Amateurs of French political rhetoric should treat themselves to a sample of the Ruffin-Villepin debate. Libération and BFM-TV did well to pair two candidates who both speak well and who appear at this stage to be so far out of contention that they have nothing to lose by avoiding name-calling and admitting to areas of agreement. What ensued was a civil conversation gently moderated by a pair of well-informed but self-effacing moderators.

Villepin has of course long been known for his fluency, grace, and occasional outré figures of speech: “Je ne revêts pas mon petit tutu rose pour m’entraîner à la barre et faire le grand écart.” Ruffin, less grandiloquent and more pugnacious, has nevertheless toned down his style and steered away from the more demagogic excesses of the polemical films (such as Merci, Patron!, 2015) that first brought him to national notice. Traces of the old populist rabble-rouser remain, as when he blamed France’s troubles of the failures of “the elite” and les sots in power, offering Villepin an opportunity to point out that cleverness is no guarantee of success in the art of governing and that those without elite pedigrees may prove no more adept at achieving consensus among conflicting interests than those with them.

The two men were able to delineate their differences without impugning each other’s character or motives. Villepin opened by saying that the challenge of the moment was somehow to derail the “runaway train” of Le Pen’s National Rally, whose momentum has created the impression that it is unstoppable. Ruffin responded by evoking Baudelaire: the oppressive political climate is like the “le ciel bas et lourd [qui] pèse comme un couvercle.” Both men alluded to the spirit of unity that they would like to believe characterized the Resistance in the latter years of World War II and after–a unity that allowed left and right to work together in spite of differences in order to combat the greater menace of fascism and its aftermath. N’exagérons pas! But still, making due allowance for the gravity of the moment, the hyperbole was not out of place.

It seems that the room in which the debate took place once served as a venue for weddings, and this prompted the suggestion that perhaps a man of the left, which is what Ruffin claimed to be (without further qualification such as “ex-Mélenchoniste” or “left dissident”), might make common cause with a “left Gaullist,” which is how Villepin defined himself. ‘Twould be pleasant to think so, but the fissiparous realities of the present soon reasserted themselves: Ruffin observed that while he might be willing to sit down at the same table with Villepin, if Philippe and Attal were invited, he would quickly be compelled to absent himself.

To succeed in politics one has to be able to count, and hard-headed practitioners of the trade will no doubt be asking “How many divisions has Villepin (or Ruffin)?” The answer of course is none, to which the inevitable riposte of the “left Gaullist” would of course be that de Gaulle had none either in 1940. Quixotic quests do not regularly end in glory, however, and if de Gaulle enjoyed the “special Providence reserved for children, drunkards, and the United States of America” (as Bismarck is supposed to have said in regard to another inexplicable political miracle), neither Villepin nor Ruffin nor some improbable tandem of the two is likely to be so blessed by Fate. Still, it was pleasant to be able to watch a political debate without being reduced to indignant sputtering and without having to endure endless statistical recitatives or ad hominem attacks.

On June 14, 2026, President Donald Trump staged a mixed martial arts cage match on the South Lawn of the White House to celebrate his 80th birthday as well as a lesser event, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. A little over a month later, on Aug. 22-23, the Freedom 250 Grand Prix, another presidentially-ordained spectacle, turned the streets of the nation’s capital into a makeshift racetrack.

To mark the first occasion, President Kennedy said that he welcomed Casals to the White House “not only because of your long and distinguished career in music but also because you have indicated and demonstrated in your own life... that an artist must be a free man." High culture was thus explicitly harnessed to the high politics of the Cold War. Eisenhower had assented to the Madrid Pact because Franco, despite his countless crimes against humanity, was a staunch anticommunist. Kennedy, silently taking note of a changed international climate, could embrace Franco’s implacable enemy Casals as a symbol of “freedom,” because the symbolism of such an embrace could in some measure compensate for the liability of having enlisted a police state as an ally in the struggle against communism.

To mark this year’s cage match, it was not the president who spoke but one of the mixed martial “artists,” Josh Hokit, who celebrated his victory over Derrick Lewis by jumping out of his cage to pay tribute to the man who had convened the unprecedented event: “Shout out to Trump for having the balls to put this shit on!” He then placed the gold chain symbolizing his victory around the neck of the president and added, “Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?”

What was celebrated at the White House in 2026 was thus the opposite of what was celebrated in 1961. In 1961, the chief of state deferred, verbally at least, to the musical artist’s freedom and its symbolic power to rebuke dictatorship. In 2026, the martial artist abased himself before the would-be dictator, whose favor he sought by mocking his predecessor’s wife and hanging a gold chain around the ruler’s neck.

One could easily extend this contrast. The elitist trappings of the 1961 event set it apart from the populist carnival of 2026. The former breathed the rarefied air of Old Europe; the latter could hardly thrive anywhere but on American soil. Kennedy’s deference to the arts, however hypocritical, harked back to the idealism of the American founding. One thinks of John Adams’ letter to Abigail, in which he wrote of his duty to “study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy … in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.”1 Although I’m not naive enough to believe that JFK spent his days lying about the White House longing to study painting, poetry, and porcelain, I’m willing to credit him with a mild pang of regret for the finer things that must be put aside by those whose supreme desire is the pursuit of power—and such a pang of regret is really all that one is entitled to expect from one’s rulers.

Clearly, Trump feels no such pang, nor does he recognize the existence of anything finer than power. When he stages a spectacle, it is not to (soi-disant) elevate the taste of the masses but, first, to demonstrate that he has “the balls to put this shit on,” and, second, that he shares with the lowest common denominator the prejudice that any pretension to anything more elevated is elitist BS. The emperors of old gave the populus romanus circuses; today’s emperor gives the populus americanus cage matches and Indy motorcars.

Admittedly, there is something almost Roman about Trump’s wish to leave his mark on the physical environment and not just in the history books. He’s rapidly pumping cubic yards of indestructible concrete into the hole that was the East Wing in the hope of forestalling any move by the courts to bar the building of his coveted ballroom. He’s drawing up plans for a triumphal arch to dwarf the Arch of Constantine. And he’s threatening to tear down the Kennedy Center if he can’t have his name on it.

Such a frenzy of erectile ambition may well be compensation for fiascos on more obdurate fronts: Iran, though ostensibly “obliterated” several times over, refuses to surrender; the miracles of reindustrialization and economic reinvigoration promised to follow from the imposition of tariffs have been slow to manifest themselves; threats to allies have stiffened their resistance rather than broken their backbones. Trump’s refusal to acknowledge failures obvious to anyone with eyes to see makes him look both ridiculous and obtuse: “Trump himself looks ever more unhinged and erratic,” writes Bill Kristol, while Paul Krugman worries that people are not “fully aware of … just how bad it can get, given that Trump is so obviously dissociating, decompensating, that he’s not all there.” Indeed, it is quite possible that the Washington circuses are the flailing president’s salve for the massive narcissistic wound that repeated failures are inflicting on his gargantuan ego.

Will there come a point when even a mega-ballroom is not enough to compensate for the merciless public defrocking of this pathetic mountebank who, in his relentless yet repeatedly unrequited search for “greatness,” eagerly compares himself to history’s greatest villains? What then might he be tempted to do? Having defiled the temple, will he now be driven to pull it down? Kristol and Krugman worry that he might. I share their anxiety.

The Secretary of War (SoW?), fortified by his long experience as a TV newscaster, set about firing top generals and admirals, reworking promotion lists to exclude women and minorities, and warning officers not conforming to his beau idéal of the fit “warfighter” that they should begin looking for another line of work. Despite the growing threat of cyberwar, Trump fired the highly respected head of the National Security Agency and Cyber Command along with his female deputy.

But that was only the beginning. He also called for construction of a new “Trump class” of battleship, even though Navy officials saw no need for it, and set about redesigning U.S. aircraft carriers to use steam catapults rather than the more modern electromagnetic variety (allegedly because a random sailor told him that the former were better than the latter) and to conform to his WWII-inflected aesthetic preferences, no matter what the experts might say.

Through all this little was heard from active-duty military officers. One might say that this is a good thing: “civilian supremacy over the military” is, after all, a cardinal principle of democratic rule; we don’t want juntas or coups or factions of colonels plotting behind fortress gates or surrounding Congress with phalanxes of tanks. But our military, to say nothing of our military-industrial complex, has never been shy about exerting pressure on decision-makers through a variety of channels. Often, it gets the results it wants. Lately, however, it has gone silent.

Some officers and some weapons manufacturers may well be pleased with the results of Trump’s meddling. But when the president curtails long-scheduled joint military exercises with South Korea on the grounds that his “good relationship” with Kim Jong Un makes them unnecessary and sends “a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile” to a country that “has been unthreatening and respectful” during his time in the White House, hackles surely must have risen on some warfighters’ necks. When long-standing allies such as South Korea are abruptly put on notice that their security is henceforth subordinate to the on-again off-again Asian amours of America’s 80-year-old chief executive,2 they must be sputtering expletives into their kimchi. When, in the same week, the U.S. pulls its last aircraft carrier out of the Asian theater to relieve sister vessels overstressed by the ill-begotten war in Iran, senior officers old enough to remember when the U.S. boasted of being able to wage war on two-and-a-half fronts simultaneously must be asking themselves if the sky has just fallen. When the top brass consult their spreadsheets and discover how many precision munitions have been squandered in Iran, their nerves must be jangled. When they study the war in Ukraine and realize how much warfare has changed since they were cadets at West Point or Annapolis, they must be asking themselves what the transformation of the battlefield requires. And surely they know that lumbering battleships, hissing steam catapults, and aircraft carriers of the Iwo Jima era are unlikely to be effective counters to swarms of cheap drones, AI-driven hybrid warfare, economic disruption, and geographic control of strategic raw materials (such as rare earths) and crucial technologies (such as semiconductor fabrication).

