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There’s a recent clip from The Ben Shapiro Show that’s been making the rounds, mostly because it’s incredibly funny. Shapiro, who a justly-mocked profile once dubbed “The Cool Kid’s Philosopher” is such an irritating little dork you sometimes have to remind yourself that an entire media empire has somehow been built around him. That’s generally easier to do on the right because a near bottomless well of billionaire money exists to pump up figures like this.

But I’ve always thought the conservative media ecosystem has another built-in advantage related to its complete and utter shamelessness — especially in the realm of advertising. These guys, truly, seem willing to sell or promote anything so long as it makes them buck, and half the products you see touted on these shows are just garden variety consumer items with anti-woke branding. (Have YOU been looking for a protein powder that refuses to use they/them pronouns and supports the troops? Well, for the low, low price…)

Anyway, Shapiro’s recent viral moment1 came courtesy of his rather jarring transition from what initially sounded like a eulogy for Lindsay Graham into an ad read for ZipRecruiter:

All the worst people are very, very excited about Lindsay Graham’s death. All the worst people. But, listen, whenever you talk about mortality or the passage of time it’s a big reminder that you don’t have time to waste. It’s just a reality. We just had a baby, that means we are super, duper busy. There is no time to waste. And that’s also true when it comes to your business. We all have our own time-saving hacks for everyday life. If you’re a business owner, how can you save time hiring? ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter has a new feature that lets…[etc etc]

The transition here is pretty funny, and I think it especially tickled me as a podcaster who has always steered clear of ad reads. I also, however, find its totally seamless nature weirdly fascinating. As best I can tell, as much as one-fifth of revenue at The Daily Wire (Shapiro’s media company) comes from advertising, so its figurehead is at this point very practised at hawking things in the midst of his shows without skipping a beat. But when it comes to the seamlessness of Shapiro’s transition in the clip above, I found myself landing on a somewhat different interpretation.

Ben Shapiro, like much of the modern conservative movement, has always been a total market zealot. To an even greater extent than certain others in the Republican tent, he really is someone who thinks market relations should determine basically everything (this old exchange between him and Tucker Carlson is a good example). This obviously translates into all of the usual policy preferences — destroy the social safety net, unions bad, more tax cuts for billionaires, etc. — but I think it ultimately constitutes a much deeper ontology for social and individual life.

Once you’ve decided that markets and private property are the One True God it follows that everything else becomes subordinate or secondary to them. All life, in effect, is just some variant of commerce and the entire spectrum of human experience is bent around the logic of buying, selling, and making a profit: your political preferences; the imperatives of your media empire; the programming on your YouTube show; your relationship to the natural world; the passage of time; the realities of life and death.

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A version of the following was originally published in Jacobin in 2023.

Having reportedly made six-figure profits on the first offering last year, Donald Trump has just released a new round of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). On an aesthetic level, the images are strangely fascinating in their gaudiness. In one, the former president is shown as George Washington crossing the Delaware. In another, he is clad in leather and hoisting an electric guitar. In a another, he is wearing camo while brandishing a crossbow and binoculars in front of a blurrily rendered forest.

Like the earlier Trump-themed NFTs, the latest batch is audaciously artificial in appearance, assembled from bland stock images and channeling a kitsch iconography of Americana, money, and machismo. Their constituent parts, recycled again and again across dozens of different NFTs, have all the elegance of Windows 98–era clip art, and some (like this one showing Trump standing in space wearing sunglasses with a basketball in hand) don’t even conceptually make sense.

Aesthetically-speaking, the collection reflects a low-rent version of the burlesque pastiche that has become the house style of Trump-era conservatism. This peculiar genre of reactionary art fuses the idioms of a lachrymose American nationalism with the cheap superficiality of a late-night infomercial or motivational seminar. Best represented by the work of painter Jon McNaughton, it yields images that are at once insipid in form and grandiose in ambition. In Trump’s NFTs, the style has finally reached its apex as a kind of algorithmically generated, dadaist folk art that effectively transcends conventional value judgments like ugliness, truth, and beauty.

For the low, low price of roughly a hundred dollars, you can now buy an ersatz likeness of America’s forty-fifth president that cannot physically exist outside the digital ether. Even for Trump, a man whose entire life has revolved around an endless series of bullshit scams, it takes remarkable chutzpah to put a price tag on something so obviously useless — especially in 2023, after the NFT bubble has already burst.

Both Trump’s embrace of the medium and his timing, however, make the whole thing a perfect marriage. Just like Trump’s career, the crypto/NFT boom was a giant confidence trick that rode a wave of bloated perceptions and sleazy hype before finally leaving a trail of human misery in its wake. Speculative virtual commodities are the proverbial ripping-the-copper-wiring-out-of-the-walls stage of American capitalism, an effort at predatory rent seeking with zero pretence to either social or use value. Whatever legitimacy they briefly enjoyed was mostly owed to liberal celebrities paid truckloads of money to hawk Bored Ape gifs on social media and promote them on late-night TV. Thin as this was, it successfully lent the crypto-NFT racket a momentary sheen of chic and glitz.

It follows that someone like Trump would get in on the action only after this initial buzz had dissipated. Throughout his career, Trump has taken the foundational myths of American capitalism — American exceptionalism, free enterprise, the self-made billionaire — and performed them as a vulgar pantomime shorn of subtext. He is a man more famous for playing a successful real estate tycoon than actually being one; a politician who projects the basest cruelties of the conservative psyche without any of the traditional appeals to unity, civility, or moral integrity.

If NFTs are capitalism stripped to its barest transactional elements in a gilded era of Big Tech dominance and monetized selfhood, Trumpism represents the distillation of American culture and politics into an ethos of pure grift and boundless commodification. Through Trump’s rhetoric and speech patterns, we have come to know what this sounds like. Thanks to his NFTs, we now have a howlingly bleak portrait of what it looks like as well.

Not incidentally, the only real flashes of authenticity in Trump’s 1987 bestseller The Art of the Deal come through his lavish (and sometimes quite tender) descriptions of physical surfaces. For Trump, life has always been about perceptions and appearances rather than depth or substance. As both a businessman and a politician, this has seen him innovate a whole new language of exaggeration and hyperbole into being. “The point is that we got a lot of attention,” he writes in Art of the Deal of a never-fulfilled promise to build the world’s tallest building that could also double as an operating principle for politics and culture today, “and that alone creates value.”

Note: Until the end of the month, I’m offering paid annual subscriptions at 50% off the regular rate. You can redeem that offer here, and I hope you’ll consider supporting my work if you can.

The following was originally published in Jacobin in 2020. You may also enjoy my interview with former McKinsey consultant turned whistleblower Garrison Lovely.

Last month, the pharmaceutical giant Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty to charges related to the sale and marketing of the painkiller OxyContin. Even by the standards of corporate malpractice, the company’s behavior, as detailed in a now-concluded federal investigation, is almost too sickening for words. Facing declining sales, it employed every tactic imaginable to skirt public health regulations and ensure that its flagship painkiller was sold and distributed as widely as possible: from aggressively marketing the highly addictive drug to offering kickbacks to doctors and defrauding federal health agencies. According to a press release issued by the Department of Justice, the penalties imposed on Purdue — which include a criminal fine of $3.5 billion and another $2 billion in criminal forfeiture — are the harshest ever levied against a pharmaceutical manufacturer.

Nevertheless, they probably offer little comfort to the countless people affected by the opioid epidemic, which kills more than one hundred Americans every single day and has claimed the lives of over 450,000 since 1999 according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). OxyContin, in particular, has played a decisive role in the crisis, having been introduced in the mid-1990s as a nonaddictive wonder drug. As the CDC explains, the rising rate of prescriptions of opioids that followed was only the first stage in what became a spiraling cascade of addictions and overdose deaths, subsequent waves seeing the proliferation of other opioids like heroin and fentanyl. “I’m a huge believer,” Ohio man Jake Bradshaw, who struggled with addiction after his first encounter with opioids at seventeen, told the New York Times, “that if we had not seen OxyContin in this area, we would not have a heroin and fentanyl epidemic.”

Considering the scale of its crimes, the penalties meted out to Purdue Pharma look like a pale imitation of justice. Even as the walls closed in and legal proceedings threatened the company, its owners — members of the impossibly wealthy Sackler family — somehow managed to get even richer and will be paying a paltry fine relative to the scale of their fortune. As the settlement was concluded, local media reported that CEO Craig Landau will still receive a performance bonus of nearly $3 million. Though nothing prevents the federal government from pursuing additional investigations against the company (which is still dealing with other litigation), one can only speculate with minimal optimism about the future.

What’s more, a key actor in Purdue Pharma’s deadly endeavor will be walking away with nothing but a PR headache to deal with. Mentioned extensively, though not actually named, in the settlement document released by the DOJ in October is a “consulting company” said to have worked for Purdue since “approximately the mid-2000s.” Though anyone familiar with a recent lawsuit against the corporation pursued by the state of Massachusetts could probably have ventured a guess as to the mysterious firm’s identity, court filings obtained by the New York Times made it official late last month. As the Times reported:

Documents released . . . in a federal bankruptcy court in New York show that the adviser was McKinsey & Company, the world’s most prestigious consulting firm. The 160 pages include emails and slides revealing new details about McKinsey’s advice to members of the Sackler family, Purdue’s billionaire owners, and the firm’s now notorious plan to “turbocharge” OxyContin sales at a time when opioid abuse had already killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Ruthless Fealty to Management, Capital, and the Market

Older and bigger than its major rivals, McKinsey is widely considered the gold standard in management consultancy — reportedly serving more than two thousand institutions worldwide and advising many of the world’s most powerful governments and corporations. Once dubbed “the single greatest legitimizer of mass layoffs” by author Duff McDonald, the company’s basic philosophy might be summed up as ruthless fealty to management, capital, and the market: the work of management consultancy is most often concerned, in the words of former McKinsey consultant turned critic Anand Giridharadas, with “increasing investors’ share of profits by reducing labor’s share.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, its internal culture strongly mirrors the Ivy League context from which it so often recruits. As a 1993 article in Fortune magazine put it: ​“Fellows from McKinsey sincerely do believe they are better than everybody else. Like several less purposeful organizations — Mensa, Bohemian Grove, Skull and Bones, the Banquet of the Golden Plate — McKinsey is elitist by design.” Though the company’s vast alumni network includes people of various political persuasions (Republicans Tom Cotton and Bobby Jindal, for example, are ex-McKinseyites), its overall ethos, much like that of a typical Ivy League school, is more culturally and politically liberal than conservative. As an anonymous former McKinsey consultant explained last year:

McKinsey consultants gave 27 times more money to Hillary Clinton’s campaign than to Donald Trump’s. The members of my team attended the Women’s March while serving an agency shaped by the man they marched against. The firm hires from top universities and many of its consultants have graduate degrees, both strong predictors of liberal political tendencies.

