I. The Week

In the first days of August, Christendom showed every seam it owns, and something older than Christendom showed through.

Upward of fifty thousand people crossed from Morocco into Ceuta. Many swam around the barriers. At least sixty-seven died in the water. Italy responded, but not to Morocco. Rome suspended Schengen against Madrid, closing air and sea to a fellow Catholic nation for the month of August. Madrid summoned the Italian ambassador. By Sunday most of the migrants had walked back to Morocco. The emergency resolved itself before the diplomacy did.

Five days earlier a young Lebanese-German drove a van into the crowd at Berlin’s Christopher Street Day, the city’s Pride march, killing one woman and injuring twenty-nine. The interior ministry called it Islamist. And across Ukraine, two Orthodox churches went on blessing the armies that kill one another’s faithful.

On Sunday, Leo XIV, who had traveled to Spain in June to address migration, said he followed the situation in Ceuta with concern and asked God, through the intercession of Our Lady of Africa, for peace, stability, and justice. Sixty-seven drowned in the strait. Two Catholic governments turned on each other over the bodies. The successor of Peter had an Angelus intention.

Do not mistake this for a failure of goodwill. It is a failure of order, and beneath it, a return. The old god is back, the god who was never God, whose sacrament is the victim, and he does not care which victim. The frightening thing about the week is not that Europe moved to defend its borders, which it must. The frightening thing is that Christendom, pressed from outside, reached for the knife and turned it on itself.

II. The Root

John Wesley knew what the church holds in common. “As to all opinions which do not strike at the root of Christianity,” he wrote in 1739, “we think and let think.” The line is quoted for its generosity. It should be quoted for its discipline. The root is one thing and opinion is another, and the church lives or dies on the difference.

The root is Christ. The root is the whole of it. True God from true God, crucified under Pontius Pilate, dead, buried, and risen on the third day. The creeds and no more. But say the creed slowly and notice what it confesses. The world’s justice condemned an innocent man, and God overruled the sentence. The resurrection is heaven’s verdict on the world’s justice, and since that verdict the old trick of purchasing peace with a victim’s blood has never worked cleanly, because the Gospel taught the world to see the face of the one expelled. Girard built a science on that observation. The church had it first, and had it in the creed. Every reflex of conscience the West still congratulates itself on, the dignity of the marginal, the care owed the victim, flows from that verdict and from nowhere else. How Christians treat one another, and the stranger, and the accused, is not an appendix to the confession. It is the confession, walking. A church that rebuilds the scapegoat machine has not defended Christ. It has changed sides at the cross.

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Everything else the church has ruled on, however venerable, is discipline built around the root, and the discipline has moved before. The church once baptized slavery. Wesley, six days before his death, wrote to strengthen Wilberforce against it. It once condemned usury as mortal sin and later learned to live with interest. “This has always been held” has been wrong before and will be wrong again. The tradition has a name for the category. Adiaphora. Things indifferent. Not unimportant, but not the root.

Now hold the sexual ethic up to that light. Sexuality is opinion. So is the ordination of women. The serious traditionalist will answer that this is exactly backwards, that the cruel thing is to leave the gay neighbor comfortable in a sin that endangers his soul, and that correction is charity. Take that answer seriously, for it is not a cynical one. But watch what it licenses in practice. A discipline meant as medicine becomes a mark of belonging. The contested ethic hardens into the load-bearing test of orthodoxy, and the congregation discovers that nothing unites it like the lesbian it chooses to exclude. That is the moment conviction becomes idol, and an idol is a hungry thing. It demands what the primitive sacred has always demanded, a victim. The tell is simple. Medicine is administered in grief and hope. The machine runs on relish. When a church needs its sinner more than it wants her return, it is no longer correcting. It is sacrificing. Bonhoeffer named the counterfeit. Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. There is also cheap orthodoxy, the rigor we bestow on others. Sexuality does not strike at the root. Sacred violence does. The foundation is known, and his name is Jesus, and he was last seen standing with the accused.

III. Household Quarrels

Hold that light up to the week, and the week convicts itself.

Italy and Spain do not disagree about the root. They share a creed, a Mass, and a Mediterranean. Spain failed in a real duty. A government owes its people a defended frontier, and the nation of the Reconquista could not hold a town it has held since the sixteenth century. Restriction is not a sin requiring apology. It is stewardship. But Rome’s answer was not stewardship. Italy closed the sea against a Catholic neighbor instead of standing with her at the wall, and the closure took effect after the crossing had already reversed. That is not border policy. That is the mechanism in miniature, a rival made into a culprit for a domestic crowd, and it has a long pedigree.