How, then, do we account for the silence—dare I say the emasculation?—of the top brass?3 Can it be laid at the door of mere incompetence? Institutions such as DoD, with their deeply sedimented layers of bureaucracy, are supposed to be able to resist erosion from above. There are procedures, protocols, rules, filing cabinets full of institutional knowledge, elaborate regulations and standards and MilSpecs up the wazoo, all of which are grounds for endless grumbling in normal times but which, in theory, serve to prevent passing storms of bad ideas, poor leaders, and rash maneuvers from washing away the durable bedrock laid down by decades and centuries of lessons learned and errors overcome.

Two cheers, then, for bureaucratic inertia. But the latest maelstrom seems to have eroded the bedrock and sent seeming terra firma tumbling into the flood. Incompetent leaders in no doubt as to the righteousness4 of their cause and prepared to purge anyone who would resist their will can indeed turn a battleship (or an aircraft carrier, or an entire foreign policy doctrine) on a dime. They can squander whole arsenals of shiny weaponry with little more than a murmur from the purged ranks and certainly nothing resembling a virile shout of opposition or even caution. Hierarchy has its purpose in any organization, but the fetishization of silent obedience that wrong-headed military leadership extols as “esprit de corps” and “unit cohesion” has allowed a self-styled “unitary executive” convinced that it knows best to destroy in a matter of months a delicately balanced system of interlocking arms, alliances, and interests (some more legitimate than others). The professionalization of the military no doubt made it a more effective fighting force, but it also left the services vulnerable to careerists eager to respond to the misguided incentives offered by their civilian masters. Bereft of the sense of duty to country rather than to ruling clique, ambitious men chose advancement over honor. Disastrous collapse followed with remarkable speed.

So much for the opportunity. The problem is that a deep factional fissure has opened within the party. The reason for this is simple, at least on the surface: so-called “progressives”1 , once thought to constitute a mere factional fringe, have lately been winning elections. A movement has been gathering steam for some time. Bernie Sanders made a credible run for the presidential nomination in 2016. Progressive candidates upset incumbents in several districts with favorable demographics: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won in a district that overlaps the Bronx and Queens; Ilhan Omar scored a victory in a deep-blue Minnesota constituency with a substantial immigrant population. And then Zohran Mamdani won the race for mayor of New York; Graham Platner won the Democratic senatorial primary in Maine before succumbing to a scandal but not before knocking the widely respected but aging and uncharismatic Gov. Janet Mills out of the race; and, most recently, Abdul El-Sayed became the Democrats’ nominee for Senate in Michigan over Haley Stevens, the candidate favored by the national party leadership and backed by substantial outside funding (including from AIPAC, which went all out to do in El-Sayed and is even contemplating support for his Republican opponent in November). The “establishment” appears to be on the run, with “radicals” in hot pursuit.

Euphoria in the wake of these burgeoning left-wing successes has encouraged some bold (or perhaps foolhardy) radicals to raise their heads above the parapet and tempt fate with proposals to cancel Thanksgiving or (why not?) cancel capitalism itself.2 Such heady talk of radical change in the wake of impressive but still limited victories has alarmed commentators such as the New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg, who has written that “there isn’t much evidence of a candidate as left-wing as El-Sayed winning a purple state” like Michigan. Jared Bernstein, former chief economic advisor to Joe Biden, counters that what matters more than the occasional radical rhetorical provocation is the “‘show-me-your-fight’ dynamic” with which the left-wing upstarts have upstaged the stodgier (and older) party leadership. Not-so-young Turks are urging the “gerontocrats” to step aside. New Republic editor Michael Tomasky also sees an insurgency at work but argues that El-Sayed won the Senate nomination in Michigan not because he challenged an extenuated and superannuated party leadership but rather “because he compellingly speaks the language of economic populism.” To which he adds this coda: “I cannot understand why anyone who calls themselves a Democrat or a liberal would oppose this.”

To this sally another liberal columnist, Michael Cohen, replied on Facebook: “Because he ran an unambiguously anti-Semitic campaign that scapegoated Jews for America’s problems … I honestly can’t understand why people who call themselves liberals would support that.” And with that what I like to call “the New Jewish Question” insinuates itself into—and threatens to poison—the robust, inevitable, and—note well!— traditional left-wing intraparty debate.

This is not the place to rehearse the long history of intraparty debates on the left between a “radical” wing focused on root problems, which it sees as essentially economic, and a “pragmatic” wing focused on what it regards as a perhaps less fundamental but nonetheless prior problem, namely, the mechanics of winning elections.

The long and vexed history of the radical-vs.-pragmatic debate on the left is not what primarily interests me today, however. It is the irruption of the New Jewish Question into this necessary and unavoidable debate. Since Hamas invaded southern Israel and killed, kidnapped, or raped hundreds of Israelis nearly three years ago, the Democratic Party has been roiled by a second debate revolving around the question of U.S. support for Israel’s retaliation in the wake of that attack.

I should make it clear that I strenuously disagree with Michael Cohen that El-Sayed’s campaign was “unambiguously anti-Semitic.” It was nevertheless unambiguously (and at times incautiously) opposed to Israeli policy in Gaza. Consider this, however: “Fewer than one-quarter [of American Jews] say they are both pro-Israel and supportive of Israeli polices,” while 63% say they are “pro-Israel and critical of the Israeli government,” according to the Jewish Electorate Institute, and 73% of Democrats are critics of Israel compared with 44% of independents and 39% of Republicans.

Therein lies the crux of the New Jewish Question: attitudes toward Israel have become a point of stark political cleavage, with Democrats, and especially “progressive” Democrats, falling on the critical side. This is a source of acute cognitive dissonance in a Democrat like Michael Cohen, who shares many positions with Democratic progressives but refuses to countenance criticism of Israel unless it is qualified with a robust disclaimer (such as disavowal of the current Netanyahu government, or vigorous denunciation of allegations of alleged Israeli “genocide,” or ringing affirmations of “Israel’s right to exist,” or protests against the supposed “singling out” of Israel for waging war in ways that go uncriticized when other states, including the United States, resort to similar tactics). To relieve the pressure of such cognitive dissonance, the charge of “antisemitism” lies ready to hand.

Vigilance against antisemitism is necessary, but at what point does vigilance shade into reflexive paranoia or unreasonable intolerance of legitimate political disagreement? If it is wrong to blame Jews (as a people or religious group or ethnicity) for the actions of the Israeli government, then it is equally wrong to charge critics of Israeli policy with antisemitism absent additional grounds for an accusation of such gravity. To center the Democrats’ intraparty debate on the New Jewish Question rather than the durable clash of radicalism with pragmatism risks envenoming the situation in a moment of acute danger, with all three branches of government in the hands of corrupt authoritarians intent on demonizing the opposition as simultaneously elitist and aloof, incorrigibly radical, morally bankrupt, and mentally deranged. We’d best not mistake our sometimes obstreperous and contentious friends for our true enemies.

Nothing of that era remains. The Red Death closed in 1986, and in the ensuing forty years Kendall Square has been transformed by a flood of high-tech money into one of those islets of ostentatiously up-to-the-minute prosperity that flourish wherever the knowledge industries find fertile soil.

Kendall Square now hosts digital-tech businesses like Google and Akamai and biotech research facilities such as the Broad and Whitehead and Koch Institutes. There are Bank of America and Fidelity Financial Centers and of course a host of mid- to upscale restaurants, mostly in the hard-edged gastrotech idiom, to service the employees who fill the burgeoning high-rise towers that have transformed the former marshland limning the northern edge of MIT’s East Campus.

No one can deny that today’s Kendall Square radiates the go-go energy associated with the most dynamic sectors of the American economy. By comparison, Harvard Square feels sleepy, quaint, and almost pre-modern. It clings to its colonial modesty, which somehow subdues every foray into modernism, such as The Architects Collaborative building on Brattle Street, which was le dernier cri in forward-looking architecture when I arrived in Cambridge sixty years ago but which has somehow receded into the cityscape with the passage of time. Yet Harvard Square retains a personality that Kendall will never acquire, since the latter’s raison d’être is to provide nomadic tech workers with an environment interchangeable with other tech Meccas from Bellevue, Wa., to Alexandria, Va.

What distinguishes Kendall Square from those places, of course, is its proximity to MIT, a proximity so intimate as to appear almost seamless. The unwalled campus is separated from the commercial real estate by a semi-permeable membrane. Money flows into the campus; ideas flow out; the ideas generate more money in a perfect symbiosis.

Or perhaps not so perfect. In a post earlier today on Substack David Bell worries about “the future of academia.” What worries Bell, a professor of history at Princeton (and, full disclosure, a friend and colleague), is the way in which not just high-tech money but a results-oriented, “move fast and break things” high-tech mentality, increasingly represented at all levels of university governance, will change the nature of the university from within: “In the future, we can expect more and more academic philanthropy directed not to ordinary university departments, but to ‘catalytic’ academic start-ups of this sort.” The example he gives is of a biomedical research institute that has been established at Columbia.

Other examples of industry’s urge to bend education to its purpose—an urge as imperious as it is impatient—are perhaps more alarming. Consider Palantir’s “Meritocracy Fellowship,” which offers selected students “a paid pathway toward working at the company” together with “training and courses on topics like Western Civilization.” Or the astronomical salaries reportedly offered to MIT math graduates to pursue careers in finance (quite a change from my day as a math nerd). Or the AI companies “stripping universities of their best researchers.”

Let’s not be naïve. Higher education requires money, and frontier research in some fields requires lots of it. World War II marked a turning point in the attitude of government and industry in the United States with respect to supplying such vast sums. The war demonstrated that knowledge was indeed power, and not in any subtly philosophical Foucauldian “power is everywhere” sense. The funders of higher education expected a return on investment but were in it for the long run.

Today’s money is less patient. It is interested not in fertilizing the seedbed of ideas but in “catalyzing” (see David Bell’s essay) a reaction that will bring power to the investors themselves rather than to the broader society that the postwar university, for all its corporatist flaws, could still plausibly present itself as serving.

Some years ago, the Kendall Square subway stop was renamed “Kendall-MIT.” This amalgamation epitomizes the transformation to which I’m pointing. The once beneficial symbiosis of commerce and education threatens to become something else. The postwar idyll of the American university could turn into one of those 1950s horror films that bubbled up from the dark underside of the power-knowledge nexus: the nutrients that used to feed the brain may begin to eat away at it.

