I am fascinated by what seems like an ambient consensus that neoliberalism is “over”.

The first time I remember encountering this claim was in 2020, when governments were suddenly spending massively on relief benefits and eschewing the kind of fiscal conservatism that’s been the norm since the 1990s. The problem with it then was that neoliberalism has never solely been about fiscal austerity (and certainly not “small government”). Neoliberalism is fundamentally about the privatization of public goods, the marketization of life, and the disciplining of labour power vis a vis capital. It seemed highly unlikely, to say the least, that temporary pandemic benefits were going to dramatically transform those dynamics.

And now?

I’m equally sceptical — perhaps even more skeptical — of the claim that neoliberalism is over and that we’re consequently living through something else. In fact I’m quite puzzled this claim has become so fashionable to make to begin with. Because American power is declining? Because a multipolar world is gradually emerging? Because it’s become trendy on parts of the New Right to make philosophical critiques of liberal individualism that are never meaningfully taken up by actual right wing governments when they’re in power? Because international trade is being reconfigured? Because American administrations have begun to flirt with vaguely protectionist industrial policy? Because the old consensus is broadly disliked and now facing a series of insurgent challenges from populist forces left and right?

All of these are real developments and many of them are potentially profound. But the extent they’re going to fundamentally transform the underlying dynamics of global political economy remain pretty unclear. An old order losing legitimacy does not in itself suggest it has disappeared (powerful institutions, after all, can remain entrenched even when they’re no longer supported). If anything, it seems to me that the core dynamics of neoliberalism have only intensified over the past half decade.

Having inherited pandemic era budget deficits, governments everywhere promptly moved to suppress wages in a doomed bid to bring down inflation while mostly doing nothing to cap prices on essential goods. Tech oligarchs have successfully captured key levers of the global economy and are wielding them to commodify daily life like never before. For all we’ve heard about populism, mass politics — of the kind that predominated throughout much of the 20th century — have not yet reemerged. Union density, at least when compared to the 1960s or 70s, remains cavernously low. As distinct from the 1990s or early 2000s, genuine alternatives are beginning to find their feet. But these remain, at best, on the periphery of real political power.

Far from being over, I think neoliberalism has simply entered a new and more heightened stage. Once again, I’m puzzled anyone think it’s otherwise.

In the early months of 2025, Canadian politics looked to be in a moment of unprecedented flux. Facing unprovoked belligerence from their southern neighbour, the longstanding continental trade consensus (and much else) was on the verge of collapse. Canada was going to have to radically rethink its relationship with the United States and, with it, the very foundations of its economy and its place in the world. As a sudden wave of civic nationalism swept across the country, even Canada’s more cautious and conservative politicians seemed to take note: contemplating a suite of retaliatory measures that would previously have been unthinkable.

The chief political beneficiary of this moment was Mark Carney, who in his election night address warned that “America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country…President Trump is trying to break us so that America can own us.” In terms of what needed to come next, Carney sounded unequivocal: “Our old relationship with the United States, a relationship based on steadily increasing integration, is over…We have to look out for ourselves and above all we have to take care of each other.”

In the election’s aftermath, Carney quickly shifted gears: trading the language of defiance for the rhetoric of conciliation in an effort to secure a new trade deal with the White House. Carney’s skills as a negotiator had been central to his campaign pitch — though, importantly, the exact nature of the deal he was ultimately seeking was never really specified.

Regardless, the past 18 months have seen Carney’s government adopt an astonishingly deferential posture towards the Trump administration. As I wrote earlier this summer for the Star:

Since last year’s election, however, the Carney government has repeatedly assumed a far more deferential and obsequious posture in its dealings with Washington. In trade negotiations, it capitulated to U.S. tech giants by abandoning plans for a Digital Services Tax, dropped retaliatory tariffs and introduced draconian border legislation that has been justly criticized by human rights groups. More worryingly, the prime minister’s efforts at cajoling the Trump White House have seen him go beyond these kinds of policy concessions and align quite explicitly with some of its most abhorrent behaviour.