Undergirded by an overriding loyalty to its clients’ interests, this ethos apparently does little to constrain the firm’s actual work.

A year ago, for example, the New York Times revealed astonishing details about McKinsey’s role in aiding President Trump’s anti-migrant and detention policies. Having been retained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), its consultants reportedly made a series of recommendations so extreme that even some career ICE personnel grew uncomfortable — among them restricting the caloric intakes of people in detention, cutting spending on medical supplies, and streamlining the deportation process.

Elsewhere involved with various despotic governments, corrupt figures, and authoritarian regimes, McKinsey’s involvement in the Trump administration’s cruel immigration agenda is just one incident among many to have earned it unwanted scrutiny in recent years — and almost certainly won’t be the last.

An Unflinching Commitment to the Bottom Line

As the Purdue Pharma case quite morbidly illustrates, McKinsey’s managerial expertise and logistical know-how are highly sought after for good reason: when a corporation or government comes calling, it can be reasonably sure that the firm’s consultants will execute their assigned task with zeal, efficiency, and an unflinching commitment to the bottom line (whatever it happens to be).

Though the company has not been charged or sued by the federal government, its involvement in Purdue Pharma’s activities was clearly not passive or peripheral. As the settlement agreement released by the DOJ makes abundantly clear, McKinsey consultants worked closely with Purdue Pharma management both to identify the causes of declining sales and to formulate a strategy by which they could be reversed.

On the first score, their diagnosis was a simple one: “Both the reformulation and safeguards against medically unnecessary prescriptions” (in the settlement’s language) were to blame, and the “retail channel” (as the company informed Purdue Pharma) was “under intense scrutiny and direct risk.” In other words, increased awareness about the dangers of excessive OxyContin prescription had caused distributors and public authorities alike to become more cautious — a development which threatened to reduce profits. A 2014 budget presentation to Purdue Pharma’s board would subsequently identify newfound safeguards against the unnecessary prescription of opioids as “challenges” to its revenue goals.

Elsewhere in the settlement agreement, the language proves equally clinical and no less sinister. To help Purdue Pharma overcome declining sales, McKinsey consultants employed sophisticated analytics techniques to identify potential areas for increasing sales and rates of prescription such that the company’s marketing and distribution efforts could be targeted more effectively. Garnishing the initiative with the peppy, vaguely collegiate label “Evolve to Excellence,” McKinsey sent a memo to Purdue Pharma asking it to approve or reject E2E, which it suggested would “Turbocharge the Sales Engine.” As the settlement agreement details:

E2E took a multifaceted approach to increasing OxyContin prescribing and Purdue’s profits. The consulting company [McKinsey] recommended, among other strategies, refreshing Purdue’s marketing messaging — particularly around titration to higher, more lucrative dosages — and undertaking strategies to ensure prescriptions would be filled. At its core, however, E2E focused on intensifying marketing to the very highest-volume prescribers in the country by targeting them with increased frequency and minimizing sales representative discretion in identifying prescribers to target. The E2E call plans targeted the highest-volume prescribers in the country, and the program demanded stricter adherence with call plans than had existed in years past.

There is little room for interpretation here. As the federal investigation makes clear, both McKinsey and Purdue Pharma, whose representatives worked together in overseeing E2E, had full understanding of its purpose, i.e., “generating prescriptions from extreme high-volume prescribers” and pursued it anyway.

Even more disturbing is a 2017 presentation reviewed by the Times in which McKinsey presented additional options to help Purdue Pharma increase sales, among them the idea of offering a rebate to distributors for every OxyContin overdose attributable to the pills they’d sold. The presentation even included projections for how many customers at companies like CVS and Anthem would either die or develop opioid use disorders (at the former, for example, it projected 2,484 “events” in 2019, estimating a cost of $36.8 million to Purdue at a rate of $14,810 per rebate).

Despite not being charged for its involvement, internal communications from the company make clear its representatives became concerned about potential legal repercussions in 2018 when Massachusetts undertook a lawsuit against Purdue Pharma and discussed the possibility of eliminating evidence. Having suddenly discovered ethics amid a growing PR disaster, McKinsey has since announced that it will no longer “advise any clients worldwide on opioid-specific business” and even issued a rare apology for its role in OxyContin sales.

In 2018, having spent years helping Purdue Pharma spike OxyContin sales, it even published a report titled: “Why we need bolder action to combat the opioid epidemic.”

Corporate Manslaughter

Those entering the cloistered world of McKinsey via the twenty-first-floor lobby of its Manhattan headquarters will pass a framed poster which lists the two ostensible pillars of the company’s mission: the first, to “observe high ethical standards”; the second, to “put client interests ahead of the Firm’s.” The Purdue episode, much like McKinsey’s involvement with ICE, is deeply clarifying about which generally takes precedence. No one put it better than Giridharadas, who recently remarked: “This is the banality of evil, M.B.A. edition. They knew what was going on. And they found a way to look past it, through it, around it, so as to answer the only questions they cared about: how to make the client money and, when the walls closed in, how to protect themselves.”

In America today, drug use, like poverty, is often perceived as an individual choice or the product of a morally defective lifestyle. But the opioid epidemic has been a top-down affair since its very beginning, in many ways closer to the sterile boardrooms of corporate America and ivied architecture of Oxford and Yale than any poor neighborhood in Ohio or West Virginia, fed more by capital’s visceral greed and insatiable demand for profit than the individual agency of its victims.

Driven by its overriding loyalty toward the former, McKinsey’s best and brightest effectively helped Purdue Pharma carry out the corporate equivalent of manslaughter, subordinating human life to cold numerical calculus in the process. Last month’s multibillion-dollar settlement may bring an end to the case, but as Ralph Boggs — who was prescribed OxyContin in the early 2000s and who recently lost his son to a fentanyl overdose — told the New York Times: “We can’t get our loved ones back. To me that’s not worth anything. You can’t write a dollar amount for that.”

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The recent swathe of electoral victories by the Democratic Socialists of America has provoked a predictably delicious meltdown throughout the political establishment. James Carville is apoplectic. Centrist Democrats are suddenly scrambling to release manifestos. Jonathan Chait continues to write his one and only column over and over again. On the reactionary right, needless to say, the Red Scare-esque pronouncements continue to fly fast and loose.

Here, however, there’s a somewhat curious phenomenon that deserves special attention. Said phenomenon generally involves a conservative pundit, Republican politician, or Fox News host rattling off various tenets of socialism or perhaps the various policy commitments of an organization like DSA as if they are some kind of revelation.

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I recently published an essay concerned with the uniquely British penchant for awkward backseat photos featuring powerful people. It’s always interested me that Britain, of all countries, boasts a cultural tradition that is broadly more transgressive toward its own establishment than its US equivalent — despite quite literally codifying hierarchy in its institutions and being ruled by a King. That irreverence manifests in all kinds of interesting ways and there is a strangely democratic quality to it.

As it happens, I was speaking to one of my English cousins after the recent Gorton and Denton by-election and we spent some time discussing Count Binface (above, right). If you have never watched a British election night, you are definitely missing out. Because the results in each seat are announced individually at wildly different times there is always plenty of drama, and sometimes some incredible surprises too.

But there is also, further to my initial point, an uncannily democratic energy to the counts themselves. As my cousin put it, it’s actually pretty incredible that British democracy periodically compels figures like Boris Johnson to stand around for hours in the likes of cramped primary school gymnasiums and community centres. As the results are announced and the winning candidate gives their speech, there is invariably a backdrop that looks something like this:

Joke and novelty candidates have been standing in British elections for decades and Count Binface (fourth from the left) is just the latest in a hallowed tradition. Binface, a creation of the writer and satirist Jonathan David Harvey, really needs no further description. He is, as advertised, a guy who walks around in a faux metallic space suit with a garbage bin for a helmet who generally makes use of the attention he gets to poke fun at the political elite’s expense.

And, it seems, he’s just been handed his best opportunity yet.

That’s because Nigel Farage, leader of the hard right party Reform UK, has just resigned his seat in Clacton-on-Sea and is soon planning to stand in the by-election triggered by his own resignation. Farage’s ploy, needless to say, is a stunt. Without going into all the details, he’s been embroiled in a scandal involving a series of sketchy, undeclared financial donations. Compounding this are revelations about a £5m gift from a Thailand-based British crypto investor, which have seemed to hit particularly hard given Farage’s incessant posturing as a sceptic of everything foreign.

Anyway, the populist logic behind Farage’s stunt is that he can neuter the whole controversy by, as it were, “going to the people.” Resignation will pause the current parliamentary investigations, giving him some breathing room to try and get ahead of the scandal. And since Clacton is an incredibly safe seat for Reform, there is little risk involved. The rub is that every other party is refusing to contest the by-election — rightly calculating that to do so would bolster the legitimacy of Farage’s stunt.

One lone hero, however, is undaunted.

Can Count Binface, Leader of the Recyclons, actually win? I have no idea, but Farage’s strong 46% showing in Clacton at the last election still means that 54% of the electorate voted against him. The bookies’ odds on Count Binface have apparently been dropping because the triumph of a joke candidate in a Westminster by-election no longer looks like a total impossibility.

Farage, of course, will probably win. But, in the event he does, his stunt seems likely to draw more attention to his alleged ethical breaches not less. In victory, he’ll also be forced to deliver his speech with no one but Count Binface standing in the background.

I’ll be on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, but I might just stay up to watch the count.

This interview was originally conducted for Jacobin and published in March 2022.

Most have probably never heard of Aleksandr Dugin or the global Traditionalist tendency to which he belongs. But the Russian thinker — and his analogues in Brazil, America, and beyond — have appeared to exercise real influence on the global right from a position of relative obscurity. Blending ultranationalism and anti-modernist ideas, Dugin’s philosophy has quietly become an important part of the intellectual backdro​​p to Putinism, and an object of fascination among reactionaries throughout the West.

Who are the Traditionalists and what are their core ideas? To what extent is Dugin’s thought playing a role in Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, and how should we understand its influence on Russian politics as a whole? With these questions in mind, Jacobin’s Luke Savage sat down with Benjamin Teitelbaum: an associate professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, and author of the 2020 book War for Eternity: The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right.

Luke Savage: Nationalism is obviously a core feature of the contemporary right, and we’ve also heard a lot about the more nebulously defined “populism” since 2016. Your recent book has a lot to say about these things, but it’s concerned with something a bit more obscure and arcane called Traditionalism. For those unfamiliar with the term, what is Traditionalism and how would you characterize its role/influence throughout the global far right?

