide Furceri and his colleagues did in 2020, and they found that GDP tends to go down after a big tariff hike. And for very large tariff increases, the magnitude of the output decline increases as the years go by — the long-term pain is worse than the short-term pain.

Output growth (annual) after tariff hike (per cent), according to first and third standard deviations. Source: “Are Tariffs Bad for Growth? Yes, Say Five Decades of Data from 150 Countries,” Journal of Policy Modeling, April 2020  

Plenty of other research finds similar results, of course. And when you remove poor countries from the sample, the effect is even more stark; tariffs seem to lead to worse outcomes for rich nations than poor ones.

Of course, the causality could be reversed here; countries that are in economic trouble might tend to be the ones that resort to tariffs, and the tariffs might simply not be enough to save the countries’ economies. In macroeconomics it’s very hard to isolate cause and effect. But the facts seem consistent with the standard story, in which both (a) a loss of specialisation in production, and (b) deindustrialisation from the soaring cost of intermediate goods leads to long-term pain. On top of that, erratic tariff policies like Trump’s probably cause uncertainty that hurts business investment.

The part about deindustrialisation is especially important, because it undercuts the core beliefs of Trump and the MAGA movement. As the economists David Baqaee and Hannes Malmberg (2025) show, any simple model in which capital goods get taxed at higher rates is going to show less capital accumulation over time — in other words, deindustrialisation.

If this were counteracted by industrial policy and export promotion, it might be fine. But Trump is cancelling Joe Biden’s industrial policies and shows no interest in promoting exports (which will be hurt by tariffs and by other countries’ retaliation). Already, we see factory construction slowing down under Trump:

Source: Michael Thomas

People who simply take it on faith that tariffs boost US domestic manufacturing, like Michigan’s Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer, need to realise that the opposite is often true, especially when the tariffs fall on capital goods and intermediate goods. This is not a policy that will revive Michigan, or the Rust Belt, or the blue-collar workforce, or the forgotten man of America. •

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But we all know that people’s behaviour doesn’t always line up with their stated preferences. Oceans of social science data have found that people prefer content that aligns with their own beliefs over content that doesn’t. What sorts of people are the most likely to prefer ideologically friendly content — not just prefer it but also say they prefer it?

One potential lens is power: who has it and who doesn’t. If you sit atop society’s food chain, perhaps you see impartial news as a potential threat — something that could mobilise the have-nots against you by exposing things you’d rather not have in the open. Or conversely, if you’re in a disadvantaged group, maybe you see “impartial” news as part of the existing power structure — telling stories that support the system that has left you at the bottom.

That’s the question explored by an interesting new paper just published in the International Journal of Communication. It’s titled “Who Wants Impartial News? Investigating Determinants of Preferences for Impartiality in 40 Countries,” and it’s by (deep breath) Camila Mont’Alverne (University of Strathclyde), Amy Ross A. Arguedas (Oxford), Sumitra Badrinathan (American), Benjamin Toff (Minnesota), Richard Fletcher (Oxford), and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen (Copenhagen). Here’s the abstract:

Despite the centrality of impartiality for many journalistic cultures, and widespread support across audiences, there is still limited research about which aspects influence people’s preferences for impartial news. This article draws on survey data across 40 markets to investigate the factors shaping audience preferences for impartial news.

Although most express a preference for impartial news, there are several overlapping groups of people who, probably for different reasons, are more likely to prefer news that shares their point of view: (a) the ideological and politically engaged; (b) young people, especially those who rely mainly on social media for news; (c) women; and (d) less socioeconomically advantaged groups. [Emphasis added]

We find systematic patterns across countries in preferences for alternatives to impartial news with greater support in places where people use more different sources of news and that are ranked lower in terms of quality of their democracies.

The first of those four groups is sort of a given. People who don’t have a strong personal ideology and who aren’t engaged with politics are unlikely to crave a strong partisan take in their news. After all, they don’t have one of their own!

But the other three — young people, women and poorer groups — indicate that it’s the people with less power in a society who are more likely to see ideological news. If you’re a wealthy middle-aged white man, a huge part of the “impartial” media is aimed squarely at you — no need to seek an alternative. And the effect is even stronger in less-democratic countries where the state typically has a larger role in how the news gets reported.

Let’s look at the study. Its basis is the 2020 Digital News Report from Oxford’s Reuters Institute. That massive effort asked 80,000 people across forty countries about their news consumption habits and preferences — twenty-four countries in Europe, seven in Asia, four in Latin America, two in Africa (Kenya and South Africa), plus the United States, Canada and Australia. Journalists have endless debates about the meaning of words like “impartial” and “objective” and “balanced,” but it’s rare to have this large a sample of how audiences think about them.

News outlets exist, in one sense at least, to serve their audiences. But they also exist to serve their advertisers. And their journalists exist in an uneasy symbiosis with a community’s institutions — government, police, schools, business, civil society — which are the subject of much of their work. Does “impartial” news represent a purity of audience service? Or some triangulation of all the various power sources and elite stakeholders that interact with it?

The Digital News Report survey asked people which they preferred when consuming news: “getting news from sources that share your point of view”; “getting news from sources that don’t have a particular point of view“; “getting news from sources that challenge your point of view”; or “don’t know.” The most popular responses overall were impartial (51 per cent) and share-my-views (24 per cent).

Within countries, they found the associations they expected — that people were more likely to prefer ideologically aligned news if they were: (a) heavily engaged in politics and had a well-defined ideology; (b) young; (c) heavily reliant on social media for news; (d) women; (e) less wealthy; or (f) less educated. Other than (a), these line up well with the idea that viewpoint-aligned news is more valued by those who feel disempowered within their society.

Interestingly, the United States was a standout on the issue of ideology — on both left and right. Among the forty countries, US liberals ranked No. 1 in how much extra support they gave to “impartial” media. This is almost certainly driven by liberals viewing the news media as a counterbalance to Donald Trump’s first administration. It’s a contrast to the broader global tendency of people on the left being more sceptical of neutral news sources. (Think of what was called “alternative media” before the internet came along.)

Meanwhile, among the forty countries, US conservatives ranked No. 2 in how much extra support they gave to ideologically aligned media. In other words, they don’t trust the “fake news” or “lamestream media,” turning instead to Fox and its ilk. (Only Spain’s conservatives gave more support to ideologically aligned media.)

I emailed Mont’Alverne, the lead author, about this tension. Part of the issue, she suggested, is that people’s ideas of “impartial” news in the abstract don’t always line up with their real-world opinions. “It is possible, and probably what is happening in this case, that American left-wingers express preference for impartiality in general and in the abstract,” she emailed. “But when they are asked about it in a more concrete way, the limits of this preference become more visible.”

Those effects appeared within countries. But looking at nations as a whole, a different set of predictors appeared in the data. People were less likely to value “impartial” news in countries where: (a) journalists are perceived as being under the thumb of the state; (b) governments are less democratic and more authoritarian; and (c) where people on average consume more sources for news rather than fewer.

The first two make immediate sense. If your country’s “impartial” media is dominated by an authoritarian state, people are less likely to value it as a source of ground truth. The third may seem a little more puzzling. But countries where people consume more news sources are likely to be ones with a more vibrant news ecosystem, representing distinct points of view — meaning a politically aligned alternative is more likely to be available:

This might be explained by the fact that in markets dominated by fewer brands — often publicly funded ones such as the BBC — respondents in that market also tend to express higher levels of preference for impartiality.

In the United Kingdom, where respondents used an average of four news brands, the lowest number across all countries, 62 per cent of respondents said they prefer news with no point of view. In Kenya and Turkey, on the other hand, two of the countries with an above-average number of news brands used (thirteen for each), a much lower percentage said they preferred news with no point of view (29 per cent and 34 per cent, respectively).

In only four of the forty countries did more people say they prefer news that shares their point of view to news with no point of view — Turkey, Kenya, Mexico, and the Philippines. All are countries where democracy traditions are, at best, challenged.

A couple variables didn’t have a significant impact on preference for impartial news: the degree of political polarisation in the country, and whether people rely more on newspapers, TV, or cable news for their information

People belonging to socially disadvantaged groups, such as women, younger, lower-income, and lower-educated participants, may find themselves less attached to journalistic norms that they do not feel have served their interests, which may be a reflection of grievances about journalistic shortcomings with respect to news that purports to be impartial but can come across as biased in favour of more privileged parts of society — especially when it comes to coverage of groups that are often stigmatised or ignored.

For some of these audiences, expressing a preference for news that shares their points of view might be another way of saying they prefer news that portrays people like themselves more fairly.

… [W]hen respondents say they prefer news with “no point of view,” as embraced by relatively more advantaged individuals in most countries, it is possible that what they are expressing is a preference for news that mirrors and does not challenge dominant perspectives in society. These respondents might answer differently should they encounter “impartial” news that did not overwhelmingly reflect their own lived experiences or outlooks on the world.

All of which is to say that audience desire for “impartiality” is profoundly contextual — embedded in the particular political, social, and economic environment that people live in. It’s less an iron law of journalism than an incentive-driven response to conditions. “It is up to news organisations and journalists, therefore,” the authors conclude, “to evaluate which approach better suits their contexts.”

Mont’Alverne told me her main takeaway from the study was that people who want news with a point of view can do so for quite different reasons — from political motivations to feeling a lack of representation. “This reinforces the importance of actually considering what audiences think about journalism,” she said, “as it is common that people’s perceptions differ from assumptions academics and practitioners might have.” •

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And they are quite open about it: Curtis Yarvin, Paypal founder Peter Thiel’s unfortunately influential intellectual henchman, wants to kill off what remains of what he calls FDR’s “personal monarchy.” During his “Liberation Day” speech, Trump did not talk about returning us to the postwar boom, but to the nineteenth century, when high tariffs were the rule rather than the exception. Although the staunch libertarian would not have liked tariffs, Trump is committed to carrying out economist Murray Rothbard’s dream of “breaking the clock” of the New Deal and repealing the twentieth century. Nowhere is this clearer than with trade.

Most educated Americans will know about New Deal initiatives like Social Security, the Works Progress Administration, and the National Labor Relations Act, but fewer will naturally associate Roosevelt with free trade. That’s partly because the coupling of the cause of labour and the cause of free trade seems odd today, but the Roosevelt administration began the gradual liberalisation of American trade that lasted from the 1930s until, well, this past Wednesday. (Not quite, but this was a dramatic reversal.)

In 1934, President Roosevelt signed into law the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, which allowed the president to negotiate bilateral reductions in tariffs with trading partners. This was an amendment of the disastrous Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930, whose onerous trade restrictions many economists believe deepened the Great Depression.

Previously, Congress held much of the authority over trade agreements, but the RTAA allowed the executive wide latitude to amend tariffs. The idea was that the president, as nationally elected, would be less likely to be captured by sectional business interests that would resist the type of trade liberalisation that might help the whole country. Ironically, it was the same process of delegation to the executive that allowed Trump to unilaterally blow up world trade. FDR and his advisors believed freeing up trade would help stagnant American industry by giving them an easier time exporting their goods.

Of course, things are not always so high-minded or clear in reality: the wily FDR had said on the campaign trail that protections would likely stay in place, which no doubt reassured nervous workers and bosses in the teeth of the Depression, but it wasn’t all campaigning: FDR’s “brains trust,” his special advisers on how to fight the Depression, contained some recalcitrant economic nationalists. Then there were the Democratic party’s constituents to think about; Democrats had long been the “anti-tariff” party, representing their own sectional interests, particularly in the South, that always favoured low tariffs.

The political scientist Thomas Ferguson describes the New Deal coalition as a “historic bloc” where the hegemonic forces were “capital-intensive industries, investment banks, and internationally oriented commercial banks” whose businesses inclined them to foreign trade:

This bloc constitutes the basis of the New Deal’s great and, in world history, utterly unique achievement: its ability to accommodate millions of mobilised workers amidst world depression. Because capital-intensive firms use relatively less direct human labour (and that often professionalised and elaborately trained), they were less threatened by labour turbulence. They had the space and the resources to envelop, rather than confront, their workforce. In addition, with the momentous exception of the chemical industry, these capital-intensive firms were world as well as domestic leaders in their industries. Consequently, they stood to gain from global free trade. They could, and did, ally with important international financiers, whose own miniscule workforce presented few sources of tension and who had for over a decade supported a more broadly international foreign policy and the lowering of traditionally high American tariff.

In this perspective, the marriage of American labour and free trade was one of convenience and it’s not hard to see how it soured as the New Deal order collapsed. It wasn’t all just a material arrangement: there was also an ideological push for freer trade from within the FDR administration. It was the pet project of secretary of state Cordell Hull, who, it should be noted once represented Tennessee in the Senate, a committed believer in international trade as a way to produce global peace and to strengthen America’s role in the world. Some historians even date the rise of American global hegemony to the passage of the RTAA, although others consider this an exaggeration since the amendment was fairly modest and still took some protectionism for granted.

The New Deal was not just a domestic program, but an international one: it opened the United States to the world. Adolf Berle, one of those “brains trust” guys, envisioned a global New Deal. Things like the United Nations, another one of Hull’s projects, came out of this orientation. FDR, Hull, and their advisors were convinced that Depression and the threat of war came out of the sectionalism, nationalism and chaos of the prewar order, and pursued institutional remedies to foster international development and cooperation — always with an eye to US advantage, of course. It’s exactly this wise and farsighted policy regime that’s being reversed right now: they are destroying everything that kept the world relatively prosperous and safe for the past eighty years.

But there’s another lesson from Roosevelt’s trade moves: they were not the policy of totally unrestricted free trade that neoliberals favoured and the American working class rightfully resents. That’s partly because the political terrain still forced a protectionist tilt, but also partly because it was done with a particular developmental goal in mind: the economic recovery of the United States. These were more cautious and limited in scope than later sweeping multilateral agreements like the WTO, GATT, and NAFTA and they tended to favour American exports. In the parlance of our time, one might say these were more “fair trade” agreements than free-trade ones. Perhaps one day studying FDR’s trade policy will help guide us out of this colossal mess. •

This article first appeared in John Ganz’s Unpopular Front newsletter.

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That may be why there has been less discussion than there might be of the disagreements within Trump’s coalition. In addition to the personal rivalries and backbiting, there’s a big, obvious ideological fissure between the hardcore religious right and Silicon Valley. For a while, I’ve wondered about the weirdness of J.D. Vance’s position, as both the regime’s chief advocate for TradCath integralism, and most prominent connection to the Silicon Valley right. The angel of tradition on one shoulder whispers: keep the modern out! An imp of wickedness on the other: let innovation rip! The one eternally contends against the other.

Just over a week ago, Vance gave a speech at the “American Dynamism Summit,” which made the contradiction clear. As with any politician’s speech, it is anyone’s guess how much is Vance himself, and how much his speechwriter. But the speech was very clearly all about the awkward relationship between Common Good Conservatism and Let Software Eat The World. When a politician specifically and repeatedly denies that a tension is important, it is excellent evidence that the tension is urgent and worrying. This tension is by no means necessarily a sign of imminent collapse. Previous conservative coalitions, such as National Review “fusionism,” had spotty welding in places, but somehow held together for decades. Still, it is a visible weakness that might be exploited.

The point is this. It is not just that the American right is becoming more extreme, but that its extremism pulls in two radically different directions. One faction yearns to return to the cultural stability of a world in which everyone agrees (or is obliged to agree) on shared values, and the only legitimate arguments are about how best to achieve the worldly version of the kingdom of heaven. The other fantasises about a radical acceleration of the forces of change, ripping society apart in the name of perpetual innovation. Moving towards the one means moving directly away from the other.

The two clashing tendencies respectively centre around integralism and right-accelerationism. Providing detailed accounts of the two would take a lot of words but you need at least a very rough sense of the two to understand the tension and how Vance is trying to reconcile it.

The simplest way of describing integralism is as the proposition that society ought be shaped by agreement on a common good that in turn reflects Christian natural law. If you believe that God has told us how we should lead our lives, then shouldn’t our society and our government reflect these values? There will be complications and compromises — the City of God is not the City of Man — but still you ought do what you can to build the worldly paradise.

What animates this vision is not simply the belief that there is a right way to order society, but the contention that the radical plurality of modern liberalism is morally wrong. According to integralism, government and society ought not reflect continued disagreement among different paths of life and values but agreement on the good. As Kevin Vallier puts it, integralists and their brethren in other religious faiths “often support an extensive state that adopts one of the great religions and shapes people to fit within that faith. Anti-liberals seek to alter or abolish liberal orders, and they oppose all liberal political and ethical theories.”

In the integralists’ preferred political system, there will still be disagreement and political conflict, but it should occur within an appropriate moral order from which there is no legitimate exit. Religious minorities can be tolerated, under some conditions and so long as they do not look to upset the principles of the society that they live in. Efforts to remake politics so that it reflects the fact that people profoundly disagree over how to live the good life are not allowable.

Accelerationism of the Silicon Valley variety takes just the opposite stance. According to right-accelerationists, the best political order is “exit” all the way down (or, more precisely, exit between one CEO-founded microsociety and another). In their radicalised version of market liberalism, if you demolish the state, and allow unhindered innovation, our descendants will find their way to the stars.

This is (or claims to be) a vision of unfettered freedom. In Marc Andreessen’s account: “We believe technology is liberatory. Liberatory of human potential. Liberatory of the human soul, the human spirit. Expanding what it can mean to be free, to be fulfilled, to be alive. We believe technology opens the space of what it can mean to be human.” In practice of course, this politics is far murkier than the exhortations suggest (fulfillment and openness for the hero-founders of Silicon Valley who discover new possibilities; humble gratitude for their vision from everyone else). But the explicit goal is to open up space for different versions of the human, rather than to constrain to one.

There are lots more complications, variations and disagreements within both these tendencies. But the basic problem that Vance confronts, and to some extent himself embodies, should be obvious: they cannot easily be brought to agree with each other. So how does Vance reconcile an anti-liberalism that wants to tamp down society, rejecting modernity and all its ways, with a turbocharged vision of a radically unconstrained future in which society evolves in a myriad different directions?

With difficulty. After the usual opening inanities, Vance’s speech lays out the problem accordingly.

