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She built a huge and devoted following on Facebook, which is widely and often accurately viewed in media circles as a home of misinformation, and where most journalists don’t see their personal pages as meaningful channels for their work.

She also contradicts the stereotype of Substack, which has become synonymous with offering new opportunities for individual writers to turn their social media followings into careers outside big media, and at times appears to be where purged ideological factions go to regroup

it’s true of left-leaning writers who have broken bitterly with elements of the mainstream liberal consensus, whether around race or national security, from the Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald to the Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias to the firebrand Matt Taibbi,

When readers on Facebook started suggesting she write a newsletter, she realized she didn’t want to pay hundreds of dollars a month for a commercial platform, and jumped at Substack because it would allow her to send out her emails without charge to her or her readers

Substack makes its money by taking a percentage of writers’ subscription revenue, and she said she felt guilty that the company’s support team wasn’t getting paid for fixing her recurring problem: that her extensive footnotes set off her readers’ spam filters.

She thinks of her politics as Lincoln-era Republican, but she is in today’s terms a fairly conventional liberal, disturbed by President Trump and his attacks on America’s institutions.

she published her sixth book, “How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America,” an extended assault on the kind of nostalgia that animates Mr. Trump’s fight to preserve Confederate symbols

The face of the South in Dr. Richardson’s book is a bitterly racist and sexually abusive South Carolina planter and senator, James Henry Hammond, who called Jefferson’s notion that all men are created equal “ridiculously absurd.”

Dr. Richardson’s “readers are people who have been orphaned by the changes in media and the sensationalism and the meanness of so much of Twitter and Facebook, and they were surprised to find her there and pleased and spread the word,” said Bill Moyers

“You live in a world of thunderstorms,” he said, “and she watches the waves come in.”

They are the chosen people who bent history to their will by holding up their visions of the future.

The Crown’s portrayal of Thatcher evokes a form of nostalgia for the certainty of the past that she has come to represent. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that on some big calls, she was right: on remaking Britain’s moribund economy, for example, and retaking the Falkland Islands

Today we see her as a leader who saw what needed to be done to get to where she wanted to go. And in one sense that designation is evidently true. Thatcher was a political titan of iron will and intellectual vigor who did change Britain—for good or ill, depending on your view.

Wouldn’t the country, like so many of its neighbors, have eventually grasped its way to some kind of economic reform and ended up, roughly, where it is today?

Does the story we tell about Thatcher, then, not reveal more about us than it does about her? Is the point, in fact, that we need the myth of Thatcher—the visionary and transformational leader—to affirm to ourselves that we too can make a difference and change the world

Obama’s memoir seems to grapple with this inconvenient problem, but the former president cannot stop believing in his own myth. How does he explain Donald Trump’s election, for example? In his interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, Obama says Trump’s rise is partly a reaction to his own success, and partly the consequence of a changing media landscape

In other words, Trump’s election does not undermine Obama’s victories or vision, because circumstances beyond his control subsequently changed for the worse.

It was not, fundamentally, because of anything Obama had done wrong, or any of his own character flaws. Crucially, it was also not because his promise of a better America was wrong.

The argument that policy failures, character flaws, personal weakness, or legitimate public distaste was the real reason leaders or their philosophies were rejected is rarely countenanced.

it is possible to discern something of an iron rule for former political leaders: Nothing can ever happen after power has been relinquished that in any fundamental way proves their central political analysis wrong

Politicians have long understood that their ability to forecast the future—to be on the right side of history—is central to their legitimacy as decision makers

a leader leads by anticipating the future using their understanding of how the past led to the present. For any statesman to admit that he failed to foresee the future is to admit that he failed as a statesman.

Obama—like almost all political leaders—feels vindicated by events, even as they drift further and further away from the path he foresaw.

“I’m convinced that the pandemic we’re currently living through is both a manifestation of and a mere interruption in the relentless march toward an interconnected world,”

they must persist in arguing that however far from the path the world has veered since their departure, the destination remains the same: that the arc bends just as they prophesied.

Our leaders must project perfection and certainty. We need them to in order to make us relevant.

Neither lynching nor the ideology of the Confederacy have been confined to the South

The revision of US history was broad and deliberate. The south lost the war but it won the narrative.

Beginning in the 1890s, across the US, the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of the Confederate Veterans erected monuments to their fallen heroes, and vilified the era of Reconstruction that granted civil rights to freed African Americans. They received support from the early film industry in Hollywood, which produced hundreds of movies that valorised southern rebels. 

The US began a broad and public reexamination of its history in 2015, after a white supremacist murdered nine people in a black church in Charleston

Until the past week, Europeans have been slow to examine their own histories of racism and colonialism.

one in five Britons regards their former empire as something to be ashamed of. Such nostalgia for empire played a toxic role in Brexit fantasies.

Germans use their history to think about an uncertain future, while Britons use their history to console themselves for a less glorious present.

