The New York Times recently published a letter from me responding to a guest essay (op-ed) by Michael Geruso and Dean Spears, with whom I’ve been engaging on the question of pro-natalism. As a colleague who had such a letter published a few years ago observed, this will probably get more readers than any journal article I’ve ever written. The text is over the fold

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A cursory glance at the Jeffrey Epstein’s biography (1953 – 2019) shows it can be treated as a modern adaptation (and so adjustment) of Horatio Alger Jr.’s framework: Epstein’s life moves from (lower) middle-class respectability to incredible wealth and luxury (and associated criminal sordidness). Epstein was an immensely successful social climber, who didn’t just manage the wealth of the ultra-wealthy, but also used his own wealth and his access to the very wealthy to position himself into the role of Macher in politics and (unusually) in science, including non-trivial associations with (inter alia) MIT’s Media Lab, Harvard University’s evolutionary dynamics programs, and the Santa-Fe institute.*

The latter is especially notable because while as a kid Epstein skipped two grades, he was de facto an academic drop-out. Yet, back in 2002 already, an incredibly instructive New York Magazine profile by Landon Thomas Jr. reports:

But beautiful women are only a part of it. Because here’s the thing about Epstein: As some collect butterflies, he collects beautiful minds. “I invest in people — be it politics or science. It’s what I do,” he has said to friends. And his latest prize addition is the former president [Clinton].

Investing in people doesn’t mean providing them with an education. Rather, Epstein brought people together from business, science, and politics which allowed them access to funds, prestige, political decision-makers, Hollywood stars, media moguls, and young girls. While Epstein donated money, his real gift to others was that he facilitated other people’s plans by brokering one of the most scarce commodities in science and politics, attention. His perceived success at this kind of brokerage is my main interest below. (Here I use ‘brokerage’ and its cognates in order to refer to his role as enabler.)

But it would be remiss of me to fail to mention that in return for facilitating attention and funds Epstein got investment opportunities — including investment in scientific projects he cared about not the least ones associated with eugenics and transhumanism — and sexual access to children. He was, in fact, convicted of procuring a child for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute. And there is very little doubt that the plea bargain only covered a small number of his life of sex crimes before and after the conviction.

Of course, part of the interest in documentation pertaining to Epstein’s life is to what degree and to whom he also brokered or trafficked in sexual access to children to people in his circle, and whether that allowed for opportunities for further financial gain (through payoffs or blackmail, etc.) I assume my readers are familiar with these sordid facts. They matter a great deal for the continued public interest in the handling of the case, but I will only emphasize them intermittently below.

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As President Trump continues to amass authoritarian power, we should consider the shocking role of the Supreme Court in facilitating his power grab. Trump v. United States declared the President immune from prosecution for breaking any criminal law as long as he uses his Presidential powers to commit his crimes. It allowed Trump to get away with gross violations of the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause. It foreclosed all feasible paths for enforcing the 14th Amendment’s Insurrection Clause against Trump and other participants in the attempted coup of Jan. 6.

In the emergency docket this year, the Court has been overwhelmingly solicitous to Trump’s assertions of unconstrained Presidential power. For the time being, it’s a-okay with Trump destroying the Department of Education, deporting undocumented immigrants to countries where they may face torture, firing 16,000 civil servants from 6 agencies without cause, even firing heads of independent agencies, deporting U.S. citizens on the pretext that the 14th Amendment doesn’t establish birthright citizenship, canceling millions of dollars of research grants already awarded, etc.

As I have previously argued, the Supreme Court’s lawless and massively destructive actions regarding Presidential power have little to do with Constitutional reasoning (which it often doesn’t bother to present in the emergency docket), but with its authoritarian mindset. Here I’ll trace their mindset to a particular understanding of executive power derived from the authoritarianism of the capitalist workplace.

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One of my foundational theoretical commitments is that the technology of reading and writing is neither natural nor innocuous. Media theorists McLuhan, Postman, Ong and Flusser all agree on this point: the technology of writing is a necessary condition for the emerge of liberal/democratic/Enlightenment/rationalist culture; mass literacy and the proliferation of cheap books/newspapers is necessary for this culture to spread beyond the elite to the whole of society.

This was an expensive project. Universal high school requires a significant investment, both to pay the teachers/build the schools and in terms of the opportunity cost to young people. Up until the end of the 20th century, the bargain was worth it for all parties invovled. Young people might not have enjoyed learning to read, write 5-paragraph essays or identify the symbolism in Lord of the Flies, but it was broadly obvious that reading and writing were necessary to navigate society and to consume the overwhelming majority of media.