One journalist, he said, had suggested that his speech on AI in Paris had “highlighted the tension between the, quote, ‘techno-optimists’ and the ‘populist right’ of President Trump’s coalition”:

And today, I’d like to speak to these tensions as a proud member of both tribes. And let me put it simply: While this is a well-intentioned concern, I think it’s based on a faulty premise. This idea that tech-forward people and the populists are somehow inevitably going to come to a loggerheads is wrong.

Why not? Vance provides two justifications. The first is that “[r]eal innovation makes us more productive, but it also, I think, dignifies our workers.” Hence, technological innovation doesn’t hurt traditional society but cements it. The second is that they share a common enemy: the mindmeld between the American state and economic globalisation. Rolling back globalisation will be good for American entrepreneurialism.

[T]he role that technology plays in a labour market, and whether we greet innovative breakthroughs with excitement or with trepidation depends on the purpose of our economic system in the first place. And I think this is where the populists have an important point. It should be no surprise that when we send so much of our industrial base to other countries, we stop making interesting new things right here at home.

More generally:

[E]ach group — our workers, the populace on the one hand, the tech optimists on the other — have been failed by this government — not just the government of the last administration but the government, in some ways, of the last forty years, because there were two conceits that our leadership class had when it came to globalization… The first is assuming that we can separate the making of things from the design of things… the second is that cheap labour is fundamentally a crutch, and it’s a crutch that inhibits innovation. I’d ask my friends, both on the — the tech optimist side and on the populist side, not to see the failure of the logic of globalisation as a failure of innovation… Both our working people — our populists — and our innovators gathered here today have the same enemy. And the solution, I believe, is American innovation, because, in the long run, it’s technology that increases the value of labour.

That is why

to come full circle on this tension — alleged tension between the populists and the techno-optimists, I can understand a reaction of scepticism when we talk about the revolutionary potential of new invention and artificial intelligence and all the other incredible technologies that you guys are working, but I think that that tension is a little overstated.

The problem for Vance is that the tension is not overstated at all. The Silicon Valley right has enthusiastically embraced the US versus China framing of global politics but is still strongly committed to globalisation. Right-wing accelerationism is not a backlash against globalisation and its combination of exit and constraint, but an argument that its logic should be extended downwards into the nation state. Grandiose claims about the “sovereign individual” and “network state” are so many arguments for replacing the nation state with an alternative that combines economic exit with corporate rule.

This is one variant of a more general Silicon Valley orientation towards the world. As David Broockman, Greg F. Ferenstein and Neil Malhotra documented back in 2019, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are globalisation-pilled:

On policies related to globalism, technology entrepreneurs are the most pro-globalism of any of the groups save for Democratic donors (0.14 to 0.36 scale points greater than the other groups, p < 0.01). For example, technology entrepreneurs are the most likely to say that trade policy should prioritise the wellbeing of those abroad instead of Americans (with 44 per cent agreeing), to disagree that we should pay less attention to problems overseas (with 53 per cent disagreeing), and to support free trade agreements (87 per cent). 56 per cent favour increasing levels of immigration, essentially equal to Democratic donors and more than any other sample, including fifteen points higher than Democratic citizens.

So too for the claims that innovation will actually enhance the dignity of workers rather than take it away. If you’re prepared to squint a bit, this seems to resemble the claims of technology-focused progressives and moderates such as Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson on the one hand, and Erik Brynjolfsson on the other. These latter thinkers argue for the benefits of labour-enhancing technology, and say we should build a trajectory that achieves those benefits.

But Vance is not arguing for choosing a worker-friendly trajectory, as far as I can see. Instead, he seems to believe that innovation as such benefits workers. As in Andreessen’s manifesto, the claim seems to be that technological change necessarily augments the value of work and hence the lives of workers. Hence, you can have both disruption-focused entrepreneurs and workers who want dignity in the same right-leaning political coalition.

At least, you can have them both as long as you don’t actually pay attention to how Silicon Valley honours the contention that innovation “dignifies” workers in the breach, not the practice. One of the most prominent shared beliefs of Silicon Valley elites, according to Broockman, Ferenstein and Malhotra, is their hostility to organised labour, and to anyone who tries to tell them what to do with the people who work for them:

[T]echnology entrepreneurs dramatically differ from Democratic Party conventional wisdom in one key policy area with important implications for economic inequality: regulation, especially of the labour market. Technology entrepreneurs are much more sceptical of government regulation than other Democrats; even technology entrepreneurs who identify as Democrats are much more opposed to regulation than are other Democrats. Technology entrepreneurs also overwhelmingly hope to see labour unions’ influence decline.

More broadly, the chief impetus of the Silicon Valley model over the last couple of decades has not been to elevate workers but to replace them. If, for example, AI does not replace workers — and replace workers wholesale — it won’t make enough money to merit the dizzying valuations set in a series of funding rounds. Perhaps this will be in workers’ interests in the long run, but in practice, few people focus on putative long runs when they are at the brunt end of creative destruction.

That Vance felt the need to give this speech suggests to me that there is a widening crack in the coalition. Perhaps it can be papered over, as Vance clearly hopes. But also, perhaps not.

It’s notable that three words related to Trump, technology and work do not appear anywhere in the speech: “Elon,” “Musk,” and “DOGE.” I suspect that it is going to be particularly difficult for Vance and his ilk to make the case for common cause between technology companies and the interests of ordinary workers while DOGE is publicly stress-testing the common Silicon Valley belief that everything could be done better with lots more algorithms and far fewer workers, and while tech leaders opinionate that we soon won’t need humans for “most things.”

You can either look back to some lost TradCath Eden in which workers were valued and everyone knew their place, or look forward to a post-Singularity utopia where work as we know it has been radically transformed. But you can’t plausibly aspire to both at once, however much Vance wishes you could. •

This article first appeared in Henry Farrell’s Programmable Mutter.

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But then something changed: people stopped paying attention to the news, or decided that they didn’t believe it anymore. They got distracted by cable TV, Facebook and TikTok. They became ill-informed, and started to make decisions that went against their best interests. The media decayed and fragmented, along with the nation. Opinion and news became indistinguishable, misinformation ran amok, and that is how we came to live in the post-truth world.

This story is not unsupported. Polls have long shown declining levels of trust in the media. Trust in many other institutions has fallen too, but in journalism it has plummeted. Since 1972, Gallup has been asking people in the United States, “How much trust and confidence do you have in the mass media?” The numbers used to be highly favourable, but in 2024 (and previously only in 2016 and 2023), more people said they had none (36 per cent) than said they had a lot (31 per cent). At the same time, a survey of how highly Americans rated the ethics of various professions found that only a fifth believed journalists’ ethical standards were “high or very high”: a better ranking than car salespeople and senators, but worse than bankers and chiropractors. Almost half said that journalists’ standards were “low or very low.”

Increasing numbers of Americans say they do not follow the news, and when they do, it is increasingly via factually unreliable social or alternative media. In some places, the picture looks rosier — the Nordic states, outliers as ever, have far higher levels of media trust — but one recent survey showed the balance of media trust and distrust across twenty-eight countries to be neutral at best, and negative among the most developed.

At the same time, large swathes of the news business have been on the retreat, stricken by dwindling advertising revenue, hostile governments and declining audiences. In the United States, the number of working journalists dropped by more than a quarter between 2008 and 2020. Meanwhile, in 2022–23, the Committee to Protect Journalists recorded more journalists jailed worldwide than ever before.

Technological change — most recently and acutely the mainstreaming of generative artificial intelligence — and political polarisation present their own challenges. In the United States, for example, the fall in trust of journalists has been sharper and more consistent among Republican voters, and the conclusion that many people turn to the news more for affirmation than for information can be hard to resist. What passes for truth often depends on where one falls on the political spectrum: it’s no coincidence that Donald Trump’s venture into social media has “truth” in its name.

It’s a grim picture, but buried in the statistics is another story. People still worry about misinformation, even if they can’t agree on what to call it. “Fake news,” aptly defined as “information divorced from reality,” is not a new concept, but more Americans than used to now register displeasure with inaccurate or unverified information on social media, and a majority now think that somebody, perhaps even the federal government, should do something about it. There seems to be widespread recognition that bad facts are bad news — globally, fears of an “information war” are rising — and, despite endemic scepticism and distraction, there is an enduring thirst for reliable information. The question is, where can it be found, and how can its purveyors make themselves heard amid the noise?

One answer has been to lionise accuracy. For some, this represents a business opportunity. NBC, CBS and the BBC have all launched fact-checking units, and for the first presidential debate of 2024, the New York Times tasked twenty-nine staffers with fact-checking the candidates’ statements in real time. Not every entrant in the emergent accuracy economy is as large or well resourced: over the past decade, hundreds of small fact-checking websites have sprung up around the world, including many in countries, such as India, where press freedom is far from a guarantee.

Whether rooted in service or aimed towards revenue, though, this sort of “political fact-checking,” which spotlights specific claims and seeks to prove or disprove them, is not as neutral as some might like to imagine. Setting out to counter and correct inaccuracies, it often takes the form of rebuttal, and necessarily entails editorial decisions over what to cover (no outfit can scrutinise every statement by every politician, and none of them wants to). Its reach is limited, and it is unclear whether it is always helpful: as one journalism professor puts it, “Disinformation itself has become kind of a toxic term for a lot of people.”

An insistent focus on misinformation or disinformation may even inflate the scale of the problem, to the benefit of what the writer Joseph Bernstein has labelled “Big Disinfo,” and to the detriment of a publication’s appeal to uncommitted readers. The provision of accurate facts does not, in itself, necessarily engender trust: “notions of news and truth are linked to what people do with information rather than what journalism unilaterally decides are accurate portrayals of reality,” says media studies researcher Silvio Waisbord.

What is more certain is that from time to time every journalist, no matter how well meaning, gets something wrong, or misses the point. If journalists want to be trusted, they need to not only police the accuracy of others, but also to ensure that their own work is careful and considered. One way to achieve this is to practise the traditional (or “primary”) variety of fact-checking, which, whether carried out by someone called a fact checker or by reporters themselves, aims at verification in advance of publication.

Today, anyone who wants it can find reporting that is, as Michael Schudson puts it, “deeper, more analytical… less fully focused on what happened in the past twenty-four hours, more investigative, and more likely to take “holding government accountable” or “speaking truth to power” as an essential goal” than was the case fifty years ago. If there ever was a golden age of journalism, we may still be living in it. The trouble is, much of the public — turned off, bored, or riled into disbelief — has ceased to listen. Pointing out the mistakes of others is not enough. If people are to trust journalists, we need to earn it.

The New Yorker, where  I work, has a reputation for accuracy. At least, that’s what the magazine tells itself. In reality, whether or not it is to be believed depends on whom you ask.

A prospectus announcing the first issue of The New Yorker in 1925 promised that,

As compared to the newspaper, the New Yorker will be interpretative rather than stenographic. It will print facts that it will have to go behind the scenes to get, but it will not deal in scandal for the sake of scandal nor sensation for the sake of sensation. Its integrity will be above suspicion.

(The same document was also where Harold Ross, the founding editor, was first rude enough to say that his new publication would “not be edited for the old lady in Dubuque.” The past hundred years have brought remarkably little change to some aspects of the magazine’s attitude, which remains equal parts tongue-in-cheek, earnest and supercilious. But today, such subscribers are highly desirable.)

True to Ross’s mandate, the New Yorker maintains an obsessive interest in facts, one that can sometimes seem to go beyond any obvious practical advantage. It didn’t take long for the early editors to recognise the usefulness of at least basic stenography. In 1927, the magazine published a profile of the poet Edna St Vincent Millay, “America’s first starlet,” claiming, among other fanciful details, that her father had been a stevedore (he was a schoolteacher). The embarrassment inspired Ross to install a fact-checking department, and since then, checkers have left their marks all over the magazine. John McPhee, in an essay published in 2009, depicted fact-checking as a pursuit bordering on mania. To shore up one important but rickety anecdote of his concerning wartime nuclear reactors, a checker placed calls that “ricocheted all over the United States: from Brookhaven to Bethesda, from La Jolla to Los Alamos.” The chase culminated, moments before the press deadline, in a call to a Florida police department, which the checker enlisted to track down a crucial witness. (He turned out to have gone to a mall.)

Not many pieces require such heroics: the reality is that fact-checkers are busy people, who traffic only infrequently in the dark arts of deep research. Most facts can be checked far more easily, especially with the benefit of the internet, and since there are so many, a checker has to prioritise. When a particular fact turns out to be especially sticky, persistence and attention, rather than any kind of special knowledge, are generally what’s needed. Checkers, of course, are not infallible, and their successes are mostly attributable to hard work and creativity. What is truly extraordinary about having a fact-checking department is that it exists at all. At the time of writing, thirty people work in fact-checking at the New Yorker, almost all of them full-time. It is labour, at scale, that produces accuracy.

Today, with a few pragmatic exceptions, fact-checkers go over everything published by the New Yorker, editing for accuracy, balance, fairness and context. Writers are asked to share their sourcing; checkers review both research materials (books, articles, emails, documents) and original reporting. For complex topics, and as needed for corroboration, they do their own independent research, perhaps conferring with relevant experts. And unless there’s a good reason not to, they get in touch with every person and entity mentioned in the story, and comb through what’s attributed to or said about them.

This fulfills a few functions. If the person cooperates, as they typically do, the checker can verify factual details, including those that appear within quotes. If they disagree with something, they get a chance to comment or correct the record. And if they are angry, well, it’s better to know. (This step is also important in libel-proofing a piece: under US law, a good-faith and thorough effort to discover the truth is a solid defence should you accidentally publish an actionable inaccuracy. No matter how solid your standards are, it doesn’t look great if you didn’t bother trying to contact the person involved.)

Checkers may discover hidden holes in a story, or garner perspectives that ought to be included. Most importantly, perhaps, this process, which is a kind of re-reporting, gives a fact-checker an opportunity to find out the basis of each statement of fact or opinion: is it personal experience, the pages of a half-remembered book, a third-hand rumour, or years of study? The value of a source, whether a person or a document, comes down mostly to their access to information, and to its quality.

Depending on the stakes — are we talking about what I ate for breakfast, or where I saw the crime occur? — and on what other sources are available, a checker may then need to seek corroboration or to do some reporting of their own. Finally, based on all this, they can decide what to say, and how: after a fashion, they decide what the magazine believes to be true.

Truth, in this sense, is sought and rendered, something produced by rigorous inquiry and informed consideration rather than something discovered. Many points, tweaked where necessary, can be stated as fact, but often a checker will want to insert a citation (‘according to…”) or present conflicting accounts. Tone matters, and may be used to indicate the level of confidence: a well-judged assertion may be one that leaves room for doubt. Falsehoods which reveal something about the speaker may have enough value to keep, so long as they are rebutted, but statements that are truly unverifiable, or clearly and unfixably specious, will typically be cut: deciding what not to publish is sometimes just as important as deciding what to keep in. In the landscape of a story, fact-checkers’ trails can often be followed along a path of hedges and denials, but an elegant fix may render the footwork behind it invisible. (Dispiritingly, checking tends to be at its most visible when it goes wrong, as when, despite Der Spiegel’s dozens-strong research department, a star reporter there recently turned out to have fabricated many of his stories.)

Subscribers to the New Yorker, of whom there were roughly 1.3 million at last count, seem to place a good deal of trust in this process. We know that they do because they’re so upset when we get something wrong. (Letter writers’ snide tendency to complain about failures of “the New Yorker’s vaunted fact-checking department” is surely a form of flattery.) Because the New Yorker, like many other publications, trades on its reputation for accuracy, readers can easily feel cheated, even betrayed, when an error slips in. This is not simply a commercial problem. “Trust,” as the philosopher Annette Baier once wrote, “is a fragile plant,” one that can easily be damaged by the kind of increased scrutiny or scepticism that a flaw, once noticed, tends to induce. Once the roots have withered, they can be hard to restore.

Trust is something that journalists ask for. It’s also something that they give. Just as readers learn about the world from the news, so journalists learn from their sources. Another philosopher, Neil Levy, points out that “much — perhaps most — of what we know, we know on the basis of testimony, and (except in some unusual cases) we acquire knowledge through testimony only when we trust speakers.” Most information comes to us from other people, whom we choose, deliberately or without thinking, to believe. As journalists, how and why we make those choices is particularly important. In the same essay, Levy writes that “trust makes us vulnerable,” and if this is the case for a writer, it’s doubly so for their reader. No reporter can avoid that vulnerability, but mediating it is essential to earning and keeping the trust of a reader. Journalists choose whom to trust on their readers’ behalf.

For journalists, as for anyone, there are certain shortcuts to trustworthiness, including reputation, expertise and transparency — the sharing of sources, for example, or the prompt correction of errors. Some of these shortcuts are more perilous than others. Various outfits, positioning themselves as neutral guides to the marketplace of ideas, now tout evaluations of news organisations’ trustworthiness, but relying on these requires trusting in the quality and objectivity of the evaluation. Official data is often taken at face value, but numbers can conceal motives: think of the disputes over how to count casualties in recent conflicts. Governments, meanwhile, may use their powers over information to suppress unfavourable narratives: in Hong Kong, “fake news” laws ostensibly aimed at misinformation threaten free expression; some see the same spectre in America.

While certain categories of information may come to be considered inherently trustworthy, these, too, are in flux. For decades, the technical difficulty of editing photographs and videos allowed them to be treated, by most people, as essentially incontrovertible. With the advent of AI-based editing tools, footage and imagery have swiftly become much harder to credit. Similar tools are already being used to spoof voices based on only seconds of recorded audio. For the average person, this might manifest in scams, but for a journalist, it puts source calls in question.

Technologies of deception tend to be accompanied by ones of detection or verification — cryptographic keys, for example, have long been used to verify identity online, and a battery of companies already promise that they can spot AI-manipulated imagery — but especially at a moment of rapid change, these remain deeply fallible. Though chatbots and AI-enabled search engines promise to help us with research (when a colleague at the New Yorker “interviewed” ChatGPT, it told him “I aim to provide information that is as neutral and unbiased as possible”), their inability to provide sourcing, and their tendency to hallucinate, look more like a shortcut to nowhere, at least for now.