Monuments are not just a matter of heritage; that’s why we don’t memorialise everything. Monuments are values made visible, embodying ideals we choose to honour. Unless we choose to celebrate their values, statues of slave owners belong in museums, not public streets. We cannot have a just and decent present as long as we refuse to face our pasts. 

It took Germans some time to learn this after the second world war, but they finally invented a concept for it: Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, which translates as “working off the past”

The rebuilding of Berlin – a long, discursive process in which historians, politicians and citizens debated for more than a decade – was aspirational.

The city’s public space represents conscious decisions about what values the reunited republic ought to hold

In addition to reimagining public space, Germany paid reparations, rewrote school lesson plans to include material against racism and filled its museums with exhibits about the worst aspects of its history

Mr Jones finds white evangelicals especially likely to express goodwill to African-Americans. But dig into their unconscious biases, he claims, and you see a different picture emerge. “In survey after survey” white Christians are much likelier than non-religious whites to express negative attitudes towards minorities and complacency about the rough treatment of African-Americans, among other indicators of racism.

Melding history, theology, statistical modelling and his own experience, as a Southern Baptist seminarian, Mr Jones suggests in “White Too Long” that white Christian traditions are so steeped in historic racism that “the norms of white supremacy have become deeply and broadly integrated into white Christian identity.”

Another explanation, argues a new book by Robert P. Jones, an authority on American religion and politics, and head of the Public Religion Research Institute, is that white Christians were especially receptive to Mr Trump’s race-baiting. Mr Jones also offers a grim theory for why this was the case.

Asked whether police killings of black men were isolated incidents, 71% of white evangelicals said they were, compared with 38% of non-religious whites.

white evangelicals are likely to be old, conservative and live in the South—characteristics that point to unreconstructed views on race independently of religion

two qualifiers are often added

Second, while people who simply identify as white evangelicals might hold such views, the most pious do not.

Mr Jones is unconvinced by either qualifier. He controls for age, partisanship and geography in his model—and finds the same pattern.

And he finds that practising evangelicals score the highest on his index of racism.

He concludes that white Christian identity is “independently predictive” of racist attitudes.

But, Mr Jones argues, the history of American Christianity makes this likelier than it might sound. The dominant southern strains of white evangelicalism were formed amid and sometimes in response to slavery.

Such claims are shocking.

The Southern Baptists, America’s biggest denomination, was launched to defend it biblically—which it did by representing black skin as the accursed “mark of Cain”. Many southern pastors were cheerleaders for the Confederacy, then shaped the culture of nostalgia and lament (the “religion of the lost cause”) that precluded a reckoning with Jim Crow’s legacy.

Post-war pessimism also led evangelicals to adopt a premillennialist theology, which viewed the world as irredeemable by man. Instead of wasting their time on social justice, it urged them to focus on their individual spirituality

The perverse effect, argues Mr Jones, was to imbue white evangelicals with “an unassailable sense of religious purity” that blinded them to their own behaviour.

As African-Americans fled north, mainstream protestants and Catholics increasingly adopted the mores of southern evangelicals.

The moral majority of the 1970s and 80s, fuelled by a Catholic aversion to abortion and common fears of the civil-rights movement, was the culmination of this fusion

Mr Jones’s model suggests the same racial attitudes are common to most white Christian traditions. Evangelicals are merely the most extreme case.

This troubling past was always the real mark of Cain, Mr Jones writes. And “today God’s anguished questions—‘Where is your brother?’ and ‘What have you done?’—still hang in the air like morning mist on the Mississippi River.

So too has been the classic officer-class trait of inattention to detail.

there are also bigger, deeper factors at work

In England in particular, there is a strand of the national culture expressed by the mixture of hectoring optimism and insularity of the rightwing press, and reducible to the idea that the supposed British way of doing anything is necessarily the best

Even now, 21st-century politics is still less about hardened matters of success and failure than these expressions of culture and history, and the sides they force people to take.

These things play into deep elements of the English psyche, shot through with the lingering traces of deference and always ready to be manipulated by Tory politicians.

we will sooner or later have to confront the fact that we have not just the highest death toll in Europe but a broken social settlement.

We cannot go on like this, with deep inequalities of race and class constantly exploding before our eyes, the need for food banks extending into the distance, and voices at the top willing us back towards the very social and political dead end that ensured the virus has had such a disastrous impact.

In the great surge of spontaneous collective action that has greeted Covid-19, there are the seeds of something better, but we should not underestimate the obstacles in the way: nostalgia, mythology and the banalities of politicians desperate to manipulate such things in their own interests as their failures become inescapable.

With Trump, evil is always better when it’s also a bargain.

Until as recently as January this year, “62 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents considered Vladimir Putin a stronger leader than Joe Biden.” That’s the primrose path down which the GOP led its supporters — seeing Putin as a more legitimate president than Biden.

