Andrew Sullivan

Dec 1, 2023

∙ Paid

As old-time Dishheads may recall, I was one of a handful of pundits who thought in early 2016 that Trump not only could, but probably would, win the election. I could feel his appeal in my lizard brain, and had long studied the fragility of liberal democracy in my frontal cortex. But the moment I knew his presidency was almost certain was when the Brexit result was announced in June, when everyone still assumed Hillary was a shoo-in. Something was stirring. And that’s why, after my annual trip back to Britain last week, I’m feeling the nausea again.

The mood is just ugly — a deep pessimism suffused with barely stifled fury. It’s not quite right or left, as we used to understand those things. It’s more irrational than that, and less predictable. A usually mild-mannered, anti-Brexit friend of mine told me that the lockdowns had filled him with a rage that was as unfamiliar to him as it was white-hot. Another friend talked about the perils of polarization, and then, as we went back to her house for a cup of tea, I noticed she had an enormous EU flag covering her entire front window. A pollster friend who specializes in focus groups said that pessimism and anger were starker now than ever: almost 80 percent, he said, saw their country as in a “steep decline” — Tories and Labourites, for different and often opposing reasons.

And in our increasingly intertwined Anglosphere online, the same culture war rages. The difference, of course, is that there is no First Amendment in the UK, and the cops will come knocking on your door if you dare to question the tenets of queer and gender theory. (A new law proposed in Ireland would criminalize all speech that could be seen as demeaning protected minorities in some fashion.) Britain went further in transing children than almost anywhere else, before scandal hit. London has become its own country in a way, leaving the hinterlands further behind, its elites still gnashing their teeth about Boris and Brexit, while picking at their octopus starters. The prime minister is Hindu, the mayor of London is Muslim, and the first minister of Scotland is Muslim. The abandoned husks of churches contrast with the bustle of new mosques. This is a Britain unlike anything before.

And some of it clearly works: close your eyes and listen to young non-white Brits on the buses or trains, and all the accents and slang are instantly recognizable from my youth. The humor is still rich. Civility is fraying but still there. Crime is nowhere near American levels. The new Elizabeth underground line is marvelous. A city with the cultural cohesion of the Heathrow departure lounge somehow hangs together. The Brits are still a nation of high-functioning alcoholics and retain their strange, hysterical aversion to cannabis. It’s a miracle of multicultural harmony, but you can feel its internal tensions rising.

Some of it doesn’t work. The National Health Service is close to breaking point. Taxation is high. Growth has flat-lined. Cynicism about politics is profound. A populist Toryism has collapsed into incoherence and imminent electoral oblivion; and the passion of the left’s Corbyn era has been replaced by the deliberate, don’t-frighten-the-horses Labour leader, Keir Starmer — as strong a supporter of Israel as Joe Biden. Keir was named after Keir Hardie, the first Labour leader, and on Israel, he represents the old Labour pro-Zionist position of Aneurin Bevan. He uses the word “stability” a lot. And the hard left despises him almost as much as they hate the Tories.

All of which is a heady stew, defined perhaps simply by anger at the current ruling class, whoever you assume them to be. It’s a profoundly anti-incumbent atmosphere, and in the UK at least, you can see why. The Tories have been in power for 13 years; and their key obsession, Brexit, has become a classic case of people fucking around and finding out. It’s not that it’s been an economic disaster in the short run; the growth rate is roughly in line with the EU’s miserable performance and the unemployment rate is lower. The glaring problem is that on the central question of Brexit — mass immigration — the result has been the precise opposite of what most Brits voted for.

For much of British history, there were more emigrants than immigrants. But that shifted after the Second World War so that by 1992, 49,000 more people came than left. By 2004, that net migration rose to 349,000. The year before Brexit, it was a net 379,000, prompting the populist revolt from below.

But since Brexit, after Boris brought in new immigration policies, the previous European wave has turned into a global tsunami. In 2022, 745,000 more people arrived than left — a record high. This year, the number is projected to be in the same ballpark, at 672,000. Brexit was, it turned out, an almighty con. Imagine the emotions and frustration this has unleashed for Brexit voters. From the Remainer side, Alex Taylor gives you a flavor of the resentments:

So, Brexiteers, you took away our right to live all over Europe, telling your supporters you’d cut immigration. Not only have you not cut it, it’s TRIPLED since we left the EU. TRIPLED. And for that we all, especially young Brits, had OUR free movement stripped away.