Benjamin Teitelbaum: Traditionalism is first and foremost a spiritual and religious school rather than a political ideology. It does bleed into the far right, but it’s certainly more than that too. There are those who say it has no relationship with the Right and I don’t believe them. It’s not an accident that, when it intersects with politics, it enters politics through the old, non-liberal right.

As far as politics is concerned, Traditionalists believe that there was a true religion once upon a time — the Tradition with a capital T — that’s been lost as the ages have moved forward, and its truths and insights have splintered into various traditions throughout the world. Hinduism, it’s believed, is the best of those because of its antiquity and its integral preservation. But also esoteric Islam, Christianity, and all of those branches. And the Traditionalist devotes themself to one of those branches, most often while engaging in a sort of comparative religion to try and reconstruct what that Tradition was.

Two things that have mattered for the figures who’ve carried Traditionalism into politics are, first, cyclic time: a belief that time is not linear and that instead we’re always coming back to a past. And more specifically that time is cycling in a downward trajectory or downward motion wherein, as time goes forward, things get worse, except for at one exceptional moment when there’s a return to a golden age, after which decline sets in again. The other key concept for Traditionalists is social hierarchy and a caste hierarchy that very much parallels that of Hinduism, with a Brahmin caste on top and a Shudras or slave caste on the bottom — that hierarchy has a number of principles within it that end up mattering for politics.

One of them is an opposition between spirituality (or the immaterial) and the material. The upper castes are at times, in the eyes of some Traditionalists, racialized. If historically there’s an association between Aryans and the Brahmins, for example, that takes on a more modern understanding of Aryanism for Traditionalists where this is a sort of hyper-white racial group opposite non-Aryan others at the bottom of the hierarchy. The top is considered masculine, whereas the bottom feminine; the top is qualitative, whereas the bottom is quantitative in that hierarchy. And this interacts with the time cycle, such that when we are living in a dark age, according to Traditionalists, we’re also in an age defined by materialistic pursuits where politics, culture, and society are not just materialistic, but also quantitative in their values.

So you’re going to get governmental systems that are the opposite of theocracies. Instead, they’re going to be systems focused on quantities of bodies — which would be democracy, communism, and so on. Also, and this is key, as you’re moving from a golden age to a dark age, the hierarchy itself disintegrates and everyone falls to the lowest level. Implicit in that concept is the notion that, when we’re in the dark age, there are no boundaries, there are no borders, we will not suffer anybody having a distinct essence, destiny, identity, or place.

However you can imagine extending the concept of boundaries and borders, a Traditionalist will go there: this can be racial boundaries, boundaries between men and women, national boundaries, epistemological boundaries — the notion that, instead just one of them being related to Enlightenment science, and that the whole world needs to fold into that single community.

For Traditionalists, the way to get out of that is, first, moving through a dark age and to see the modern institutions which enabled this new interconnectedness or borderlessness blown apart (destruction, in other words). But in its place they want to see a new world of boundaries where men and women are different from each other, where different cultural groups, ethnicities, and races are separate from one another, where national boundaries reemerge, where federations and empires disintegrate if they really are colonizers, where there are different understandings of truth that are allowed to coexist without commingling and influencing each other. That’s the real goal here.

When it comes to Traditionalism’s influence on populism and nationalism today, that influence is not because it’s popular. There’s no critical mass of people, let alone voters or supporters, for these movements who are stealing away in the middle of the night to Sufi tariqas to subvert Enlightenment epistemologies or something. Instead, Traditionalist influence comes from a small handful of very well-positioned individuals. The ones that I focus on in my book are really three: Steve Bannon, Brazil’s Olavo de Carvalho (who died recently), and Aleksandr Dugin in Russia. None of them are politicians themselves. None of them evangelize with their Traditionalism or seem to advocate for it publicly. But they all have a history with it. In Carvalho’s case he was formally initiated into a Traditionalist sect by a man named Frithjof Schuon (and Carvalho has a Muslim Sufi name, which is very odd given that he became so influential in the [Jair] Bolsonaro government).

Aleksandr Dugin learned Italian in order to translate the works of far-right Traditionalist thinkers, wants to name schools after Traditionalist thinkers, and speaks in those terms. Bannon will call himself a Traditionalist with varying degrees of qualification. But that has been his consistent interest throughout much of his life. He seems like a real dilettante in other ways — bouncing from person to person, job to job, pursuit to pursuit — but he’s been interested in alternative spirituality in general and also anti-modern alternative spirituality (and Traditionalism in particular) for a very long time. It’s been consistent.

So those are the three key figures, but some Traditionalists have also been advisors in Hungary’s Jobbik Party. There’s something to be said about its influence on populist parties in France, Austria, and, to a smaller extent, Scandinavia as well. There have been some individuals who have found themselves there, but none of them have been as successful, or come as close to power as Bannon, Carvalho, and Dugin.

Luke Savage: Let’s turn to Dugin, who some regard as Putinism’s house philosopher — analogous, in some ways at least, to the role Steve Bannon fleetingly played in the Trumpian project. He’s had a bizarre and eclectic trajectory that’s seen him try to organize a “National Bolshevik Party,” represent Russia in various diplomatic and political posts, and also fight in Georgia. Before we get to Dugin’s ideas or influence, what can you tell us about his life and overall trajectory?

Benjamin Teitelbaum: It’s a crazy biography. Especially in his adult life, anytime you say, “Oh, he’s supremely influential. He’s [Vladimir] Putin’s brain,” he’ll do something that looks pretty lame, such that it seems like he’s just beguiled the media into building him up. But then if you say, “Oh, this guy is a joke. He’s a phony, let’s ignore him,” he pops up in some extremely tense diplomatic setting, and it seems like he’s a key Russian political operative who’s been underestimated. He has always bounced around on the edges. He’s had good instincts throughout his career, and this has been key to his success: he has a good sense of when to turn up or turn down his esotericism. He’s very interested in weird and spooky magic and esotericism. But he also has a more dry calculating realpolitik.

He wrote a textbook, for example, about what he saw as Russia’s role in the world after the fall of the Soviet Union called Foundations of Geopolitics. This is still, in my mind, the nucleus of his influence today. It’s been taught to a generation of military leaders and military elite in Russia since the fall of the USSR, and there’s almost no wacky time cycle stuff or Traditionalism stuff in there. It’s just about Russia’s divine right to push itself and its sphere of influence, how it can do that, how it can reimagine the world, and why it should reject the political map as it has been drawn by the West since the 1990s.

It also outlines a lot of practical suggestions for how Russia can subvert democracy in the West, and those suggestions include fomenting all kinds of ethnic separatism, anti-government trust, and media criticism. It even extends to contradictory messages just designed to create discord in the American body politic. He creates political parties that can be more radical than the Russian government. When Russia has invaded Georgia and Ukraine, they will put him on the air on their state media channels in order to let him narrativize what they’re doing.

And it’s been quite clear. Charles Clover, a journalist from the Financial Times did a great analysis of this: it seemed quite obvious that Putin was listening to Dugin speak, because when Putin went out afterward he was recycling and learning from Dugin, almost letting him teach him how to characterize the war and Russia’s role in the world. But throughout all of this, he has basically had no significant official role in the Russian government. That’s what makes him so hard to characterize.

Luke Savage: His influence indeed seems a bit difficult to pin down. On the one hand, the whole enterprise of Traditionalism scans as something quite fringe and abstruse, even within the already obscure parts of the far right. On the other, Dugin has held actual posts within the Russian state and has become an object of fascination within certains sects of the Western far right. To what extent would you say Dugin’s Traditionalism is actively shaping Russian politics, policy, and foreign policy? Or is it more the case that he’s merely synthesizing, articulating, and formalizing ideas and tendencies that were already present?

Benjamin Teitelbaum: I think it’s impossible to answer that question definitively. The most that I can do is, when I hear someone else give an affirmative answer that’s too far in one direction, I can come up with reasons for why they’re wrong. Certainly his influence on narrative matters: pushing a more aggressive Russia matters, as does adding meaning to the war so that it is not just a war between two states but a war between two different ideologies. That’s where Dugin is useful and influential: when there’s a perceived opposition not only between East and West or between liberal values and conservative values but between modernity and tradition or materialism and spirituality.

If Russia is being characterized or ever characterized itself as a beacon of the immaterial and the spiritual in the world (which you do hear from Putin occasionally — we heard a version of it at the beginning of his speech on Ukraine right before the invasion) that’s Dugin territory. It’s in the most deeply messianic and eschatological framings of this war that you can see Dugin’s influence.

Luke Savage: Dugin met Steve Bannon in Rome in 2018, and a quite predictable schism emerged in that meeting: the former believing that Western liberalism (and, by extension, the United States) is the great enemy, and the latter instead finding that in China. What can you tell us about that meeting? And what’s significant about these different Traditionalists having similar narratives but such different antagonists? It seems like that would potentially limit their ability to forge any common project.

Benjamin Teitelbaum: You characterize it perfectly. This one of the problems with Traditionalism. I mean, I gave you a short overview of it, but even if you’d given me two hours to talk, it doesn’t get much more specific than what I said. There’s very little content to its major categories, despite everything, and that has I think prevented Traditionalists from advancing as political actors. Actually, they’ve tended to be these lone advisors who don’t have access to formal power, can’t hold political power, and can’t coordinate very well with other people. But, in this case, we saw two Traditionalists — Dugin and Bannon — attempting to coordinate with one another and attempting to leverage a common value system. And they ultimately were not able to because, as you put it, they don’t agree on the actors.

For Dugin, the source of modernity is the United States. For Bannon it’s China. He believes that China is the actual engine of globalization, of cosmopolitanism, of borderlessness, and that you have this little upper crust in the United States that interacts with it. So, for him, Americanism might instead be found in some sort of more archaic, even pre-revolutionary American essence that could coexist with Russia and maybe collaborate with it internationally.

Dugin wasn’t interested. He was very amused by the effort and saw it as a positive development that things were really changing throughout the world and in the heart of the United States at a time when it looked like Hillary Clinton was about to take over (in his mind, she’s basically an avatar for ultimate darkness), then all of a sudden out of nowhere there’s a Traditionalist underneath Trump who’s pushing things forward.

He kind of doesn’t care about the content of their discussion because he thinks that other, greater forces are at play and Bannon is just a tool for them. For Bannon the meeting was frustrating though. And it’s ever more so today because what he really wanted was to see a realignment. He wanted a Russia that was part of the West and to align with Brazil, which he saw as an island of European tradition and cultural essence — the whole plan being to unite to isolate China.