Steve Bannon summed it up: “Putin ain’t woke. He’s anti-woke.”

over the years, this drumbeat of love for the Russian dictator shifted the views of many grassroots Republicans. In the wake of Trump’s personal infatuation with Putin, the murderer’s favorability among Republicans jumped from 10 percent in 2014 to 37 percent by December 2016.

For besieged social conservatives and Christianists in America, Putin loomed like some phantasm of strange hope.

The last two weeks, to put it mildly, have pummeled this narrative. It’s happened in a couple of ways. The first is that there really is no legitimate defense — even at CPAC, the fetid armpit of the Trump right — of sending troops and tanks into a neighboring country to teach it a lesson in submission to Mother Russia

If you’re Bannon, you can still try and wing it, but the sheer sight of bombed hospitals, murdered children, homeless seniors, and mortar explosions in residential neighborhoods tends to shape public opinion overnight.

Secondly, and perhaps most important, Putin is failing. He looks weak. The visual of a vast, stalled, vulnerable convoy of trucks on its way — or not — to Kyiv is now a metaphor for Putin’s presidency.

Putin has also done something no US president has been able to do in decades: rally Europe around NATO, get NATO countries to re-arm (finally), and give them a new and pointed mission: the deterrence of Russia

Putin’s blunder has revealed, in fact, that the West has a unique new weapon in the history of global warfare that can end wars almost before they begin: an economic kill-switch. The vast and complex set of financial, economic, and travel sanctions that the West unveiled this past fortnight and is imposing on Russia — effectively removing it from international banking and most international trade — is something no country can survive for very long.

if the EU is able to ramp up nuclear power (as France and Britain are), allow more fracking, and keep its investment in renewables surging, Russia’s entire carbon-based economy will have an expiration date attached to it.

None of this was supposed to happen. The West wasn’t supposed to unite this expeditiously; the EU wasn’t expected to find a new and confident voice; Russia’s access to global finance wasn’t supposed to be severed overnight; and a senile American president wasn’t supposed to corral a massive coalition to marginalize and isolate Russia on the global stage.

“Everything the [far right] wanted to perceive as decadent and weak has proven strong and brave; everything they wanted to represent as fearsome and powerful has revealed itself as brutal and stupid

so a president recently celebrated as a mastermind on the world stage has allowed his ancient fantasies of imperial glory to kick-start his own country’s economic and social collapse. Putin emerges from this as neither smart nor strong; he is, in fact, dumb and increasingly weak.

That’s why he’s a useful insight into what reactionism actually is. It’s not really a politics; it’s a mood. It’s not really about the problems of the present; it’s about living in an imagined past, and believing that you alone can restore it by some mystical rhetorical magic.

It’s about “subscribing to a worldview that combines Orthodox Christian mysticism, anti-American conspiracy theories and hedonism.

Trump longs for the 1950s in America — just as Putin longs for the USSR of the same period

Wrapped up in nationalism, provoked by left-extremism, corralled by skillful demagogues, this longing can be a path to power. It can bring tyrants into office. But it cannot work in practice — because the world is different now. We live in 2022. America will never have the cultural and relative demographic homogeneity of the 1950s again. Never.

“White nationalism” in the most ethnically diverse democracy in human history is a kind of insanity — perpetuated by woke leftists and sad rightists. No wall, no president, no new immigration policy, no mass deportations, no book-bannings and no neo-Nazi rallies will bring it back. It’s gone.

globalization as a whole will not be undone. And because it will not be undone, exclusion from it will effectively remove any country from great power status in the foreseeable future. And so Putin has had his bluff called as well. If the sanctions hold, the danger from Russia henceforth will come from desperation, not ambition.

d this is often the risk of reactionary movements. The backlash they provoke can be lethal to their cause.

If Trudeau tried to freeze the bank accounts of political opponents, the West has chosen to cut an entire country off from global finance — to precipitate its collapse. The scale of this organized global cabal and the immensity of its power should alarm anyone. Putin’s hyper-nationalism has actually generated the most potent globalist power grab since the Cold War. And made it look reasonable.

That was a very new idea, this idea of progress. It is not the way most people in history have understood their times. Most ancient peoples either saw history as cyclical or as declining from a past golden age. Nobody thought that humanity’s best years were ahead. Nisbet said that this idea came originally out of Christianity, but then during the Enlightenment it had been secularized.

Instead of seeking to ground that optimism in the fact that God has the future in his hands, we collectively said, “No, we’ve got the future in our hands.” That particular story about the human race, which is a modern and Western story, started to lose altitude in the first part of the 20th century. Although there was a small uptick, it went on life support as decades passed. I would say it’s really dying now.

Mark Lilla has written a couple of interesting books, one on the conservative mind and one on the liberal mind

conservatives have a nostalgia for the past. They feel like things are getting worse. Liberals and progressives have the opposite perspective. They see the past as being horrible. They think our hope is in the future. Even Lilla, who is not a believer, noted that Christianity had a different story than either. He observed that Saint Augustine’s book The City of God rejected both conservative and liberal perspectives.