Add to that anger a lockdown far more intense than in the US and a period of crippling inflation, and you have a recipe that will likely lead to a Labour landslide next year. And in so many countries right now, for a variety of reasons, you see the same “blow it all up” mentality, turfing out incumbents mercilessly, often in favor of performative populists of various hues and flavors.

Look at the Netherlands: a progressive country that just saw Geert Wilders’ hard-right anti-immigration party go from 10 percent in 2021 to 23.5 percent of the vote, and become by far the biggest party in the Dutch House of Representatives, with center-right parties open to joining them. Or Argentina, where a weirdly coiffed, former rock-singer, Javier Milei — who had a near mental breakdown in a televised interview during the campaign, complaining about voices that weren’t there — wiped out the Peronist establishment in a landslide.

Orbán’s decisive re-election, Meloni’s electoral victory in Italy, and Sweden’s lurch to the right all suggest a sudden widening of the Overton window in much of Europe. In Germany, the AfD, the far-right movement, is now polling at 21 percent of the electorate, compared with 15 percent for Chancellor Scholz’s Social Democrats and 9 percent for the Greens. None of it is particularly coherent. Milei is Steve Forbes in a very bad toupee — about as far away from Boris’ Red Toryism or entitlement-friendly Trumpism as you can get. The only truly consistent thing is the ridiculous hair, and contempt for elites.

And the fear of the crazy right has gone. Milei and Wilders instantly moderated on some of their most outlandish positions, as soon as power was within reach. No, Milei won’t dollarize the Argentine economy, it turns out; and no, Wilders won’t ban mosques, as he tries to build a coalition government. Meloni has talked up immigration control, but in power, she hasn’t done much about it, and her support for Ukraine and the EU has been a big surprise. Poland’s hard-right party showed it could not stay in power forever this year, and in Spain, Vox lost ground. But in all this, a taboo has been broken — the same kind of taboo that the election of Donald Trump represented. The small-c conservatism of the Western electorate has expired.

That’s why I find the re-election of Joe Biden so hard to imagine. Biden is the incumbent of all incumbents. He became a senator in 1973! He has been vice president for eight years and president for four. He’s extremely old for the job he is doing, and everyone knows it. He has presided over inflation higher than at any time since the 1970s, and a huge new wave of legal and illegal immigration. We may now have a higher percentage of the population that is foreign-born than in the entire history of this country of immigration. Americans’ support for a border wall is the highest it’s been since 2016.

And Gallup’s latest polling on how the public feels about crime should terrify the Democrats. Coming back to DC this week after seven months away, I’m struck by how stark the decline has become. It says something when a city is experiencing a massive wave of carjackings, bars the cops from pursuing them, and just hands out free AirTags so you can track your stolen car yourself.

And the key, lame argument from Biden will be that Trump is too big a risk to take. He’s right. Broadly speaking, I agree with Bob Kagan on the crazed ambitions of this tyrant wannabe. But how has that argument worked out so far? Impeachments and indictments seem to have strengthened, not weakened him. And what we’re seeing all over the world is that voters are rushing toward the risky candidates, not away from them.

And Trump has already been in office for four years, and … democracy didn’t end, did it? Or at least, that’s what his supporters will say. They’ll remember the pre-Covid years as the good old days (and economically they wouldn’t be wrong), and also vent anger at an elite that seems to care more about pronouns and “equity” than protecting the border or controlling crime — the core functions of government. I’d be worried if Biden were ahead of Trump by five points in the battleground states. But he’s actually behind.

And though I will never vote for Trump, in my lizard brain, I kind of get the appeal. Inflation and mass immigration, alongside a bewildering and compulsory cultural revolution, are the kind of uncontrollable things that make people vent, especially if the president seems oblivious to these concerns — as Biden does. When Elon Musk f-bombed on Andrew Ross Sorkin and the advertisers who are boycotting X this week, the rational part of me shook my head. He’s bonkers and may see his company collapse from his whims and rages.

But at some deeper level, I also wanted to yell “Fuck yeah!” I find myself despising the elites I joined in ways that shock me. I have come to despise the woke left, their indifference to crime, their reveling in reverse-racism, their deep hatred of Western civilization. I hate how they’ve taken so much of the progress we made on gay integration and thrown it all away in transqueer solipsism. I loathe their piety and certainty and smugness. I found their instant condemnation of Israel, even as October 7 was taking place, shocking.

I may be misjudging the moment. I got the 2022 cycle wrong — over-estimating culture war reactionism. All I can say is I can feel the rage that’s destroying incumbents the world over. It isn’t deep down what I know. But it is how I feel. And I fear we’ll find out soon enough that I’m not alone.