Venetian Crete bled for twenty-one years while Catholic Europe watched, its capital, Candia, enduring the longest siege in European history. France sent one late expedition, withdrew it after losses, and the island fell in 1669, because Louis XIV would not cross his Ottoman alliance for a fellow Catholic republic. Two centuries later the powers kept the dying Ottoman Empire alive for fear an Orthodox Tsar might restore the cross over Hagia Sophia. Britain and France allied with the Muslim sultan against Christian Russia and called it statecraft. Dostoevsky answered that Constantinople must be Russian and meant it as prophecy, though a Tsar in the city would likely have meant Russified Greeks and subordinated Armenians, the same disorder in an Eastern key. When the Armenians were slaughtered in the 1890s and driven into the desert in the war that followed, the powers that had guarded the straits found no interest at stake and defended nothing. The victims were visible. The ledger was louder.

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Once it was not so. When the Ottoman army stood before Vienna in 1683, Catholic Poland under Sobieski and Lutheran Saxony under her Elector marched to the same relief. Confessional enemies of a century’s standing fought under a single command, and the gates held. For one season the household knew its own name, which proves that every later failure was a choice.

Ukraine is the failure in its final form. Christian kills Christian. Orthodox kills Orthodox. The Moscow Patriarchate blesses the invasion outright, the altar annexed by the state it exists to judge, sacred violence in its oldest costume. And the West funds Kyiv for the balance of power, the same wager it placed at Candia and the straits, with the Christian question never entering the ledger. This is not East against West, for the West bankrolls one Eastern church against another, and Kyiv’s church is no Protestant novelty. Constantinople recognized it as a self-governing Orthodox church in 2019, and it is Orthodox to the marrow. The deepest wound in Christendom now runs through a single communion, and a house divided against itself, the Gospel says, cannot stand.

IV. The Contest of Victims

Berlin showed the disorder’s other face. The van came from outside Christendom. The revelation came after.

Within hours the dead of the Tiergarten had been conscripted by every faction in Germany. A vigil speaker confessed she had hoped the killer would prove not a foreigner but a white Christian. Hear what that is. Not grief. A preference, sacrificial appetite dressed as mourning. The city’s commissioner for queer affairs conceded the attack was Islamist and blamed the Christian Democrats in the same breath. The right counted the dead as ammunition before it counted them as dead. It was a contest over the correct scapegoat, conducted in the open, by the heirs of the one civilization that was taught to see through exactly this. Every faction reached past the murdered for the persecutor it needed. No one reached for the murdered.

The left’s confusion runs deepest, because it is confusion about an inheritance. A movement founded on the sacred worth of the despised individual could not name the one ideology in Europe that denies that worth root and branch, and so blamed a Christian party for an Islamist’s murders. But the instincts doing the blaming are borrowed. Concern for the victim flowed from a particular hill outside a particular city, so deep now in the groundwater of the West that the heirs mistake it for nature. A Pride parade is an artifact of Christian civilization. It marches only where the verdict of the resurrection still holds, and the van in the Tiergarten is what arrives when a rival verdict does. The marchers owe the churches no gratitude. They owe the truth. The freedom is a bequest, the bequest has enemies, and the enemies are not the Christian Democrats.

V. The Hour

Why does the distinction matter now, more than in Wesley’s century? Because of the hour.

“Little children, it is the last time,” John wrote, “and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists.” The apostle named not a man but a spirit, and Paul told the Thessalonians how to recognize its arrival. Not as chaos. As comfort. “When they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them.” The antichrist does not storm the gates. He administers them. The old question is recently back before serious people: whether the true danger of the age is armageddon or the world order that promises salvation from armageddon at the price of everything else.

Both forms are in view at once. Islamism is the armed form, an anthropology that met the verdict of the resurrection in a Berlin park and answered with a van. The subtler form is being assembled in the server farms, minds without flesh that speak with the tongues of men, before which a generation half-catechized by the algorithm brings its questions and its loneliness. The machines may yet serve the faith. But a total administration of human life, a peace-and-safety machine with no exit, is now buildable for the first time, and what restrains it is not a regulation. Paul had a word for what restrains. The katechon, the withholder, whatever it is that stands in the way of the lawless one and delays his hour. A scattered Christendom restrains nothing. A church running its own scapegoat machine restrains nothing, for it has become a small franchise of the power it was sent to restrain.

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A Christendom that meets this hour divided over adiaphora will not survive it, and will deserve its end. The faith that holds the root cannot spend the last of its strength policing opinions. Italian and Spaniard, Catholic and Lutheran, Wittenberg and Constantinople, the marcher under the rainbow flag and the grandmother at the Latin Mass: the household is one household, and the hour does not care which room it burns first.

Wesley’s formula is not a courtesy. It is a survival discipline. Think, and let think, so that the root stands clear of the quarrels, and the quarrels stand down before the enemy at the gate. Sixty-seven bodies came out of the water at Tarajal while two Catholic governments closed ports against each other and a sincere pope prayed a sincere prayer because nothing else was on offer. The faith was not lost in a war. It was bargained away, transaction by transaction, at Candia, at the straits, across the Donbas, always for something that looked at the time like power. Vienna proves the bargain was never necessary. A people becomes what it loves, and a people that loves the old god will get the old god’s peace, the peace of the graveyard with an altar on it. The hour is late. The household is one. The restrainer must be whole to restrain. And the victim God raised is the foundation, and the foundation has a name.