Now, one might challenge the premise of the story on empirical grounds: Platner's background (son of a lawyer, prep-school education) was hardly unalloyed working-class, and polls suggested that his strongest support came not from workers but from young professionals. By the same token, Platner's replacement may once have been a logger and may have entered politics through his engagement as a labor militant, but he has been a professional politician for 20 years and formerly served as president of the Maine Senate.

What interests me here, however, isn't the empirical question of “how working-class must a candidate be” to “deliver,” as the Times puts it, the working-class vote. I'm rather interested in the underlying notion that a candidate is defined not by a set of policy commitments or a socio-political analysis of current affairs but rather by a carefully curated imago whose purpose is to instill in prospective voters confidence that no matter how alienated they may feel from the undifferentiated mass of their fellow citizens, there nevertheless exists a potential majority endowed with all the virtues with which it was once possible to invest “the People” at a time when the People could plausibly be represented as the virtuous opposition to an irredeemably tainted Elite.

Voters amenable to such an appeal may not—indeed, almost certainly do not—see themselves as members of the “working class,” but it flatters their sense of justice to think of themselves as being in solidarity with an imagined class whose very name indelibly associates it with sweat, toil, and tears. Far be it from me to suggest that the editors of the Times have been reading Gyorgy Lukács, but their decision to dramatize the quest for a “working-class hero” hints at an intuited familiarity with the idea from History and Class Consciousness that only the commodified worker is capable of grasping the totality of the system that oppresses him. Through a kind of master-slave dialectic, the working class of wage slaves emerges from its chrysalis as the philosophically exalted “universal class.”

Such a romantic transmogrification of the alienated laborer into something akin to Ralph Waldo Emerson's “transparent eyeball,” which “becomes nothing” but “sees all,” and from which “all mean egotism vanishes,” harks back to a more heroic era of socialist ambition and yearning.

All this high philosophical socialism was a pleasant enough fantasy, to be sure. In reality, however, a progressivism more pragmatic than Lukács's socialism of the assumed “universal class” enlisted the actually existing “egotism” of the working masses to win support for a government capable of regulating capitalism and improving living standards. When the unity of that reformist era shattered, the shards of the (most definitely non-universal) working class were hoovered up by the oligarchs and fashioned into a sinister ampoule through which the toxins of reaction were inoculated into the system.

The left inherited, as if from some socialist-realist cartoon, only the residue and not the substance of the faux-universal class: what the Times called the “working-class hero,” with his robust frame, rolled-up sleeves, stout Carhart workwear, and well-scuffed leather boots (modify the outfit as necessary to fit the lobsterman or the logger).

Pace the Times, the resurrection of the Democratic Party will not be effected simply by adopting such a heroic avatar. The class structure of the 21st century, as opposed to the early 20th when Lukács conceived his phantasmagoria of philosophical revolution, cannot be reduced to a simple dichotomy of workers and their oppressors; it's far from clear that any simple alternative to capitalism exists; and if the point is to change the world rather than simply interpret it, the would-be designers of the future would do well to learn from engineers that innovation is less likely to end in disaster if it builds on past successes rather than starting every new design with a blank sheet of paper.

The latest case in point: the nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia. The Saudis thought they had struck a bargain to buy nuclear reactor technology from the United States. This is of course a fraught area of international diplomacy, especially at a time when the United States is engaged in a war with the Saudis’ neighbor Iran, ostensibly to prevent the Islamic Republic from building a nuclear bomb.

Now, there is of course a difference between a reactor and a bomb, but there is also a worrisome family resemblance, not least because the exploitation of nuclear technology for civilian uses necessitates the creation of a community of expertise whose knowledge can easily be shifted from civilian to military use. Since non-proliferation remains a paramount policy goal of the United States, one would expect any agreement to transfer nuclear technology to be accompanied by strict and enforceable controls.

When the lack of such controls in the current agreement was immediately pointed out and contrasted with the terms of previous agreements negotiated by presidents despised by the present one, the response was as bizarre as it was immediate. Rather than seek to remedy the absence of controls, our feckless president announced that “the deal is off” unless the Saudis recognize Israel, as other Arab states did under the so-called “Abraham accords.”

The Saudis must be puzzled. They have in their hands an agreement signed by the American chief of state, which the same chief of state has now repudiated before the ink was even dry. If that is not the very definition of feckless rule, I can’t imagine what is. Pacta sunt servanda, the Saudis may be tempted to protest if they studied Latin: “Agreements must be kept.” But, knowing the feckless and faithless fool with whom they are dealing, they will hold their tongues and try to finesse their way through this embarrassing episode. What they really want out of their reactors is known only to themselves, as are their true intentions toward Israel. But two things are clear: they cannot allow themselves to be “jammed up” by a blundering and incompetent American administration, and they won’t easily relinquish the access to long-coveted knowhow that they believe they have been promised.

As so often, the French, whose venerable monarchy saddled them with a fair number of incompetent rulers, have an expression for feckless kings: rois fainéants. Although the literal meaning of the word fainéant suggests that the problem with such rulers is that they are lazy and do nothing, the real problem is more complicated. It is that, while they do nothing much of the time, they are apt to spasmodically assert their claim to absolute power at the most inopportune moments: after a treaty has been arduously negotiated or when a momentous decision—to wage war, for example, or to grant terms for peace—hangs in the balance.

Trump’s fecklessness has been on abundant display of late. When he realized that Iran could not be pulverized into submission, he pretended to believe that his bombing had effected a regime change in Iran, whose new rulers, unlike the old, were “smart people” who might be amenable to an agreement in exchange for a little baksheesh derived from a sharing of tolls on traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. When that fantasy proved to be a will-o’-the-wisp, the threats of war crimes resumed despite the repeated assertion that the enemy was “desperate” to return to the negotiating table.

Trump, as we know, is fond of comparing international relations to a game of cards. What is more feckless, what is more inept, than a poker player who tells an adversary holding three-of-a-kind that he is desperate to fold? You can bluff about your own hand, but you can’t tell your opposite number that he doesn’t actually hold the cards he can see with his own eyes, as can kibitzers the world over.

In truth, “the exception,” der Ausnahmezustand, is not a singular thing, not a “condition” or “state,” as the Nazi jurist’s German would imply, but a steady numbing of the senses, a persistent denial of the obvious, a painstakingly constructed consensus in falsehood, inculcated by repetition and legitimated by shameless brazen defiance of all normal standards of reasonable discourse. “Gaslighting” is too genteel a term: it implies a certain subtlety in deception. The despot’s exception is not subtle: it is a state of public stupefaction achieved by a brutal bludgeoning of language, a dull deafness to all critique, a puerile pretense that reality must conform to desire rather than the other way around.

We’re now two years into this banalization of the exceptional. Witness the extraordinary assertions that we are daily asked to embrace as prima facie truths. Iran’s military capabilities have been obliterated. We control the Strait of Hormuz. In Springfield the Haitians ate cats and dogs. Trump won the 2020 election. Washington was a hellhole until the new regime banished the criminals, drained the swamp, restored the Reflecting Pool to its pristine beauty, and ended corruption. Tariffs are paid by foreigners and have revived America’s industrial base. ICE arrests only criminals, “the worst of the worst.” Our leading universities are terrorist training camps. Israel’s wanton destruction of Gaza is fully justified by, and entirely proportionate to, Hamas’s wanton attacks on Israel.

This normalization of the abnormal is what is truly exceptional. The theorist of our downfall is not Carl Schmitt but Steve Bannon, who astutely observed that “flooding the zone with shit” would confront defenders of the reasonable with an impossible task. There is no Hercules capable of cleaning these Augean stables. But the enormity of it all must be pointed out over and over again, tedious though it may be to do so. Because the flood never ceases, the pumps must also be kept going day and night.

In addition to this Substack, I write frequently on French and European politics at Tocqueville21, the website of the Tocqueville Society.

I also run a news aggregator site that collects articles from various European and American newspapers. The password (intended only to keep bots out) is “shazam”.

Finally, I aggregate polls from France, Germany, Italy, and the UK at this site. This site updates automatically every few days. Happy to add other countries if there is interest and I have time.

This is extraordinary, but it’s by no means the most extraordinary comment in this piece on our contemporary torpor. Wallace-Wells goes on to say this:

That alone is a kind of depressing, distressing development: that the public could come to hold those two thoughts in their head at once, to say, “We understand that this is irresponsible imperial behavior by a madman president, and we’re not even paying all that close attention to it.” [emphasis added]

To which Cottle responds: “Yeah, we just shrug. ‘Yeah, whatever.’”

Let me be clear. I’m not disagreeing at all with this view, shocking though it is. I agree that the United States has just lost a war with Iran. I agree that this loss was the result of “irresponsible imperial behavior.” And I agree that this irresponsible behavior was authorized and intermittently overseen by a president who, while he may not be a “madman” in any sense recognized by DSM-5, is nevertheless so feckless, corrupt, ignorant, and consumed by petty grudges and grandiose obsessions that a mad king might well be preferable to the concupiscent kingpin with whom we are currently saddled.

And yet, and yet … We the People remain strangely unmoved. We just shrug. Perhaps this is because we are convinced that retribution is just around the corner, that the democratic process that has brought us to this juncture will soon correct itself—doesn’t it always?—and reintroduce the vaunted checks and balances that have lately gone missing.

And yet if we believe that this confidence in ultimate vindication explains our torpor in the face of such extraordinary events, we owe it to ourselves to explain why we seem able to shake off our somnolence long enough to protest vociferously the lapses of judgment on the part of the young activists who recruited a candidate as flawed as Graham Platner to run for the Senate in Maine. Of course, if we lose Maine, our chances of retaking the Senate plunge dramatically, and if we don’t retake the Senate, what chance have we of halting the “irresponsible imperial behavior by a madman president”?