The consequent problems extend far beyond journalism: election campaigns, where subtle impressions can lead to big differences in voting behaviour, seem increasingly vulnerable to deepfakes and inscrutable algorithms. Like everyone else, fact-checkers have only just begun to grapple with the consequences.

In such a landscape, it becomes difficult to know what is true, and, consequently, to make decisions. Trust and naivety can feel uncomfortably close. We live in complex societies, where the media often functions as “the expert system helping people navigate the social and political world.” If this system fails, and nothing takes its place, the consequences look dire. But failure — the endpoint of the story of generational decay, of gold exchanged for dross — is not inevitable. Fact-checking of the sort practised at the New Yorker is only one potential, highly specific and resource-intensive solution, but its relationship to the basic tenets of editorial good practice make it worth examining. It acknowledges the messiness of truth, the requirements of attention, the way we squint to see more clearly. It tells you to say what you mean, and know that you mean it. •

This essay appears in Age of Doubt: Building Trust in a World of Misinformation, edited by Tracey Kirkland and Gavin Fang, published this month by Monash University Publishing.

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Who cares about poll numbers anymore, you might ask. Congressional Republicans should. They are on the ballot next year, and they could easily lose control of the House. If Trump doesn’t defy political gravity, he could drag them down, just as he did in his first term.

Presidential polling honeymoons always end, but rarely so fast.

Bill Clinton, in Gallup polling, had a rough beginning but didn’t go underwater until May 1993, four months in. At the end of February, his 59 per cent approval was thirty points higher than his disapproval, marking an eight-point drop in net approval from the prior month.

George W. Bush, who came into office without a popular-vote majority, was cruising in the polls after one month, with a Real Clear Politics job-approval average of around 60 per cent, nearly forty points more than his disapproval. Net approval narrowed to thirteen points before the 11 September attacks prompted an intense national unity that temporarily sent his poll numbers into the stratosphere. His numbers wouldn’t go underwater until the summer of 2004, though he recovered enough to eke out re-election.

Barack Obama had a six-point slippage in net job approval over his first month in 2009, according to Real Clear Politics. Still, his job approval was steady in the low 60s, and his disapproval ticked up from a modest 20 per cent to 27 per cent. The bruising, though ultimately successful, fight for healthcare reform would drive Obama’s numbers underwater, but not until early 2010.

Trump essentially spent his entire first term underwater in the polls, won the presidency in 2016 without a popular-vote majority; his job disapproval was consistently higher than his approval in both Real Clear Politics and FiveThirtyEight polling averages.

In 2024, Trump won the popular vote (albeit with a plurality, not a majority) and during his first month remained above water in the job approval averages. In turn, some media coverage of the recent polls has noted that Trump is more popular than ever. But grading Trump on a curve doesn’t give us an accurate read of the electoral pulse. And it doesn’t inform Congressional Republicans how firm their political ground is. Remember, Trump will not be on the ballot in 2026, but the House Republican majority will.

Trump’s numbers are sinking because he has swiftly implemented radical policies many people do not want. According to the Washington Post-Ipsos poll, the public opposes mass civil service firings, shutdowns of federal agencies including the foreign aid conduit USAID, banning transgender people from military service, and scrapping diversity programs. Only 34 per cent of respondents approved of Elon Musk’s involvement in the administration, while 57 per cent believe Trump has “gone beyond his authority as president.”

Trump’s voters expected him to improve the economy, yet approval of his handling of the economy is already underwater, with huge majorities still upset about food and energy prices. While Trump has been extremely busy gutting the federal government, he’s done nothing about the cost of living — the issue on the minds of most Americans — except institute new tariffs, which raise prices, and threaten many more. A recent University of Michigan survey found consumer sentiment declined by ten points, driven by inflation fears.

Presidents and their parties can recover from slippages, of course. Obama’s Affordable Care Act was initially unpopular and, combined with the sluggish recovery from the Great Recession, led to an awful Democratic midterm in 2010. But his overall legislative and economic record looked better by 2012, when he won re-election. Six years later, Republicans suffered a backlash in the midterms after trying to repeal Obamacare program.

So, don’t assume Trump’s poll slide will continue. But if you are a congressional Republican, can you be confident that slapdash decisions made by Trump and Musk today will look better in nineteen months? Nothing from Trump’s first administration suggests he learned how poor governing choices could lead to poor electoral outcomes, and nothing in the past month suggests any lessons were learned from the first administration beyond how to break things faster.

Perhaps Republicans will cling to the hope that Trump’s bravado will matter more than policy decisions and economic conditions. After all, Trump is “one of the most skilled propagandists in history,” as the historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat told the New York Times this week.

But Trump’s propaganda skills have worked best when he is out of office and can blame everything on those in power. They failed him in 2018 when the Republicans lost the House and in 2020 when Democrats regained the White House and the Senate. When you’re in charge and things go wrong, deflecting blame is much harder, even for the most shameless propagandists.

Trump’s hold on Republican officeholders remains strong. I doubt many of them support Trump’s echoing of Russian narratives about Ukraine or defense secretary Pete Hegseth’s plan for annual 8 per cent cuts in the military budget over the next five years. But they are afraid to say as much and risk the president’s wrath and a primary challenge.

Yet a continuing presidential poll slide with a midterm election on the horizon could, and should, focus the mind not just on the president’s temperament but on the voters. Trump could become a dead weight for his party. Congressional Republicans in swing districts and those not necessarily seen as vulnerable today should think about what has been unthinkable: creating some distance between themselves and Trump. •

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Steve Bannon: The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time…

All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity. So it’s got to start, and it’s got to hammer, and it’s got to —

Michael Kirk: What was the word?

Bannon: Muzzle velocity.

Muzzle velocity. Bannon’s insight here is real. Focus is the fundamental substance of democracy. It is particularly the substance of opposition. People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media — be it mainstream media or social media. If you overwhelm the media — if you give it too many places it needs to look, all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next — no coherent opposition can emerge. It is hard to even think coherently.

Donald Trump’s first two weeks in the White House followed Bannon’s strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasn’t in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trump’s country now. This is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. If Trump tells the state to stop spending money, the money stops. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, it’s over.

Or so he wants you to think. In Trump’s first term, we were told: Don’t normalise him. In his second, the task is different: Don’t believe him.

Trump knows the power of marketing. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true. Trump clawed his way back to great wealth by playing a fearsome billionaire on TV; he remade himself as a winner by refusing to admit he had ever lost. The American presidency is a limited office. But Trump has never wanted to be president, at least not as defined in article II of the US constitution. He has always wanted to be king. His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.

Don’t believe him. Trump has real powers — but they are the powers of the presidency. The pardon power is vast and unrestricted, and so he could pardon the 6 January rioters. Federal security protection is under the discretion of the executive branch, and so he could remove it from Anthony Fauci and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and Mark Milley and even Brian Hook, a largely unknown former State Department official under threat from Iran who donated time to Trump’s transition team. It was an act of astonishing cruelty and callousness from a man who nearly died by an assassin’s bullet — as much as anything ever has been, this, to me, was an X-ray of the smallness of Trump’s soul — but it was an act that was within his power.

But the president cannot rewrite the constitution. Within days, the birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge — a Reagan appointee — who told Trump’s lawyers, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.” A judge froze the spending freeze before it was even scheduled to go into effect, and shortly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded the order, in part to avoid the court case.

What Bannon wanted — what the Trump administration wants — is to keep everything moving fast. Muzzle velocity, remember. If you’re always consumed by the next outrage, you can’t look closely at the last one. The impression of Trump’s power remains; the fact that he keeps stepping on rakes is missed. The projection of strength obscures the reality of weakness. Don’t believe him.

You could see this a few ways: is Trump playing a part, making a bet, or triggering a crisis? Those are the options. I am not certain he knows the answer. Trump has always been an improviser. But if you take it as calculated, here is the calculation: perhaps this Supreme Court, stocked with his appointees, gives him powers no peacetime president has ever possessed. Perhaps all of this becomes legal now that he has asserted its legality. It is not impossible to imagine that bet paying off.

But Trump’s odds are bad. So what if the bet fails and his arrogations of power are soundly rejected by the courts? Then comes the question of constitutional crisis: does he ignore the court’s ruling? To do that would be to attempt a coup. I wonder if they have the stomach for it. The withdrawal of the Office of Management and Budget’s order to freeze spending suggests they don’t. Bravado aside, Trump’s political capital is thin. Both in his first and second terms, he entered office with approval ratings below that of any president in the modern era. Gallup has Trump’s approval rating at 47 per cent — about ten points beneath Joe Biden’s in January 2021.

There is a reason Trump is doing all of this through executive orders rather than submitting these same directives as legislation to pass through Congress. A more powerful executive could persuade Congress to eliminate the spending he opposes or reform the civil service to give himself the powers of hiring and firing that he seeks. To write these changes into legislation would make them more durable and allow him to argue their merits in a more strategic way. Even if Trump’s aim is to bring the civil service to heel — to rid it of his opponents and turn it to his own ends — he would be better off arguing that he is simply trying to bring the high-performance management culture of Silicon Valley to the federal government. You never want a power grab to look like a power grab.

But Republicans have a mere three-seat edge in the House, and Trump has done nothing to reach out to Democrats. If he tried to pass this agenda as legislation, it would most likely fail in the House, and it would certainly die before the filibuster in the Senate, where the margin is also slim. And that would make Trump look weak. Trump does not want to look weak. He remembers John McCain humiliating him in his first term by casting the deciding vote against Obamacare repeal.

This is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: he is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.

The flurry of activity is meant to suggest the existence of a plan. The Trump team wants it known that they’re ready this time. They will control events rather than be controlled by them. But the closer you look, the less true that seems. They are scrambling and flailing already. They are leaking against one another already. We’ve learned, already, that the Office of Management and Budget directive was drafted, reportedly, without the input or oversight of key Trump officials — “it didn’t go through the proper approval process,” an administration official told the Washington Post. For this to be the process and product of a signature initiative in the second week of a president’s second term is embarrassing.

But it’s not just that directive. The Trump administration is waging an immediate war on the bureaucracy, trying to replace the “deep state” it believes hampered it in the first term. A big part of this project seems to have been outsourced to Elon Musk, who is bringing the tactics he used at Twitter to the federal government. He has placed longtime aides in the Office of Personnel Management, and the email sent to nearly all federal employees even reused the subject line of the email he sent to Twitter employees: “Fork in the Road.” Musk wants you to know it was him.

The email offers millions of civil servants a backdoor buyout. Agree to resign and in theory, at least, you can collect your paycheck and benefits until the end of September without doing any work. The Department of Government Efficiency account on X described it this way: “Take the vacation you always wanted, or just watch movies and chill, while receiving your full government pay and benefits.” The Washington Post reported that the email “blindsided” many in the Trump administration who would normally have consulted on a notice like that.

I suspect Musk thinks of the federal work force as a huge mass of woke ideologues. But most federal workers have very little to do with politics. About 16 per cent of the federal work force is in healthcare. These are, for instance, nurses and doctors who work for Veterans Affairs. How many of them does Musk want to lose? What plans does the VA have for attracting and training their replacements? How quickly can he do it?

The Social Security Administration has more than 59,000 employees. Does Musk know which ones are essential to operations and unusually difficult to replace? One likely outcome of this scheme is that a lot of talented people who work in nonpolitical jobs and could make more elsewhere take the lengthy vacation and leave government services in tatters. Twitter works poorly after Musk’s takeover, with more frequent outages and bugs, but its outages are not a national scandal. When VA healthcare degrades, it is. To have sprung this attack on the civil service so loudly and publicly and brazenly is to be assured of the blame if anything goes wrong.

What Trump wants you to see in all this activity is command. What is really in all this activity is chaos. They do not have some secret reservoir of focus and attention the rest of us do not. They have convinced themselves that speed and force is a strategy unto itself — that it is, in a sense, a replacement for a real strategy. Don’t believe them.

I had a conversation a couple months ago with someone who knows how the federal government works about as well as anyone alive. I asked him what would worry him most if he saw Trump doing it. What he told me is that he would worry most if Trump went slowly. If he began his term by doing things that made him more popular and made his opposition weaker and more confused. If he tried to build strength for the midterms while slowly expanding his powers and chipping away at the deep state where it was weakest.

But he didn’t. And so the opposition to Trump, which seemed so listless after the election, is beginning to rouse itself.

There is a subreddit for federal employees where one of the top posts reads: “This non ‘buyout’ really seems to have backfired. I’ll be honest, before that email went out, I was looking for any way to get out of this fresh hell. But now I am fired up to make these goons as frustrated as possible.” As I write this, it’s been upvoted more than 39,000 times and civil servant after civil servant is echoing the initial sentiment.

In Iowa this week, Democrats flipped a state Senate seat in a district that Trump won easily in 2024. The attempted spending freeze gave Democrats their voice back, as they zeroed in on the popular programs Trump had imperiled. Trump isn’t building support; he’s losing it. Trump isn’t fracturing his opposition; he’s uniting it.

This is the weakness of the strategy that Bannon proposed and Trump is following. It is a strategy that forces you into overreach. To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting, keep moving, keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear. You overwhelm yourself. And there’s only so much you can do through executive orders. Soon enough, you have to go beyond what you can actually do. And when you do that, you either trigger a constitutional crisis or you reveal your own weakness.

Trump may not see his own fork in the road coming. He may believe he has the power he is claiming. That would be a mistake on his part — a self-deception that could doom his presidency. But the real threat is if he persuades the rest of us to believe he has power he does not have.

The first two weeks of Trump’s presidency have not shown his strength. He is trying to overwhelm you. He is trying to keep you off-balance. He is trying to persuade you of something that isn’t true. Don’t believe him. •

This is an edited transcript of an audio essay on the New York Times’s Ezra Klein Show.

The post Don’t believe him appeared first on Inside Story.

The Trump administration illegally spent money appropriated for immigrant detainees on dog food and night-vision goggles for Border Patrol. It illegally diverted funding from the military to build a border wall. More than thirty times, courts found that the Trump administration’s policies were implemented illegally.

The result was more — not less — border chaos and less — not more — safety for Americans. Trump’s misguided enforcement priorities allowed criminals to enter while ejecting peaceful immigrants. At the same time, Trump severely curtailed legal immigration.

President Biden made a concerted effort to rebuild the immigration system despite a hostile political climate and a less-than-supportive Congress. But, sadly, President Trump is set to destroy it again.

The assault on the rule of law during Trump’s first term was so relentless that many of his changes could not be stopped. By his last full month in office, Trump abused his authority and cut legal immigration from abroad by nearly 80 per cent and refugees by 92 per cent. He removed requirements that focused interior enforcement on public safety threats. He reassigned Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, agents from terrorism and smuggling cases to track low-level visa overstay offenders. He forced US attorneys to prioritise misdemeanour family-separation prosecutions of parents over sex offenders. Thanks to such misguided enforcement priorities, Trump ended up releasing twice as many convicted criminals as President Biden.

By the time Trump left office, he had cut:

• total grants of legal permanent residence or green cards by 54 per cent from their 2016 average

• immigrant visas that have a path to a green card by 78 per cent

• non-immigrant visas for temporary workers, students, and tourists by 82 per cent

• refugees entering legally from abroad by 92 per cent

• asylum seekers lawfully entering at ports of entry by 93 per cent.

In short, he completely and totally gutted legal immigration. But when people don’t have legal means of entering the country, they resort to illegal means, resulting in border chaos.

And, indeed, by December 2020, Trump’s last full month in office, Border Patrol arrests were at the highest level for any December since 1999. Evasions of Border Patrol were a whopping 75 per cent, higher than when Trump had entered office. Encounters with convicted criminals had tripled.

In other words, Trump left for President Biden an immigration system that was in complete shambles. The infrastructure was gutted. Immigration courts were closed; consulates for processing visas around the world were limited only to “emergency” cases; ports of entry were blocked to “nonessential” travel.

President Biden had to begin from scratch. Yet Congress failed in its duty to appropriate the necessary resources to rebuild the gutted immigration system. Biden made a great deal of headway despite the magnitude of the task and the paucity of resources.

To be sure, he acted too slowly and too timidly in the face of this challenge — but the fact is that it was always going to take time to undo the mess Trump left with no help from Congress and active obstruction by the states. Plus, the US had the hottest labour market in the world, attracting migration to its southern border. Border Patrol arrests, which had already reached the highest level in twenty-one years before Biden took office, rose even faster as the US economic recovery outpaced the rest of the world’s.

So what did Biden do to restore the US immigration system?

He reprioritized public safety threats in the interior and cut releases of convicted criminals from detention in half. He reunited hundreds of children separated from their parents during President Trump’s cruel zero-tolerance border policy and ended discriminatory travel bans that separated families based on their birthplace. He refocused on border security, doubling detention, removing three times as many border crossers as President Trump.

But his crackdown wasn’t what saved the system. It was fixing legal immigration that most contributed to ending the crisis. Biden restored visa and refugee processing to above 2016 levels. He also deregulated the parole process to allow asylum seekers to enter in a lawful and orderly way.

This was working. Yes, overall crossings initially increased during the economic recovery, but by Biden’s final months, Border Patrol encounters were down 33 per cent, and criminal crossings were down 57 per cent compared to Trump’s final months. Evasions of Border Patrol were down 42 per cent, falling immediately after President Biden reversed Trump’s expulsion to Mexico policy. The share of US Customs and Border Protection encounters with people who crossed illegally fell from 98 per cent to 49 per cent — meaning that at the end of Biden’s term, and for the first time ever, most immigrants coming to the US border were applying to enter legally through a regulated and screened lawful pathway.

But President Trump is already undoing all the progress. The slew of executive orders he issued on his first day violate the US constitution, target peaceful people while leaving violent felons alone, and by limiting legal immigration, will inevitably encourage illegal immigration.

He suspended resettlement entirely for refugees from abroad, including for Afghans who backed the US military and Iranian Christians en route to the United States. The president ordered violations of the constitution’s fourteenth Amendment, denying the legitimacy of millions of Americans their citizenship and threatening to deport babies born in America. He declared a national emergency at the border, even though illegal immigration is falling and significantly lower now than it was when he was last in office.