Not only did he not convince Dugin to go and start propagandizing for this realignment, but the whole thing is completely falling apart. It’s in shambles today. So a lot of the story that I have to tell is about failure. It’s about failed attempts to coordinate behind the scenes and it’s based in much more obscure and alienating ideas than what most people realize or associate with right-wing populist movements. That doesn’t mean, of course, that real damage is not taking place along the way.

Luke Savage: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which had a variety of motivations but has a clear ultranationalist impetus, is increasingly looking like a failure if not a disaster for Vladimir Putin — both in terms of thwarted military objectives but economically as well. Perhaps the answer to this question is obvious but, assuming this impression is borne out in the coming weeks and months, do you think the result will weaken or buttress the ultranationalist ideas and themes associated with Dugin? What does the future look like for Traditionalism in Russia and beyond?

Benjamin Teitelbaum: So there are a lot of questions there. A military failure or even catastrophe is my impression too. The Traditionalists obviously don’t like that. They do, on the other hand, like the sanctions though. Dugin is really excited about those: McDonald’s is gone, all of these Western businesses are gone. There’s increasing management of the informational sphere, which he loves. Russia has broken off from Western finance, the disturbance of the global capitalist capital system, and flow of money and goods. Traditionalists like Dugin love all of those things. If that’s the ultimate outcome of a failed military campaign, I think he would still think the campaign was one of the best things Russia’s ever done — even if he wants to have Ukraine and would still like to see them bent under the will of Russia and pulled away from the West.

Everyone who follows him, including me, anticipated when the sanctions were announced that he’d be pleased by them. Just yesterday, for example, amid news about the internet being managed, he came out and said, “Oh, this is fantastic. This is great.” I think he’s probably in a stronger position now. I don’t think that you’re going to see — and this is one criticism of the sanctions — you’re not going to see everybody turn on Putin for this reason. In many cases you’re probably going to see them rally in defiance and embrace a new identity. That will be the one way that they can maintain some dignity in the face of some severe economic conditions. So that will strengthen him. And it will strengthen this cause: of creating this island, an island of Russia. What will happen with Traditionalists in the future? It’s ultimately very tied up with individuals, because this is not a mass movement.

So to answer that question is to consider what is going to happen with these particular figures. Olavo de Carvalho — who was the one who had probably the most unquestionable influence because he was Bolsonaro’s guru — no one really doubted that he had a faction of the cabinet that were all Olavists. He died, and his faction has been weakened and is splintering as a result. It’s not clear what’s going to happen or if he’ll be replaced in the Brazilian political context with another Traditionalist, maybe merely an ultraconservative (but that’s not quite the same thing). When it comes to Dugin, I have a feeling he could be bolstered by the outcome, even if it’s a military defeat.

It was a fad in 2018–19 when I was writing my book to say that Bannon has become irrelevant, but nobody says that anymore — that discourse, in the United States at least, has just faded. He’s not a political leader. He’s not going to be the chief advisor to any president anymore. But his platform and his podcast have risen slowly to become arguably the most important media in the MAGA [Make America Great Again] movement. It’s the clearing house for candidates who are advancing Trumpism and the MAGA agenda. And, if that fails, he’ll come up with something else. He’s not going anywhere.

But here’s the other thing to bear in mind about Traditionalism. These figures — Duggin, Bannon, Olavo, and Tibor Baranyi in Hungary — all more or less popped up independently of one another at the same time, at least in a big picture historical sense. We’re only talking about a couple decades here, but there’s no one before them who’s anything like them. Without wanting to sound too spooky myself or participate in Dugin’s strange eschatologies I wonder if it says something about populism that its claims also are fairly vapid and ill-defined . . . and when you have that much of a vacuum in terms of messaging and ideology, I think you’re going to get a real cross section of outsiders.

Dominic Cummings in Britain, even though he wasn’t a Traditionalist, was very much wanting to probe the outer edges of anti-liberal, anti-modern thought. I think that’s going to keep happening. For the real radical ideologues who want a dramatic alternative to the status quo, right populism is going to provide them space. And it wouldn’t surprise me if we don’t see more of these figures in the future. Not in large numbers, but perhaps in positions of power and influence.

A few days ago, columnist Nick Kristof published a lengthy piece of reporting on the Scandinavian model in the New York Times. Pegged to the Fourth of July, and published in print under the title “Learning From Nordic Happiness”, its unstated subtext was that America may actually have things to learn from the North European model, and Norway in particular. In this sense at least, the effort was clearly well-intended. Kristof, for his part, is a self-described progressive and much of the piece consists in presenting evidence that countries like Norway do not, in fact, suffer from the kinds of social and economic maladies their American detractors so often assert. In that spirit, here’s how it begins:

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David Cayley died at his home in Toronto on June 10 at the age of 81. I never met him in person and our only interactions were over email. But when you’ve spent so many hours in the company of someone’s voice, it can certainly feel like you know them, and the effect is only magnified when you’ve long treasured their work.

Most of you have probably never heard of Cayley, a longtime producer and broadcaster with CBC Radio’s magnificent Ideas program until his retirement in 2012. We might live in an age of podcasting, but the term doesn’t really seem adequate for what Cayley did on Ideas. He didn’t just write, present, and produce exquisite documentaries, he elevated the form. A serious thinker in his own right who authored no less than ten books, Cayley had a singular gift for distilling complex ideas and could present them, in compelling fashion, for experts and the broad public alike. Anyone who takes even a cursory glance at a catalogue of his work will immediately register its breadth of theme and subject. You’ll see history, you’ll see philosophy, you’ll see science, you’ll see religion, you’ll see politics. Cayley wasn’t exactly a household name in Canada. But as our closest equivalent to the BBC’s Melvyn Bragg, he probably deserves to be (as does his Ideas colleague Paul Kennedy).

Cayley’s best work, for me, will always be his remarkable profiles of artists, thinkers, and philosophers like René Girard, Karl Polanyi, and William Blake. In form and in substance, these documentaries harken back to a lost age of public intellectualism; to a time when people would happily sit down to listen to a sixty-minute disquisition about abstract ideas, then mail a cheque to CBC headquarters for the official transcript. For most of Cayley’s professional life, as for most of the history of radio, this meant tuning in at a specific time every week because you couldn’t just get things on demand. Part One of a four-and-a-half-hour series on the life of French mystic and Christian Platonist philosopher Simone Weil? Sign me right up.

In a country that has sometimes been indifferent about its own history, Cayley was someone who doggedly refused to ignore or provincialize the richness of Canadian intellectual life. His treatments of figures like Charles Taylor, C.B. Macpherson, Northrop Frye, George Grant, and Harold Innis invariably featured a roster of other fascinating men and women from every corner of this vast land whose commentary helped bring the ideas to life. In addition to being brilliant radio, they are a monument to the dynamic output of scholarship and theory that flourished here throughout the 20th century — even as a young nation was still grasping in the dark for its modern identity. Never let anyone tell you Canada hasn’t produced great thinkers or great minds.

When I corresponded with Cayley back in 2024, I was searching for the raw tape of interviews he’d conducted for his 1987 program on the University of Toronto’s C.B. Macpherson, including one with my late friend Ed Broadbent (a doctoral student of Macpherson’s in the 1960s). He graciously, and apologetically, explained he had lost a whole lot of material upon his retirement. Tragically, it seems, Canada’s public broadcaster neglected to preserve this incredible trove of archival material (though it’s possible at least some of it now rests in obscurity at Library and Archives Canada). As things stand, you can’t even find the majority of his broadcasts online. Cayley, who spent more than three decades creating work that was expressly designed for the wide Canadian public to hear and enjoy, was clearly frustrated by this, having written on his blog that “The most recent of the more than 250 programmes remain available on the Ideas website, but the rest languish unknown, unheard and inaccessible in the CBC Archives.”

Some years ago, with a view to rectifying this, Cayley uploaded nearly fifty of his old programs to that very blog and made them freely available. In doing so, he has left behind not only a generous parting gift for Canadians and the world but an enduring testament to a career well spent and a life well lived.

Appendix: David Cayley’s programs by subject (from davidcayley.com/podcasts)

See also this more recent interview with about his life and work.

• After Atheism

• Age of Ecology

• Being Born

• Between Two Ages

• Beyond Institutions

• Bread and Puppet Theater

• C.B. Macpherson

• CBC

• Charles Taylor

• Doctoring the Family

• Ecology/Economics

• Education Debates

• Flesh and Stone

• Forests

• George Grant

• Heroic Measures

• History Beneath the Skin

• History and the New Age

• Ivan Illich

• John McKnight

• Justice as Sanctuary

• Karl Polanyi

• Legacy of Harold Innis

• Leopold Kohr

• Literacy

• Modes of Thought

• Myth of the Secular

• Nils Christie

• Northrop Frye

• Not an Ecosystem

• Origins of Modern Public

• Plastic Words

• Politics of Information

• Prison/Its Alternatives

• Radical Orthodoxy

• Rebellions of 1837

• Redefining Development

• Religion and Science

• René Girard

• Richard Cartwright

• Richard Kearney

• Richard Sennett

• Security

• Simone Weil

• The Loyalists

• To Hurt or To Heal

• Willam Blake

• World of the Child

James Carville, if you can believe this, is less than ecstatic about the recent swathe of DSA victories in New York state. Over at The Nation, has written a wonderful dissection of Carville’s complaints — complaints that, among other things, ironically channel all of the bad impulses neoliberal centrists like him typically invoke to indict the left (purity testing, a rejection of pluralism, the dogmatic refusal to operate in the context of a big tent party).

I’ve always found Carville incredibly annoying, in part because so much of his mythos comes from a single election in 1992 whose outcome was to elect Bill Clinton with 43 percent of the popular vote (and a popular documentary that came out of it, which I wrote about here). He’s now been saying the exact same things about politics and electoral strategy for more than 30 years and it’s both incredibly unoriginal and utterly lacking in insight. If one hears that Carville has weighed in on some recent political development, it’s immediately obvious what he’s going to have said, and it’s inevitably just some orthodoxy from the heyday of the Democratic Leadership Council stuck in the microwave.

Anyway, a few years back I wrote a goofy little article for Jacobin about the Carville mythology and why a guy like this can spend 30 years saying the exact same thing and never see a drop in his Beltway share value despite constantly being wrong.

As a final publisher’s note: I keep as much of this Substack free as I can, but writing takes time and energy and if you’re able to subscribe here at one of the paid tiers and support my work you’d be doing me a solid. If you’re unable to afford a paid subscription, consider subscribing for free or send me a message and I’ll gladly comp your subscription.

Anyways, enjoy.