Could an empire of this magnitude—”like nobody has ever seen before,” as the “mad” president likes to say—really have been brought this low by a handful of twenty- and thirty-somethings drunk on the notion that the way to the People’s heart is to find a candidate who can put on a flannel work shirt and swear like a sailor? Isn’t the more pertinent question to ask how a polity with a constitution like that of the United States, with its myriad veto points, and a central government structure designed to place numerous institutional hurdles in the way of any executive, no matter how mad or irresponsible, could have been so thoroughly and rapidly commandeered by this lamentable band of rogues? Were they exceptionally ruthless and cunning, or have the termites been eating away for decades now at barriers that once seemed as solid as the doors of the Capitol before January 6, 2021? I incline toward the latter theory; the rogues in question, with a few notable exceptions, resemble the Three Stooges, not Ocean’s Eleven.

If institutional decay has brought us to this pass, we need to know more about where the wormholes have developed. This strikes me as a question in regard to which liberals and conservatives might find common ground. No one, right or left, has an interest in licensing irresponsible behavior by an unhinged executive. Everyone, right and left, has an interest in rousing the public from its dogmatic slumbers, its complacent belief that “democracy will provide,” as if We the People don’t from time to time need to hear words of wisdom whispered in our ears, even if the whisperer isn’t wearing a flannel shirt or sporting a pectoral tattoo. Perhaps the problem lies not with the judgment of the candidate recruiters but rather with widespread beliefs about what kind of candidate needs to be recruited. Donald Trump won the working-class vote despite, not because of, his sartorial choices and suspect grammar.

With old countries as with old men, age enforces awareness of another home truth, that maturation is eventually followed by decline and birth by death. Depending on where one stands along this ineluctable trajectory, one begins to think differently about the stages that mark the way, as suggested by the title of this Substack, “the sense of an ending,” which is intended to signal the melancholy mood in which it is written.

The trajectory of a human life is more clearly defined than that of a nation. When you reach 80, as I will soon, you can be quite confident that the end is nigh. Not so with a nation. If, at 250, the American nation is no longer a babe in arms, is it about to enter adolescence, middle age, or senescence? Only time will tell. Some nations die young, others aspire to live a thousand years, and some may even achieve that goal and more. Yet intimations of mortality have been known at times to haunt nations as they may haunt individuals during bouts of illness or after a momentary palpitation or a frighteningly close call.

Amid the cacophony of voices unleashed by the impending national anniversary, there is an unmistakable note, if not of mortality, then at least of morbidity. Despite the extreme polarization of our politics, there is general agreement that the national condition is critical.

Of course, the diagnoses of what accounts for that critical condition differ. On either side of the factional divide, partisans proclaim that the political enemy has deputized a posse of assassins and mercenaries, not to say lunatics, to murder the nation in its sleep and vanquish the only true defenders of its founding principles. Meanwhile, even relatively sober observers point to one form or another of rapid decline in the country’s vital signs: the economy is no longer the world’s largest; the military is no longer incontestably the world’s mightiest (and has in fact now suffered a long string of humiliating defeats by seemingly lesser powers); the position of self-appointed primus inter pares among liberal democracies has been voluntarily forfeited (both by apparent abandonment of the commitment to liberal democracy at home and by deliberate insults to erstwhile allies abroad).

Are these symptoms of impending doom or merely harbingers of a mid-life crisis? One might argue that America came of age at the end of World War II, when it both willfully and unwittingly assumed the hegemon’s role it has held ever since: willfully, because it knew full well that the postwar order it envisioned needed a leader capable of imposing discipline when necessary and that it could expect to profit handsomely from that role; unwittingly, because it lacked the experience to foresee the resentments and enmities that such a role would inspire and lacked the maturity to accept the criticism and blame that come with such responsibility.

If this analysis is correct, one could argue that the United States is now undergoing its second mid-life crisis. The first came when the first real challenge to its global hegemony emerged with the Soviet acquisition of first a nuclear weapon and then a thermonuclear one, as well as the Sputnik launch, which raised fears that the technological superiority that undergirded the self-confidence of an American nation now mature but still full of the robust vigor of youth might not endure forever. But the Soviet economy never overcame its internal contradictions; in the Cold War order of battle, the sleek refrigerators and microwave ovens that Nixon extolled in his “kitchen debate” with Khrushchev counted as much as the ICBMs and MIRVs, but decades of anxiety intervened before this would become apparent.

Now, middle-aged America is undergoing an analogous crisis of confidence. The Chinese threat, which the majority of us quite likely misconstrue as seriously as we did the Soviet one, seems more insidious because globalization has woven Chinese suppliers intimately into the very fabric of domestic production and consumption. A national consciousness formed around the idea of being always and inevitably at the top of the heap and in a position to set the rules that everyone else must follow cannot readily adapt to such a fundamental challenge to its identity. To cope, some have fallen back on what they take to be the bedrock of the earlier, more youthful stage of our history and identity, when we were isolated by geography from the vagaries of the rest of the world, ethnically homogeneous (if only in fantasy), and sufficiently autarkic to thrive without the assistance of others. But to assert such a credo as a viable ideology for today’s world is like trying to deny the consequences of middle age by indulging the fantasy of perpetual youth—a fantasy that, nevertheless, seems lately to have found a foothold among some of the aging Wunderkinder of Silicon Valley.

Perhaps it is true that this is “no country for old men,” or should I say “no world for old countries” (although China, it could be argued, is both the youngest and the oldest of nations). But the aging process, in nations and polities as much as individuals, can’t be stopped by wishing it away. The only acceptable response is to adapt. What we are witnessing at our 250th anniversary is the effect of failing to do so. Whether this signifies an early death for the Republic or merely a passing crisis on the way to life’s next phase remains to be seen.

Some write as scholars, to trace the evolution of ideas about particular aspects of political life; although I may occasionally fall into that vein, I'm not at heart a scholar and still less a controversialist of the sort who hopes to bring the benighted over to his side by showing them the light. I write, as they say, as I breathe, because I can do no other. My thoughts become clear only if I write them down, even if it is only to contradict them a few hours or weeks or years later.

One might therefore say that my writing about politics is the expression of a kind of passion, but often it's a passion aroused by resistance to the passions of others, which seem to me wrong-headed or dangerous or accelerants along the road to perdition.

The 18th-century French moralist Nicolas Chamfort wrote that “les raisonnables ont duré; les passionnés ont vécu” [the reasonable endured; the passionate lived]. This antithesis might at first sight appear to affirm the superiority of passion over reason, but then I would be hard put to explain why my first reflex upon encountering vituperative passions in others is to try to subdue them with sweet reason. On the other hand, the economist Albert Hirschman's book The Passions and the Interests argued that sometimes sublime passions need taming by sordid interests. For me, one function of writing about politics is to take the heat out of political passions by dousing them—some would say straitjacketing them—in cooler prose.

Hirschman's passions/interests dichotomy is different from Chamfort's passions/reason. It would be easy, and somewhat facile, to create a bridge between the two by noting that interests live in the realm of calculation—toting up benefits minus costs, profits minus losses—and are therefore amenable to a kind of reason. This may well be the kind of reason, or reasonableness, that Chamfort had in mind: reasonable caution allowed the merchant to survive the vagaries of a turbulent marketplace, whereas the knight's bold passion prevented “the native hue of Resolution” from being “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of Thought.” Political passions often arise out of “enterprises of great pith and moment, and an excess of reasonableness might well, as the Bard feared, “turn their currents awry and lose the name of Action.”

Hamlet was a prince, however, and I'm not. I'm under no illusion that my occasional forays into political writing merit “the name of Action” in any way, shape, or form. They are at best an exercise in mental hygiene in a world that seems increasingly unmoored from sanity.

Some Substack political commentators are former activists who hope that the pen might prove mightier than the sit-down, or perhaps incite a new sit-down in the real rather than the virtual world. They are more optimistic than I am.

Or is it rather that they are more passionate? To be honest, I don't think so. If there are activist passions, there are also quietist passions of equal intensity, and unlike Chamfort, I do not think it is correct to oppose passion to reason. What makes reason of the non-calculating kind worth aspiring to is that the quest to understand the world with all its contradictions justifies itself as a form of passionate affirmation. “L’homme n’est qu’un roseau … mais c’est un roseau pensant” [Man is merely a reed … but a thinking reed], said Pascal. The world—with its politics—may crush us, Pascal observed, but we know that we are being crushed, whereas the world is unconscious of its crushing power. Writing about politics is thus an exericse of passion as well as reason. Pace Chamfort, the passionately reasonable individual both lives and endures.

No political issue today has greater salience than immigration. The immigration issue has been central to the rise of far-right political parties in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, and beyond.

The rhetoric around immigration often intentionally inflames passions. The issue can be conjugated in a variety of tenses, persons, and moods. Immigrants can be denounced for being too lazy or too ambitious; too abject or too privileged; too impoverished or too wealthy; too zealous or too lax in their religious practice; too ignorant or too educated; too ripe for exploitation or too haughty to accept relegation to a secondary status.

At bottom, the gravamen of the charge against immigrants is that they are different. Right-wing discourse thrives on difference, the basic building block of hierarchy, its raison d’être, whereas left-wing discourse, always yearning for equality and universality, is embarrassed by it. Despite this embarrassment, difference remains an obdurate fact, a durable problem for every variety of egalitarian ideology, which the left ignores at its peril. So what is to be done?

The very ubiquity of the issue suggests that transnational comparisons may be helpful. The conditions surrounding immigration, the political responses to it, and the ensuing political transformations and realignments vary from place. Immigration has ranked high on the French political agenda since the rise of the Front National (now called the Rassemblement National) more than half a century ago. Like the United States, albeit in somewhat different form. France has birthright citizenship (called droit du sol in French). The country is therefore a natural object of comparison.