He has baselessly declared an “invasion,” which under the Constitution would authorise states to make war and open the potential for habeas corpus to be suspended. He is threatening to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to deploy the military to arrest, detain, and remove people without proving to courts that they are removable noncitizens. He has moved to illegally block law enforcement grants intended for local policing and public safety for cities that fail to cooperate with his agenda. All in all, President Trump’s orders explicitly declare that he is above US law, and he asserts that he can ignore any immigration law that members of Congress write.

The president once mused that he wanted to be dictator for a day. But despite its awesome powers, the presidency is no place for a dictator and the United States no place for an authoritarian. Congress should defend its powers and the U.S. Constitution and our rights before they’re gone.

Immigrants come to America because it is the land of the free. Let’s keep it that way. •

This essay article been adapted from congressional testimony David J. Bier provided the House Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement on 25 January. It first appeared in the Unpopulist.

The post Chaos and cruelty appeared first on Inside Story.

We’re only two weeks into Trump’s presidency, and that optimistic scenario is looking more and more remote by the day. Trump is creating a lot of institutional chaos, and I’ll talk about that in a bit. Today I’m going to talk about Trump’s main economic policy: tariffs.

In Trump’s first term, he enacted a bunch of tariffs on China and a few tariffs on specific products like steel and aluminium from a variety of countries. This ended up raising prices very slightly for American consumers, but otherwise having little effect on the nation’s economy, manufacturing sector, or trade deficit. Why? As I see it, there were three basic reasons.

First, the tariffs weren’t actually that high or that broad in terms of which countries and products they affected. Second, China rerouted some of its exports through third countries like Vietnam. And third, the tariffs caused the US dollar to appreciate and the Chinese yuan to depreciate, which cancelled out maybe about one-third or more of the intended effect.

I think that benign experience gave a lot of people a sense of complacency. If Trump kept tariffs narrow and symbolic, they probably wouldn’t hurt US households by an appreciable degree, and targeted tariffs on Chinese strategic tech products would even help us in the military–industrial competition with our main rival.

But it was not to be. Trump just announced  25 per cent tariffs on all products from Canada and Mexico (except for a 10 per cent tariff on Canadian energy imports), as well as a 10 per cent tariff on products from China. He followed this up with a promise to impose tariffs on the European Union. This is very different from his first-term tariffs, for two reasons. First, they’re on a far broader set of products than before. And second, these tariffs mainly strike at US allies instead of at a US rival.

The second part of this is worth remarking on. It’s part of a larger pattern of Trump attacking friendly nations. As with his aggressive rhetoric toward NATO countries, he seems to feel deeply that America’s allies are taking advantage of us, and need to be brought to heel. But it’s striking that Trump’s new 10 per cent tariffs on China — the focus of his first-term trade war — are so much less than his tariffs on Canada and Mexico. In his first term, Trump talked about reversing trade deficits, but America’s deficit with Canada and Mexico together is less than half of its deficit with China:

Source: CIA via Wikipedia

It seems reasonable to worry that the Chinese Communist Party may have succeeded in gaining a measure of influence over Trump.

As usual with Trump’s tariffs, there’s the possibility that he’ll remove them once the targeted countries comply with some demand or make some symbolic concession. But it’s not yet clear what Trump actually wants from Canada and Mexico. His tariff announcement talks about illegal immigration and fentanyl:

The extraordinary threat posed by illegal aliens and drugs, including deadly fentanyl, constitutes a national emergency… Until the crisis is alleviated, President Donald J. Trump is implementing a 25% additional tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico… President Trump is taking bold action to hold Mexico, Canada, and China accountable to their promises of halting illegal immigration and stopping poisonous fentanyl and other drugs from flowing into our country… The orders make clear that the flow of contraband drugs like fentanyl to the United States, through illicit distribution networks, has created a national emergency, including a public health crisis… There is also a growing presence of Mexican cartels operating fentanyl and nitazene synthesis labs in Canada. A recent study recognized Canada’s heightened domestic production of fentanyl, and its growing footprint within international narcotics distribution.

So it’s possible that if Mexico agrees to crack down on illegal border-crossing and Mexico and Canada both agree to take some sort of action to crack down on fentanyl, Trump will lift the tariffs. These actions might be substantive, or they might be purely symbolic, like China’s concessions in Trump’s first term (which of course it reneged on).

If Mexico and Canada get Trump to drop tariffs by taking symbolic actions, it will seem to justify the belief that Trump is all bluster and smoke, and that all he really wants is to force other countries to bend the knee and acknowledge his power. This would be distasteful, but it’s clearly the best possible outcome for both Americans and for the people of Canada and Mexico.

But even in that best-case scenario, the uncertainty generated by this policy will be considerable. American businesses that rely on imports from Canada, Mexico and other US allies — including many manufacturers — won’t be able to make long-term plans about sourcing. And American businesses that rely on exports to Canada, Mexico and other allies will have to worry about future trade wars and future retaliations. Uncertainty is bad for business and generally bad for the economy.

But if Trump keeps the 25 per cent tariffs on Canada and Mexico in place, it will be a very significant policy. Although Canada and Mexico are responsible for less of America’s trade deficit than China, they’re responsible for much more of our total imports:

Source: Observatory of Economic Complexity

Economist Brad Setser has made some back-of-the-envelope calculations showing that the new tariffs are more than twice as big as Trump’s tariffs during his first term — even before adding in potential additional tariffs on the European Union. Things are starting to get serious.

What harms could the tariffs do? Well, the most obvious one is that they’ll raise prices for American consumers. The Yale Budget Lab has some estimates of how much these tariffs will increase prices for various goods in the US, and while it’s not catastrophic, it’s also enough to be noticeable. Here’s a truncated version of their chart:

Source: Yale Budget Lab

What’s more dangerous is if these price increases manage to reignite inflation expectations. Already, market expectations of inflation over the next five years have risen since it became likely that Trump was going to win the 2024 election. They now stand at 2.5 per cent — still not super high, but generally higher than over the last two years.

If inflation expectations go higher, it could cause a self-fulfilling prophecy where businesses raise their prices in the expectation that other businesses will do the same. That would force the Fed to either raise interest rates or accept higher inflation. And it could make Americans very angry.

(Exchange rate appreciation, of course, will cancel out some of the impact of tariffs — maybe a third or even half. But a stronger dollar has the downside of making US exporters less competitive.)

And the negative consequences go well beyond consumer prices. American manufacturers could be severely hurt by the disruption of their supply chains. When I wrote about the problems with broad tariffs back in November, I pointed this out:

Broad tariffs also raise costs for American manufacturers, without increasing costs for Chinese manufacturers.

Consider the market for cars. Car companies use a lot of steel and aluminium to make cars. When steel and aluminium get more expensive in America, that raises costs for American car companies. That makes them less competitive, both in the domestic market and abroad.

So if the US puts broad tariffs on everything we import, that will include steel and aluminium. GM and Ford and Tesla will be paying higher prices for steel and aluminium because of the tariffs, so they’ll have to raise the prices of their cars. But BYD and other Chinese car companies won’t have higher costs, because the tariff only applies in America. So the Chinese car companies will gain a competitive edge against the American car companies. That will make Chinese car imports cheaper and American car exports more expensive.

In fact, we have good evidence that this happens. Lake and Liu (2022) studied the effects of Bush-era tariffs on steel and aluminium, and found that they hurt steel-consuming industries like the auto industry… Across-the-board tariffs make US-made cars and semiconductors and washing machines and refrigerators and farm equipment and robots more expensive, because they raise the cost of imported inputs like steel, aluminium, photoresist, batteries, and so on. But foreign-made products can still get cheap inputs, because they aren’t paying tariffs.

Brian Albrecht has a good post explaining this in basic Econ 101 terms. Some excerpts:

As I’ve explained before, one implicit assumption in this argument is that trade is in finished products for consumers. But a large part of international trade occurs in intermediate inputs and components, not finished products ready for consumers. Companies import parts, materials, and unfinished goods to use in their own production processes. This means tariffs often act more like a tax on domestic manufacturers who use these imports, raising their costs instead of protecting them from foreign competition…

[R]esearch by Handley, Kamal, and Monarch examining the 2018–19 US tariffs — which included duties on solar panels, washing machines, steel, aluminium, and a wide range of Chinese imports — found that products more exposed to tariffs on imported inputs experienced significantly lower export growth. This effect was equivalent to foreign countries imposing a two percent tariff on US exports. On average, exports of unaffected products grew two percentage points faster than affected items. The tariffs intended to protect domestic industries ended up acting as a tax on US exporters, undermining their global competitiveness.

In fact, the real situation is even more complex than Brian’s simple model suggests, because many of the intermediate goods the US imports from Canada and Mexico are themselves made using US exports. Automakers have stated that if the tariffs go into effect, it will shut down a lot of automotive production on both sides of the Canadian and Mexican borders. Supply chains are a delicate web, and if you want to smash them with tariffs, you better have a good reason for doing so.

For China, national security might provide us with such a reason; fentanyl labs across the Canadian and Mexican borders are not one. Trump’s new round of tariffs has been roundly condemned by pro-business voices such as the US Chamber of Commerce, Tyler Cowen, and the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board. The WSJ called it “the dumbest trade war in history.”

I’m not sure if that superlative applies, but it’s certainly America’s dumbest trade war in living memory. There’s really no upside for the country here — it’s not going to help domestic manufacturing, it’s not going to make Americans better off, it’s not going to materially affect the fentanyl problem, and on top of all the economic risks it’s going to piss off US allies and make America look terrible.

I still hold out hope that the tariffs will be quickly revoked after some sort of symbolic concessions. But if not, then we’ll know that we’ve left the era where Trump just blustered and preened, and entered a more frightening era where he starts lashing out and breaking things. •

The post Trump starts to break things appeared first on Inside Story.

According to the most popular strand of this thinking, the Brexit vote and Trump’s victory were the reverberations of a profound economic and social transformation. Globalisation and technological change had shattered the livelihoods of working-class people and eviscerated their communities, provoking a groundswell of anger and resentment, a populist rejection of the status quo and the political establishment.

Since then, observers have been quick to find further evidence of the surging force of populism in an ever-lengthening list of countries, including Brazil, Hungary, India, Italy and Sweden. An electoral surge for a supposedly populist party anywhere in the world renews the drumbeat of alarm that populism is submerging established party systems and, ominously, democracy itself.

And yet for all the alarm that populism has generated, its nature and political significance are widely misunderstood. The metaphor of a “populist wave” reflects this error. It exaggerates the electoral success of populism around the world, which has been rather more modest than it sometimes appears. It also exaggerates the coherence of populism as a political tendency, overlooking the extent to which ostensibly populist entrepreneurs in different times and places have appealed to distinct grievances. Even more important, the metaphor overstates the implications of populist parties’ electoral successes for policymaking and for democratic stability.

Those panicking about the rise of populism tend to imagine that shifts in public opinion fuel the success of populist parties and figures; the public’s broadening antipathy to globalisation, immigration, integration (in the European context) and the political class threatens to empower extremists and undermine democracy. But that is demonstrably not the case.

Public opinion in the West on most typically “populist” issues has remained relatively stable for decades, belying the notion that a new surge of popular discontent is remaking the political landscape. Both in the United States and in many parts of Europe, the gains of populist and far-right forces have less to do with a genuine shift in political beliefs among the public than they do with changing elite politics.

In other words, top-down developments, not bottom-up ones, drive populism: an expanded menu of political alternatives for voters, more effective mobilisation of longstanding discontents, and the tendency of mainstream political leaders to concede in the face of challenges that are sometimes more illusory than real.

Liberal democracies do face genuine threats, including the potential erosion of important democratic norms and institutions. And citizens of democracies have long prized their own well-being and values over the defence of democratic procedures. But their passivity is to be expected, not understood as a sign of rebellion against the status quo. The political successes of populist groups and leaders do not in themselves augur democracy’s demise.

Misconstruing the nature and appeal of populism muddles a clearer understanding of the contemporary political landscape and distracts attention from the chronic vulnerabilities of democracy — notably, the perennial temptation for political leaders to entrench themselves in power.

The emergence of populist parties as significant electoral players in many parts of the world has been a shock to the unusually stable party systems of the decades since the Second World War, but in the longer arc of democratic politics it should hardly be surprising. Across Europe, for example, the average vote share for right-wing populist parties has increased by less than half a percentage point per year since the turn of the century. The rise of social democratic parties in many of these same countries in the early twentieth century was far more dramatic.

The impression of a relentless surge in support for populist parties is partly a product of media hype. The international press is fascinated and alarmed by their successes but mostly tends to ignore their struggles and downturns. The New York Times’s coverage of the 2023 election in Spain provides a striking illustration of this habit. Two weeks before the election, the Times rolled out a long front-page story portraying the rise of Vox, a far-right party, as “part of an increasing trend of hard-right parties surging in popularity.” The morning of the election, the paper ran another long front-page story whose headline touted a “Far Right Poised to Rise.” But the next day, after Vox fared poorly in the vote, the election result itself was reported only in a brief article on page 8.

The media’s fascination with populism doesn’t just warp conventional wisdom; it can have real consequences at the polls. British political scientists studying media coverage of Britain’s pro-Brexit UK Independence Party found that its electoral successes received “disproportionate attention” in the press, which in turn helped generate additional popular support. Insurgent parties thrive on the perception that they are viable alternatives to the status quo, and journalists unwittingly stoke that perception.

The press also routinely misinterprets shifts in electoral support for populist parties as evidence of momentous changes in public opinion. In fact, there is remarkably little relationship between support for these parties at the polls and underlying populist sentiment — the specific attitudes, such as antipathy toward immigrants, distrust of politicians, and nationalism (and in Europe, opposition to further European integration) that generally predict individual support for contemporary populist parties. That incongruity is paradoxical. How can the factors that account for populist support at the individual level not do so in the aggregate?

That is because support for populist parties depends on factors beyond the predispositions of voters. In particular times and places, populist parties succeed or fail mostly as a result of the quality of their leadership, the alternatives voters have to choose from, and the strategic incentives provided by electoral systems. These parties have long flourished in a variety of places where populist sentiment is relatively scarce.

The Swiss People’s Party, for instance, has garnered 25 to 30 per cent of the vote in each of the past six elections — more than any other populist party in western Europe — despite Switzerland’s unusually high levels of trust in politicians and satisfaction with the economy, the government and democracy. Populist parties in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden are among the most successful in Western Europe despite those countries having the continent’s most favourable attitudes toward immigrants. Conversely, populist parties were slow to emerge in Belgium, Ireland, Portugal and Spain — all places where public opinion exhibited more widespread populist sentiment.

In majoritarian democracies, winning parties are generally broad coalitions of diverse interests, and it is hard to gauge how much of a party’s support can be ascribed to “populist” rhetoric or policy positions. In the United States, for example, the Republican nominee for president won 46 per cent of the popular vote in 2016 and 47 per cent in 2020, but that is a testament to the strength of partisan loyalties in the current, highly polarised political environment, not to the specific appeal of populism or of Trump.

Trump won the 2016 Republican nomination with intense factional support in a crowded field, then mostly relied on the backing of traditional Republicans to defeat an unpopular Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, in the general election. Although the Republican Party has indeed reflected an increasingly populist cast in recent years, that is probably more a product than a cause of Trump’s success; loyal partisans are notoriously susceptible to cues from party leaders.

Republicans’ shifting views regarding Russian president Vladimir Putin during Trump’s presidency provide a remarkable example. A 2014 survey by YouGov and the Economist found just 10 per cent of Republicans expressed favourable views of Putin. But in December 2016, after more than a year of Trump’s pro-Putin campaign rhetoric, that number was up to 37 per cent. It seems far-fetched to imagine that the party of Ronald Reagan was transformed by an autonomous groundswell of enthusiasm for the Russian dictator; rather, Trump supporters were swayed by the president’s peculiar fondness for Putin.

Effects of this sort are not limited to the domain of foreign policy. In the early days of Trump’s presidency, the political scientists Michael Barber and Jeremy Pope tested the reactions of rank-and-file Republicans to information about his positions on a variety of major issues, including immigration, healthcare, guns and abortion. They found substantial shifts in preferences, especially among the most committed and least informed partisans, in the direction of positions ascribed to Trump, regardless of whether those positions were conservative or liberal. “Many people’s expressed issue positions,” they concluded, “are malleable to the point of issue innocence.”

The common invocation in Western media of a “populist wave” encourages observers to imagine that there is some single driving force propelling the various manifestations of populism seen around the globe in recent years. In fact, populism is a political language and style adaptable to a wide array of circumstances. In most democracies most of the time, there is a substantial reservoir of potential support for challenges to the status quo, and populists draw on that reservoir opportunistically to build their brands and jostle for power.

The most frequent explanation for the so-called populist wave is widespread economic disaffection stemming from deindustrialisation, globalisation and technological change. This explanation appeals to observers for a number of reasons: it gratifies nostalgia for an orderly postwar era in which economic issues shaped the party systems of affluent democracies; it invites leftists to chastise so-called neoliberals for the policy errors of the late twentieth century; and it submerges the ugly significance of racial and ethnic animosities in contemporary democratic politics. But it doesn’t really fit the facts.

In conventional accounts, the global economic crisis triggered by the financial meltdown of 2008 was the key factor in what the author John Judis called “the populist explosion.” As the journalist Matt O’Brien wrote in the Washington Post a few months after Trump’s inauguration, “It shouldn’t be too surprising that the worst economic crisis since the 1930s has led to the worst political crisis within liberal democracies since the 1930s.” But it hasn’t. Although populist parties in some places made electoral gains in the wake of the economic calamity, they were mostly small and scattered. Moreover, careful survey research showed that the supporters of populist parties were mostly distinguished by traditional conservative ideology, as measured by where respondents placed themselves on a left-to-right spectrum of political belief, and by opposition to immigration and European integration; economic disaffection played little discernible role.

In Spain, for example, GDP fell by almost 5 per cent during the euro crisis that lasted from 2009 into the early 2010s and unemployment soared to 26 per cent, yet no viable right-wing populist party emerged. Vox made substantial inroads only several years later, in 2019, after economic disaffection had ebbed and the relatively favourable attitudes toward immigration and globalisation that had been cited as explanations for Spain’s quiescence had become even more favourable. Statistical analyses of survey data showed that the most important factor driving support for Vox was the same conservative self-identification that had long predicted support for the mainstream People’s Party; nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment played lesser roles, while economic disaffection, opposition to European integration, and dissatisfaction with democracy had little or no effect.