-Luke

A version of this article was first published in Jacobin in July, 2021

J. R. R. Tolkien famously christened “cellar door” as the most aesthetically-pleasing phrase available in the English language. By way of contrast, I submit that it’s nearly impossible to conjure a less euphonious sequence of words than “James Carville interviewed by Chris Cuomo.” It’s similarly difficult, even by the lowly standards of cable news, to imagine a program description that sounds less appetizing. Whatever your politics, I think we can all agree that the prospect of hearing Andrew Cuomo’s brother pick the brains of a Clinton-era apparatchik mainly known for yapping received centrist wisdom in a Louisiana accent doesn’t exactly scream “good vibes.”

Not counting myself among the dozen or so millennials who regularly watch network primetime shows, I hasten to add that I discovered the interview in question while scrolling through Twitter — that is, without the intercession of paid agitprop from personal injury lawyers, insurance companies, or miracle weight loss scams. And so it was that I happened to stumble upon the iconically cadaverous face of a man who has not had the flicker of an original political insight or purchased a single skincare product since 1992.

At a glance, very little about the segment was actually notable. With a few assists from a sympathetic Cuomo, Carville essentially regurgitated a version of the same narrative centrist Democrats have been peddling since they barely won last November: the crux of it being that a “noisy” and pronoun-obsessed “identity left,” representing about 15 percent of the party, has become an albatross round the necks of those in the sensible middle — imperilling their prospects with voters who are turned off by rhetoric about defunding the police.

Nuance and careful analysis, for what it’s worth, have never exactly been Carville’s strong suits. As the New Republic’s Osita Nwanevu pointed out, 15 percent is actually a less than negligible chunk of the Democratic base — barely smaller than the African-American share of the electorate and in fact more sizeable than Hispanics (which seems somewhat beside the point that Carville was, with characteristic hyperbole and imprecision, attempting to make).

What struck me, though, was how tiresomely familiar it all sounded. Interminable debates about November’s election notwithstanding, Third Way liberals like Carville really have been performing the same basic schtick for decades — its thrust being that Democrats win by scolding and/or disciplining a portion of their own base and lose whenever said portion is allowed to become too vocal.

Whatever the era, whatever the actual debates at hand, and however many cultural and political realignments occur, there is somehow always said to be a segment of liberal voters and activists whose crank enthusiasms are alienating the good people of the hardworking, reasonable middle.

The exact contours of this caricature, of course, can be amended as needed. Thus, in one fell swoop, the same cadre of Dem hacks who so cynically wielded identity politics as a cudgel against Bernie Sanders can now just as easily blame a phantom version of them for their own lacklustre election results. South Carolina’s Jim Clyburn, among the originators of the spin presently being wielded by the likes of Carville (and one of the biggest recipients of Big Pharma money in Congress), can casually collapse Medicare For All supporters and slogans about defunding the police into the same, hazily defined scapegoat constituency. Thus, in one fell swoop, last year’s feral pinko “cult” can become this year’s cop-hating pronoun brigade.

Triangulation may come in many forms, but the basic political cosmology embraced by centrist liberals really hasn’t changed since the early 1990s when Bill Clinton consolidated the shunning of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition and made antagonizing the left a formal part of the Democrats’ political repertoire.

For Carville and plenty of others involved, Clinton’s 43 percent victory in 1992 was less a conventional electoral event than it was an act of providence. As far as electoral tactics were concerned, it was seen to represent a formula that could be repeated more or less indefinitely. Since this was so obviously not the case (two years after Carville’s would-be Machiavellian genius helped build the indomitable Clinton coalition, the Democrats lost control of the House for the first time in forty years) it ensued that the same logic could also be applied in instances of failure — even, and especially, when centrists themselves had defined, planned, and executed a campaign.

Talking to Chris Cuomo, Carville’s warmed-over bash-the-fringe routine thus felt a bit like a flash-in-the-pan pop star performing a one-hit wonder decades after its disappearance from the charts. In the nearly thirty intervening years spanning today and 1992 — years which have seen dynasties rise and fall, the global economy collapse, orthodoxies dissolve, and American culture undergo countless seismic shifts — his political outlook does not seem to have evolved one iota. To give the Ragin’ Cajun due credit, consistency is hard to come by in the political mainstream and, for what it’s worth, the man has never wavered from his steadfast determination to be wrong as often as humanly possible.

The Carville mythos, such as it is, owes heavily to 1993’s The War Room, co-directed by living legend of documentary cinema D. A. Pennebaker. Its stylistic flair notwithstanding, the film has aged about as poorly as the Third Way consensus itself: it now being a monument to the final conquest of American politics by a class of backroom hacks whose air of impenetrable wizardry has at least as much to do with playing savvy operatives on TV as it does with actually being them.

‘He’s become a commodity of himself by design . . . a walking conglomerate,” a Washington insider once said of Carville in an apparent attempt at a compliment. The remark wasn’t exactly wrong. In fact, Carville’s rather dubious billing as a kind of ur-political impresario has earned him astonishing sums in the form of book deals, media appearances, and corporate ad campaigns (the beneficiaries ranging from Heineken and American Express to Nike).

For a guy whose original billing was as a “strategist,” however, it must be said that he is hardly a modern-day Sun Tzu. Animated by his hall monitor–like desire to defeat Bernie Sanders in 2020, Carville’s finely tuned political instincts led him to go all in with Colorado senator Michael Bennet, who fetched a whopping 952 votes, or roughly 0.3 percent of the total, in the New Hampshire primary and ultimately finished behind several write-ins (one of whom was quite literally Donald Trump).

Last year, he brazenly boasted that November’s contest would swing so decisively in Joe Biden’s favour that its it outcome would be known by 10 PM on election night, a crystal ball divination so eerily prophetic it would later be included by Politico on a list of “the most audacious, confident and spectacularly incorrect prognostications about the year.” No matter. In the sclerotic culture of the Beltway, the reheated bilge of triangulations past can be forever packaged as hardheaded political wisdom; the hacks of neoliberal yesteryear as electoral grandmasters of Clausewitzian insight.

James Carville will never stop being wrong. But, God help us all, he’ll also never stop being on TV.

“England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly.” — George Orwell

Note: I keep as much of this Substack free as I can, but writing takes time and energy and if you’re able to subscribe here at one of the paid tiers and support my work you’d be doing me a solid. If you’re unable to afford a paid subscription, consider subscribing for free or send me a message and I’ll gladly comp your subscription.

There is a distinctly British genre of image that is instantly recognizable the moment you see it, and if you’ve found your way here you already know exactly what I mean. Said image generally involves a politician, celebrity, or public figure seated in the back of a car. The face is instantly familiar but, dimly lit by the violent ambush of a flash bulb, looks unusually pale and eldritch, the eyeballs peering out at you with the demonic hue of an underworld creature who only drinks blood. The expression is abject, like that of a murderer’s mugshot or the death mask of some ancient despot that’s been weathered and degraded by the passage of centuries.

While every nation on earth has famous people who take bad photos, and plenty have paparazzi of one kind or another, only Britain has produced an uncanny style of portraiture that specifically involves celebrities and national leaders looking grey and beleaguered in the back seats of cars. On its face, you might assume such images are unique to the social media age. In fact, the genre has been alive and kicking for decades and very much predates the more recent meme-ification of fame.

There has always been a garish and tabloid quality to these photos and, indeed, the greasiest people in the British Isles are probably paid handsomely by rags like the Sun and Daily Mail to capture them. But they also express an irreverence towards entrenched wealth and institutional power that is hard not to admire and, in doing so, speak to something more fundamental in the British cultural imagination.

An American who watches an interview with a British politician or cabinet minister for the first time will be instantly struck, and perhaps even a little put off, by how probing and hostile it’s liable to be. As a rule, Beltway journalists or TV anchors who sit down with US presidents tend to be much more deferential than their Westminster equivalents and are sometimes openly sycophantic. When Congress meets to watch the president’s annual State of the Union address, there is usually a spirit of bipartisan pomp to the affair and it’s perfectly normal for members from both factions to rise and applaud. The House of Commons, by contrast, stages a ritual sacrifice of the prime minister every week that regularly sees even backbenchers from the government side stand up to grill their own party leader.

In America, late night comedians perform limp parodies of political elites and issue cloyingly earnest pleas for bipartisanship. In Britain, their equivalents have spent the past half century or more acerbically ridiculing every part of their country’s political and cultural establishment — the gentry, the clergy, the monarchy, the civil service — while caricaturing powerful people as grotesque monsters. Where British irreverence has given us the likes of Private Eye, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Yes Minister, and Spitting Image, American deference has given us SNL and The Daily Show. One satirical tradition finds its transgressive edge by portraying elites as dunces or doofuses —sometimes with an air of implicit affection — and the harshest form of censure it can conceive is declaring someone unworthy of their office. The other gleefully profanes every person or institution it touches. Where Americans merely lampoon, Britons quite literally take the piss.

The contrast is puzzling when you reflect on what a deeply unequal society Britain continues to be. This is a country that has hierarchy in its bones: one with a dynastic head of state who wears bejewelled robes, lives in a palace, and has their authority consecrated through medieval rites; a place where an unelected chamber called the “House of Lords” can hold up duly passed legislation, there is a designated state church, and even revolution finally yielded a constitutional monarchy rather than a republic. In no other English-speaking democracy do the most subtle variations of accent or speech retain such specific class connotations.

America’s self-image is in many ways the opposite of Britain’s. On paper at least, it is a Jeffersonian republic where equality and individual freedom are constitutionally-guaranteed and institutional authority flows upwards from the people. The old cliché that anyone can make it in America is obviously untrue but it remains a powerful civic narrative with wide social buy-in. Both countries, needless to say, boast decadent ruling classes and are profoundly unequal. But where Britain’s official culture openly codifies and celebrates hierarchy, the American ethos prefers to mask it with ideology. The upshot, ironically, is that the country founded by rebellious colonists is more reverential toward its political and economic elites than the one still ruled by a king.

We should not, of course, get too carried away here. The irreverence conveyed by candid backseat mugshots might be preferable to the American culture of deference but (with the notable exception of the NHS) the UK is hardly light years ahead when it comes to real equality. Societies accommodate and rationalize their unjust social arrangements in different ways, and there’s probably a case to be made that British transgression has been more of a release valve for populist sentiment than the expression of a genuine counterculture. Still, between the pretentious liturgy of your average State of the Union address and the fluorescent humiliation of Keir Starmer or Prince Andrew immortalized on celluloid, I would take the latter any day.

Note: I keep as much of this Substack free as I can, but writing takes time and energy and if you’re able to subscribe here at one of the paid tiers and support my work you’d be doing me a solid. If you’re unable to afford a paid subscription, consider subscribing for free or send me a message and I’ll comp your subscription.