To help us understand the French situation, we are fortunate to have a newly published book by one of France’s leading experts on immigration, Patrick Weil: De l’immigration en France. The immigration question has preoccupied Weil for much of his career. In 1997 he authored a government report entitled “Pour une politique de l’immigration juste et efficace” (For a Just and Effective Immigration Policy), and in subsequent years he has published often on the subject, including La France et ses étrangers: Qu’est-ce qu’un Français? (France and Its Foreigners: What is a Frenchman?) and De la laïcité en France (On laïcité in France). In 2003 he served as a member of the so-called Stasi Commission, appointed by President Jacques Chirac to consider whether the growing presence of Muslim immigrants on French soil warranted changes in the laws governing religious expression. Weil also teaches at Yale Law School for part of each year, so he is deeply familiar with the differences between French and American approaches to immigration issues.

Immigration is an emotional issue. A 2025 poll revealed that 67% of the French agreed with their then prime minister, the centrist François Bayrou, that the native population was being “submerged” by waves of immigrants. Taken to an extreme, this feeling of submersion leads to the so-called “great replacement” theory, most closely associated with the far right-wing writer Renaud Camus, according to which mass immigration has been encouraged by an elite cabal determined to perpetuate its ascendancy by creating an immigrant underclass. This theory of the extreme right finds its mirror image in the far-left idea of a dynamic and energetic “new France” that will sweep conservative elites from power and turn the country in a new direction—an idea that Jean-Luc Mélenchon hopes will carry him to the presidency.

Weil’s book has the great merit of situating these recent fears of submersion by immigration in a broader historical and political context. As long ago as 1889, the nationalist writer Maurice Barrès voiced fears that “new Frenchmen whom we are not strong enough to assimilate have slipped in among us … and seek to impose on us their ways of seeing and feeling. … The name ‘France’ might well survive, but our country’s distinctive character would nevertheless be destroyed.” Yet at the time the number of children of immigrants who became naturalized was quite small.

After World War I, political leaders envisioned a more liberal naturalization policy to help compensate for the massive population loss due to the war. The far-right newspaper Action française railed against the fabrication of “paper Frenchmen.” After adoption of the policy, François Coty, the editor of the mainstream paper Le Figaro, was even more virulent: “Three million robust, healthy, honest Frenchmen have been driven to the slaughterhouse so that they could be replaced by the world’s vermin. … The occult world government of ‘The Three Hundred,’ … a veritable International, has decided to replace the French race with another … [which will] impose its unpatriotic theories on us before driving us out or exterminating us.”

As extravagant and blood-curdling as this rhetoric was, it did in its overheated way reflect actual demographic changes. “In 1930,” Weil writes, “France had a higher percentage of immigrants in its population than any other country (515 per 100,000, compared with 492 for the United States.” In the wake of the Depression, 800,000 Polish immigrants were sent home from France, while Spanish refugees, German Jews, Armenians, and Russians were spared deportation, the right of asylum being deemed “one of the essential elements of republican doctrine,” according to Édouard Herriot.

French attitudes toward immigration continued to evolve with events: Vichy’s hostility to foreigners gave way in the postwar era to a desire to do away with national quotas, which were seen as unacceptable by many appalled by the racist atrocities of World War II. Huge postwar needs for manpower encouraged a loosening of immigration restrictions, and many new workers flowed in from countries such as Algeria.

When the labor market tightened after the oil shock of the 1970s, President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing envisioned sending half a million Algerian workers back to their homeland, at first voluntarily but later under compulsion. The left and some churches protested, and the Conseil d’État refused to ratify Giscard’s proposal. The president nevertheless ordered the minister of foreign affairs to seek Algiers’ agreement to accept 35,000 returnees per year. In the archives of the Quai d’Orsay, Weil found a document admonishing the negotiators to “avoid mentioning any child quotas.” In an interview with Claude Chayet, who was responsible for immigration issues in the foreign ministry at the time, Weil learned that the foreign minister, Jean François-Poncet, was appalled when Chayet pointed out that enforcing Giscard’s order would require canceling the residence permits of thousands of legal immigrants, arresting them, and “forcing them onto busses, trains, and ships before the TV cameras of the entire world. And the children—they’re French. What is to be done with them? Will you separate them from their families? Will you deport French children along with their parents?” When confronted with these unpalatable realities, the foreign minister agreed that Giscard’s policy was unworkable, and it was quietly dropped. An American reader in 2026 may be forgiven for wishing that such internal resistance had been mounted to the U.S. government’s deportation policies in the second Trump administration.

Skipping ahead in this history, Weil notes that “the great replacement theory” made its way back into French discourse well before Renaud Camus published Le Grand Remplacement in 2011. Indeed, the centrist intellectual review Le Débat published in 1990 an article by sociologist Paul Yonnet attacking the immigration policies of the socialist government of Michel Rocard: “The media constantly admonish us to respect the right to be different while saying nothing about the long-term project of cultural deportation of French identity.” Cultural deportation of French identity—a concept as meaningless as it is inflammatory, to the point where one wonders how it made its way into the sober pages of a respected journal.

In the same issue of Le Débat, demographer Jean-Claude Chesnais denounced “an unavowed policy of quasi-exclusive preference for Africans on foreign policy grounds on which the political establishment has achieved remarkable agreement.” In 1996, the sociologist Bruno Latour objected in the pages of Le Monde to a proposed ban on racist and xenophobic pronouncements. For Latour, the law would force the French to “look upon acceptance of foreigners as an actual fact, … a natural, ineluctable fact.” Antiracist laws, he argued, had the effect of “naturalizing” race. These words were written more than two decades before Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the Parents Involved decision that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

As these examples make clear, the idea of a “great replacement” of the existing population by hordes of immigrants imported at the behest of a shadowy elite cabal has a lengthy history in France (and elsewhere). To counter the phantasmagoric image of wholesale civilizational transformation, Weil relies on a systematic exposition of the facts surrounding immigration. In 2025, for example, France issued a total of 384,000 new residence permits to foreigners wishing to live in France, of which 118,000 went to students, 92,600 to refugees and others seeking humanitarian relief, and 62,000 to “economic migrants.” Such numbers do not suggest a tidal wave of immigration. Nor does the fact that between 1999 and 2024, the immigrant population in France increased from 4.3 to 7.7 million out of a total of 68 million. An average increase of just 133,000 per year does not constitute a “submersion” of the tens of millions of natives but rather a manageable addition to an aging population.

Nevertheless, the stark fact remains that 67% of the population accepts the term “submersion.” In a democracy, an opinion shared by 67% of the population is significant even if it represents a distortion of reality. Why has this opinion become so prevalent? As Weil points out, between 1975 and 1999, the share of immigrants in the population remained virtually stable (7.4% in 1975, 7.3% in 1999), but between 1999 and 2024 it increased from 7.3% to 11.3%. This increase coincided with important economic changes, including a dramatic increase in global trade, offshoring of important aspects of manufacturing production, and increased industrial employment of immigrant labor. At the same time, the 1985 Schengen Agreement and the EU’s move toward a Single Market diminished the psychological significance of international borders, contributing to the perception that the barriers that had once defined the nation and culture had become permeable. Terrorist attacks linked to immigrants undoubtedly heightened suspicion of the alien Other. Although immigration was only one component of these large-scale changes, for many citizens it became the most tangible and immediate sign that the contours of the society they had known in the Trente Glorieuses period of postwar growth and improved living standards were changing in ways of which they disapproved. Sentiment gradually shifted against immigrants, and the xenophobic Front National gained new adherents.

Another source of resentment against immigrants is the so-called Aide Médicale d’État (AME), which pays for medical treatment for foreigners on French soil even if their status is irregular. In 2024, Weil reports, 484,000 persons benefited from the AME, costing the state one billion euros (0.5% of total medical insurance outlays). Not all AME recipients are in France unlawfully, but a substantial number are: some 124,000 were ordered to leave France in 2024.

Illegal immigration gives rise, Weil notes, to hypocrisies of both the right and left. On the right, people who vote for anti-immigrant parties freely admit that their businesses often rely on immigrant labor “because there is no one else to do the work,” while on the left, the most frequent answer to the question of how to deal with illegal immigration is “to regularize the illegals” [p. 51] “It is as if right and left, for different and even opposite reasons, refuse to recognize that France has once again become a land of immigration and therefore needs to develop an immigration policy.” He goes on to outline such a policy in some detail. His suggestions invariably have merit, although some will inevitably provoke more disagreement than others. To mention just one, Weil remains faithful to the conclusion of the Stasi Commission on which he served, namely, that the wearing of visible signs of religious affiliation should be prohibited in public schools. It reached this conclusion on the grounds that “wearing the [Islamic] veil or imposing it on others had become a matter not of individual liberty but of national strategy on the part of an organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, which was using the public schools as its principal battlefield.” There is no doubt that the Muslim Brotherhood did attempt to exert its influence in this way. But there is also no doubt that some young women would choose, if permitted, to express their cultural, religious, or even individual difference by wearing the veil if permitted. Much has been written about the difference between American and French liberal points of view on such matters. My disagreement with Weil on this point no doubt reflects the bias of my origins. That is why I find reading him so profitable: there is no better guide to the nuances of liberal thinking on such matters of cultural identity.

De Gaulle has now been dead for well over half a century, enough time for the turbulence and controversy that surrounded him as long as he occupied the center stage of French history to have subsided and for his story to have passed into myth, as magisterially recounted more than a decade ago by Sudhir Hazareesingh in his In the Shaow of the General: Modern France and the Myth of de Gaulle. In 2005, French TV viewers—perhaps not the most discerning of judges—voted de Gaulle the greatest Frenchman of all time, edging out Louis Pasteur and Victor Hugo.

The film, by French standards a lavish production (and only the first part of a projected diptych), takes the mythical status of its eponymous hero as a given and recounts the “passion” of its hero-martyr as so many stations on the path to apotheosis. From the opening sequence, in which a fearless Colonel de Gaulle unerringly directs his nervous driver to steer right and left so as to avoid the shells launched by onrushing German tanks, to the final sequence, in which a temporarily sidelined de Gaulle is recalled to life (resurrected, as it were) by the timely assassination of Admiral Darlan by a youthful Hotspur, the viewer is not allowed to forget that Destiny has from the outset stamped its mark on the Savior of France. That the film fails to mention the fact that said young Hotspur, whose path from naïf to assassin forms an important subplot, is not so much an idolator of General de Gaulle as an illuminated young monarchist enlisted in the non-Gaullist faction of the Resistance led by Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie is perhaps the kind of simplification required to compress such a complicated history into an already extended (157 minute) film epic. But the accumulation of simplifications leaves us with a film that steps beyond mythification into the realm of the fantastic. As I watched, I found myself carried back to my youth as an American child of the 1950s, reading comic books devoted to the derring-do of our valiant GIs.