And it’s equally obvious to today’s young people that this is no longer the case, that they will not need to spend all this time and effort learning to read long texts in order to communicate. They are, after all, communicating all the time, online, without essentially zero formal instruction on how to do so. Just as children learn to talk just by being around people talking, they learn to communicate online just by doing so. In this way, digital culture clearly resonates with Ong’s conception of “secondary orality,” as having far more in common with pre-literate “primary oral culture” than with the literary culture rapidly collapsing, faster with each new generation.

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There’s a great anecdote about Roman Jakobson, the structuralist theorist of language, in Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan’s book, Code: From Information Theory to French Theory. For Jakobson, and for other early structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers, language, cybernetic theories of information, and economists’ efforts to understand how the economy worked all went together :

By aligning the refined conceptual systems of interwar Central European thought with the communicationism of midcentury American science, Jakobson envisioned his own particular axis of global fraternity, closely tied to forces of Western capitalist production. (He colorfully illustrated this technoscientific fraternity when he entered a Harvard lecture hall one day to discover that the Russian economist Vassily Leontieff, who had just finished using the room, had left his celebrated account of economic input and output functions on the blackboard. As Jakobson’s students moved to erase the board he declared, “Stop, I will lecture with this scheme.” As he explained, “The problems of output and input in linguistics and economics are exactly the same.”*

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Now that the Trump government is relentlessly attacking higher education and abusing its power at the border to arbitrarily refuse entry to scholars, many academics wonder whether it’s still possible to travel to the US for conferences or other research purposes, especially if they have publicly criticized the Trump government or its allies. But where you can travel, under what conditions, for your academic work, has long been an issue for scholars who come from countries with “weak passports”: passports with which they require visas, often in long-winded, uncertain bureaucratic processes that they might not be able to finish before the conference in question has taken place, and for which they often have to pay with their private money.

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I’ve owned this mug for twenty-five years now. Bought in the gift shop of the Metropolitan Opera in New York on my first ever trip to America, which I doubt I shall ever visit again. The mug, in art nouveau style, celebrates Pucchini’s La Bohème, which we might have seen there. I forget what we saw from the cheap seats, high up. The colours are badly faded after a quarter-century of machine washing, which suggests that its manufacture was cheap, though it has served me well through different places. Sometimes it disappeared for weeks on end into other people’s offices and I had to mark “property of Chris Bertram” in indelible marker on the base. But all sign of that writing has now gone.

Clinton was President then, and the Twin Towers still standing. We went to the top. Terrible things had already happened in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, but we didn’t think they might happen to us too, as now we do.

I was surprised by America, how cheerful people were and large the food portions. It all seemed to work and the buildings went upwards forever. We stood in the street and looked up, up, up. That journey made me see America as human and not just an abstraction of ideas and power. When 9/11 happened I got angry at my British friends who said they got what they deserved. Those were actual people in a place that really existed.

My youngest child got sick there on that trip. Appendicitis. Luckily we had insurance, which paid. We resisted their demand that one parent should fly back with the other child, not knowing if the operation had succeeded, or not. Lenox Hill Hospital was nice once you got past the ER with people shouting about gunshot wounds and others behind transparent screens demanding that you show that insurance. The nurses, mostly black, were friendly and made conversation with us about the NHS.

The mug is not all that remains. I have some amber cuff-links from the New York Public Library gift shop, a tie bought at Macy’s, photos (one with a banner behind us “CAPITALISM MADE FRESH DAILY”),the drawings our children made of the skyline and a cartoon book about the appendicitis. But the mug I see daily.

I’ve been back many times, visited many US cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Providence, Boston, Chicago, Madison, Tucson. But nothing quite matches that first glimpse of Manhattan out of a plane window, the immediate raucousness of the airport, the taxi ride from JFK, the first multi-decker sandwich with pastrami, the cacophony of different voices, colours, accents, possibilities. So much gone, and I will not return. But I still drink my morning coffee from that mug.

(Inspired by Jenny Erpenbeck’s “The Pressure Cooker” in her Not a Novel.)

Have they changed, or just become their worst selves

While Trump is unpopular with a majority of Americans, his support among Republicans remains solid. That’s despite blatant corruption, fascist policies and a failure to deliver any of the economic benefits he promised. Faced with this depressing fact, the standard New York Times response has been to send an intrepid reporter to “Trump Country” (rural Kentucky or Midwestern diners) to find out what is going on.

But it would be far more instructive to send them to Long Island, where Trump won both counties in 2024. Long Island voters have given solid support to Republicans at all levels. Even as he was crushingly defeated in New York as a whole, Mitt Romney got close to half the vote in Suffolk and Nassau counties. Trump did a few percentage points better in 2024, winning both. But he would have gone nowhere if not for the solid support of Romney voters

This doesn’t fit at all with the usual stories about Trump voters. The residents of Long Island are not the “left-behinds” routinely described in explanations of Trump’s appeal. The average income is over $100 000 and unemployment rates have long been around 3 per cent. Like most New Yorkers, Long Islanders have been beneficiaries of the globalised economy of which Romney was a symbol. And, if you were to believe Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind they did so because they valued honor, loyalty and purity, qualities Trump routinely trashes.