In Foreign Affairs after the election, an essay by the journalist Sam Edwards was subtitled “Far-Right Populism Has Finally Conquered Spain, but the Real Shift Lies Elsewhere.” The use of “conquered” is a typical example of exaggerating populist strength — Vox’s vote share peaked at 15 per cent. But Edwards’s real point was that even that level of success had less to do with the intrinsic appeal of right-wing populism than with the “implosion” of the People’s Party, triggered by the failure of prime minister Mariano Rajoy to head off a chaotic referendum on Catalan independence and the convictions of several prominent party officials for their role in what the High Court called an “authentic and efficient system of institutional corruption.”

In most of the places where populist parties have made significant electoral gains, the explanations have been similarly prosaic; the scandals and failures of mainstream parties were often paramount.

Economic disaffection is similarly overblown as an explanation for the rise of Trump in the United States. Pundits surmised that Trump’s rise was a testament to the crash of the American middle class and the high debts and consequent frustration of millions of Americans. But in Identity Crisis, their book-length analysis of the 2016 election, the political scientists John Sides, Michael Tesler and Lynn Vavreck found that the biggest shifts in voting patterns were related to education, not income, and that those shifts primarily reflected “attitudes about race and ethnicity,” not “economic anxiety.” They concluded that “the dividing line between Clinton and Trump voters was not the widespread belief that average Americans are being left behind” economically. The real key was “how people explained economic outcomes in the first place — and especially whether they believed that hard-working white Americans were losing ground to less deserving minorities.”

A separate analysis by the political scientist Diana Mutz likewise showed that perceived loss of status, not tangible economic deprivation, explained the 2016 presidential vote. Even “deaths of despair” — such as suicides and deaths caused by addiction and overdose — in economically devastated white working-class communities seem not to have had the populist resonance that many pundits imagined. Sides, Tesler and Vavreck found that whites who voted for Clinton were more likely than those who voted for Trump to report knowing someone who had abused alcohol or been addicted to painkillers.

Support for populist parties and candidates in contemporary Western democracies is driven primarily not by economic grievances but by cultural concerns. In broad terms, these parties and candidates appeal to people distressed by the pace of social and cultural change in Western societies. Like William F. Buckley’s conservatives in the 1950s, today’s right-wing populists stand athwart history yelling, “Stop!” In the United States, changes stemming from the decades-long struggle for racial justice and the decline of organised religion are major sources of distress for this group. Fears about the erosion of local and national identities loom large in many places. But the most concrete and common source of tension is immigration — especially that of people ethnically and culturally distinct from existing populations.

Many affluent societies have experienced significant inflows of immigrants in recent decades. The European refugee crisis that began in 2015 provided new opportunities for right-wing populist entrepreneurs to stoke and exploit long-simmering concerns about immigrants and immigration, inflaming public fears about “the great replacement” of a white majority by non-whites. As with the supposed impact of the economic crisis, however, the causes and political implications of these developments are often misunderstood.

For one thing, there is remarkably little relationship between the scale of immigration in specific countries and the extent of anti-immigrant sentiment. In long-running cross-national surveys, Germany and Sweden, which have experienced substantial immigration, remain among the most welcoming countries in Europe; the refugee crisis barely dented favourable opinions there toward immigrants and immigration. Hungary and Poland, which have not received many immigrants (although Poland has taken in many refugees from Ukraine), are among the most hostile — largely because their governments have energetically scapegoated immigrants, another instance of leaders manufacturing rather than responding to public opinion.

The ubiquitous notion that the immigration crisis was tearing Europe apart represented an overreaction to the agitation of a xenophobic minority. Just as the press tends to exaggerate electoral gains by anti-immigrant parties, it tends to mistake outbursts by extremists for broad shifts in public opinion.

Across Europe, attitudes toward immigrants and immigration have become substantially more favourable since the turn of the century, even in places where there have been significant inflows of immigrants. This shift is largely due to generational replacement, as younger, better-educated people are less concerned about immigration than their parents and grandparents have been. In surveys conducted in the past few years, the difference in attitudes toward immigrants and immigration between young Europeans (born in the late 1990s) and some of the oldest ones (born in the early 1930s) is comparable to the difference between the countries that have the most favourable perceptions of immigration, such as Norway and Sweden, and those that have the least favourable, such as Poland or Slovenia. Although immigration is not about to disappear as a political issue, it is swimming upstream against a strong generational current.

A similar generational divide appears in the United States. Indeed, in recent years, the longstanding gap in immigration attitudes between older and younger Americans has widened. A 2023 Gallup poll found that 55 per cent of people fifty-five and older wanted the level of immigration reduced, but only 16 per cent of eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds agreed.

For some older Americans, especially, concerns about immigration have been supercharged by the deeper fear of becoming strangers in their own country. A decade ago, the psychologists Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson showed that reminding white Americans of a projected demographic future in which whites are outnumbered by non-whites significantly altered their political attitudes. Now, such reminders are constant, as politicians and pundits on the right incessantly hawk the conspiratorial notion that radical elites are using non-white migration to hasten that future and cement their own hold on power. For people who view demographic diversity as a significant threat to the traditional American way of life, the political stakes could hardly be higher.

The frictions stemming from immigration are real. But they reflect the increasing intensity of feeling among a minority, not the massive, irresistible tide of popular conviction that many observers imagine. Moreover, their political implications are often overblown; much of the opposition to immigration is more symbolic than concrete. For example, a June 2024 Gallup poll found 47 per cent of Americans saying they favoured “deporting all immigrants who are living in the United States illegally back to their home country.” But anyone tempted to take that dire finding at face value would do well to note that 70 per cent of the same survey respondents said they favoured “allowing immigrants living in the United States illegally the chance to become US citizens if they meet certain requirements over a period of time.”

As with many issues, there may be less to the public’s immigration policy preferences than meets the eye. Exaggerating the breadth and solidity of anti-immigrant sentiment merely encourages mainstream political leaders to cave to pressure from extremists, abdicating their responsibility to craft policies and rhetoric that address the issue soberly and sensibly.

The electoral successes of populist parties invariably raise alarms about their potential impact on public policy. But that impact, too, is often exaggerated and, even more often, difficult to assess. Regardless of the specific institutional structure in which they operate, populists generally need political allies to shape policy. In majoritarian systems, that requires bargaining within parties and governments. In multiparty systems, it usually requires populist parties to partner with mainstream parties in governing coalitions. The more extreme a populist party is, the less attractive it tends to be as a coalition partner and the more likely it is to have to moderate its policy ambitions to participate in government. Thus, as the political scientist Cas Mudde once put it, even when Western Europe’s right-wing populists reach parliament, they are “dogs that bark loud, but hardly ever bite.”

The accession of the right-wing populist Giorgia Meloni to the post of prime minister of Italy in 2022 is a case in point. Meloni’s rise was portrayed as the vanguard of yet another “new wave of populism,” but in truth she benefited from the crash of Matteo Salvini, an earlier far-right leader who lost support after he overplayed his hand in a coalition government. As prime minister, Meloni has been less zealous and ideological than many analysts anticipated, constrained by Italy’s reliance on the European Union for economic support and by her coalition partners.

In some countries, mainstream political leaders have long shunned populist parties as political allies. In Sweden, for example, the electoral rise of the right-wing populist Sweden Democrats was counterbalanced for many years by mainstream parties across the political spectrum refusing to partner with it in governing coalitions, even at the cost of ceding power to their rivals. In 2018, the Sweden Democrats’ sixty-two seats in parliament represented a clear balance of power between the Red–Green coalition’s 144 seats and the centre-right Alliance’s 143 seats. Nonetheless, the mainstream parties negotiated for more than four months, eventually settling on a precarious but functional centre-left coalition. In 2022, the Sweden Democrats won seventy-three seats, making it the largest party in a prospective centre-right coalition. But the reluctance of the other parties in the coalition to partner with it resulted in a minority government with carefully negotiated external support from the Sweden Democrats.

Although the norm of “cordoning” the Sweden Democrats from power has clearly eroded in recent years, it hasn’t disappeared. Whatever one may think about the legitimacy of nullifying the influence on government of a substantial minority of voters, political leaders in multiparty systems retain considerable leeway to do just that.

The efforts of mainstream political elites to contain the policy influence of right-wing populists is similarly evident in the Netherlands, where the issue of immigration fuelled a major political crisis, leading to the collapse of the long-time prime minister Mark Rutte’s centre-right coalition in 2023. The big winner in the resulting snap election, more than doubling its previous vote share and parliamentary representation, was the Party for Freedom, helmed by the anti-immigrant firebrand Geert Wilders. Although some media declared the outcome “a tectonic change in the Dutch political landscape,” Wilders’s potential coalition partners blocked him from becoming prime minister, eventually settling on a new leader with no party ties or political experience. As in Sweden, the policy impact of Wilders’s election victory remains to be seen.

For mainstream politicians, attempting to suppress populist parties and the grievances they exploit may often be good politics. Yet it sometimes risks further alienating their supporters. A survey conducted in the six months following Sweden’s 2018 election showed satisfaction with Swedish democracy declining substantially among people who had reported voting for the Sweden Democrats, as the drawn-out post-election manoeuvring made it increasingly clear that the party would once again be shut out of government. Managing the currents of populism sometimes requires concessions and compromise.

More often, however, political leaders panicked by the overblown threat of a populist wave probably concede more than they must or should. Perhaps the most consequential instance of such overreaction was British prime minister David Cameron’s promise in 2013 to stage a referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership in the European Union, a reckless gamble intended to blunt the exaggerated threat of the UK Independence Party and a move that even many who supported it soon came to regret.

While observers have overstated the electoral successes and political clout of populist parties, they have also exaggerated what is at stake in those successes by conflating populism with democratic backsliding. According to the political scientists Yascha Mounk and Roberto Stefan Foa, “Far-right populist parties… have risen from obscurity to transform the party system of virtually every Western European country. Meanwhile, parts of Central and Eastern Europe bear witness to the institutional and ideological transformations that might be afoot: In Poland and Hungary, populist strongmen have begun to put pressure on critical media, to violate minority rights, and to undermine key institutions such as independent courts.” The word “meanwhile” is doing a lot of work here. In fact, the parties that eroded democratic institutions in Hungary and Poland bore little resemblance to the populist parties of Western Europe, and the forces fuelling their rise were largely unrelated to the conventional understanding of right-wing populism.

In Hungary, prime minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party came to power in 2010 as the only viable alternative to an incumbent party fatally discredited by years of scandal and mismanagement. Contrary to many observers’ assumptions, Fidesz’s support at that point was unrelated to anti-immigrant sentiment, resistance to European integration, political distrust and other common bases of support for right-wing populist parties. Only after winning did Orbán turn to scapegoating refugees and the European Union, adapting and extending the populist playbook and pulling the views of his supporters closer to those of right-wing populists elsewhere. But the vote that brought Orbán to power in 2010 was a surprisingly routine instance of “throwing the rascals out,” not a welling up of xenophobic or antidemocratic passions.

Having won 53 per cent of the popular vote — hardly a ringing mandate under the circumstances — Orbán exploited what one Hungarian writer aptly called an “accidental” two-thirds majority in the National Assembly to retrospectively declare a transparently bogus “voting booth revolution,” engineering changes to the electoral system and constraints on civil servants and the media intended to entrench Fidesz in power. This assault on Hungarian democracy was not a reflection of Hungarians’ yearning for populism, much less for authoritarianism. Orbán took advantage — as incumbent politicians in many times and places have — of an opportunity to rewrite the rules of the game in his own favour.

Orbán’s changes to the Hungarian electoral system and attacks on independent media gave Fidesz “an undue advantage” in subsequent elections, as an international monitor reported in 2014. An even more important basis for the party’s continued hold on power, however, was a marked improvement in ordinary Hungarians’ subjective quality of life. Surveys registered massive improvements after 2009 in public satisfaction with the economy, the national government, and — ironically — the working of Hungarian democracy. These improvements in subjective well-being continued for several years after Fidesz’s rise to power.

Democratic backsliding in Poland followed a similar course after the centre-right Law and Justice party’s victory in 2015. “Law and Justice won big,” a BBC News analyst explained at the time, “because they offered simple, concrete policies,” including “higher child-care benefits and tax breaks for the less well-off.” Scholars concurred that Law and Justice “softened its image,” running on the anodyne slogan “Good Change.” Only after taking power did the party turn to packing the judiciary with party loyalists, castigating the European Union, and tightening its control over state radio and television. “You have given an example,” the party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski told Orbán in 2016, “and we are learning from your example.”

If the authoritarian turn in Poland was attributable to political elites rather than ordinary citizens, the same might be said of its end. The ouster of the Law and Justice party in an election in October 2023 — just a month after its expected re-election had been touted in the Economist as part of “a fresh wave of hard-right populism” — led some observers to wonder whether Europe’s populist wave had finally crested.

But the election outcome was hardly a sea change in Polish public opinion. The Law and Justice party’s 35 per cent of the vote was only slightly lower than the 38 per cent vote share that brought it to power in 2015. The key difference was not in voters’ behaviour but in the determination of the various opposition parties’ leaders to subsume their differences in a coalition government led by former prime minister Donald Tusk.

The tolerance of many citizens in Hungary and Poland for what scholars have characterised as “mildly authoritarian” regimes may strike democratic idealists as blameworthy, but it should not be surprising. Ordinary people in most times and places have cared more for their security, their personal finances and the validation of their social identities than they have for the upholding of democratic norms and procedures.

Summarising her detailed study of full-blown breakdowns of democracy in twentieth-century Europe and Latin America, Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times, the political scientist Nancy Bermeo wrote that “ordinary people generally were guilty of remaining passive when dictators actually attempted to seize power.” Although they “generally did not polarise and mobilise in support of dictatorship, they did not immediately mobilise in defence of democracy either.”

A study published in 2020 tested how survey respondents’ willingness to support a hypothetical political candidate was affected by informing them that the candidate had violated some democratic norm (for example, advocating the prosecution of unfriendly journalists or ignoring unfavourable court rulings). The authors concluded that “only a small fraction of Americans prioritise democratic principles in their electoral choices,” making public opinion a “strikingly limited” check on undemocratic behaviour by elected officials. Turks and Venezuelans were similarly “reluctant to punish politicians for disregarding democratic principles when doing so requires abandoning one’s favoured party or policies.”

Americans’ commitment to democratic principles was put to a more concrete test in 2022 when scores of Republican members of Congress who had supported or condoned Trump’s “stop the steal” effort following the 2020 election stood for re-election. In contested general elections, they did not fare significantly worse or better than their counterparts who had bucked Trump — the electoral cost of “disregarding democratic principles” was essentially zero. Moreover, in other respects they were advantaged; for example, they were much less likely to lose Republican primary elections or to retire from politics and more likely to seek higher office.

It might be tempting to interpret public indifference to violations of democratic norms as itself a product of the “populist wave.” In fact, it is a longstanding feature of democratic politics and not only in the cases of breakdown studied by Bermeo. Six decades ago, the political scientist Herbert McClosky’s classic study of “consensus and ideology in American politics” documented the shallow allegiance of many ordinary Americans to the “rules of the game.” McClosky concluded that members of “the active political minority” were “the major repositories of the public conscience” and “the carriers of the [democratic] Creed.”

In McClosky’s postwar era, elite support for democratic norms was bipartisan. That consensus was facilitated by the fact that policy differences between the two parties were modest by historical standards. (In 1950, the American Political Science Association issued a public report titled Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System that advocated for stronger, more distinct party platforms and greater power to implement them.) In recent years, however, the rise of hot-button issues such as civil rights, abortion, immigration, and national identity have polarised the parties, raising the stakes of political contestation. In response, political elites — especially Republicans — have demonstrated a troubling willingness to violate democratic norms in pursuit of partisan advantage. The increasingly unrestrained struggle for power among elites, not populism, represents the greatest threat to democracy in the United States and elsewhere.

Case studies of democratic breakdowns around the world suggest that the most important bulwark against autocratic backsliding from the top is uncompromising opposition from prominent political allies. Orbán’s constitutional coup in Hungary required absolute party discipline, facilitated by his ironclad control over the Fidesz party apparatus and candidate selection. Although Trump’s control of the Republican Party has been less complete, it has increased considerably since 2016. When he floated the possibility of postponing the 2020 election, Republican leaders in Congress promptly and publicly rejected the idea, and it was quickly dropped. But after the election, when Trump’s allies hatched a plan to derail the certification of electoral votes, Republican congressional leaders were divided in their response. Two-thirds of House Republicans ended up voting to decertify electoral votes, while only seven of fifty-one Senate Republicans did so.

Since 2021, Trump has bolstered his standing among the Republican rank and file, as demonstrated by his cakewalk through the 2024 primaries. He has also significantly tightened his grip on the party organisation — for example, by installing allies and in-laws in the leadership of the Republican National Committee. Many of the Republican leaders who resisted his extremist tendencies have voluntarily or involuntarily retired from politics and been replaced by newcomers who seem willing to give Trump a freer hand. Back in the White House, the institutional fragmentation of power in the U.S. system will leave him well short of the ironclad control that Orbán enjoys in Hungary. Nonetheless, with an increasingly united Republican Party and an increasingly compliant Supreme Court supporting him, there is good reason to fear a further erosion of democratic norms.

Trump’s movement to “Make America Great Again” appeals to a deep fear of diversity and social change. That sort of fear is commonplace in all societies, and it has often roiled democratic politics. Yet the threat Trump poses to American democracy has little to do with “populism.” It doesn’t come from ordinary citizens immersed in “culture wars” — even from those who stormed the Capitol on 6 January. They were and are a sideshow. The real threat is from the Republican officeholders who, hours later, supported Trump’s effort to decertify the election outcome. It was not some rush of anti-democratic feeling that threatened American democracy in those months; it was the machinations of political elites determined to entrench themselves in power.