This came as something of a surprise, because I had read that the film was based on Julian Jackson's magisterial biography of de Gaulle. Hence I was astonished by the film's depiction of de Gaulle's crucial meeting with Churchill on June 17, 1940, the day before the famous Discours du 18 juin, which was broadcast from London to de Gaulle's countrymen and established him as the leader of the Free French (even though almost no one heard the speech at the time). Jackson is at pains to point out that a previous biographer, Jean Lacouture, had inflated the significance of this encounter with Churchill: “This is splendid purple prose,” Jackson writes of Lacouture's description of the scene, in which a perspicacious Churchill is said to have discerned qualities in de Gaulle imperceptible to others.;“It is not history. We do not know whether Churchill had such hallucinations [of de Gaulle's tenacious genius] since he did not deign to mention that meeting with de Gaulle in his own memoirs. The truth is probably that Churchill, happy to welcome any Frenchman ready to fight on, distractedly made de Gaulle a non-committal promise about being allowed to broadcast, and had him ushered out as fast as possible so that he could turn to more important matters.”

The cinematic translation of Lacouture's purple prose might have been redeemed by actors capable of imparting some nuance to the confrontation, but what we see is rather the transformation of the purple into the screaming red italics of those WW II comics I ingested so hungrily as a child. Churchill gruffly clamps his lips around his cigar; de Gaulle, impassive as a statue, as he remains throughout the film, does not so much as move an eyebrow.

The director, Antonin Baudry, comes to the comic-book style naturally. He is the author of Quai d’Orsay, a rather stylish reconstruction in bande dessinée format of Dominique de Villepin's resistance to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, which Baudry witnessed at first hand as a foreign ministry staffer. I confess that I rather enjoyed Quai d’Orsay. Unfortunately, I can't say the same about this first half of the de Gaulle epic. Perhaps I remember too many of the WW II films I saw in a later stage of my childhood. Anyone who has seen the 1967 film Tobruk, for example, will know that there was more to the desert war than the Battle of Bir Hakeim, which of course takes pride of place in this very Franco-centric nationalist epic. It is perhaps not a mystery why a French director might think this a propitious moment to issue a resounding cocorico by contributing yet another embellishment to already towering edifice of the Gaullian myth. I may have a heart of stone, but I'm afraid this extravagant effort left me quite unmoved.

“A Quarter-Millennium of Franco-American Relations”: that is the title that my co-organizers and I came up with early in our discussions of what this year’s Tocqueville Society colloquium would look like. Obviously, we wanted to join in honoring the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

On reflection, however, it occurred to me that a better title might have been—with a nod to Charles Dickens—“A Tale of Two Countries.” And that might have led to a conference organized around the dual theme, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

But of course that would have been hyperbolic: The times we are living through right now are neither the best nor the worst. Both France and the United States have seen worse and better. The word that I think best characterizes today’s mood is morose. We are morose because we have the sense that something fundamental in our societies is changing for the worse, but we can’t yet divine what the future will look like. So we live with a gloomy sense of foreboding not quite justified, for most of us, by concomitant changes in the texture of daily life.

In the course of our colloquium, we’re going to do what scholars do. We’re going to ignore the ambient morosity and devote ourselves to learned analyses of our two sister republics, the French and the American, with laudable objectivity and scientific detachment.

But just for the next ten minutes, I’m going to ask you to indulge me. I’m going to set scholarly objectivity aside. What follows will be purely subjective, and entirely my responsibility.

It so happens that I’m celebrating a personal anniversary: I first set foot in France 58 years ago, in the summer of 1968—which, as some of you will recall, was quite a chaotic moment to discover France. Despite or perhaps because of the chaos, I was smitten for life. So while I can’t claim to have personally witnessed all of the 250 years to which this conference is devoted, I can claim nearly a quarter of them as part of my passionately lived experience as both observer and participant.

For much of these past six decades I served as a humble go-between between France and the United States. I’ve tried to keep faith with both sides of that relationship. When Françoise Mélonio gave me a copy of her splendid biography of Tocqueville last year, her dedication touched my heart: “Au plus français des Américains, un livre sur le plus américain des Français.” To be sure, I’m no Tocqueville, but it is true that we are both intellectually métissé, mental hybrids, as it were.

Now, it so happens that on one of the streets with which I’m most familiar in Paris, la rue Rollin, there is a wall that bears an inscription attributed to another intellectual métis, René Descartes: “I never feel so free as when I stand with one foot in one country and the other foot in another.” He was referring to France and the Netherlands, but his adage applies in spades to those of us who stand with one foot in France and the other in the United States. These two “sister republics,” as my friend Patrice Higonnet called them in his book by that name—and Patrice happens to live on la rue Rollin—are like catnip to comparatists.

When I refer to France and the United States as “sister republics,” I want to be clear about what I mean. I’m using the word “republic” in Tocqueville’s sense. For him, “republic” referred to “the slow and tranquil action of society on itself.” This is not Plato’s Republic, which is a portrait of the ideal city conjured up by philosophical speculation. Nor is it Augustine’s City of God or the more recently propounded “common-good republic,” which proposes a theologically informed hierarchy of values.

For Tocqueville, society comes first, and society is neither a Platonic ideal nor a divinely ordained order but a product of history, with all its contingent messiness and diversity, and all its complex and often conflictual social relations. Like us, Tocqueville lived in a morose time, after the emancipatory hopes kindled by revolution had faded. Events were passing in rapid succession before Tocqueville’s eyes with no clear destination in sight: “Immersed in a rapidly flowing stream, we stubbornly fix our eyes on the few pieces of debris still visible on the shore, while the current carries us away and propels us backward into the abyss.”

Tocqueville’s strategy for understanding the democratic republic he saw emerging in France was, as we all know, to turn elsewhere. The democratic revolution in France had “proceeded more rapidly” than elsewhere, but in “haphazard” fashion. So he turned to the United States, whose history he hoped would provide clearer conceptual contours. In short, he became a comparatist, that is, an intellectual métis.

Now, one of the advantages of intellectual métissage is that it enlarges the ego. We are all born with egos—some would say burdened with them—and growing up is the process of integrating the world into which we are thrown at birth into those egos, from which there is no exit.

If we confine ourselves to exploring only the corner of the world into which we happen to be born, however, we limit our potential for growth. We remain intellectual nativists, stuck in un huis clos. When we study another country, we do so in part to escape the confines of our egos and the inherent limits of unnecessarily constricted native experience.

I don’t go as far as Pascal, who said “le moi est haïssable,” the ego is detestable. In fact, I’m closer to Montaigne, whom Pascal was criticizing. Like Montaigne, I take the Delphic commandment to “Know thyself!” to be an injunction to recognize the limits of the ego we happen to born with and of the society we happen to be born into. Nativists, by depriving themselves of the richness of the world’s diverse cultures and traditions, lead a stunted existence. The ego needs to be enlarged if it is to encompass the world, if it is to become not just an ego but a soul. We must know others if we wish truly to know ourselves.

That is why we study others, and that is why we study other cultures and other times. But if we’re to do our jobs properly, we need to look beyond the “pieces of debris” scattered on the shore. We must attempt to understand not just what remains of the past but where the current is taking us.

When I was a student at MIT longer ago than I care to remember, I sought respite from the very rich diet of math and physics that I was being fed by signing up for a course on existentialism. And there I was introduced to J-P Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and to Sartre’s concept of the “reef of solipsism,” l’écueil du solipsisme. I had not previously known the word “solipsism,” but I found Sartre’s warning against self-absorption salutary and his exhortation to go forth and encounter the Other inspiring.

Lately, it seems to me that my own American culture has run aground on the reef of solipsism. Some among us have become unduly fearful of the encounter with the Other, perhaps because we had become convinced of our own superiority, or because we had acquired certain forms of power—military and financial, cultural and technological, hard and soft—that made it possible to pretend that we were alone in the world, immovably and invulnerably ensconced on our solipsistic reef.

Tocqueville had already remarked on a certain self-centeredness in our national character. “Americans,” he wrote, “are pleased by the merest of commendations and seldom satisfied by the fullest. … Their vanity is not only greedy but also restless and envious. … It is simultaneously grasping and argumentative.” (DA III:16, 719). Among my compatriots, those who believe that America has only recently been made great again seem to me to be reviving the antebellum braggadocio that Tocqueville found so tiresome: “A patriotism more trying or loquacious is impossible to imagine. It wearies even those who honor it.”

To say this is not to deny that there is much in the American version of liberal democracy to be proud of, but pride is more adequately expressed by modesty than by boasting. Lasting achievement needs no meretricious self-advertisement. Superlatives are diluted by overuse. But what is a latter-day Descartes to do? Will he really feel freer if he lifts one foot from the rich Mississippi bottomland of the self-styled “indispensable nation” and plants it firmly on the cobblestones of the similarly grandiloquent “grande Nation”?

Has the usefulness of the Franco-American comparison perhaps run its course? Comparison works when similarities and differences mutually illuminate each other. In recent years our sister republics have simultaneously succumbed to crises that are striking for their similarities, while the differences that once set them apart have become less salient. Let me illustrate what I mean:

Both countries have witnessed insurgencies against allegedly out-of-touch elites by elements that have felt excluded, disadvantaged, or, worse, disdained.

Both have seen rising resentment against immigrant populations.

Both have experienced transformations, albeit of different kinds, of long-standing party systems and informal norms that had previously served to stabilize democratic competition and contain both majoritarian and minoritarian tyranny.