Democrats from Hillary Clinton on assumed that these contradictions would lead suburban Republicans to abandon Trump in numbers large enough to offset any losses of Democrats attracted by Trump’s racism and misogyny. Evidently this is not the case. Not only have the Republicans who once voted for Romney maintained their support for Trump but they have preferred him to any Republican alternative. And, with few exceptions, they have embraced Trump’s racist and fascist policies, even as he approaches outright Nazism.

What has happened here? Has Trump, as Walter Olson suggests, radicalised his followers leading them to support positions they would once have rejected? Or has he simply allowed them to reveal themselves (or at least their worst selves) as the racists and fascists they always were?

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I’ve held off posting this in the hope of coming up with some kind of positive response, but I haven’t got one.

When I wrote back in November 2024 that Trump’s dictatorship was a fait accompi there was still plenty of room for people to disagree. But (with the exception of an announced state of emergency) it’s turned out far worse than I thought possible.

Opposition politicians and judges have been arrested for doing their jobs, and many more have been threatened. The limited resistance of the courts has been effectively halted by the Supreme Court’s decision ending nationwide injunctions. University leaders have been forced to comply or quit. The press has been cowed into submission by the threat of litigation or harm to corporate owners. Political assassinations are laughed about and will soon become routine. With the use of troops to suppress peaceful protests, and the open support of Trump and his followers, more deaths are inevitable, quite possibly on a scale not seen since the Civil War.

The idea that this process might be stopped by a free and fair election in 2026 or 2028 is absurdly optimistic. Unless age catches up with him, Trump will appoint himself as President for life, just as Xi and Putin have done.

None of this is, or at least ought to be, news. Yet the political implications are still being discussed in the familiar terms of US party politics: swing voters, the centre ground, mobilisation versus moderation, rehashes of the 2024 election and so on. Having given up hope, I have no interest in these debates. Instead, I want to consider the implications for the idea of democracy.

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Many thanks to Hannah for her beautiful post on George Eliot’s Silas Marner and the evacuation of moral purpose from the Protestant work ethic. That resonates with Hijacked, my latest book, which traces the history of the work ethic from 17th century Puritan theologians, through the economic theory and policy debates of the 18th and 19th centuries, to today. I argue that the work ethic split into two versions during the Industrial Revolution. One–the version Max Weber analyzed–expressed the ideological perspective and interests of capitalists, and ultimately led to what we call neoliberalism–or, in a less institutionally articulated form, a version of libertarianism. The other mostly forgotten version expressed the perspective and interests of workers, and ultimately led to social democracy.

Americans inherited the UK’s capitalist work ethic in colonial times, and (not for the first time) put it on steroids from the mid-1970s to today. Scratch an American libertarian, and most likely you’ll find a believer in the capitalist work ethic underneath. However much libertarians talk about universal freedom, at heart they are advancing a deeply authoritarian doctrine tied to capitalist rule. To see this, it’s helpful to relate current policy proposals to 19th century ones, when capitalist proponents of the work ethic were more open about their aims.

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The UK government has signalled its intention to “proscribe” the protest group Palestine Action under anti-terrorism legislation. This will place it in the same legal category as Al Qaeda and Islamic State: it will be illegal to belong to the group, to show public support for it, to arrange a meeting in support for it, and so on. The difference between Palestine Action and Al Qaeda et al, as many commentators have pointed out, is that it has never committed violence against individuals or, as far as we can tell, does it have any plans to do so. It is a protest group which seems to adopt fairly typical strategies of civil disobedience. It seems to have attracted the ire of the government, though, by breaking into a military base and spraying red paint on aircraft (as a protest over the government’s support for Israel).

I am not the first to say this, but: if this is terrorism, then so too was the Greenham Common Peace movement. The women of Greenham Common also (regularly) broke into a military compound and committed criminal damage there. Their stated aim was to force the government to stop storing cruise missiles on the site. But the women of Greenham Common are not usually considered terrorists: in fact, visit the scene now and you will see a public monument to their efforts.

So, can any sense be made of the apparent claim that – quite aside from any purported threat to kill or harm or cause mass panic among civilians, none of which appear to be at stake here – mild damage to physical assets should count as terrorism, in cases where those assets are military in nature? Or is this an instance of absurd legal over-reach, intended to produce a chilling effect on anti-war protestors?

NB: Let’s keep any discussion focused on the nature of terrorism and the question of whether this is a good use of legislation please – there are plenty of opportunities to discuss the conflict(s) in the Middle East elsewhere.