At its heart, widespread misunderstanding of the contemporary populist threat rests on a misunderstanding of the nature of democracy itself. An idealised “folk theory of democracy,” as the political scientist Christopher Achen and I have called it, encourages journalists, scholars, and ordinary citizens to imagine that the moving force behind major shifts in party systems and governing coalitions must be correspondingly major shifts in public opinion. If populist parties are gaining strength in parliaments, it must be because people are turning against immigration, European integration, and established political institutions. (They are not.) If democratic norms and institutions are eroding, it must be because public support for democracy as a system of government has weakened. (It hasn’t.)

As the eminent political scientist E. E. Schattschneider observed several decades ago, this sort of understanding of democratic politics is “essentially simplistic, based on a tremendously exaggerated notion of the immediacy and urgency of the connection of public opinion and events.” The fate of democracy lies in the hands of politicians. It is they who choose to manage, mollify, ignore, or inflame populist sentiment. It is a dangerous blunder to gullibly accept their show of bowing to the ostensible will of the people. And when popular grievances are used as a pretext for bad policy — or, even worse, as a pretext for democratic backsliding — it is politicians, not the citizenry, who are culpable. •

This article first appeared in Foreign Affairs. © 2023 Council on Foreign Relations. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency

The post The populist phantom appeared first on Inside Story.

Russia and Iran were Bashar al-Assad’s most vital backers, so we can be reasonably confident that for now both are the big losers. After a decade of substantial investment in Syria, Russia has nothing to show other than Assad himself, now taking up residence in Moscow. It is abandoning its air base in Syria, probably its naval base, and in practice its aspirations to be a major player in Middle Eastern affairs, with only its position in Libya to cling on to.

Iran’s investment goes back even further, and its setback is even greater. This comes at the end of a disastrous year for the defining feature of its foreign policy — its “axis of resistance” drawing on radical Shi’ite groups throughout the region, including in Iraq and Yemen, but with Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Assad in Syria as the key components.

To understand the rise and fall of the axis of resistance we need to go back to political ferment that gave rise to the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

In the summer of 1976, when I was a research associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, the Iranian ambassador to Britain came to visit. Parviz Radji was tall, urbane, and spoke impeccable English. He represented an immensely strong, rich and ascendant power, buoyed by the surge in oil prices. But he also represented the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who had succeeded his father in 1941. He was an absolute ruler who occasionally experimented with a bit of democracy. He was close to the West, so criticism was muted, not least because he was recycling his oil wealth through huge purchases of Western military equipment. Iran’s military budget rose from $1.4 billion in 1972 to $9.4 billion by 1977.

These purchases were one of the topics for discussion when Radji visited. A recent staff report from the Senate foreign relations committee had concluded that Iran was turning itself into a regional superpower with these purchases but lacked the technical and industrial capacity, along with the personnel, to absorb the new weaponry. We quizzed the ambassador about whether Iran had spent wisely. Had it gone for a form of conspicuous military consumption that looked more impressive on paper than they would be in battle? The ambassador refused to concede the point, dismissing the criticisms as Western condescension, although he did add “anyway, we are only going to be fighting the Iraqis.”

Just two years later the situation in Iran looked a lot different. The oil price was still high but the Shah’s regime was not. The oil wealth had distorted the economy, aggravating corruption and inequalities. Hundreds of thousands of expatriates, many there to look after the many military programs, had combined with the decadence of the elite to challenge the Islamic character of the society. The Shah’s tentative experiments with democracy and human rights had left the middle classes dissatisfied and strengthened rather than calmed dissent.

The Shah’s experimentation had begun in 1976 in anticipation of Jimmy Carter becoming US president. Carter was campaigning on a progressive foreign policy opposed to excessive arms sales and promoting human rights. Once in office he was persuaded that the Shah was on the right track and deserved encouragement rather than undue pressure.

At the end of 1977, Carter and his wife attended a banquet in Tehran. Unaware of the discontent gripping Iran, which would overwhelm the regime over the coming year, the president observed to his delighted host: “Iran, because of the great leadership of the Shah, is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world. This is a great tribute to you, Your Majesty, and to your leadership and to the respect and admiration and love which your people give to you…”

(One is reminded in terms of timing of US national security adviser Jake Sullivan’s statement of late September 2023: “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”)

Instead of stability, 1978 was marked by demonstrations, strikes in the oilfield and occasional acts of violent repression. The Shah’s progressing cancer left him uncertain and indecisive about whether and how to deploy the army to crush the gathering insurrection or to try a more liberal and conciliatory approach. As he oscillated between the two, neither had a chance to succeed.

When the Shah eventually fled Tehran in January 1979 I thought back to the earlier conversation with the ambassador (who stayed in London, never to return to Iran). The regime had appeared so powerful, yet a lot of the Shah’s power was of the wrong sort: he had great wealth, ubiquitous secret police and a formidable military, with the best kit that money could buy. But at the crudest level it was the wrong sort of power for crowd control and dealing with angry protests, and at the most fundamental level he had the political problem common to all autocracies. They can never be sure of the state of public opinion and the forces arraigned against them, and the only constitutional changes they can imagine still leave them exactly where they were before, completely in charge.

Some reformers might be prepared to govern more liberally and competently, but in the Shah’s case his most bitter foes could never regard him as legitimate. The 1953 overthrow of Iran’s popular, nationalist prime minister in a US–UK operation (about which they unwisely boasted) meant that he was seen as a foreign imposition. The modernising, secular aspects of his rule appalled the Islamic clergy; the inequalities were exploited by the communist Tudeh party.

The Ayatollah Khomeini provided the public face of the revolution. A long opponent of the regime, he had moved to exile in Iraq, from where he delivered fiery sermons offering an uncompromising Islamism with a leftist slant. These were circulated in cassette form in Iran’s Mosques.

After the Shah lobbied the Iraqi government to expel him, Khomeini moved to Paris which gave him access to the world’s media. Khomeini was widely assumed to be a figurehead and so was consistently underestimated. He knew exactly what he wanted. After the revolution, religious leaders under his direction took control of the country’s supreme levers of power. The other, more secular, elements of the coalition that overthrew the Shah, from the moderate reformers to the communists, were purged and marginalised.

The big crisis came in October 1979 when Carter agreed to allow the Shah to go to the United States for medical treatment. This led to huge pro-revolution and anti-American demonstrations in Tehran. On 4 November some 300 militants occupied the US embassy compound, taking hostage sixty-six diplomats and marines. Attempts by the foreign minister to defuse the situation quickly were thwarted by Khomeini.

The crisis defined the final year of Carter’s presidency and help bring Ronald Reagan to victory in November 1980. The hostages were not released until the day of his inauguration.

Since then there have been periods when possibilities opened up for a rapprochement, but US–Iranian relations have never fully recovered. Even less so have Israel–Iranian relations. Before the revolution, Israel’s second-largest embassy after Washington was in Tehran. The new regime handed the embassy over to the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the new regime made anti-Zionism a centrepiece of its foreign policy.

The year of the revolution — 1979 — was full of incident and turbulence, including the Israel–Egyptian peace treaty, the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, and Saddam Hussein’s becoming president of Iraq. Each of these events helped shaped Iran’s course: the Israel–Egyptian treaty left a gap for new anti-Zionist leadership; the Soviet intervention against Jihadists in Afghanistan was condemned by Khomeini, depriving Moscow of the chance to replace the US as Iran’s superpower friend; the next year Saddam saw an opportunity to avenge the past humiliations wrought by an Iran now in post-revolutionary disarray, and so launched the invasion that began an eight-year war.

The war with Iraq helped the regime consolidate its power. Other wars then helped it expand its influence. Hezbollah, a radical Shi’ite group formed to fight back against Israel’s ill-fated invasion of Lebanon in 1982, was a natural ally. So was the Syrian regime because of its shared antipathy to Saddam’s Iraq and of its roots in the minority Shi’ite Alawites. When the American-led coalition overthrew Saddam in 2003 radical Shi’ite groups, backed by Iran, were soon harassing coalition forces. The Arab Spring of 2011 and the subsequent upheavals saw Iran back the anti-Saudi Houthis in Yemen and then move sharply, with Hezbollah, to keep Assad in power as the deadly civil war began. Here, however, it required Russian intervention, beginning in 2015, to defeat the rebels.

Because its roots lie in the Sunni Moslem Brotherhood, Hamas’s membership of this axis was less obvious. Its leadership couldn’t operate in Palestine and so had been based in Damascus until 2012, when Assad would not accept it taking a neutral position in the developing civil war. The Syrian president saw them as too sympathetic to the local Sunni groups with their own roots in the Moslem Brotherhood. Hamas leaders went instead to Qatar, where they worked to improve relations with the Gulf states.

Even before he became leader of Hamas in Gaza in 2017, Yahya Sinwar disagreed with this path. He cultivated ties with Iran as the best source of weapons with which to threaten Israel and promote the armed struggle.

The idea of an axis of resistance had some basic problems. It resembled the old Soviet Comintern, which coordinated communist parties around the world ostensibly so that they could promote class struggle better in their own countries but in practice to serve as instruments of Soviet foreign policy. In the same way, Iran’s “axis” was there to serve the security interests of Iran, even while offering in-principle backing to the individual members in their own national struggles.

Anti-Zionism might have been presented as the glue holding this axis together but the overriding priority for the Iranian regime was its own security. With ample supplies of rockets and other weapons, Hamas and Hezbollah demonstrated a real ability to resist the Israeli military, at least on occasion. But they had no obvious means of going beyond resistance, and when Hamas tried in October 2023 the result was disastrous for both the movement and for the Palestinian people on whose behalf they acted.

Sinwar assumed that the Iranians took their slogan of “Death to Israel” as seriously as he did, and that the whole axis would therefore follow when Hamas took the initiative. To a degree it did, at least sufficient to demonstrate solidarity with Hamas, but not sufficient to put Israel into real difficulty. Iran wanted to keep capabilities in reserve, especially Hezbollah’s, for its own security needs. It might have hoped that the international outrage at the sufferings of the Palestinians would result in Israel coming to terms with Hamas, as it had done in the past.

But the ferocity of the original Hamas attack propelled Israel into an even more ferocious response, which kept on coming. Not only was Hamas dealt body blows, and its leadership, including Sinwar, killed off, but Hezbollah suffered the same fate, to the point where it had to agree a ceasefire even while Hamas wanted it to continue the fight. Now Hamas is ready to accept a ceasefire without its core conditions having been met.

And then, as if this was not enough, Assad fell. Just a few weeks earlier he had been at an Arab-Islamic summit in Saudi Arabia among leaders who had earnestly sought his downfall. His rehabilitation was almost complete. But his power had relied on external props, and these were being eroded — Russia because of the war in Ukraine and Iran because of the wars with Israel.

Turkey, always keen to assert itself in the lands of the old Ottoman Empire, saw an opportunity to unleash Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, an Islamist group it had been supporting in Syria’s Idlib province, to make a dash towards the city of Aleppo, the city of some of the most bitter fighting of the civil war. Syrian army defenders were caught by surprise and gave way quickly.

The HTS offensive then moved on to Homs, another symbolic place, which turned out to be the regime’s last stand. The fighting there was tougher, and the Russians were still joining in with air strikes, but defeat left the Syrian army demoralised and it began to crumble. Russia and Iran concluded that there was no point in committing more resources to a doomed regime. Assad went to the Russian base at Latakia — to oversee operations against the rebels, he claims — but once the base came under drone attack, the commander advised evacuation, again according to Assad’s account, which is how he ended up in Moscow and his regime came to an end, well over fifty years after his father had first seized power.

For now, HTS provides the closest thing to an interim government in Syria, although a variety of militias who played some part in the struggle against Assad are knocking at the door. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has yet to make up its mind as to whether he wants to encourage a relatively stable Syria, in which Turkey should enjoy considerable influence, or whether — entirely for internal Turkish reasons — take the chance to use another proxy force, the Syrian National Army, to undermine the US-backed Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces. Erdoğan still has the capacity to spoil the party he helped to organise.

Israel, meanwhile, has taken the opportunity to prevent a new Syria turning into a serious threat by striking numerous weapons sites, including those linked with chemical weapons, and seizing border territory.

As an offshoot of al Qaeda with a vicious past, HTS has, shall we say, a reputational problem, and it is also under Western sanctions, which make conversations difficult although not impossible. To overcome this handicap it claims to have reformed, and points to its relatively restrained administration of Idlib as evidence. Its leader, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, has abandoned his nom de guerre and reverted to his original name of Ahmad al-Sharaa. He is currently engaged in a sort of Gerry Adams tribute act as he seeks to demonstrate that he is a born-again moderate.

In this he has made an impressive start. He doesn’t deny his attachment to Islamic law, but promises to respect minorities, including Christians, and not to pick unnecessary fights with Israel. For now the first priority of the neighbouring Arab governments, along with the Europeans and the Americans, is fourfold: to prevent the country being consumed with more fighting; to start on the path of reconstruction and economic recovery (with less of the narcotics that kept the Assad regime funded); to get refugees back home; and to develop a new constitutional arrangement, which hopefully would involve a more inclusive government and even democracy. Given there is no obvious current alternative, if Jolani/Sharaa can find a way to form an inclusive government then more resources and assistance should flow towards Syria.

Given the presence of many armed factions in Syria, the risks of more violence will be present for some time. But while the Iranian revolution of 1979 had a long gestation its active period was relatively brief and the violence, although not trivial, was contained. Syria has been at war since March 2011 in by far the deadliest of modern Middle Eastern wars. By March of this year, after thirteen years, the death toll was put at around 620,000. Wars brutalise but they also exhaust. HTS wants all the militias to dissolve and put their fighters under the control of the new defence ministry. We wait to see how it will cope with those that insist on keeping their weapons and their independence. But the people will want and deserve some respite from violence.

Are revolutions contagious? It is a thought that must be crossing the minds of the Iranian elite. Can Hamas and Hezbollah reconstitute themselves in much more forbidding settings, with Gazans and Lebanese angry with them for involving them in wars they then failed to win, and with military resupply far more difficult than it has been in the past? What do these events means for the militias in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen?

Since 1979 the Iranian regime became even more repressive and parasitic as the one it had replaced. As Ali Ansari noted two years ago:

The current regime sees the success of the revolution as consequent on the weakness of the Shah and the central lesson they draw is that one must always show “strength” — here interpreted crudely as force — in the face of protests. To do otherwise is to invite ridicule and collapse for in the absence of affection, fear must hold sway.

But he added that weakness can also be manifested in “a stubborn determination not to change one’s ways — on the pretext that this reflects strength.” The regime has repeated the ways of the past “in the belief that brute force will compensate for corrupt governance.” This, Ali warned, might buy the regime some time but not long-term stability. He was then looking at the protest movements in the county — against both strict religious rule and economic mismanagement.

Now a directly elected and reformist president, Masoud Pezeshkian, offers one route to a more legitimate government. But what he can achieve remains circumscribed by the Supreme Leader, currently the Ayatollah Khamenei. He has been in power since 1989, but his health is poor, and the regime over which he presides is vulnerable. The question of succession looms large, and behind that question is one about the future direction of the regime. Does it continue on its current path of defiance or does it look to rebuild relations with the West if only to ease its economic predicament?

Over the coming months the regime must decide on two issues, both of which could trigger mass protests. The first, and the hardest to avoid, concerns petrol prices. Sanctions and regime dysfunctions have left the oil industry starved of investment and electricity production so low that there are regular blackouts and people are being asked to survive the winter at lower temperatures. The currency has lost almost half its value this year, which means that they can no longer afford to subsidise petrol prices. But the last time they were raised there were intensive and violent protests throughout the country.

The second issue concerns the determination of the hardline Islamists, who currently dominate the parliament, to prescribe appropriate dress for all women. A bill has passed to this effect, a response to the popular protests following the detention of a woman for not wearing a suitable hijab. President Pezeshkian is holding back on implementing the law on the grounds that he has enough problems with a failing energy sector and a failing foreign policy. But the more it appears that the regime is reluctant to crack down on dissent the bolder the dissenters may become.

One argument is that the setbacks of the past year will leave Iran even more determined to complete its nuclear weapons program. Yet Donald Trump has threatened “maximum pressure” if Iran moves in that direction, and for now the regime needs less rather than more than pressure. Also Israel, having taken out Iranian air defences earlier in the year, might welcome a chance to have a go at Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

A belligerent rhetoric that outreached its capacity has left Iran at a crossroads. In 2011 Bashar Assad had an opportunity to reconstruct his regime by accepting the need for more democracy and openness. Instead he chose more repression and fighting, leading to immense death and destruction, and still his regime collapsed in the end. He relied on the wrong sort of power — brute force with little underlying legitimacy. Whether Iran can or should stick to its current course will be hotly debated in Tehran. It can trade military capabilities with Russia, but Moscow is struggling to cope with its own problems and has no spare capacity to help, especially in the economic sphere.

With Iran, as with Syria, as its leaders try to find a new way forward the West shouldn’t watch passively, reflecting on the unpredictability of events, waiting to see what turns up. This is an opportunity for significant engagement.

Less than a month ago, following the Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire, I asked, without quite answering, the question of whether Trump could do a deal with Iran. The sudden fall of Assad provides the new administration with even more of an opportunity. I concluded that piece with the observation that: “The optimists can point to the positive benefits of a grand project of peace-making; the pessimists can point to the likely pitfalls along the way.”

Much depends, of course, on the extent to which Trump’s team sees the possibilities opening up in the region, and on its ability to work with Europeans and Arab governments, as well as Israel, to take advantage. Will it even be bothered to try? This remains a region where chaos seems always around the corner. But for once, as ceasefire agreements are signed, and a brutal dictatorship falls, we can at least allow ourselves a moment of optimism. •

The post The wrong sort of power appeared first on Inside Story.

But bowing down to Trump serves nobody’s interest on either side of America’s borders, save for autocrats like Vladimir Putin who want him to undermine international norms, and any corporate leaders who believe they can preserve their profits by cooperating with a corrupt kakistocracy.

The world needs some elected leaders who are willing to stand up to Trump. And this week the impulsive incoming president has given two in particular a golden opportunity to expose the empty nature of his bullying and sap him of power.