Both have blamed the other as a source of their woes: “French theory” has stood accused of deconstructing rock-ribbed Yankee truths and values and infecting American minds with the debilitating viruses of relativism and “cultural Marxism”; and then, turnabout being fair play, vigilant French officials, including one recent Minister of Education, felt it necessary to erect a cordon sanitaire around the “American woke mind virus” that allegedly threatened to end gender distinctions, enthrone identitarian politics, and give Alain Finkielkraut apoplexy every Saturday morning.

So the question I want to leave you with is this: Does this recent convergence of our two democracies on a similar failure mode pose a problem for comparatists? Or is it rather an opportunity to recast the Franco-American comparison, on which most of the conference papers will focus, in a broader, more global context? For now I will simply pose the question without answering it.

The reproduction:

The (modified) original:

Recall that for Benjamin reproduction had the effect of draining art of what he called its “aura,” which is a function of distance, “its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” One might argue that this is the case with the second image above, the original of which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum in New York and must (some say) be visited and viewed up close to appreciate the material embodiment in pigment and brush strokes of what was once a living model in a black dress. The interest of the portrait lies in the uniqueness not of the woman portrayed but of the manner in which Sargent portrays her: the movement of his hand, the quality of his brush strokes, the placement of the figure, the featureless background, the decision to show the woman’s bosom frontally and partially bared but her head in profile, as if stamped on an imperial coin. She leans on a side table, oddly supported by knuckles and casually, improbably placed thumb, while gathering the fabric of her dress in her other hand, whose clutch, combined with the troubling ashen pallor of the shadowed neck and shoulders and elbow, hints at a quiet desperation or nervousness or loucheness otherwise belied by the regal confidence of the pose.

In reality, of course, the model in the second image, Virginie Amélie Gautreau, was no more a regal figure than Lauren Sanchez Bezos, the model in the first image. Like Ms. Bezos, Ms. Gautreau was an adventuress who married a wealthy older man and made a career as a “professional beauty.” Whether the endless reproduction of Sargent’s portrait of her deprives her of her aura or endows her with an enduring aura that her actual earthly existence would not have sustained is a question that can be debated.

But I write mainly to consider the first image rather than the second. Ms. Sanchez Bezos’s corporeal reproduction of Sargent’s portrait seems expressly intended to clothe her (the verb may be poorly chosen) in a borrowed aura. Surely there is no shortage of reproductions of Ms. Sanchez Bezos’s likeness: we have seen her abundant, indeed overflowing, physical assets exposed, and overexposed, in all manner of settings from the Inauguration in the U.S. Capitol to the deck of a megayacht awash in soap bubbles to the Gatsbyesque wedding in San Giorgio Maggiore. Such overexposure has made us all familiar with her unique appearance, but as is well-known, familiarity breeds contempt. As Benjamin noted, a ubiquitous image forfeits its owner’s “unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” Yet we all remain impossibly distant from the source of that image. We can scarcely imagine life floating upon hundreds of billions of dollars in sufficient detail even to envy it. Instinctively, we turn away in disgust.

Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X has been called “the Mona Lisa of American painting.” That is not necessarily a compliment. The fate of the Mona Lisa is no doubt a testimonial to the curious inversion of the aura that distorts our relation to artistic tradition. Multitudes persuaded (by Benjamin?) that art can only be savored in intimacy, that all distance between the subject and the thing-in-itself must be removed, flock to experience the current that is presumed to flow between subject and aureoled object when experienced up close—in the flesh, as it were, rather than in the mind. And the result is Bedlam, not beatitude.

Could it be that Ms. Sanchez Bezos imagined that she could overcome the omnipresence of her reproduced image and achieve the uniqueness intrinsic to art by inhabiting the flesh, or at any rate a simulacrum of the clothing, of Mme Virginie Amélie Gautreau? That she would then acquire the aura of the American Mona Lisa that even the distance from her real presence enforced by her husband’s security guards could not guarantee?

Unfortunately, the experiment seems to have gone awry. One has to credit Ms. Sanchez Bezos with the audacity to restore the transgressive element of the original portrait that Sargent has chastely painted out in the image reproduced above: the left shoulder strap is allowed casually to fall, suggesting further carnal revelations to come. This sexual boldness is what scandalized the Salon patrons of 1884, who saw an affront to bourgeois standards. Even Virginie Gautreau was offended, and she and her mother came to Sargent in tears and begged him to withdraw the painting.

Ms. Sanchez Bezos is guilty of no such hypocrisy. She is as proud of her assets as her husband is of his and flaunts them with self-confident satisfaction. Indeed, she has magnified the ornaments that adorn her shoulder strap in proportion to the difference between Virginie’s already ample breasts and her own still more generously proportioned appurtenances. It’s hard to imagine any display of flesh that would provoke a scandal today, even in a setting as mondain as the Metropolitan Museum, because “high” society has long since gone so Hollywood that there’s no longer any distinction between a socialite and a sexpot.

I don’t know how much of the Bezos fortune was pledged to the Met to earn Jeff and Lauren the title of “honorary chairs” of the absurd Gala, which this year was dedicated to the conceit that “Fashion Is Art.” But if the concept of “aura” has applicability today, it must refer to the uniqueness that attaches not to the act of creation but to the absolute distance that stands between wealth of Bezosian magnitude and the ordinary run of humankind. The mass reproduction of the Sanchez Bezos parody of Sargent’s portrait ultimately conveys the message that extreme wealth is the only modern form of apotheosis, and digital reproduction its indispensable evangelist.

The workings of Trump's mind must baffle anyone not used to mucking about in the primary processes of the uninhibited and unrestrained id. Observing such a spectacle may give rise to a feeling akin to awe, as Proust remarked in La Prisonnière:

It is nonetheless true that a great fascination and even a kind of beauty may arise from actions stemming from a mind of a type quite remote from everything we feel and everything we believe, actions that we cannot come close to understanding and that unfold before us like a spectacle whose cause we cannot fathom.

As it happens, Proust's example of such a mind involves another Middle-Eastern strait—the Hellespont, better known today as the Dardanelles or Strait of Gallipoli—and another deranged leader, Xerxes, a Persian as it happens, whose vaulting ambition to conquer Greece ended in humiliating defeat.

Proust reminds us of Xerxes’ fury when a storm sank the pontoon bridge he was attempting to build across the Hellespont. In his rage he ordered the sea to be whipped with chains. “What could be more poetic?” Proust asks, no doubt with tongue in cheek, since the “great actions” on which he is commenting in this passage are those provoked by the incomprehensible “inclinations” and “tastes” (read: sexual vices) of the French aristocracy.

Trump has not yet ordered the sea to be scourged but one senses a similar Xerxian impatience in his order to the Navy to “escort” vessels from the Persian gulf, not in the traditional sense of “escort,” meaning to physically accompany, but rather to guide, by providing information as to where danger might lie without actually exposing the great American armada to the damage the “already defeated” and “obliterated” enemy somehow remains capable of inflicting.

My guess is that between the strains imposed on Iran's economy by the U.S. sanctions and blockade, and on the economy of the rest of the world by Iran's blockade and attacks on its neighbors in the Gulf, both sides will soon find themselves whipping the seas in fury at the necessity of coming to some kind of accommodation. The Iran War will then end in a whimper that will be lost in the booming braggadocio and bluster of both battered belligerents.

Meanwhile, to the east, both China and Taiwan, on either side of yet another strait, will have drawn the consequences of this misbegotten adventure. On April 10 of this year, Cheng Li-Wun, the leader of the Kuomintang, the main Taiwanese opposition party, met with Xi Jinping in Beijing. Trump's abandonment of America's oldest allies has surely made it clear to many in Taiwan that if its future depends on American guarantees, it has no future. Hence accommodation with the old enemy is inevitable.

Moreover, Iran's deft wielding of the economic weapon has surely made it clear that Taiwan's central role in the global semiconductor industry represents a choke point no less potent than Iran's position adjacent to the Strait of Hormuz.

If all of America's military might is not enough to extricate itself from the Hormuz debacle, the endgame in the Strait of Taiwan is not difficult to imagine. The dispute that has for some time defined the stakes for the United States in Asia could well be resolved not by the “arbitrement of swords” but rather by the reconciliation of old enemies, in opposition to a United States that has proved itself to be both an unreliable and an unworthy ally.

It would be ludicrous, of course, to compare Trump to Xerxes. One imagines him exercising his wrath not on the fickle seas but on the new reflecting pool he's ordered his “pool guy” to build on the Mall in Washington, D.C. And he will thrash its waters not with chains or cudgels but with rubber duckies bearing his iconic signature: “President Donald J. Duck. Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

At the end of the talk, the lecturer invited the audience to undertake a similar critique of the United States. Is it possible to imagine some essential goodness of American culture or the American character that might survive what we like to think of as the aberration of the present to redeem the country from its current sins? Which prompted a member of the audience to recall a remark made by then German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier to mark the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II:

Rabbi Nachman once wrote: "No heart is as whole as a broken heart." Germany’s past is a fractured past – with responsibility for the murdering of millions and the suffering of millions. That breaks our hearts. And that is why I say that this country can only be loved with a broken heart. (emphasis added)

I find much of the above analysis problematic. The concept of national character is flawed. The idea that “nations” can be identified with “cultures” ignores their internal heterogeneity. To assign didactic functions to works of art or scientific achievements, to present them as mere vehicles of “value,” is to suck the marrow from them, leaving only hollow bones.

In an earlier incarnation, during a previous world war, the Thomas Mann of Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen portrayed German culture in a rather different light, as the residuary legatee of humanist ideals discovered by the Greeks and subsequently cultivated in Europe until threatened by the rise of a commercial, capitalist Zivilisation embodied in the Allied Powers arrayed against the German Empire, the last bastion of the soulful Kultur whose pinnacle could be found in German Romanticism. In The Languages of Paradise (which I translated from French to English), Maurice Olender showed how German linguists sought to demonstrate similarities in the very structure of the Greek and German tongues that made Germany the ideal nation to embody and defend the humanistic heritage of the Ancients.