Augustine believed that “the city of man” is bad and “the city of God” is good, and that eventually the city of God is going to supplant the city of man. He said you cannot identify any particular political order or any particular city of man with the city of God, and that our true hope lies in the new heavens and earth of the future. That gets rid of the conservative idea that that everything in the past was better and there is no hope. However, it also gets rid of the liberal idea that if we all just pull ourselves together we can bring about the city of God on earth. It gives us a chastened hope for the future rather than a utopian one.

Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist, observes that empirically we are living healthier and longer lives. Nevertheless, people feel more culturally and emotionally dislocated than ever. Younger generations are experiencing far more depression and anxiety than those that came before them. We can feel the cultural anxiety today. There’s a real pessimism about the future that I’ve not seen in my lifetime. We find ourselves in a new age of anxiety.

The gospel creates virtues in Christians. If Christians multiply in the culture, we can work for a more just society. And even if we do not immediately bring about a perfectly just society, we have the hope that eventually that’s going to be established on earth by God.

We do not have to become the darkness to bring this about. We do not have to say, “Well, we have to break eggs to make an omelet.” We do not have to trample on people because we think that is our only hope for a better world. It is not

We can remain faithful in our hope, even if it means that we ourselves do not necessarily see the immediate success we want. To be hopeful means to do what we are supposed to do because our eventual prospects are certain.

In English, hope can mean the opposite of the biblical sense—to be uncertain. If you say, “I know it’s going to happen,” that is certainty. If you say, “I hope it will happen,” that is uncertainty

My son Jonathan is an urban planner. In his mind, he has all these exciting ideas about what a great city would look like. Well, as a Christian, he realizes that in his entire life he may only get one “leaf” done of his beautiful vision. We all face that reality. Nevertheless, we live with the hope that there will be a tree. There will be a city. There is going to be a just society. Beauty will be here. Poverty and war will be gone. We are not the saviors. Instead, hope can set us free from both the despair of nihilism and the naivety of utopianism.

The word hope in English has declined in meaning. We use it as if it were a pleasant wish. What you are describing, like the Bible’s definition, is obviously richer.

We have a translation problem. Like the word shalom, which is usually translated into English as “peace.

There is a famous short story by J.R.R. Tolkien called “Leaf by Niggle.” Niggle is a painter who spends his entire life trying to paint a mural of a tree. By the end of his life, he has only gotten one leaf completed. Then he dies. But when he gets to heaven, he sees the tree that was always there in his mind. That is the way of the Christian

The Greek word elpis means assurance of the future—assured anticipation. You are sure of your hope. Quite the opposite of how we typically use the word in English.

Eventually everybody will get to the place where it matters personally whether the resurrection of Jesus Christ really happened. Because if it did, then there is hope for you, no matter what happens

I did not want to try to redo what N.T. Wright did. He wrote what is in my opinion the best book on the resurrection in the last 100 years, The Resurrection of the Son of God. He traces significant evidence that the resurrection accounts were not merely made up. They have all the marks of historic eyewitness testimony—including bizarre details no one would include in a fictional account.

Wright said there were only two ways that people had ever thought of resurrection before Jesus. The first was as resuscitation—like Lazarus. The person was dead, then something miraculous happens and he gets up out of the tomb, in which case you recognize him because he still looks the same, right? The second idea of resurrection is of the transformation of the person into an angelic or radiant being. But the idea that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead as recognizable, yet somehow different from the way he had looked before his death (so much so that even his closest friends didn’t at first recognize him) is so utterly counterintuitive. No one would have made that up.

Why does the resurrection matter? Well, as one reason among billions, because I have cancer. Because one of the things you do when you have cancer is ask how you are going to deal with it. That experience has required that I increase my hope, by reading the Word, especially on the resurrection of Jesus. Because if he were raised from the dead, then basically, it is going to be OK. If he were raised from the dead, then Christianity is basically right, and the hope it gives is an infallible hope.

as a mortal person facing his own death, the resurrection brings perspective to our theology. At this stage in my life, I am looking at the big things of which I can be sure

when it comes to the resurrection? If I am sure of that, then I am OK. I can handle anything that life—or death—throws at me.

Add the language in these speeches to all of the programmatic changes Trump and his allies have threatened to enact once he’s back in office—establishing massive detention camps for undocumented people, using the Justice Department against anyone who dares to run against him, purging government institutions, singling out Christianity as the state’s preferred religion, and many other actions—and it’s hard to describe it all as generic “authoritarianism.” Trump no longer aims to be some garden-variety supremo; he is now promising to be a threat to every American he identifies as an enemy—and that’s a lot of Americans

Unfortunately, the overuse of fascist (among other charges) quickly wore out the part of the public’s eardrums that could process such words.

ere I want to caution my fellow citizens. Trump, whether from intention or stupidity or fear, has identified himself as a fascist under almost any reasonable definition of the word.