Earlier this year, Carney offered swift backing for the illegal U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran (even as that war’s earliest casualties included nearly 200 children killed in the bombing of a school.) He has similarly backed the administration’s Orwellian “Board of Peace” plans in Gaza, indicated a willingness to sign on to its proposed “Golden Dome” defence initiative, refrained from criticizing Marco Rubio’s attempts to dismantle the International Criminal Court through coercion and sought to reassure American investors by pledging to help “Make America Great Again.” Last fall, the government also invited Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts — a key Trump ally and architect of the far-right blueprint Project 2025 — to attend a closed-door meeting with members of cabinet (the visit was ultimately cancelled, almost certainly thanks to the ensuing backlash.)

This approach was clearly a far cry from the days of Elbows Up, but its defenders argued it was the necessary path to any new trade pact.

For my part, I don’t believe any deal negotiated with the Trump White House was ever going to be one worth signing. But, putting the desirability of any such deal aside for a moment, the recent collapse of trade talks suggests it was never really in the cards to begin with. A would-be negotiating partner who openly muses about annexing you was never going to deal in good faith and offering concessions of any kind to Donald Trump was only ever going to result in him demanding more.

This, in fact, is exactly what happened. And, as Alan Beattie notes in the Financial Times, Trump’s penchant for making outrageous demands very likely saved Canada from accepting a bad deal that Mark Carney would have tried to spin as a victory.

So, here we are. Eighteen months on from the dizzying days of Elbows Up and right back where we were in the first place: the trade war is back on, counter-tariffs are on the way, Donald Trump has reverted to 51st state talk and is trying to rename things, and Doug Ford is busy performing the kinds of empty gestures that shouldn’t get him a bump in the polls but probably will.

This outcome wasn’t inevitable in January 2025, but the conservative direction taken by Canada’s Liberal government after last year’s election made it very likely. Under different leadership, Canada could have seized the moment to reverse the decades’-long experiment that brought us here in the first place.

As I wrote for in February 2025:

In the wake of Trump’s threats, there’s a much more ambitious vision of nation building to be pursued and plenty of older questions that are worth asking again.

Do Canadians really want their country’s economic destiny so closely tied to the boardrooms of American multinationals and the shifting whims of Washington? Do they really want the power of their elected governments to protect Canadian workers and industries to be constrained by anti-democratic trade agreements? Do they want to live in a permanently stratified society or in one bound together by an ethic of solidarity, community, and social co-operation?

Substantively speaking, the only satisfactory answers to any of these questions will all involve rebuilding the capacity of the democratic state and wielding that capacity to intervene in the public interest. In the short term, this means we should be looking beyond retaliatory tariffs and consumer boycotts to more ambitious industrial policies that create good jobs and high-quality manufacturing. Instead of building pipelines and financing privately owned infrastructure, we should be exploring green options like the creation of an east–west electricity grid and fully national, fully public high-speed rail that will both fight climate change and consolidate our energy independence around clean and renewable resources.

Beyond those things, however, Canadians should be looking at the current trade war as an opportunity to think more profoundly about the nature of our institutions and the structure of our society. In this spirit, a renewed sense of national solidarity in the face of external threats can be made concrete through policies that begin to reverse the long march of social and economic inequality. The tens of billions some hope to see invested in new military equipment—at least some of which is ironically bound to end up in the hands of American arms contractors—could instead be used to end food insecurity, wipe out homelessness, and lift hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty.

Since I wrote those words, the spirit of democratic ambition they describe has been largely absent from the Carney government’s agenda. Over the past year and a half, the crisis prompted by Trump’s trade has been transformed into an excuse for lacerating public sector cuts and the embrace of military Keynesianism. The promise of renewed “economic sovereignty”, meanwhile, is now synonymous with the steamrolling of environmental regulations and the creation of a more favourable investment climate; billions in handouts to profitable corporations with progressively-coded phrases like “sovereign wealth fund” and “industrial strategy.”

As a final indignity, the very government elected on the heels of Elbows Up quite literally bent over backwards could to secure a new trade agreement with the Trump White House and was only pulled back from the brink by the president’s impulsiveness. Eighteen months later, things are right back where they were.

A long and circuitous voyage, it would seem, only to reach a very familiar shore.

I recently joined Derek Davison and Danny Bessner of the excellent American Prestige podcast for a broad-ranging discussion amid the recent collapse of trade talks between Canada and the United States.

As I explained to the hosts of AP, I’ve been quite skeptical from the outset that any kind of deal was ever going to be desirable here — let alone possible when one of the parties was Donald Trump. The Carney government practically bent over backwards to get one anyway, but this outcome always seemed probable to me. Why? Mainly because Canada’s strategy of non-stop concessions and endless cajolery were only going to convince the White House it could keep asking for more. And, sure enough, the Trump administration added a roster of last minute demands that no Canadian government would ever be able to accept.