The idea that the humanist universal could find its most perfect embodiment in a particularistic national Kultur exerted an unfortunate influence on one very accomplished German scientist, Werner Heisenberg. Heisenberg had little use for the Nazis but great respect for German Kultur. He therefore felt that a defeat of Germany at the hands of the Allies would be a disaster for humanity and thus, rather than flee, which he could easily have done, chose to stay and lend his talents to the Third Reich (though he would later claim that he withheld just enough of his talent to deprive Hitler of the atomic bomb). This is the sort of doleful outcome to which the conflation of culture with nation can lead.

But I’ve been skirting the issue broached in the title of this post. What about collective guilt? Can one hold Germans as a people responsible for the crimes of the German government? Can one hold Americans as a people responsible for the crimes and corruption of the Trump regime? If so, can one atone for one’s share of the collective guilt simply by verbally dissociating oneself from the crime? Should Gunter Grass burn in hell because he served in the Waffen SS? Should Christa Wolf be pilloried for having collaborated with the Stasi? Should Mann be condemned for having been a conservative nationalist in World War I? Should I be excoriated for having served in Vietnam? How does one expiate what one might call a sin of subsumption by an enveloping category to which one had no choice but to belong?

No doubt this whole way of thinking is defective. “Goodness” and “sin” are not appropriate terms in which to speak of responsibility for political choices. Works of art are not coin of the realm that can be paid out as reparations for wartime damage. Stendhal wrote that “Politics in a literary work is like a gunshot in the middle of a concert, vulgar yet impossible to ignore.” Conversely, invoking Beethoven and Goethe to atone for the Kaiser or Führer, or Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington to atone for Donald Trump, may salve the troubled conscience of the cultivated while failing to grapple with the true nature of the trouble.

The answer depends in part on how you understand both the this of the question and the significance of the term “fascism.” Is it useful to attempt to link our current predicament to events that took place in Europe a century ago, in countries with histories, social structures, and political systems very different from ours? Comparative history is difficult and potentially misleading, but, as one of the panelists put it, “It may not be easy to learn from the past, but we have nothing else to learn from.”

But why this past? History offers no shortage of examples of blundering governments, lying leaders, authoritarian rulers, mad kings, rampaging empires, indiscriminate violence, persecution of minorities—a vast array of kakistocracies, or governments of the worst, of which ours is only the latest in a long line. Why focus attention on fascism in particular, rather than on political pathologies more specific to the United States?

The word, which history has incrusted with a variety of terrifying connotations, possesses a certain galvanizing potential. For many people, fascism denotes the most proximate incarnation of pure political evil, the thing that must “never again” be tolerated. If this is fascism, therefore, it must provoke resistance; it must be nipped in the bud before it fully evolves, which the panelists by and large agreed (contrary to many) it had not yet done in the United States, despite the many dismaying developments of the past few years.

But what then? Galvanizing resistance may be a goal as necessary as it is worthy, but is it sufficient? One of the panelists recounted a recent visit to the German Resistance Memorial Center in Berlin, whose purpose is to show that there was no dearth of resistance to fascism in Germany, and yet fascism still triumphed. So even if one succeeds in convincing substantial numbers of people that this is indeed something very much like renascent fascism and therefore to be resisted by all possible means, the question remains whether it can be stopped, because it was not stopped in its previous incarnation despite substantial resistance.

Antonio Gramsci's Prison Writings were invoked in what may have been an imprecatory gesture, calling upon the institutions of civil society to rise up in defense of an atomized citizenry, rendered passive by a lengthy period of peace and prosperity and thus incapable of defending itself against the power of a state asserting a monopoly of the legitimate means of violence. Only those civil institutions—schools and universities, centers of industrial and financial power, religious establishments, research centers, hospitals, law firms and those parts of the judiciary that remain unbowed before the asserted power of the unitary executive—possess the organizational capacity and knowhow to thwart the ostensibly fascisant state.

Gramsci's lessons have not been lost, however, on the very political actors he meant them to oppose. The far right has learned to cite Gramsci for its purposes—and not just to cite him but to put his teachings into practice by attacking precisely those institutions that he thought might spearhead resistance. It is no accident that the first targets of the Trump administration included universities, law firms, and medical research centers. The degree to which these bastions of civil society had become dependent on federal largess, rendering them vulnerable to a state determined to undermine them, came as a shock to many people working inside them, who should have known better but who had long enjoyed the benefits of a division of labor that freed them from the need to worry about how their work was funded or what needed to be done to earn continued public support. Gramsci's call for cultural hegemony has thus triggered an assault on civil society for the purpose of establishing a counter-hegemony. The “long march through the institutions” runs in two directions.

Even before Gramsci, Tocqueville recognized the importance of civil society institutions as a corrective to the self-aggrandizement of the centralizing state. The very passion for equality that defines democracy induces distrust of and enmity toward any form of elite, and we can easily recognize the role that the fomenting of such distrust and enmity has played in the consolidation of the this whose resemblance to fascism is here in question. Like Gramsci, Tocqueville hoped that society would secrete from its own organs the antibodies with which to ward off this particular pathology: he called those antibodies corps intermédiaires, or intermediary bodies.

Inevitably, however, such bodies take on an elitist coloring. The danger, then, is not that this, “fascism” or whatever it may be, is antidemocratic but rather that it is a consequence of democracy's fundamental egalitarian passion and therefore likely to recur again and again, even in flourishing liberal democracies. The passion for equality, pushed to paroxysm, refuses to acknowledge any hierarchy of reasoning; if one person's opinion is as good as any other's, there can be no general will but only an atomization of individual wills among which coordination is impossible except by the imposition of a supreme authority: the polity is reduced to “dust,” to borrow Tocqueville's term. The instincts of the supreme authority are embraced as superior to the contested contentions of other public voices in what passes for rational political debate, which by its nature can offer only tentative propositions in lieu of the specious certainty promised by the authoritarian leader.

This, of course, is one of the features of “fascism” singled out by Robert Paxton, in his influential attempt to “anatomize” the fascist beast. No one has given a better definition than Paxton's, but the very “rationalization” of the object that such an exercise implies robs it of the terror that makes its use in political debate so potent and problematic. Many political movements that exemplify some or all of Paxton's criteria may be remembered as deplorable but not damnable. Colonel de la Rocque's Croix de Feu comes to mind. Or Huey Long's bayou populism. Even Mussolini's fascism, the nominal fons et origo of the question at issue, might occupy a far less salient place in our historical memory had it not been enlisted in and subordinated to Germany's “national socialism.” Perhaps a cautious nominalism is preferable to incautious abstraction when hunting these apex predators. The successful hunter of lions might fail if his quarry were tigers or panthers and would surely be out of his depth if attempting to spear a shark.

What kind of beast is the American this, then? Paxton already warned that if fascism were ever to come to America. It wouldn't wear jackboots or carry swastikas; it would rather swaddle itself in the American flag, profess a divine Christian mission, and draw inspiration from a supposed golden age of American greatness when its only nonwhite population was enslaved. Check. But perhaps the most remarkable thing about the American beast is just how deeply American it is. Its cultural shrine is not the Bayreuth opera house but the golf course. Its philosopher is not Friedrich Nietzsche but Curtis Yarvin. Rather than cast himself as a latter-day emperor to be apotheosized by torchlight parades and Roman salutes, our leader transforms the White House driveway into a car lot and makes himself the huckster-in-chief for Elon Musk's automobiles. Even the regime's most grandiose architectural realizations—the proposed White House ballroom and the Arc de Trump—are more kaiserish kitsch than anything else. The emperor's headgear is not a crown or a laurel wreath but a baseball cap emblazoned with a campaign advertisement. If this is fascism, it is a fascism determined to advertise the emptiness at its core.

Odd though the concept may be, one can't help thinking that the stock of moral credit in the current account of the United States has now fallen deeply into the red. A leader who asks his countrymen to lay down their lives in pursuit of some prize or advantage has a moral obligation to be clear about what that prize or advantage might be. He is not at liberty to say on one day that achieving some particular end is indispensable and on the next that he “doesn't care” about failing in that endeavor because some other end has taken its place. To do otherwise is morally bankrupt. It's to pay the moral price of one's action in counterfeit currency.

Consistency has never been the forte of the current President of the United States. A foolish consistency, it has been said, is the hobgoblin of small minds, but persistent and egregious inconsistency about matters of state is nevertheless, in light of the foregoing, a sure sign of moral bankruptcy at the highest levels.

A few days ago the President asserted that he was prepared to destroy Iranian civilization if the new Iranian leadership—composed, he said, of more reasonable and rational people than the old—did not open the Strait of Hormuz. He then retreated from that threat on the ground that they had allegedly acceded to this demand, despite their explicit statement that they retained “control” of the Strait. Thanks to this fabricated and wholly fictional concession by the adversary, the President agreed to negotiations, whose prompt collapse exposed his duplicity. In response, Mr. Trump now asserts that he will “blockade” the Strait, ensuring that the blame for ensuing shortages of fuel and other essential supplies will redound to the United States rather than Iran. Well-played, Mr. President.

Has a war ever been more ineptly prosecuted? Has a great power ever displayed such strategic incompetence? Has a rogue state, known for repressing its own people, fomenting terror abroad, and subverting governments beyond its borders, ever been so carelessly granted the martyr's role it covets by a blundering superpower blinded by the shock and awe of its enormous but heedlessly squandered firepower?

Donald Trump's one great gift has always been his ability to believe his own lies. Today he professes to believe that fate of the Strait no longer matters because “we've already Won,” capital W. Presumably, it will now be up to the Europeans, the Indians, and the Chinese to fetch their own oil by hook or by crook. If they pay the Iranians for the privilege of passage, they declare themselves enemies of the United States. If they respect the U.S. blockade and thus bring their economies to a halt, their people will join the Iranian leadership, “reasonable and rational” though they are now declared to be, in viewing the United States as the Great Satan. “Moral bankruptcy” is too mild a term to apply to the regime that has brought us to this pass. “Moral idiocy” might come closer to the truth.