He is also constrained by circumstance: The country is not in disarray, or at war, or in an economic collapse

Now, students will participate in a jigsaw activity. Below are three articles about three different student populations that have been affected by the war in Ukraine. Assign each student, or have them choose, one of the articles to become an “expert” in. Make sure there are about an even number of students reading each article.

5. What are some of the fears or challenges teachers themselves are facing because of the war?6. You’ve read one of three articles about what education is like for a specific group of students. What role is school serving for the group you read about? Is there anything more schools could be doing to support these young people? If so, what and why?

What role can schools serve, even during war? How important do you think education is in a time like this? Do you believe educators should teach about what is happening in Ukraine? How do you think they should handle this sensitive subject?

Many teachers answered our call in mid-March to tell us how they were addressing the war in their classrooms. Here are some responses that show the many ways, large and small, that educators have sought to help their students understand the conflict and its roots, the plight of the Ukrainian people, the role of the United States and more. They have been edited for length and clarity.

I was shocked at how hungrily they soaked up the information, especially once Russia officially invaded Ukraine. These 10-, 11- and 12-year-olds wanted to learn more about what was happening in their world in the “right way” — via vetted news sources, exactly as you mentioned. After each episode, we discussed positives that we heard, we shared “wonders” (the things that we want to find more information on), and we shared one word to summarize the new information.

That day, my students’ remarks on the Russian invasion of Ukraine fit into five categories: empathy for the people of Ukraine, fear of World War III, criticism of Putin, criticism of memes that treat the invasion as a joke, and geopolitical curiosity.

Students then created infographics on Canva to illustrate their learning. Synthesizing that learning into smaller, digestible data bites helped them to make sense of such large, challenging concepts. Here are four examples of their work.

When discussing the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, that consisted of orienting everyone to where this conflict is happening geographically and what cities and countries are involved. We spoke about the history of NATO, key leaders, the concept of trade and supply chains — basically defining the common vocabulary and giving everyone the same tools for discussion.

That’s how I realized that my students needed to talk about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As a result, I took the following steps the next day, with positive results.

As part of a larger project on the theme of “nostalgia,” students were asked to think of a family recipe that made them nostalgic. But we also talked about the food that brings us comfort no matter where we find ourselves. To help students connect to the Ukrainian people, we talked about the comforts of borscht with information from this article about a chef who is leading a drive to recognize the soup as a Ukrainian cultural heritage.

Teaching about Russia and Ukraine this spring encompassed history, vocabulary, maps, graphs, and photo analysis. We began with a brainstorm about what students had heard about what was happening with Ukraine and Russia. Then students moved on to define terms like Soviet Union, Cold War and NATO, and worked together to combine their definitions into one “best definition.” This vocabulary work set them up to read the Times article about what was happening in Ukraine as Russia invaded, annotating in the

Part of what has made the coverage of the war in Ukraine compelling is my students seeing visual inversions of their own lives. There’s a photo of a grandmother, but she’s holding an assault rifle. There are teenagers, not much older than they are, running drills. There’s a teacher, but instead of trying to manage a class, she’s barely managing to hold it together.

What do you notice about how the person is framed in the photograph?What is the posture? Where is their gaze?Imagine what they might be thinking as they gaze out of the frame.

This is an excellent piece to use when considering primary and secondary audiences, purpose, appeals, and overall effectiveness. It is also a story we can track to see if the speech moves anyone in Congress to change their position on the type of support to provide Ukraine.

Does the American government favor any countries over other countries? What is the policy that guides the American government when dealing with other countries?How does the American government handle disagreements with other countries?Which countries are American allies, or friends?Which are America’s traditional enemies? How is this determined? Does that history matter?

How does President Biden “create the enemy?” Why should America follow this course of action? What is he suggesting will happen if America does not? What does America stand to gain from this plan? Are potential losses discussed?Note patterns in rhetorical appeals, diction, values and themes. What assumptions does President Biden make about the American character or national identity? In what ways do American mythologies seem to bolster a “single story” of foreign policy?

Begins.” Students took notes on the use of ethos, pathos and logos in the construction of the podcast. They also responded to the importance of having free and independent journalists report on the war.

“We Lived Happily During the War,” “Dulce et Decorum Est” and “Dancing.”

E.I.H.R. cultivates partnerships among educators globally to create materials and deliver training based on best practices in Holocaust and human rights education. Together we deliver content and strategies for teaching conflict history and prevention, and sustainable peace. They have been building resources for teachers about Ukraine since Feb. 24, including this webinar on Understanding the Crisis in Ukraine from March 19.

People here feel responsible for one another.