At least a dozen times a day, I receive an email that reads like this:

“Hi Luke!

Tom from Livewire Communications here.

Given your past reporting on developments in the tech space, I’m reaching out to see if you might be interested in an interview with entrepreneur and VibeTech CEO Marcus Crawford on how companies can create social value by opening the doors to new innovators? Marcus is currently available to speak about:

1) Why synergies are the future🔗🔗

2) How the platform approach can create pathways for global collaborative problem-solving ecosystems🌍🔓

3) Why the next industrial revolution must be a revolution of values🏭🤝.

If you would be interested in a guest post or interview with Marcus or have any other ideas for him, please contact me at Tom[at]Livewire…etc etc”

I guess you might call this promotional slop. And though there’s plenty of variation in the things actually being promoted — often, as in the above, it’s some incorrigible tech bullshit, but it can just as easily be music, books, or any number of consumer products — there’s an uncanny homogeneity when it comes to the messages themselves.

Stylistically, they tend to be formulaic to the point of absurdity. There’s usually an overly casual and familiar greeting from [insert highly generic first name here] followed by a blandly chirpy description of the product/service/person in question and then some kind of offer or pitch that barely even pretends to be non-transactional. Because I work in media, I’ve been getting these kinds of emails for at least a decade. But, as recently as a few years ago, it at least usually seemed like there might be an actual human being on the other end. The content might still have been hack, but it was reasonable to assume that the proverbial Tom or Sara on the other end still had a pulse. These days, it’s safe to say that even the ersatz pitches companies now use in their marketing have been thoroughly ensloppified.

The mind boggles to think how many emails like this are now being sent out every day; hell, every hour, every minute, every nanosecond — the majority presumably generated with only the most passive involvement of actual human beings.1 I mean, just stop and consider the sheer volume of worthless verbiage this slop economy must now be producing. If you printed out even a day’s worth on a single piece of paper, it would probably reach past the Moon and require the clearcutting of every forest on Earth. (And that’s not even accounting for all the other kinds of spam we’ve seen proliferate in the form of junk text messages, voicemails, and the like.)

If the goal of marketing and advertising is to promote things with a view to getting people’s attention or making some kind of profit, the mind similarly boggles at how ineffective this stuff must be. Most of it no doubt goes straight to people’s junk folders, though I’d wager that even whatever sliver does sneak through probably has a lower response rate than your average Nigerian Prince phishing scam. Why even bother?

The obvious, technologically-deterministic answer is that AI has made it possible to generate lots of words and images very quickly at relatively low cost. Since the beginning of mass culture, marketing and advertising have formed the ambient din of social life; the humdrum muzak of capitalist society that serenades us through radios and TV screens and blares down from gaudy billboards mounted in public spaces. Understood this way, promotional slop and spam emails are just a continuation of something all-too familiar. It’s noise that’s always been there and these days it’s simply louder.

That’s no doubt the case but I think there’s a bigger story here about how the imperatives of the attention economy don’t just necessitate slop but require its constant scaling up. The most interesting thing to me about the promotional slop I get isn’t that companies are trying to get eyeballs on their products or plant interviews with their CEOs in media, because of course they are.

No, what’s more remarkable is how homogeneous and low-rent this style of promotion really is. With the exception of the emails I receive from flesh and blood publicists (usually on behalf of publishing houses, who I genuinely do want to hear from) most of this stuff has literally nothing to do with things I write about. Much of it is tough to distinguish from garden variety spam and it’s sometimes hard to discern what the thing or product is even supposed to be. Does this person or company actually exist? Is what I’m reading just an AI-generated press release, or something that renders the distinction between media promotion and sales pitch — that is, between commerce and everything else — effectively moot?

Can anyone seriously believe this is a viable way of doing promotion? The same might be asked about automated spam calls, Facebook ads, online pop-ups and countless other things in the same vein. As best as I can tell, this ever-expanding churn of virtual junk exists less because it’s successful at promoting or selling things than because it’s what the attention economy demands.

Which is to say: there are now more apps, ads, and websites competing for our attention than ever before and, since that attention is finite, there is a constantly escalating battle among those who are looking to convert in it into revenue or clicks. The result is a kind of perpetual inflation wherein every competitor tries to compensate by flooding the market even more, a self-defeating arms race that creates a corollary drop in quality because the overall output must be constantly increased. Since mass production necessitates sameness — if you’re trying to produce a large volume of something quickly, whether it’s junk emails or Volkswagens, standardization is generally the best guarantor of efficiency — the upshot is, well, the enslopification of everything.

The halcyon days of Web 1.0 gave rise to many utopian predictions about what the internet would do for humanity. With the global integration of communications, it was said, authoritarian regimes would collapse and instant access to the sum of human knowledge would foster a new enlightenment. Twenty-five years later, digital modernity has instead yielded a virtual marketplace whose principal output is junk; a vast ecosystem of mass-produced text and images where the boundaries between discourse, commerce, and entertainment are steadily collapsing and the social internet is increasingly being replaced by a slop shadow economy that is gradually turning the entire world into one giant spam folder.

In keeping with the national stereotype, I played a lot of hockey as a kid. For several years, my family’s Saturday ritual involved getting up way too early to drive to one of the countless rinks and community centres dotted across Southwestern Ontario in the frigid cold, probably grabbing some Tim Hortons along the way. Because Ontario is a very big place, and because my younger brother also played, the outing would usually take up most of the day. But when we and our teammates arrived back home in the evenings, our tired and battered bodies would invariably find respite by watching Hockey Night in Canada on the CBC.

For decades, something like this ritual has doubtless been familiar to successive generations of Canadians from coast to coast. In a decentralized country where national unity has sometimes been tenuous and a relatively small population is spread out over a vast landmass, Hockey Night in Canada has always been a singular kind of institution. It’s been around for nearly a century, beginning in 1936 as a radio program and appearing in televised form on the country’s only national public network since 1952. It’s offered broadcasts not just in English and French but also in Inuktitut, Cree, Hindi, Punjabi, and Mandarin Chinese. It’s brought the nation’s gaze into small towns and rural communities too often ignored by our metropoles and successfully bound Canadians together across the usual divides of language, culture, and geography.

To me, its opening theme will always be synonymous with hockey itself. Every week, when the slightly garbled radio voice of old time broadcaster Foster Hewitt announced “Hello Canada and hockey fans in the United States and Newfoundland…” and that unforgettable theme followed, you’d nestle down on the couch to watch the Leafs or Habs and feel instantly cozy, the music greeting you like the warm embrace of your favourite sweater on a cold winter’s night.

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A version of the essay below was originally published in Jacobin on October 28, 2020 — just before Donald Trump’s defeat in that year’s presidential election. But I think it pairs especially well with events at the White House last weekend and that, if anything, the passage of time has only affirmed the argument. Since it’s now more than five years old, I would only add that the Biden years ultimately reinforced and intensified the phenomenon the piece describes. In any case, I hope you all enjoy.

-Luke

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By the mid-eighteenth-century, the French system of absolutist monarchy painstakingly constructed during the reign of Louis XIV was showing serious signs of decay.

Humiliations in foreign policy, domestic grain shortages, and clashes with the landed nobility all served to discredit the regime of the Sun King’s hapless successor. But decades before the national debt crisis that precipitated the revolutionary overthrow of the Bourbons, the French state was already facing a catastrophic loss of legitimacy exemplified by the royal figurehead himself. Domestic failures and military defeats notwithstanding, Louis XV’s private life and sexual indiscretions also became the stuff of eighteenth-century tabloid fodder.

The personal compounding the political, the king proved increasingly unable to project the aura of divinity from which the country’s entire system of government drew its authority — gradually withdrawing from the public rites and religious ceremonies that consecrated his rule. After 1739, when his mistresses became visible at court, Louis discontinued the longstanding practice of touching people with scrofula. By 1750, he had ceased to attend grand masses or conduct ceremonial entrées to Paris.

Literally and figuratively, the king had lost the royal touch, and with it a critical link to the people he ruled. In subsequent decades, the process of desacralization was accelerated by a boom in subversive literature that denigrated the royal court and depicted leading figures like Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette as sexually depraved perverts.1 Amid intellectual ferment, economic stagnation, and unrelenting political turmoil, French subjects, as historian Sarah Maza puts it, experienced an “acute sense of moral void and social dissolution,” feeling “dangerously adrift in a world” without its “traditional sacred centre.”

At precisely the moment its ability to competently execute basic state functions was thrown into crisis, the symbolic legitimacy of the Bourbon dynasty — and the system over which it presided — had collapsed.

****

“He became president of the United States in that moment, period . . . For people who had been hoping he would become unifying, hoping that he might find some way to become presidential, they should be happy with that moment.”

The occasion was late February 2017, and Donald J. Trump, former host of NBC’s The Apprentice, had just given his inaugural State of the Union address as president of the United States. The remark, belonging to liberal CNN commentator and former Obama administration special adviser Van Jones, referred to a moment in the speech when Trump had recognized a Navy SEAL killed during a raid in Yemen and paid tribute to his attending widow.

While this was clearly insipid pundit babble, Jones’s comment had an accidental eloquence in context. The Yemen operation had, after all, been Trump’s first as commander in chief of America’s military. In addition to costing SEAL William Ryan Owens his life, fourteen people dubbed “militants” by authorities at the Pentagon had been killed alongside some ten women and children. Worse still, at least from the point of view of some mainstream commentators, the raid had been deemed a military failure, and Trump had off-loaded responsibility for Owens’s death onto his generals.

In applauding the president’s tribute, Jones was thus signalling his relief that, in spite of everything, the country’s unlikely new leader could look sufficiently “presidential” while presiding over imperial slaughter. Having decried the result of the 2016 election as a “whitelash against a changing country,” he would now find at least momentary solace in his own strained assurance that, however fleetingly, Trump appeared capable of executing the symbolic function demanded of a US president.

Notwithstanding Jones’s justly mocked comment, Trump never succeeded in projecting the “presidential” aura that so many traumatized denizens of official Washington had hoped for in the early months of his first administration. Instead, Trump has happily continued the postmodern carnival barker routine he first pioneered on network TV: eagerly insulting opponents, attacking supposedly nonpartisan figures, and transgressing against norms of civility on a daily basis. (To the particular ire of his liberal and centrist critics, he has even continued to binge-watch cable news and post in his own, now-iconic vernacular.)

Since the 2016 election, the threat posed by Trump to the office and reputation of the presidency has been a major preoccupation of the bipartisan backlash against him; moral and ideological outrage revealingly taking a back seat to the endless fixation with his personality and temperament. Both Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, two of Trump’s loudest and least effective political opponents, opted to make character the central theme of their campaigns, and their defeats somehow did little to dissuade others from emulating their approach. While the rank incompetence of Trump’s opponents is certainly one explanation, another is that America’s elite quite viscerally recognizes the symbolic disruption wrought by his continued presence in the Oval Office.