Anyway, you’ll hear me discuss all this and more with Derek and Danny in the video below. I also talked about what may be coming next, how Canada’s domestic politics have responded to the collapse of trade talks, and (perhaps predictably) field a question about Doug Ford. Hope you all enjoy!

-L

PS: 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.

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.

Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries recently appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press and fielded a question about Medicare For All from host Kristen Welker, who among other things noted his co-sponsorship of Medicare for all legislation from 2013 to 2021. Here’s the rest of their exchange:

Jeffries: Well, listen, these are all conversations that the House Democratic Caucus is going to have to have. Right now, we’re focused on November 3rd, not January 3rd. What we are promising the American people is that we’re going to fight to make health care affordable for every single American. And we know there’s a lot of damage that Republicans have done that we’ve got to restore and repair. For instance, Republicans have enacted the largest cut to Medicaid in American history. More than a trillion dollars or so has been cut from Medicaid. And what you’re going to have is about 14 million Americans lose access to healthcare.

Welker: Do you personally support Medicare for all? Do you personally support Medicare for all?

Jeffries: No. As you indicated, I haven’t co-sponsored the Medicare for all legislation that has been introduced over the last several years. I do think we need to figure out how to fix our broken health care system and then build something better once we repair the damage that has been done. Now, that will include doing things like extending the Affordable Care Act tax credits so that more than 20 million people who have seen their health insurance premiums skyrocket in some cases by up to $1,000 a month, that’s not sustainable. And that’s something that Donald Trump and Republicans have visited upon the American people.

Pressed by Welker a third time, Jeffries then concluded the exchange like this:

I think as you’ve uh indicated in your question to me, it’s not legislation that I currently am co-sponsoring or that I support. Okay. But we do support the notion that we’ve got to find a path forward to fix our broken health care system and make health care affordable for every single American.

So, there you have it. The House leader of America’s nominal liberal opposition party opposes Medicare For All but boldly supports “the notion” that Democrats “have got to find a path forward” to fix a broken system and make healthcare “affordable” for every single American.

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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.

The image of totalitarianism found in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has become so iconic that the subtleties of its world can sometimes be overlooked. Oceania — the novel’s thinly-fictionalized version of postwar Britain — is most often remembered as a place of absolute centralized control; a panoptic police state so intensely authoritarian that the private lives of individual people have effectively ceased to exist. This is true for people like the novel’s main characters Winston and Julia, who belong to Oceania’s ruling party. What’s often forgotten is that life outside the party’s inner confines is allowed to carry on under much less scrutiny.

The “proles”, who comprise Oceania’s vast underclass, actually enjoy certain rights that party members don’t, notably when it comes to leisure and entertainment. Here, the actual production of culture is still managed by the state, but the culture it ultimately produces — which is variously formulaic, dull, and titillating — is for the proles’ consumption alone:

And the Records Department, after all, was itself only a single branch of the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job was not to reconstruct the past but to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programs, plays, novels—with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child’s spelling book to a Newspeak dictionary. And the Ministry had not only to supply the multifarious needs of the Party, but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat. There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime, and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. There was even a whole sub-section—Pornosec, it was called in Newspeak—engaged in producing the lowest kind of pornography, which was sent out in sealed packets and which no Party member, other than those who worked on it, was permitted to look at.

Later in the book, when Winston watches a prole woman singing in her backyard, we even catch a glimpse of what the versificator produces:

Whenever her mouth was not corked with clothes pegs she was singing in a powerful contralto:

“It was only an ‘opeless fancy,

It passed like an Ipril dye,

But a look an’ a word an’ the dreams they stirred

They ‘ave stolen my ‘eart awye!“

The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator.

In writing this scene, Orwell was clearly drawing inspiration from media that already existed: e.g. tabloid newspapers, mass market fiction, the formulaic films churned out by big studios. His innovation, however, was to imagine a version of these things that required no human input whatsoever.