The central problem, of course, is that this sense of belonging may flow as much from who is not a part of the Villages as who is. The populace here is 98 percent white, putting it increasingly out of touch with the broader nation.

It is reminiscent of college or summer camp — but for people who no longer have to worry about what they’re going to be when they grow up or what their political choices will bring. For Villagers, the future is less of a concern than living their best life. Right. Now.

The culture, like the overwhelmingly conservative politics, can feel like a scrupulously maintained bulwark against the onslaught of time and change.

In this way, the community is a distillation of the cultural crosscurrents at play in an America that is simultaneously graying and diversifying.

One of Donald Trump’s shrewdest political moves has been to exploit some people’s nostalgia for a bygone era where the cultural hierarchy was clear and the world made sense. The Villages works overtime to maintain a replica of that fantasyland — a shiny, happy, small-town bubble where seniors can tune out the rest of the world and party like it’s 1969.

I have some fond memories of my trips to the pre-collapse Soviet Union (I made four from 1983 to 1991). It was a weird and fascinating place. But it was also every inch the “evil empire” that President Ronald Reagan described, a place of fear and daily low-grade paranoia where any form of social attachment, whether religion or simple hobbies, was discouraged if it fell outside the control of the party-state.

the idea that anyone in Moscow would be stupid or deranged enough to want to reassemble the Soviet Union seemed to me a laughable fantasy. Even Putin himself—at least in public—often dismissed the idea.

I was wrong. I underestimated the power of Soviet imperial nostalgia. And so today, I grieve.

It was never designed, however, to function with one of its permanent members running amok as a nuclear-armed rogue state, and so today the front line of freedom is in Ukraine

I have lived through two eras, one an age of undeclared war between two ideological foes that threatened instant destruction, the next a time of increasing freedom and global integration. This second world was full of chaos, but it was also grounded in hope

The Soviet collapse did not mean the end of war or of dictatorships, but after 1991, time seemed to be on the side of peace and democracy, if only we could summon the will and find the leadership to build on our heroic triumphs over Nazism and Communism.

Now I live in a new era, one in which the world order created in 1945 is collapsing.

The United Nations, as I once wrote, is a squalid and dysfunctional organization, but it is still one of the greatest achievements of humanity.

I was convinced that everything I knew was more than likely destined to end in flames. Peace seemed impossible; war felt imminent.

But democracy is under attack everywhere, including here in the United States

I will celebrate the courage of Ukraine, the wisdom of NATO, and the steadfastness of the world’s democracies

But I also hear the quiet rustling of a shroud that is settling over the dreams—and perhaps, illusions—of a better world that for a moment seemed only inches from our grasp.

I do not know how this third era of my life will end, or if I will be alive to see it end. All I know is that I feel now as I did that night in Red Square, when I knew that democracy was in the fight of its life, that we might be facing a catastrophe, and that we must never waver.

The western world kept a buzz going for twelve years, and that’s an accomplishment. It must also be said that the 1990s weren’t squandered, because even in the dark years they were fun. They weren’t complicated.

the 1990s make great nostalgia bait: simpler politics, plus great music, plus cool fashion cues. And maybe we can create another halcyon bubble again one day!

The generation that came of age in the 1990s, now well into middle age, have a lot of happy memories of a sort that may never be possible to have again. At the moment any possibility of collective joy seems about as realistic as a Miss America contestant trying to wish world peace into existence

n the 1990s we still had the future, a place that you could travel to, that would be cool when you got there, like Australia or the South Pole. Right now we merely have a future, and a murky one at that, and it’s probably more like Kenosha, Wisconsin than Sydney.

I remember doing a book tour and ending up on a local AM radio station’s podium at the grand opening of Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota on 11 August 1992. It was full of Americans in alpha consumption mode, eating ice cream, faces beaming, walking around in unselfconscious bliss. The local radio jock said to me, “You must think all of this is pretty silly”. He motioned towards the crowd and then to a rollercoaster directly beside us that came screeching at our heads every 95 seconds.

But I said, “No. In a century people are going to look back on right now as a sort of magic era, a charmed time of peace and prosperity and freedom from fear, as something that can never happen again, no matter how much they wish it would”.

Since coming to power in 2019, Bukele has declared a still-to-be-rescinded state of exception, suspended the Salvadorean constitution, and locked up some 70,000 alleged gang members without due process.

This trait also makes him a touchstone for the Right-wing movement that I predict will replace “conservatism” in the 21st century. This outlook owes more to the Italian Futurist Filippo Marinetti than conservatives of the G.K. Chesterton variety

yet, Bukele’s strongman tactics have made him wildly popular with Salvadoreans, who doubtless enjoy a reported 70% reduction in the country’s previously extremely high murder rate. They have also made Bukele a rock star for the online Right. This group, fond of complaining about spineless leaders, fraying Western law and order, and the bleeding-away of political agency into international institutions and NGOs, regards the spectacle of a strongman leader with good social media game as something like a fantasy made flesh.