As the symbol that ultimately consecrates American’s political order, the presidency necessarily depends on myths that must be maintained for its semiotic function to persist: myths of personal virtue, of executive competence and, above all, of a democratic meritocracy in which the very best inevitably rise to the top. If mainstream outrage toward Trump has often expressed itself in the language of propriety, a major subtext has always been a deeper sense that the presidency as such will be diminished — and, with it, the capacity of the system to maintain itself; his capture of the office working to overturn each and every one of its foundational myths.

Managerial competence? Before 2016, Trump had never wielded political power and was known for a string of crash-and-burn business ventures that had made his name a punchline in polite society. Democracy? Trump is someone who visibly relishes hierarchy and partly became famous by playing a cruel boss on TV. Personal virtue? You’d be hard-pressed to imagine a more cruelly vindictive and morally depraved person or find anyone whose private life has inspired more tabloid fodder. Trump has finally exposed the lie of meritocracy in twenty-first-century America by demonstrating that wealth does, in fact, supersede everything else. If someone like him can become president, then the likes of competence, professionalism, and personal virtue are clearly not prerequisites for those in high office.

And if the country’s imperial figurehead can really be this transparent huckster of a man, the average person may start to wonder whether the whole thing is a con. As Jodi Dean wrote in 2016:

Donald Trump cuts through the ideological haze of American politics and exposes its underlying truth…Where other candidates appeal to a fictitious unity or pretense of moral integrity, he displays the power of inequality. Money buys access — why deny it?…This expression demonstrates the truth of economic inequality: civility is for the middle class, a normative container for the rage of the dispossessed and the contempt of the dispossessors. The .1 % need not pretend to care.

Trump’s symbolic disruption of the presidency thus reflects the deeper dysfunction of a society whose foundational myths have become increasingly distant and alien to all but a privileged few. Amid imperial decline, falling living standards, cultural polarization, incessant economic crisis, and the paralysis of political institutions, American elites have continued to preach the same old fables of national exceptionalism, perpetual progress, and a brighter future awaiting every citizen just over the next horizon. In the figure of Joe Biden, Democrats, liberals, and their conservative allies hope to restore a pristine image to the office tarnished by Donald Trump, incorrectly holding him to be the cause of the country’s ills rather than a mere symptom of them.

Should Biden prevail on November 3, he may briefly assume the symbolic aura demanded by America’s bipartisan establishment. Certain to take office in a country even sicker than the one that produced Donald Trump, the sheen is unlikely to last for long.

Nothing in politics is ever inevitable, but once a particular dynamic has solidified it can be tempting to see it as permanent.

Such has been the case since Mark Carney’s election victory a little over a year ago and, in poll after poll, Liberal fortunes have only seemed to rise further; the Conservatives gradually losing ground and the NDP mostly treading water. In short order, both in the sense of public psychology and the Liberal Party’s seat count in Parliament, the Carney era has seemed to consolidate itself as the new norm.

On a personal level, Carney himself has often looked politically unassailable: the cool and collected new face of elite managerial competence in an uncertain time; popular and politically ambidextrous enough to attract floor crossers from the Conservatives and the NDP alike. This popularity has been compounded by generally high approval ratings for the government itself and — as you can read here in this recent analysis from — by the sense among some 47 percent of Canadians that the country is headed in the right direction (that figure representing a ten-year high). At various points, the Liberal Party has even looked poised to leapfrog the Tories in Alberta.

For the first time since April 2025, however, we are beginning to see at least a nascent shifting of the political winds.

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Note: For the next little while, you can get a full year’s paid subscription for half off the regular price. If you enjoy my work and would like to support it, please consider taking advantage and subscribing for 50% off at this link.

In any case, I’m pleased to publish the whole conversation in full for those who weren’t able to join us live. For those interested, here are a few related links:

• On AI and art — The tedious power of storytelling, by Cory Doctorow

• Lord Byron Defends the Luddites in his Maiden Speech in the House of Lords

• Cory’s forthcoming book — The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence—Before It’s Too Late

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Since he entered provincial politics in 2018, Ontario premier Doug Ford has consistently maintained a level of discipline that always eluded his late brother Rob. For what it’s worth, I mean this as an observation rather than a compliment and there are plenty of caveats to be issued — in part because the bar there isn’t particularly high. Ford has often been a wildly impulsive politician, prone to teasing the most hair-brained schemes imaginable in public and strong-arming his way through perceived obstacles without a second thought. Yet, under his leadership, the Progressive Conservatives have managed to stay in power for eight years in spite of themselves.

It’s somewhat perplexing in light of everything that’s transpired, from the many instances of breathtaking dishonesty and rank corruption like the Greenbelt scandal (which saw Ford’s government effectively conspire with a small group of handpicked developers to inflate the value of protected public land it planned to sell off) and contemptible negligence (thousands of deaths in for-profit long term care homes during the pandemic) to the many far more ordinary things going badly in Canada’s largest province (the cost of living remains completely out of control, Ontario is short tens of thousands of nurses, and the list goes on).

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There’s a viral clip of Holly Valance that’s been making the rounds on social media in which the Australian actress, asked about her political trajectory, says this: “I would say that everyone starts off as a lefty and wakes up at some point after you start either making money, working, trying to run a business, trying to buy a home and realize what crap ideas they all are.” Valance, who has been a quite vocal supporter of politicians like Nigel Farage and Donald Trump, may be a somewhat distinct case here. But I also think the sentiment she’s expressing is one plenty of people — including non-conservatives — have internalized even though it isn’t really true.

As an addendum to the piece below, which is now a few years old, it’s worth acknowledging that right of centre parties like the Conservative Party of Canada have actually been faring somewhat better among young voters in elections since. Though I wrote what follows partly to explain the drift of many millennials and zoomers to the political left during the 2010s, I think recent developments only serve to underscore the underlying point that the way many people like to generalize about how political values necessarily correlate with either youth or age leaves much to be desired.

A version of the following was first published in Jacobin in 2020.

Some years back, I attended a panel discussion at the Manning Centre Conference — in its day the biggest annual gathering of Canada’s conservative movement. A number of well-known Conservative MPs gave speeches, and in the Q&A that followed, the moderator asked each to offer some insight into how they thought conservatives might make their project more appealing to the young. Most or all issued some version of the same reply: “Young people love freedom, and so do we!.”

As the solitary socialist in the room, I found myself privately scoffing. Whatever this reductive declaration was supposed to mean, it was obvious — then as now — that the word “freedom” meant something very different to the people on stage than it did to me. In the 2015 federal election, for example, despite an unprecedented increase in youth turnout, the Conservative Party had finished firmly behind both the centrist Liberals and the social democratic NDP among those aged 18–24.

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In context, however, the sentiment did have a certain coherence. It later occurred to me that these Tory MPs positing a frictionless union between their own conception of freedom and the values of today’s young were all either Gen-Xers or youngish members of the baby boomer generation — which is to say: people who grew up against a backdrop of postwar growth and came of age politically during a period of broadly shared prosperity (at least when measured against the present day). Keynesianism was the economic order of the day and the welfare state, though still relatively new, was an integral part of the political consensus.

Within such a climate, it’s not terribly difficult to see how the ascendant project we now today call neoliberalism might have had intuitive appeal to some people under the age of 30. New and insurgent, it quite ingeniously channeled the individualist zeitgeist of the 1960s while recasting it in market-centric terms. It promised liberation from the supposed fetters of an activist state it also successfully blamed for various crises and social malaises. Perhaps more to the point, the thrust of its intervention came after many Gen-Xers had already enjoyed the fruits of postwar social democracy in their early years: consistent growth, high union density, rising wages, free or nearly free college and university, etc. It was in this context that conservatives of a particular generation forged their politics and worldview.

Not everyone felt the same way, of course. Generations are, by definition, a somewhat hazy and arbitrary construct and plenty of people, young and old, fiercely resisted the right-wing counterrevolution of the 1980s and ‘90s. But, considering how many eagerly jumped on board, this history is a useful corrective to the popular idea that youth engenders radicalism and age sees it melt away. This is, I think, a widely believed truism about the typical person’s political trajectory and is perhaps best expressed in that famous quote erroneously attributed to Winston Churchill: “If you’re not a liberal when you’re twenty-five, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re thirty-five, you have no brain.”

The thing is, a perfunctory glance at the political behaviour of young people belonging to different generations suggests this just isn’t true. In both Britain and the United States — neoliberalism’s two most significant political epicentres during the 1980s — young people actually voted in large numbers for the conservative politicians who carried out the dismantling of the welfare state. Ronald Reagan essentially tied Jimmy Carter among voters 18–29, winning easily every other age group including people 30–44. By 1984, this dead heat became a rout. Here, for example, is how the New York Times reported on Reagan’s youth prospects mere weeks before an election he would win in a landslide:

“In the late 1960’s, the rallying cry for many young Americans was, ”Don’t trust anyone over 30.” In 1984, by contrast, the youth culture appears to put its trust in a President who is over 70. According to combined figures from the two most recent New York Times/ CBS News Polls, taken before the Presidential debate on Oct. 7, voters from the ages of 18 to 24 supported Mr. Reagan by 61 percent to 30 percent over his Democratic challenger, Walter F. Mondale.”

Margaret Thatcher actually won the youth vote in her first two elections, drawing about even with Labour among voters 18–24 in 1979 and winning every demographic over 35 by 10 percent. By 1983, the Tories got more support from those 35–44 than those 65 and older and secured some 41 percent support from those voting for the first time.

If this picture grates against our intuitive sense of the correlation between political values and age, it’s probably because young people today are often more likely to lean left than they were four decades ago, the generational gulf separating millennials and zoomers from boomers and Gen-Xers being pretty difficult to ignore.

During the 2020 Democratic primary race, as in 2016, Bernie Sanders won the youth vote in unprecedented numbers, with older voters breaking overwhelmingly for Joe Biden. In the United Kingdom’s general election upset of 2017, Labour won every age group under 39, capturing more than 60 percent of the vote from people aged 18–29. A Gallup poll conducted in 2018, meanwhile, found that only half of young American adults now have a favourable view of capitalism — down 16 percent since 2010 — while about the same proportion now has a favourable view of socialism. Though a less than negligible plurality of older people also view socialism positively, it’s undeniable that a considerable majority favours capitalism.