In the hands of a different writer, it’s easy to imagine the same idea manifesting as a promethean fantasy about machines surpassing Goethe or outdoing Shakespeare. But the versificator exclusively exists to produce an endless output of cultural slop whose sole purpose is to distract, stimulate, and anesthetize. “It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity,” he relatedly observed in a 1946 essay called The Prevention of Literature, “to write books by machinery,” adding that “a sort of mechanizing process can already be seen at work in the film and radio, in publicity and propaganda, and in the lower reaches of journalism.”

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.

By the time you’re reading this, voting will be well underway in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. At time of writing, I can’t say for certain what the result will be but the race appears to have broken wide open for insurgent challenger Abdul El-Sayed — who looks poised to defeat establishment favourite Haley Stevens by a considerable margin. That this has even become a competitive race at all, in fact, is pretty remarkable. The dark money has been flowing fast and loose and you can probably guess which candidate it’s backing. As Mother Jones here reports:

No Democratic congressional primary in history has ever attracted so much super PAC cash. The overwhelming majority of the outside money has gone toward ensuring that Stevens, a moderate, pro-Israel Democrat, defeats El-Sayed, a Bernie Sanders-endorsed champion of Medicare for All and Israel critic.

If you haven’t followed the race closely, I cannot stress enough how much it has ultimately become a retread of the Democratic presidential primaries in 2016. The difference, of course, is that in this case the insurgent challenger is a Muslim and the contest has seen Democratic alignment with Israel take centre stage. Among other things, this has often made things very ugly and evoked memories of the Clinton ‘08 campaign’s truly hideous dog-whistling strategy against Barack Obama (Stevens, incidentally, worked on said campaign).

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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.

Long ere the second centennial arrives, there will be some forty to fifty great States, among them Canada and Cuba...The Pacific will be ours, and the Atlantic mainly ours. There will be daily electric communication with every part of the globe. What an age! What a land! Where, elsewhere, one so great? The individuality of one nation must then, as always, lead the world. Can there be any doubt who the leader ought to be?

—Walt Whitman. May, 1870.

I have a piece in today’s issue of the Toronto Star on the Carney government’s handling of relations with the United States. Last year, amid an unprecedented trade war and persistent aggression from the Trump administration, Canadians gave Mark Carney a mandate to disentangle our country — economically and diplomatically — from the empire to the south. By any reasonable standard, he has done the opposite: aligning closely with Trump on the world stage, trying to cajole the White House wherever possible, and deepening our integration with the American military-industrial complex. From the piece:

Earlier this year, Carney offered swift backing for the illegal U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran (even as that war’s earliest casualties included nearly 200 children killed in the bombing of a school.) He has similarly backed the administration’s Orwellian “Board of Peace” plans in Gaza, indicated a willingness to sign on to its proposed “Golden Dome” defence initiative, refrained from criticizing Marco Rubio’s attempts to dismantle the International Criminal Court through coercion and sought to reassure American investors by pledging to help “Make America Great Again.” Last fall, the government also invited Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts — a key Trump ally and architect of the far-right blueprint Project 2025 — to attend a closed-door meeting with members of cabinet (the visit was ultimately cancelled, almost certainly thanks to the ensuing backlash.) Does anyone seriously think this was what Canadians elected the Carney-led Liberals to do?

It’s important to recognize the duplicity and dishonesty at work here. But we also need to grapple with the extent to which Carney’s ingratiating approach to Trump is a direct extension of his government’s right-leaning domestic agenda:

When the prime minister gave his big speech in Davos earlier this year, what many heard was a stirring call for a new progressive internationalism in the age of Donald Trump. But, as I argued at the time, what he was really saying was that middle powers like Canada can no longer afford to ground their actions in the pursuit of idealistic notions like human rights. This, not incidentally, is more or less how the government has sought to justify its own right-leaning domestic agenda as well: its abandonment of climate targets and gutting of environmental regulations; its tax cuts for the wealthy; its slash and burn attitude toward the public sector; and its overzealous embrace of AI.

Both at home and abroad, the Trump threat serves as a pretext for a form of would-be pragmatism that is really just conservatism by any other name. Within its own borders, Canada is increasingly being run less like a country and more like a business. On the world stage, it is barely even pretending to care about concepts like international law and human rights.

Either way, this is plainly not what millions of people who voted Liberal in 2025 elected Mark Carney to do.

You can read the full piece here.

Note: Until the end of July, 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.

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.

Note: Until the end of July, 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.

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.

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 can’t afford a paid subscription, consider subscribing for free or send me a message and I’ll comp your subscription.

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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

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.

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.