“On January 20th, as one of my many first Executive Orders,” threatened the typographically challenged Trump on his social media website, “I will sign all necessary documents to charge Mexico and Canada a 25% Tariff on ALL products coming into the United States, and its ridiculous Open Borders. This Tariff will remain in effect until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!”

For Trump to train his initial fire on America’s closest allies is both illogical and predictable, as he was always more interested in punishing democratic friends while coddling dictatorial adversaries. A rational president would not threaten Canada and Mexico. They already cooperate with the United States on immigration and drug trafficking, and Trump did not specify what exactly he wants them to do differently. After much bluster during his first term, he negotiated a new trade agreement with the bordering nations to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement with his United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement, which he touted at the time as “the largest, most significant, modern, and balanced trade agreement in history.” Yet now the seventy-eight-year-old is poised to violate his signature accord unprovoked.

Assuming Trump follows through on his threat, the ball will be in the courts of president Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico and prime minister Justin Trudeau of Canada. Obviously they need to be sensitive to the economic needs of their constituents. But they would be doing themselves — and the world — a favour by responding to Trump’s tariffs in kind and pressuring him to stand down.

Trump is vulnerable because he is misreading his mandate, and his mandate shapes his negotiating leverage. If a majority of the public — and most Republican officeholders’ constituents — insist that he imposes high tariffs with a complete understanding of how that would increase prices on imported goods, then he can wage a trade war without intra-party blowback. But poll after poll tells us, of course, that the vast majority of voters want lower prices. The most reasonable explanation for the six-point shift towards Trump in the margin of victory from the 2020 to the 2024 presidential elections is swing voters thought he would get prices down.

Trump might take some solace in a recent CBS poll that showed a narrow 52 per cent majority support higher tariffs. He shouldn’t. The same survey showed 79 per cent believe he should make lowering the price of goods and services a “high priority,” with another 16 per cent saying it should be a “medium priority.” Pretty much every American wants stuff to be cheaper. Still, some don’t understand that tariffs literally raise prices — perhaps because Trump pretended only other countries would suffer. (Nor do many Americans understand that broad price deflation would risk an economic recession.) Price hikes soon after Trump’s swearing-in would jolt the public.

In other words, Trump is not wielding fearsome leverage when he threatens Canada and Mexico with tariffs. He is pointing a gun at his own foot.

Meanwhile, the newly inaugurated Sheinbaum enjoys a honeymoon with a 74 per cent approval rating, giving her some political capital to burn. Standing up for Mexico’s autonomy might deepen her initial bond with the public, even if it means some immediate economic upset. Sheinbaum could be making that calculation, as evidenced by her initial response to Trump. “One tariff would be followed by another in response, and so on until we put at risk common businesses,” she said, threatening retaliatory tariffs, “If tariffs go up, who will it hurt? General Motors.” She further blamed America for its own drug problem and for allowing gun smuggling into Mexico.

Trudeau’s political position, at fifty-two, is much more precarious. After serving as prime minister for nine years, the once captivating and charismatic leader is scraping the bottom with a job approval of 30 per cent, putting his Liberal Party’s control of the government in jeopardy before next year’s federal elections. The only politician Canadians might hate more is Donald Trump; only 21 per cent wanted him to win the US election. A fight against Trump might stir Canadian pride and buoy the Liberals.

But the long-term substantive need to constrain Trump’s worst impulses is more important than any short-term political consideration. Allowing Trump to get away with rank bullying will only lead to more irrational policymaking and global instability.

Granted, it is possible that Trump doesn’t care about public opinion. He can’t run for president again (no matter what dark insinuations he makes). He won’t be impeached. The Supreme Court has given him broad criminal immunity for any “official” acts. We have no reason to believe he cares about the fates of other Republicans or what historians will write about his legacy.

A price spike and a tanking of Trump’s job approval might not change his behaviour. But it could well change his relationship with other Republicans, who do have to fear accountability in the 2026 midterms, and might thus lead to a more robust internal opposition.

Moreover, we have experienced Trump climbing down when he’s gone too far out on the political ledge, such as when he ended a government shutdown without securing nearly as much border-wall funding as he demanded and when he issued an executive order abandoning his policy of migrant parent–child separations after a few months of public outrage. He’s perfectly capable of using Orwellian language to describe a loss as a win and then move on to instigate a new drama.

Sheinbaum and Trudeau should not fear Trump’s tariffs and beg for mercy. They should exploit his political impetuousness and ineptitude. He has a weak hand. Sheinbaum and Trudeau should call the bluff. •

The post Taking on Trump appeared first on Inside Story.

Even six months ago, it was reasonable to regard slow growth, high unemployment and deflationary pressures as the predominant risk to the economy. Today, while continuing relief efforts are essential, the focus of our macroeconomic policy needs to change… Inflationary pressures are mounting… How much does it matter whether inflation accelerates? In general, increases in inflation disproportionately hurt the poor and are associated with reductions in trust in government. Progressives might consider the role that inflation played in electing Richard M. Nixon in 1968 and Ronald Reagan in 1980.

In February 2021, Olivier Blanchard, another prominent macroeconomist, wrote a detailed argument that the Biden administration was spending too much on Covid relief with the American Rescue Plan, and that this would generate a surge of inflation. The argument included a simple model whose predictions ended up being close to what actually happened.

Other economists pushed back hard against Blanchard and Summers, arguing that inflation was due to transitory factors, and that it was important to keep spending in order to preserve full employment. One of these was Paul Krugman, who declared himself “a card-carrying member of Team Transitory” — “Team Transitory” being those who thought inflation was mostly due to pandemic disruptions and would fade on its own. There was even a live debate between Krugman and Summers in early 2022. But by late 2022, Krugman issued a mea culpa, and admitted that Biden’s American Rescue Plan had exacerbated inflation:

In early 2021 there was an intense debate among economists about the likely consequences of the American Rescue Plan, the $1.9 trillion package enacted by a new Democratic president and a (barely) Democratic Congress. Some warned that the package would be dangerously inflationary; others were fairly relaxed. I was Team Relaxed. As it turned out, of course, that was a very bad call.

Economic analyses of the inflation surge of 2021–22 generally assign the American Rescue Plan some share of the blame.

Ignoring Summers’s warnings, and believing Team Transitory, might have cost the Democrats the 2024 election. I’m no political scientist, but there are reasons to believe that the burst of high inflation in 2021–22 was one factor in Kamala Harris’ loss.

Why inflation probably mattered in this election: The first reason we should think inflation mattered is that people pretty consistently said it mattered. On Gallup’s long-running “most important problem” survey, inflation consistently ranked as the most important specific economic problem that people mentioned, right behind “economy in general.”

A lot of other surveys showed similar results. And the percentage of people who told Gallup that the economy was “extremely important” to their presidential vote was unusually high — almost as high as in 2008, when the financial crisis had just devastated the US economy. And, of course, consumer sentiment was pretty low, even after adjusting for changes in methodology.

Now, it’s possible that this was mostly just Republicans complaining about inflation because it felt more substantive than talking only about more social/cultural grievances like wokeness, immigration, trans stuff, etc. After all, opinion on the economy shows a very partisan pattern depending on who’s in the White House. It’s a pretty good bet that Republicans will suddenly “discover” that inflation in America is actually low now, and give Trump the credit.

But if you look historically and across countries, it really looks like inflation tends to make voters particularly mad. Research often finds that cumulative inflation over a president’s term in office — not just the current inflation rate — affects presidential approval and election performance. And if you look at other countries, you’ll see that governing parties in every other rich country have seen their vote shares go down this year.

There are relatively few factors that are affecting all rich countries at the same time. A backlash over immigration is another possible common factor, but the list is basically just that plus inflation.

On top of that, there was a model that predicted the election outcome quite well. An interdisciplinary team of researchers created a model based on presidential approval ratings and economic conditions in each state, and they ended up predicting each state correctly

It might be a fluke, but the same model got only one state wrong in 2020 (Georgia), so that’s pretty encouraging. In any case, the model relies partly on economic fundamentals — measures of the labour market and real wages. And real wages depend on inflation. So since labour markets are generally very strong all across America, the erosion of state-level wages by inflation is going to be the main economic factor that led this model to forecast a Trump victory. (The other factors that influence elections — culture wars, charisma, narratives, and so on — are all represented by the presidential approval ratings that get fed into the model.)

So I think it’s safe to say that while it’s possible inflation mattered less for Trump’s victory than people say on polls, it did matter at least somewhat.

Why inflation makes voters even angrier than unemployment: Let’s talk a little about macroeconomics for a second. Most mainstream macroeconomic models assume that there’s some sort of short-term trade-off between inflation and unemployment. If the Federal Reserve lowers interest rates or does quantitative easing or otherwise prints money, the general consensus is that unemployment will go down and inflation will go up. Similarly, if the government borrows and spends money and the Fed doesn’t counteract this by raising interest rates, the general consensus is that you’ll get faster growth, more jobs, and rising prices. (This effect will generally be magnified if nominal interest rates are at the zero lower bound, as they were in 2021.)

Macroeconomic policy then becomes a question of how to strike the right balance. We want everyone to have a job. We don’t want inflation to go about 2 per cent. But if we must choose between these two things, how do we choose? In economic models, the relative degree that policymakers should care about inflation versus unemployment is determined by a social welfare function — basically, how much each of these economic ills makes regular people unhappy. A lot of economic research is dedicated to figuring out what that welfare function, and there’s not really a consensus.

But the experiences of the 1970s and the 2020s are teaching us that in America at least, people seem to get even madder about inflation than they do about unemployment. And the question is why.

The basic story here comes from a survey the economist Robert Shiller did in 1990. Basically, inflation tends to make people’s purchasing power go down, because their wages can’t keep up. This makes people poorer, and people don’t like to be poorer.

The inflation of 2021–22 definitely made people poorer. In fact, the drop in real personal disposable income from mid-2021 to mid-2022 was more severe than the Great Recession or the 1970s inflation. (Actually, not all income measures show the same thing. Real median personal income did much worse in the Great Recession than in the post-pandemic inflation. Real median household income fell significantly in both episodes.)

This was caused by a combination of the end of pandemic relief, and falling real wages and other income due to inflation. In 2021 and 2022, Americans’ real wages suffered their biggest drop in postwar history, thanks to inflation. Some of this was due to a “composition effect” — low-wage workers returning to work dragged down the average. But wage measures that control for composition effects also found that wages failed to keep up with inflation in 2021–22.

Remember, real wages are a key economic input that went into the model that managed to successfully predict every state’s election result. People really don’t like it when their real wages go down!

One key thing to understand is that this sudden impoverishment happened to most Americans. Rising consumer prices affect everyone, from the rich to the poor, the employed and the unemployed, the old and the young.

In a recession, on the other hand, the negative effects are largely concentrated. If you’re one of the unlucky people who loses their job, you take a huge hit. But if you’re not one of those people, you probably do OK. Maybe your wages grow more slowly for a few years, and maybe you have to stress out about the increased possibility of being laid off. But in general, the harms of inflation are diffuse while the harms of unemployment are concentrated.

If you’re a moral philosopher, an activist, or an economist estimating a social welfare function, you may prefer harming a lot of people a little bit with inflation to harming a few people a lot with unemployment. But a democracy doesn’t vote based on social welfare. It’s one person, one vote. So if unemployment harms ten million people a lot, and inflation harms 200 million people by a moderate amount, it’s clear that inflation will directly harm a much larger number of voters.

The social welfare function and the “get your butt kicked in an election” function are two very different things.

I actually suspect that there are other reasons why inflation bothers voters even more than unemployment. Inflation is something that’s obviously beyond an individual’s control — if the price of eggs goes up, you can choose not to buy eggs, but otherwise there’s not much you can do. But unemployment is something that individuals do exercise some degree of control over — if you work a bunch of extra hours during a recession and establish a good relationship with your boss, maybe you can avoid getting laid off.

In general, I think people are less worried about risks they have some control over, even if the overall level of danger is higher. Look at how people are more afraid to fly than to take long road trips, despite road trips being much deadlier per mile. The leading theory is that in a car you have some control over your safety, while in a plane you have basically zero control. Similarly, I suspect that inflation makes people feel powerless, like being stuck in a crashing airplane.

In any case, this is probably an important area for survey research to explore. But in the meantime, Democrats need to remember that full employment doesn’t necessarily mean an economy that Americans are happy with. If it comes at the expense of rapid inflation, that price is going to be one that most Americans aren’t comfortable paying.

Democrats should be wary of macro-progressivism going forward: I’d like to say a little more about the debate over the American Rescue Plan in 2021. While Paul Krugman and Larry Summers viewed their argument in purely technical terms, some economists and commentators did come at the debate from an ideological angle. In general, spending more was considered the progressive position, while spending less in order to avoid high inflation was considered more centrist or moderate.

This makes sense — full employment disproportionately benefits the least well-off in society. The lowest-paid workers are often the first to be fired in a recession and the last to be hired in an expansion, so the longer you can keep an expansion going, the more poor people can have jobs. Also, full employment tends to push up wages, especially at the lower end of the scale — in fact, even as most Americans lost purchasing power during the inflation of 2021–22, the bottom 10 per cent of American workers actually saw their real wages rise.

This July, I wrote about how some influential progressive think tanks basically push for full employment all the time, and downplay worries about inflation:

Some progressive economics commentators — I will not name names, because I’m trying to be a less confrontational blogger these days — also consistently downplayed the risks of inflation and extolled the many benefits of full employment during Biden’s tenure in office.

In retrospect, whether or not this was a good move from a moral standpoint, it looks like a big mistake from an electoral standpoint.

I hope that these commentators are reevaluating their beliefs. And I hope that Democratic politicians, staffers, and donors are re-evaluating the paradigm as well. Full employment is great, all things equal. But sometimes the price of full employment is too high — not just for the majority of Americans who have to endure years of erosion in their purchasing power, but for everyone who has to suffer from the election of a leader like Donald Trump. •

This article first appeared in Nosh Smith’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.

The post Americans hate inflation more than they hate unemployment appeared first on Inside Story.

So why am I so quick to dismiss savings as a source of cash for Britain’s new Labour government? The answer starts with an explanation of why I, and most people in Whitehall, eyeroll when the word “efficiency” is spoken by a minister, and what I mean by the “efficiency paradox.” Then I’ll set out what would actually need to happen to enable real savings.

And this is really important. I don’t think that the government will have any choice but to substantially increase taxes (unless they want to make decisions about stopping services or benefits altogether that would make the row about winter fuel allowances seem like a pleasant chat). But pressures on spending aren’t going away, given the costs associated with an aging population, climate change, new healthcare treatments and a more dangerous world. Unless Britain’s long-run growth substantially improves we will need to keep increasing the tax take and make services a lot more efficient to survive.

For as long as I’ve been around Whitehall, spending has been tight. (I was offered my first think-tank job on the day two Bear Stearns hedge funds collapsed in July 2007, so I sadly missed out on the years of plenty.)

When I arrived at the Department for Education in 2010 there was still a reasonable amount of fat in the budget. The savings exercise demanded by the incoming Conservative chancellor, George Osborne, in the weeks following the election was not arduous. That year’s spending review was more painful but still manageable. The next request for “in-year” savings was doable too, as was the next spending review. But the pressure has never let up.

By the time the Conservatives were governing alone, after 2015, departments had used up all their easy savings and were starting to really struggle with these exercises. Part of the problem was the lack of certainly over budgets, which got significantly worse after 2019. The spending review of that year had to be ripped up almost immediately because of Covid. And the next attempt at a three-year review, in 2021, was quickly followed by rapid surges in inflation following the start of the Ukraine war. The Truss fiasco led to another wave of uncertainty and cutbacks.

Coping has required almost constant re-budgeting at department level both in response to requests to identify savings and because the Treasury has demanded that new costs, such as higher pay packets for public sector workers, be funded from existing budgets that were set in very different economic conditions.

These savings are always described in official documents as “efficiencies” but everyone knows that efficiency has nothing to do with it. They are emergency cuts that often have to be found in weeks or even days. They usually involve some mix of underspending due to delays in implementation (particularly for building projects); small cuts to programs that just get incrementally worse as a result; greater restrictions on any spending that seems discretionary (like advertising); hiring freezes combined with voluntary redundancy packages.

All of which contribute to future problems. The use of capital underspending as an “efficiency” is one reason our infrastructure is in such a mess, causing many policy challenges from the lack of prisons to collapsing school roofs. Restrictions on spending are often arbitrary and poorly thought through, creating enormous frustrations and delays for civil servants while they try to get permission to do things that are in fact necessary. The refusal of the Cabinet Office to allow the Department for Education to run TV adverts for teacher recruitment undoubtedly contributed to falling applications when I was there.

The hiring freezes combined with voluntary redundancies are the most destructive of all, as a load of good people leave and it’s impossible to replace them.

Of course, once these annual exercises become predictable the cannier senior officials learn to fudge their initial budgets so they can squirrel away a little extra to hand back when the time comes. The enthusiastic newbies get burned, and so learn to game the system too. These perversities are not discouraged so the whole budgeting process gets undermined, and Treasurys get more annoyed and more determined to get the money back.

This doesn’t just happen in departments but across any part of the public sector over which central government has control. One weary observer explained how this process plays out for NHS Trusts:

A fictional “breakeven” plan will be developed at the start of a financial year. When reality refuses to play along, a “recovery plan” is developed, perhaps with the help of expensive management consultants. This is supported by an “ambitious efficiency programme” with wildly optimistic savings… [A]fter a while, people stop listening.

They know that at the start of every year a “balanced” plan will be agreed; that part way through the year there will be a crisis when spending goes off track; and that towards the end of the year some money will be found to make it good. A rational response to this is to treat it all as noise. So senior managers find not only that they are spending their time managing fictions rather than reality, but that no one takes their exhortations to save money very seriously anymore.

Thus the paradox: in government “efficiencies” nearly always end up costing money and increasing inefficiency.

These kinds of resource allocation problems exist to some extent in all organisations with more than a few employees. But it’s worse in government for three reasons. First, it’s much bigger and more complex than even the largest multinational. Secondly, pay restrictions mean it’s harder to get good operational staff. Thirdly, and most importantly, incentives aren’t aligned: short-term political objectives rarely fit well with good management.