Arguably, it’s as much his embrace of technology that accords Bukele the mantle of poster-boy for a futuristic Right. Whether in his extremely online presence, his (admittedly not completely successful) embrace of Bitcoin as legal tender, or the high-tech, recently rebuilt National Library, funded by Beijing and serving more as showcase for futuristic technologies than as reading-room

Western critics, though, point to allegations that he has corrupted institutions by packing them with allies, not to mention, according to Amnesty International, “concealed and distorted public information, backed actions to undermine civic space, militarised public security, and used mass arrests and imprisonment as the sole strategies for counteracting violence in the country”.

is perhaps most visibly embodied in American technologists such as Elon Musk, Mark Andreessen or Peter Thiel. As a worldview, it is broadly pro-capitalist, enthusiastically pro-technology and unabashedly hierarchical, as well as sometimes also scornful of Christian-inflected concern for the weak.

We might call it, rudely, “space fascism”, though N.S. Lyons’s formulation “Right-wing progressivism” is probably more accurate. Among its adherents, high-tech authoritarianism is a feature, not a bug, and egalitarianism is for fools. Thinkers such as Curtis Yarvin propose an explicitly neo-monarchical model for governance; Thiel has declared that: “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible.”

El Salvador is thus the most legible real-world instance of something like a Right-wing progressive programme in practice. And along with the tech enthusiasm and public-order toughness, the third distinctive feature of this programme can be gleaned: a desire not to end international migration, but to restrict it to elites.

For Right-wing progressives, polities are not necessarily premised on ethnic or cultural homogeneity — at least not for elites. Rather, this is a vision of statehood less based on affinity, history or even ethnicity, and more on a kind of opt-in, utility-maximisation model

As a worldview, it’s jarring to cultural conservatives, who generally value thick ties of shared history and affinity

Right-wing progressives generally accord greater political value to gifted, high-productivity foreigners than any slow-witted, unproductive coethnic: those within Right-wing progressive circles propose, and in some cases are already working on, opt-in startup cities and “network states” that would be, by definition, highly selective about membership.

As for those still wedded to the 20th-century idea that being Right-wing necessarily means ethnicity-based nationalism, they are likely to find this outlook bewildering.

Yet it’s still more heretical to egalitarian progressives, for whom making migration and belonging an elite privilege offends every premise of inclusion and social justice.

Right-wing progressives, by contrast, propose to learn from the immigration policies of polities such as Singapore and the Gulf states, and avert the political challenges posed by ethnic voting blocs by imposing tiered citizenship for low-skilled migrants, while courting the wealth and productivity of international elites

Bukele’s proposal suggests a pragmatic two-tier Right-wing progressive migration policy that courts rich, productive, geographically rootless international “Anywheres” of the kind long understood to have more affinity with one another than with less wealthy and more rooted “Somewheres” — but to do so while explicitly protecting cultural homogeneity on behalf of the less-mobile masses.

There are larger structural reasons for such pragmatism, not least that population growth is slowing or going into reverse across most of the planet.

At the same time, impelled by easier transportation, climate change, social-media promises of better lives elsewhere, and countless other reasons, people everywhere are on the move. As such, like a global game of musical chairs, a battle is now on for who ends up where, once the music stops — and on what terms.

How do you choose who is invited? And how do you keep unwanted demographics out? Within an egalitarian progressive framework, these are simply not questions that one may ask

Within the older, cultural conservative framework, meanwhile, all or most migration is viewed with suspicion.

The Right-wing progressive framework, by contrast, is upbeat about migration — provided it’s as discerning as possible, ideally granting rights only to elite incomers and filtering others aggressively by demographics, for example an assessment of the statistical likeliho

od of committing crime or making a net economic contribution.

In Britain, meanwhile, whatever happens to the Tories, I suspect we’ll see more of the Right-wing progressives. I find many of their policies unnerving, especially on the biotech side; but theirs is a political subculture with optimism and a story about the future, two traits that go a long way in politics.

Special effects software can give your music all sorts of subtle vibes. For $299, for instance, you can make your song sound as though it was recorded in Sound City Studios in Los Angeles, on the $20,000 vintage microphones with the $100,000 mixing console that recorded Fleetwood Mac and Nirvana. For $259 you can simulate the Beatles’ Abbey Road Studios

In the past, when you assembled all the tracks for a song, it would have to be mixed and mastered in a studio by a sound engineer adjusting the levels. Now an app will do it for you.

Now, all you need to do is get the files uploaded to streaming services. If you are signed with a label, they will do that for you, but you don’t need a record deal to do that. There are companies such as DistroKid that act as postmen: for £17.99 a year, you can ensure that the song you created in your bedroom is available on multiple streaming platforms.