Rather than assume these trends reflect attitudes that inherently come with either youth or age — which, as we’ve already seen, doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny — we might ask why it is that young people today are often so much less inclined towards capitalism than their parents or grandparents. The simple, though oft-ignored answer is that the average young person in the 21st century has had a radically different set of experiences and developed a quite different set of political values to match them. In 1960 the median American house price was around $97,000 adjusted for inflation; today the figure is $226,000. Whereas wages grew steadily for workers in the decades between the 1940s and the 1970s, most haven’t seen the value of their paycheques improve since. In many societies, social mobility has plummeted while education has grown increasingly expensive and good jobs harder to come by.

Common Experience

If you’re under 40 today, there’s a good chance capitalism hasn’t served you particularly well and that exhausted political narratives emphasizing individual grit and personal responsibility carry a very different connotation than they once did to an earlier generation. The postwar/Keynesian version of capitalism, and the economic prospects it once guaranteed, are completely unimaginable to most of us today. Some of the hardest working people I know barely hover above the poverty line and even the more professionally successful among my friends and acquaintances are unlikely to have much in the way of savings (though they probably have plenty of debt).

This is anecdotal, of course, which is a good moment to issue the standard caveats about conceiving of politics in generational terms. First of all, generations aren’t monolithic things: their boundaries being somewhat arbitrary and people within them having a limitless multitude of social backgrounds and experiences. Not every millennial or zoomer is hostile to capitalism and there are plenty of people over 60 who either radicalized with age or never abandoned the left-wing politics of their youth. Generations also have plenty of material and cultural divisions within themselves, making the imposition of some unitary narrative a messy and sometimes pointless exercise. They’re also, to some extent, an invention of capitalism itself. As journalist and music critic Jeff Chang has argued: “Generations are fictions, often created to suit the needs of demographers and marketers.”

Still, there’s no denying that generalized trends predominate among particular age groups and that some degree of shared experience is the most obvious explanation. This experience is the key because political ideology is ultimately the intellectual and moral shorthand through which people explain and interpret their reality. There is nothing inherently radical or reactionary about belonging to any particular generation just as there’s nothing inherently progressive or conservative about being a particular age. There is no singular epistemology that comes with youth and wanes with maturity, but there are a broad set of experiences and social facts that inevitably shape people’s attitudes and political views.

Millions born at the end of the twentieth century or the early part of the twenty first did not enter life with some special disposition that made them receptive to socialist or left wing politics. Rather, looking to political alternatives like socialism or opting out of political engagement altogether (something large numbers of young people also do) are rational responses to the world as they have experienced it: one defined by the manifold crises, financial meltdowns, and political upheavals liberal democracies have experienced since the end of the 1990s.

This does not mean, of course, that the left should start dealing in crass generational politics or rest on its laurels while awaiting rescue from some imagined future cohort that will inevitably sweep it into power. (In an odd way, understanding the sources of generational belief actually stands as a warning against the very idea of seeing politics in generational terms, insofar as this tends to presume some intrinsic correlation between age and conservatism, or vice versa.)

Instead, social and material realities — not the discrete internal cultures thought to belong to people of different demographics — should be our guide: the better to understand how capitalism is failing, and why so many young people are now looking to political horizons quite different from those of their parents and grandparents.

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Sometimes in politics the stars momentarily align to make the outcome in a small local race feel as consequential as a national election. It’s a rare thing but, when it does happen, an individual politician can suddenly wield the kind of influence few will ever possess. When there’s widespread hunger for change, that effect is only magnified. With this in mind, it’s worth putting the scale of the opportunity that’s just been handed to Greater Manchester’s Mayor Andy Burnham into perspective.

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A few weeks ago, I recorded a lengthy conversation with Bhaskar Sunkara: founding editor of Jacobin (where I’ve been publishing since 2014) and president of The Nation magazine. Bhaskar was in town to deliver the 2026 Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture, which you can watch in full here, and this conversation — filmed and recorded the next day at Toronto Metropolitan University — gave us the opportunity to dig more deeply into the past, present, and future of the socialist project.

In September, Bhaskar and two his coauthors (Ben Burgis and Mike Beggs) will publish The Blueprint, which offers a remarkable sketch of what socialist economics might look like in the 21st century. The book is quite hard-headed about the failures of the socialist project in the 20th, particularly when it came to the question of economic planning. In different ways, this was true of both major strains of socialism: the social democratic model that became dominant across much of Europe and the Leninist variant that held power throughout the Eastern Bloc. It proved especially true of central planning, whose limitations you’ll hear Bhaskar and I discuss at length.

How should the left approach the question of economic organization? Is it still possible or necessary to embrace a political horizon that reaches beyond not only liberal capitalism but also traditional social democracy? How might a socialist economy achieve an efficient allocation of labour and resources while avoiding the maldistribution of wealth and power inevitably engendered by the market system?

In this conversation, you’ll hear us engage both questions like these and less abstract topics like the resurgence of socialist ideas among millennials, the electoral successes of the Democratic Socialists of America, and the nascent mayoral administration of Zohran Mamdani. I’d like to thank my partners at the Broadbent Institute and Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung and I hope you enjoy the discussion — included here in full in both podcast and video form.

I keep as much of this Substack free as I can, but as a freelancer I depend on the income I receive from writing so please do consider subscribing for as little as $5 a month if you can afford to contribute. Those who do so will get instant access to every paywalled piece in full, including those from the archives, and to plenty more conversations like this.

-Luke

NOTE: I keep as much of this Substack free as I can, but as a freelancer I depend on the income I receive from writing so please consider subscribing for as little as $5 a month if you can afford to contribute. Those who do so will get instant access to every paywalled piece in full, including those from the archives.

I can’t quite remember when it was, but I once watched a TVO panel about housing policy. The details aren’t hugely important, but part way through one of the more conservatively-minded panelists made a derisive comment in response to someone else’s fairly straightforward case for the building of new non-profit public housing (“Oh, so you want a future where millions of people live in units owned by the government?” or something to that effect).

It didn’t matter, evidently, that public housing has both a long lineage and a pretty good track record in Canada — or did, at any rate, before Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin killed the National Housing Program back in the 1990s. It didn’t matter that Canada is in the midst of a massive housing crisis and that non-profit houses and rental units are by definition more affordable than what’s currently on offer from an overpriced and overly financialized housing market. The idea of the state involving itself in the construction or provision of housing was just inherently uncouth, full stop.

I’ve been recalling this little episode over the past few days while looking on at events in the UK. For context, the British government recently asked supermarket chains to cap rising prices on essential foodstuffs amid continued inflation. I say “asked” because what we’re talking about here is something completely voluntary rather than the imposition of actual price controls (Scotland’s SNP government, for what it’s worth, is doing just that). The government, in fact, has apparently even tried to nudge grocery conglomerates by offering them some regulatory cuts in return.

But even this, it seems, is a bridge too far for Britain’s market ideologues. Here’s just a sample of the reaction so far:

“Completely preposterous…My advice is that the Government should reduce some of the tax and regulatory burden and free us up in a very competitive market.” — Stuart Machin, chief executive of Marks & Spencer

“I think the whole idea is the stuff of nonsense and it will never fly. This smacks of state control, it’s idiotic, it’s dangerous, and it’ll never work. [There is] no better system than a free market economy.” — Lord Stuart Rose, former chairman of Ocado and Conservative peer

“Rather than introduce 1970s style price controls and trying to force retailers to sell goods at a loss, the government must focus on how it will reduce the public policy costs which are pushing up food prices in the first place.” — Helen Dickinson, the chief executive of the British Retail Consortium

“Lost for words. Never thought I’d see a British govt trying to set food prices. If there is one highly competitive sector it is food retailing. Do we really want to live in a country where the state sets these prices?” — Paul Johnson, Provost at The Queen's College, Oxford and former director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies

“We did have price caps and purchasing caps during the Second World War. And of course Stalin and his successors were pretty good at capping prices and that’s how they ran the economy. But in general, outside of wartime or a state planned economy, finding ways in which you can cap the price of ordinary goods…in general people have not done it because if you try and do it it all goes wrong.” — Ed Balls, former MP and Labour Shadow Chancellor

It’s quite remarkable, really.

Britain is a wealthy country where there’s more than enough for everyone to eat, yet millions are going hungry and food bank usage is reportedly up 45 percent relative to pre-pandemic levels. For those quoted above, however, the real crisis is the notion that the state might intervene. The sheer incredulousness of these reactions is, I think, telling in and of itself. The market system may be failing to meet a basic need here but acknowledging this, let alone doing anything about it, is state-ism, Stalinism, an attack on freedom itself. In Canada, incidentally, NDP leader Avi Lewis’s proposal for publicly-owned non-profit grocery stores has been greeted with a similarly doctrinarian reaction from the same crowd.

This species of market dogma has its roots in old Cold War hysteria and in some ways reaches back even further (Ayn Rand, for example, thought Roosevelt’s New Deal represented the creeping encroachment of communism in the United States). Here, healthy scepticism about the possibility of state overreach was superseded by the far more radical belief that the market system is so foundational as a bulwark of freedom that constraining or limiting it in any way poses an existential risk. Even when markets are failing to provide something quite fundamental, this thinking goes, having the state — even the democratic state — intervene will inevitably yield a worse outcome.

It’s a view that stays fixed regardless of how the world changes and what actual evidence might say to the contrary. Here, for example, is how Ronald Reagan — then still in his Hollywood era — made the case against socialized medicine in a now infamous 1961 propaganda recording cut for the American Medical Association:

One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project, most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it…in our country under our free-enterprise system we have seen medicine reach the greatest heights that it has in any country in the world. Today, the relationship between patient and doctor in this country is something to be envied any place. The privacy, the care that is given to a person, the right to choose a doctor, the right to go from one doctor to the other. But let’s also look from the other side…The doctor begins to lose freedoms…From here it’s a short step to all the rest of socialism, to determining his pay, and pretty soon your son won’t decide when he’s in school, where he will go, or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him where he will go to work and what he will do.

Needless to say, countries throughout the world have established systems of socialized medicine without anything even faintly resembling Reagan’s dire warnings coming to pass (I’m incidentally fortunate to live in Canada and would take its model of nationalized health insurance over the healthcare dystopia that exists south of the border). The same can be said about price controls, public housing, rent caps, and plenty else as well. Just look at what governments are doing right now in places like Mexico and Spain.

Once again, to a particular species of market dogmatist this stuff simply doesn’t matter. Paying $3000 a month to a private landlord for a 450 square foot box in the sky is freedom but paying half that amount to a publicly-owned rental company for more space is communist tyranny. The state providing everyone with health insurance will end in death panels but leaving profiteers to their own devices guarantees “choice.” And between letting people go hungry in the richest societies on earth and reforming a system that is visibly failing, the former is somehow deemed the more desirable option.