That doesn’t make it impossible though. It’s not as if public sector workers enjoy these inefficiencies, which make their lives harder and more frustrating. But doing it would require a very different approach. Here are three things that could unlock real savings.

Infrastructure: Lord Darzi’s recent review of the NHS confirmed a point made previously by me and many others — it has been starved of infrastructure funding even while staffing costs have shot up. Health minister Wes Streeting compared it to British Airways hiring a load of extra pilots but not buying any more planes. Not only have we spent £37 billion less since 2010 than peer countries but “Some £4.3 billion was raided from capital budgets between 2014–15 and 2018–19 to cover in-year deficits that were themselves caused by unrealistically low spending settlements.”

The government has responded by proposing three big shifts from “hospital to community, from analogue to digital, and from sickness to prevention.” Long-time NHS watchers will know that this has been the strategy for the last several decades and indeed Darzi notes that, in practice, “the NHS has implemented the inverse of its stated strategy.”

It’s good this has been acknowledged but it’s hard to see what will stop it happening again. My major worry is that there will be an ongoing lack of infrastructure investment in hospitals justified by the prospect of improving prevention and community care and thus requiring them less. This has been the logic of previous strategies and it has not turned out to be right. It seems like a contradiction but there’s no way of being able to shift resources away from hospitals until you give them the space to manage patient flow in a way that doesn’t lead to semi-permanent crises.

The same logic applies to numerous other policy areas. It might be nice to imagine we won’t need to build more prisons because of better approaches to rehabilitation, but experience tells us that even if that strategy is pursued countervailing factors will mean we need more prisons. (And that, in any case, rehabilitation isn’t even possible in many of the rotting prisons we have.)

Numerous savings can be secured from technology investment, which we’re now starting to see in the NHS in a number of trusts. We’re not talking whizzy AI hype here, just having live data records so that, to take one example, waiting lists aren’t full of dead people (or in a more alarming example I heard recently, patients aren’t allocated to dead doctors).

Treasury is, not unreasonably, sceptical of many “spend to save” proposals. But in this instance not only is the case watertight but the budgets can be kept separate. Having a proper infrastructure fund outside the fiscal rules on day-to-day spending would be an easy sell to markets and would allow you to keep that day-to-day spending number down.

Make management easier: It’s obvious to anyone who digs into NHS productivity that organisation is undermanaged compared to other similar-sized systems. But when you talk to frontline staff, they usually complain about being overmanaged. The apparent contradiction comes from what managers are expected to do which, as University College London’s Dan Honig shows, ends up being largely focused on compliance. There’s a lot of reporting upwards, which leaves less time for dealing with the specific challenges facing the hospital trust in question.

A huge amount of time is also wasted in the kind of fictional budgeting exercises described above. The same is true within Whitehall, where senior management must run spurious cuts exercises, and chase approvals to spend fairly small amounts of money, or hire specialists on a slightly higher than normal salary.

Some of the fixes here are cultural, the hardest types of change to make because they require the centre to cede control and managers to relearn how to do their jobs properly. A shift is needed to less reporting for compliance and more delegated authority.

System changes can also improve things. Stable multiyear budgets will be helpful. Labour has committed to going back to three-year spending reviews, done every two years, so as to avoid cliff edges of the sort we have had repeatedly over the past few years.

But these budgets also need to be realistic and automatically adjusted for inflation and pay reviews to avoid Treasury using unexpected events to insist on further rounds of “efficiencies.” Of course, if there’s a major crisis then resetting is unavoidable, but if management can otherwise plan several years in advance then real cost reductions would be much more plausible. I suspect most management teams in the highest-spending parts of the public sector would accept an annual efficiency improvement goal in return for this kind of certainty — if they believed the centre would stick to the agreement.

Contracting/commissioning: Government procurement is a complete disaster area. It’s another victim of the efficiency paradox. Frustrations with poor contracting that has led large private firms to make excessive profits (see Avanti’s “Roll Up, Roll Up, Get Your Free Money” presentation) have led departments to ramp up the level of complexity in the process. Even for fairly small amounts of money, hundreds of pages of forms must be completed and absurdly burdensome reporting and compliance rules followed.

This doesn’t stop large companies taking advantage because they will usually be able to find some kind of loophole that allows them to save enough money on delivery or staffing to make it viable. But it does massively increase the costs of taking on contracts for organisations, particularly smaller charities, that do want to deliver a high-quality service.

In the last few years I’ve seen numerous organisations get caught up in failed procurement exercises that have disrupted services and added huge costs to the delivery of programs. A classic example I’ve written about elsewhere involved the Department for Education making a complete horlicks of contracting out the National Tutoring Programme, which ended up being taken off a nationally respected education charity and given to a Dutch outsourcing firm with predictably dire consequences. A billion pound scheme was effectively ruined.

But this is now happening all the time. Recently an effective and important charity, Unlocked, that had successfully recruited high-flying graduates as prison managers announced it would be closing due to the nonsense contract proposed by the Ministry of Justice. This will unquestionably reduce the productivity of the prison system, which is in an exceptionally bad way already. And there are multiple other examples I can’t talk about for legal reasons, or because various charities involved are still trying to resolve situations without going public.

Two things would make a difference here. Initially there needs to be an overhaul of contracting processes based on the size of contract. No principle of proportionality exists at the moment — it makes zero sense to use the same approach for a £10 million contract that is designed with a particular charity in mind as one would use for multibillion-pound defence projects. Policy teams in departments need to be given the ability to push back against procurement teams that are treated as untouchable.

Longer term, as discussed in chapter three of my recent book, we need to become less dependent on big outsourcers by building up public sector capacity in mayoral authorities and local authorities. That would allow the procurements that do happen to be more focused, targeted at things where they would make a positive different.

Labour is currently in the process of setting up a new Office of Value for Money with an independent chair. It will apparently have two primary roles: “First, to provide targeted interventions, working with Treasury and departments, so that value for money governs every decision government makes. Second, to recommend system reforms to ensure any changes support the government’s missions and deliver value for money.”

This could go one of two ways. Either it will become yet another opportunity to create compliance for other bits of government, reducing their authority and bogging them down yet further. Or it will actually tackle some of the big systemic challenges outlined in this article. Even if it does recommend these kinds of solutions they might not happen, the chancellor will need to agree to their recommendations.

But if they take the same approach to efficiency we’ve seen in the past they’ll get the same result: some short-term savings and a less productive, more costly, public sector. •

The post The efficiency paradox appeared first on Inside Story.

I would have been more sympathetic to these prescriptions before I spent a decade researching Reagan’s life and legacy — uncovering a historical record that is sharply at odds with the legends that have come to surround the fortieth president. One of the biggest such myths is that Reagan had a plan to bring down the “evil empire” and that it was his pressure that led to US victory in the cold war. In reality, the end of the cold war and the fall of the Soviet Union were primarily the work of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev — two consequences of his radically reformist policies (the former intended, the latter unintended).

Reagan deserves tremendous credit for understanding that Gorbachev was a different kind of communist leader, someone he could do business with and thereby negotiate a peaceful end to a forty-year conflict. But he did not bring about Gorbachev’s reforms, much less force the collapse of the Soviet Union. To imagine otherwise is to create dangerous and unrealistic expectations for what US policy toward China can achieve today.

To be sure, there is a superficial allure to the thesis that Reagan brought down the Soviet Union and won the cold war, because Reagan sometimes spoke of doing just that. Richard Allen, Reagan’s first national security adviser, recounted to me a conversation he had with the former governor in 1977 as he was preparing for his 1980 presidential campaign. “Do you mind if I tell you my theory of the cold war?” Reagan said. “My theory is that we win, they lose. What do you think about that?”

Once in office, Reagan raised defence spending — he undertook the largest peacetime military build-up in US history — and launched the Strategic Defense Initiative to create a “space shield” against nuclear missiles. He also provided arms to anti-communist insurgents in Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua, along with secret, non-lethal assistance to the Solidarity movement in Poland. Reagan often talked tough about the Soviet Union and forthrightly called out its egregious human rights abuses. In 1982, he prophesied that “the march of freedom and democracy” would “leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history.” In a 1983 speech, he labelled the Soviet Union “the focus of evil in the modern world.”

The most compelling evidence to suggest that Reagan had a strategy to defeat the Soviet Union — cited by advocates of a get-tough approach to China today — is a pair of now declassified national security decision directives issued in 1982 and 1983 by Reagan’s national security adviser, William Clark. NSDD 32 called on the United States to “discourage Soviet adventurism” by “forcing the USSR to bear the brunt of its economic shortcomings, and to encourage long-term liberalising and nationalist tendencies within the Soviet Union and allied countries.” NSDD 75 further elaborated on the need “to promote, within the narrow limits available to us, the process of change in the Soviet Union toward a more pluralistic political and economic system in which the power of the privileged ruling elite is gradually reduced.”

It is easy to draw a direct connection between the policies enunciated in NSDDs 32 and 75 and the epochal events that followed just a few years later and culminated in the end of the cold war. Indeed, Clark’s admiring biographers, Paul Kengor and Patricia Clark Doerner, called the policies “the directives that won the cold war.”

Reality, however, is a lot messier than this simplistic storyline. “It’s tempting to go back and say, ‘You know, we had this great strategy and we had all these things figured out,’ but I don’t think that’s accurate,” Reagan’s secretary of state George Shultz told me. “What is accurate was that there was a general ‘peace through strength’ attitude.”

Indeed, accounts that focus only on Reagan’s get-tough approach to the Soviet Union during his first term miss a big part of the picture. Reagan’s approach toward the Soviet Union was neither consistently tough nor consistently conciliatory. Instead, his foreign policy was an often baffling combination of hawkish and dovish approaches based on his own conflicting instincts and the clashing advice he received from hardline aides such as Clark, secretary of defense Caspar Weinberger, and CIA director William Casey and more pragmatic advisers such as Shultz and national security advisers Robert McFarlane, Frank Carlucci and Colin Powell.

In dealing with the Soviets, Reagan was constantly torn between two opposing images. On the one hand, there was the human suffering behind the Iron Curtain: after an emotional Oval Office meeting on 28 May 1981 with Yosef Mendelevich, a recently released political prisoner, and Avital Sharansky, the wife of the imprisoned Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, Reagan wrote in his diary: “D—n those inhuman monsters. [Sharansky] is said to be down to 100 lbs. & very ill. I promised I’d do everything I could to obtain his release & I will.”

On the other hand, there was the spectre of nuclear destruction if the US–Soviet confrontation spun out of control. This danger was brought home to Reagan by a nuclear war game, code-named Ivy League, on 1 March 1982. While Reagan watched from the White House Situation Room, the entire map of the United States turned red to simulate the impact of Soviet nuclear strikes. “He looked on in stunned disbelief,” the National Security Council staffer Tom Reed noted. “In less than an hour President Reagan had seen the United States of America disappear… It was a sobering experience.”

Reagan’s policy toward the Soviet Union was thus far less consistent than most of his admirers would admit. Although his meetings with Soviet dissidents pushed him toward confrontation, his knowledge of what a nuclear war would entail tempered him toward cooperation. He did not bring about Gorbachev’s reforms, much less force the collapse of the Soviet Union.

While many Reagan fans have suggested that NSDD 32 and 75 amounted to a declaration of economic warfare against the Soviet Union, Reagan repeatedly acted to reduce economic pressure on Moscow. In early 1981, he lifted the grain embargo that president Jimmy Carter had imposed the previous year in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. When a Soviet-backed regime declared martial law in Poland in December 1981, Reagan imposed tough sanctions on the construction of a Siberian gas pipeline to Western Europe before lifting them the following November in response to opposition from European allies.

Hawks were frustrated by the president’s willingness to renounce one of the United States’ most powerful economic instruments without getting any concessions in return. Writing in the New York Times in May 1982, the editor of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz, aired these frustrations under the headline “The Neo-Conservative Anguish Over Reagan’s Foreign Policy.” Podhoretz complained that Reagan’s reaction to the imposition of martial law in Poland was even weaker than Carter’s reaction to the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan: “One remembers easily enough that Carter instituted a grain embargo and a boycott of the Moscow Olympics, but one is hard-pressed even to remember what the Reagan sanctions were.”

Conservatives would have been even more horrified if they had known that Reagan was secretly reaching out to the Kremlin at the time. In April 1981, he sent a sentimental handwritten note to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev professing his desire for “meaningful and constructive dialogue which will assist us in fulfilling our joint obligation to find lasting peace,” and in March 1983, two days after calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” the president privately told Shultz to maintain lines of dialogue with the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin. Indeed, Reagan hoped to meet with a Soviet leader from the start of his presidency and lamented during his first term that Soviet leaders “keep dying on me.”

Many admirers now give Reagan credit for a calculated strategy that combined pressure and conciliation, but this approach bore little fruit in his first term, instead baffling Soviet leaders: “In his mind such incompatibilities could coexist in perfect harmony, but Moscow regarded such behaviour at that time as a sign of deliberate duplicity and hostility,” Dobrynin wrote in his 1995 memoir.

In 1983, a series of escalating crises — including the Soviet shootdown of a Korean civilian airliner, a false Soviet alert of a US missile launch, and a NATO war game (code-named Able Archer) that some Soviet officials saw as a cover for a preemptive US attack — raised the fears of nuclear war to their highest levels since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Realising that the risk of Armageddon was very real, Reagan consciously dialled back his hawkishness. In January 1984, he delivered a conciliatory speech in which he spoke of how much the typical Soviet citizens “Ivan and Anya” had in common with the typical Americans “Jim and Sally” and promised to work with the Kremlin to “strengthen peace” and “reduce the level of arms.”

The problem was that Reagan had no partner for peace at the time: during his first term, the Soviet Union was successively led by the elderly hardliners Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko. Only when Chernenko died in March 1985 did Reagan finally find a Soviet leader he could work with in Gorbachev, a true “black swan” who rose to the top of a totalitarian system only to dismantle it.

Those who argue that Reagan brought down the “evil empire” usually focus on Gorbachev’s ascension as the turning point, crediting the US president and his defence build-up with the selection of a reformer as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. The problem with this theory is that no one in early 1985 — not even Gorbachev himself — knew how radical a reformer he would turn out to be. If his colleagues on the Politburo had known, they likely would not have selected him. They had no desire for the Soviet empire, or their own power and privileges, to end.

Gorbachev did not want to reform the Soviet system in order to compete more effectively with the Reagan defence build-up. In fact, it was the opposite. He genuinely worried about the dangers of nuclear war, and he was appalled by how much money the Soviet Union was spending on its military-industrial complex: an estimated 20 per cent of GDP and 40 per cent of the state budget.

This was not a reflection of a Reagan-induced crisis that threatened the bankruptcy of the Soviet Union but rather a product of Gorbachev’s own humane instincts. As the historian Chris Miller has argued, “When Gorbachev became general secretary in 1985, the Soviet economy was wasteful and poorly managed, but it was not in crisis.” The Soviet regime, having survived Stalinist terror, famine, and industrialization, as well as the second world war and de-Stalinisation, could have survived the stagnation of the mid-1980s as other, poorer communist regimes such as China, Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam did.

There was nothing inevitable about the Soviet collapse, and it was not the product of Reagan’s efforts to spend more on the military and to curb Soviet expansionism abroad. It was the unanticipated and unintended consequence of the increasingly radical reforms implemented by Gorbachev, namely glasnost and perestroika, over the objections of more conservative comrades who finally tried to overthrow him in 1991. The Soviet Union broke up not because it was economically bankrupt but because Gorbachev recognised that it was morally bankrupt and he refused to hold it together by force.

If any other member of the Politburo had taken power in 1985, the Soviet Union might still exist and the Berlin Wall might still stand, just as the demilitarised zone still divides North Korea from South Korea. Although he did not induce Gorbachev’s reforms, Reagan deserves credit for working with the Soviet leader at a time when most conservatives warned that the president was being hoodwinked by a wily communist.

Reagan and Gorbachev hardly saw eye to eye on everything. They clashed over human rights in the Soviet Union and Reagan’s beloved Strategic Defense Initiative. But despite temporary setbacks, the two leaders signed the first arms control accord to abolish an entire class of nuclear weapons, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, in Washington in 1987, and in 1988 the Reagans travelled to Moscow. During the visit, as the two leaders strolled through Red Square, Sam Donaldson of ABC News asked Reagan, “Do you still think you’re in an evil empire, Mr. President?” “No,” Reagan replied. “I was talking about another time and another era.”

There is little evidence that pressure on the Soviet Union in Reagan’s first term made the Soviets more willing to negotiate, but there is a good deal of evidence that his pivot toward cooperation with Gorbachev in his second term allowed the new Soviet leader to transform his country and end the cold war. Yet many conservatives conflate Reagan’s second-term success with his first-term failures, applying the wrong policy lessons to relations with communist China today.

Ramping up confrontation with Beijing regardless of the consequences risks a repeat of the war scares that brought the world to the brink of catastrophe in 1983, and such a strategy has even less of a chance of success today. Even if it was not on the verge of bankruptcy, the Soviet Union’s economy was weak in the 1980s, thanks to communist central planning and a fall in world oil prices. China, on the other hand, has successfully combined free-market economics and political repression to become the world’s second-largest economy. As the journalist Fareed Zakaria has noted, the Soviet economy accounted for roughly 7.5 per cent of global GDP at its peak; China today makes up about 20 per cent of global GDP. There are no policies that the United States can plausibly implement that will “defeat” China — it is hard to know what “defeating China” even means. It is easy, however, to imagine that unrelentingly hard-line policies from both the United States and China could raise the risk of a nuclear war.

The United States should continue to contain and deter Chinese aggression, limit the export of sensitive technology, and support human rights in China while still engaging in dialogue with Chinese leaders to lessen the risk of war. This was the prudent approach to the Soviet Union that US presidents of both parties adopted during the cold war. But Washington should not imagine that it can transform China. Only the Chinese people can do that. Today’s confrontation with China can only end if Chinese leader Xi Jinping is succeeded by a true reformer in the Gorbachev mould. Unless that long-shot scenario comes to pass, pursuing a one-sided caricature of Reagan’s policy toward the Soviet Union is likely to make the world a more dangerous place. •

This article first appeared in Foreign Affairs. © 2023 Council on Foreign Relations. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency

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