Some artists thrive on social media. It suits lively, quirky performers like Ryder, and artists who want to experiment with different genres. Mxmtoon, a 23-year-old American YouTuber, singer-songwriter and ukulele player, is also a streamer on Twitch, a platform on which people watch others playing online games, has published graphic novels and made a podcast. Maia — the artist’s name — describes mxmtoon as “a multi-hyphenated project”.

More traditional musicians struggle with some aspects of tech. “We get together,” says Sital-Singh of his contemporaries in the business, “and have a little moan about how everyone’s telling us to do TikTok and we can’t bring ourselves to dance and we feel old and decrepit.”

Even digital natives struggle sometimes: “I already have nostalgia for a simpler past, even though I’m 23,” says Maia. “It’s exciting but it does put so much pressure on a normal individual to be an entrepreneur to advertise their own personal brand.”

Journalists, regrettably, no longer have the power they once did. What matters these days is social media. The A&R (artists and repertoire) people at record companies who would once have hung out in basement clubs scouting for new talent now sit in meetings examining the data on artists’ social media performance.

Now that the whole world’s music is available all over the world at the click of a play button, there’s a greater diversity among top-selling artists.

People making videos of themselves performing or dancing to the song on TikTok helped propel it to the stratosphere. It has been streamed a billion times. Sethi now plays to packed venues in America and Europe; last year, he performed at Coachella, America’s Glastonbury. “Without digital technology I would be a south Asian indy musician, working on the fringes of Bollywood,” he says from his home in New York.

For musicians, it’s more ambiguous. Because the costs of making music are lower, anybody with ambition can have a go. Many more people, as a result, are getting into the music business. According to PPL, the organisation which distributes money to music performers and rights-holders, the number of registered artists has risen from 61,310, when the industry was at its nadir, to 165,039 last year.

That makes the business fiercely competitive. As Will Page, former chief economist at Spotify and author of Tarzan Economics, points out, around 100,000 tracks are being uploaded on to Spotify every day: that’s more than were released in an entire calendar year in the 1980s

That has cemented the power of the record companies. When the digital revolution started, it was widely expected that record labels would cease to exist, and be replaced by a model in which everybody promoted and distributed their own music. That’s not what has happened: because it’s so difficult to get noticed, embryonic stars need record labels to promote them.

A label invests in the production of the music, the styling of the band, video content, interviews, touring and the crucial business of getting a song on a streaming service’s playlist that suggests the song to listeners to suit their tastes. Artists that are signed with major labels get paid more, per stream, than those that aren’t.

Three quarters of streamed tracks have one of the major record labels behind them. And even though streaming is booming, it doesn’t contribute much to the incomes of the vast majority of artists.

Most artists stay hungry. A single stream will earn a musician anywhere between 0.1p and 2.4p. Crispin Hunt reckons that on average a million streams for a song — a wild ambition for most musicians — will, if you have to pay a cut to a record company, probably make you £1,000

If you’ve then got to pay your manager 20 per cent, and divide the rest between the four band members, “it barely pays for a Sainsbury’s shop. That’s why music is dominated by middle-class people called Crispin whose parents can afford to buy them an electric guitar and a laptop.”

For Christie Gardner, half of Lilo, a two-woman band, it helps planning gigs. “You can see where your listeners are and you can tell what they’re listening to. We make decisions about shows on that basis.” But for most bands, the economics of live performance are pretty grim.

Deathcrash’s manager Joe Taylor says that the band has been offered the opportunity of a European tour supporting a much bigger act. It would be good for their career but not their bank balance. The fees per show would be €200; once the costs of a sound engineer, a tour van, a driver, fuel, hotels and a carnet for importing musical instruments into the EU had been factored in, they would lose £15,000.

music has always been an uneconomic business, which people subsidise through other activities. The fiddler in the village pub probably worked in the fields in the daytime and played for money and fun in the evenings and at the weekend, rather as Ryder ran a juice bar and sang at weddings. These days, there is also the wafer-thin chance that they might end up being one of the 1,200 artists who make more than $1 million a year on Spotify

There are some signs that in the new musical economy, the balance of power between artists and the big record companies may have tipped slightly in the artists’ favour

the share of streaming revenues going to artists increased from 19.7 per cent to 23.3 per cent between 2012 and 2021 and that going to songwriters has risen from 8 per cent in 2008 to 15 per cent in 2021. “Outcomes for consumers, artists and songwriters,” it concludes, “are getting better.”

Most of the extra revenues generated by streaming are going to the top earners. But the stars are not the only ones benefiting. Between 2017 and 2022, the number of artists earning over $1 million on Spotify more than doubled, but so did the number earning over $10,000

more than two fifths of artists who release their own music aren’t expecting to make a full-time career. They’re in it for fun, for the love of it, or to be able to show their mum that they have released a song on Spotify.

It seems likely that the more music is being created, the greater the chance that wonderful tunes are being written, but it’s not necessarily the case. The best stuff might get buried under a mound of mediocrity.