Tim Rosenberger is a pastor and attorney and cofounder of Excelsior Action.

Man was created for greatness, for God himself; he was created to be filled by God. But his heart is too small for the greatness to which it is destined. It must be stretched.
—Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi

I’d be a liar if I didn’t say that an exclusion that pointed didn’t stab just a little bit. But I am a great one for saying it’s no good looking back.
—Ann Widdecombe

He was inside the house for two minutes. On the eighth of July, a man who had driven two hundred miles walked into a cottage in Haytor Vale, on the edge of Dartmoor, carrying a hammer. Ann Widdecombe was in her kitchen, eating lunch. The provisional cause of death, read out at Westminster Magistrates’ Court, was blunt force injury to the head. She was seventy-eight. She was found the next morning, after missing a television interview, which was the only appointment anyone expected her to keep.

The coverage has gone where coverage goes, to security reviews and the question of how a former parliamentarian could be so reachable. The larger question is why she was there to be reached at all.

Start with the woman, who deserves better than to become a premise. In May 1997 she stood in the Commons and said of Michael Howard, her own former boss, that there was something of the night about him, because she believed he had misled the House. It ended his leadership hopes for years. Costly candor aimed inward is the rarest kind, and she spent it on a point of truthfulness that profited her nothing. She held Maidstone for twenty-three years. She cared for her mother at home until she died. She wrote novels because she wanted to make things. In 2010 she let herself be hauled around the Strictly Come Dancing floor by Anton Du Beke while the nation laughed, a humility grave people never manage. She was unserious about herself and never once about her convictions. When David Cameron passed her over for a peerage, reportedly for being too traditional, she said it stabbed a little, and then that it was no good looking back. She was good, and I admired her.

The obvious objection is that she kept leaving. She left the Church of England in 1993 and the Conservative Party in 2019, after forty-three years. A woman who exits whenever she loses has not found a principle. She has dressed an incapacity as one.

The answer is the destination. She went to Rome, the one body in Christendom that purports to be incapable of redefining itself by vote, and one does not escape argument by moving to the institution whose theory is that certain arguments are closed. Her judgment was that the change had been constitutive rather than incidental, and that staying would have required her to call something by a name it had stopped deserving. Most of her countrymen think she was wrong, and it is not a question this essay must settle. What it needs is the thing underneath, an unusually old view of what makes an institution the thing it is, held by someone willing to be ruined by it.

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What she fled was no synodal resolution. The Priests (Ordination of Women) Measure 1993 was approved by Parliament and given Royal Assent, and Parliament then compensated the clergy who resigned in conscience. There could be no faithful remnant parish for her, because an established church’s identity is fixed by statute rather than by conscience. The state defined the church and then funded the exit.

There is an English counterexample, instructive because he failed. John Wesley had every reason to leave and refused for fifty years; he published his Reasons Against a Separation in 1758 and died a priest of that church. What he built inside it is the most successful parallel community in Protestant history, and when the pulpits closed he preached in the fields and called the world his parish. That is expansion under exclusion rather than withdrawal, and the better answer to her problem. Yet four years after his death, the Plan of Pacification permitted the sacraments in Methodist chapels and the separation he had refused for half a century came anyway. A community nested inside an institution it will not leave runs on personal authority rather than jurisdiction, and lasts one founder’s lifetime. Every classical academy and intentional community now rising in Idaho and Tennessee runs on the same fuel: a founder’s authority, a founder’s energy, a founder’s remaining years. They should read the Plan of Pacification and count.

America solved heresy with land. Roger Williams did not reform Massachusetts Bay; he walked to Narragansett Bay. Penn took a charter. The Mormons walked out of the country entirely. American religious liberty is downstream of open ground as much as of argument, and the ground closed in 1893.

What remained was law, and its foundation stone is rotten. Reynolds v. United States, handed down in 1878, fifteen years before the ground closed, was wrongly decided, and the practice at issue is beside the point. What it established was the rule that religious liberty protects belief while conduct belongs to the state, a rule the opinion supported by observing that the practice was confined to Asiatic and African peoples. That is the holding’s logic, and the direct ancestor of the rule Employment Division v. Smith restated in 1990. In Fulton, three decades later, Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch called for Smith to be overruled, and Barrett found the textual case against it compelling. Four years later, Mahmoud reached strict scrutiny by way of Yoder, around Smith rather than through it, and left the rule intact in name only.

Until then every American exit is exit by leave. In 1972 Wisconsin v. Yoder won the Amish the most complete withdrawal our law permits, and required the permission of the sovereign it sought to escape. Utah is the abject case. The Mormons left the United States altogether, crossing thirteen hundred miles to a Mexican basin in 1847; the border caught them the next year. Within fifty years Congress had dissolved their church as a corporation, seized its property, and jailed its leaders; the Manifesto of 1890 surrendered the doctrine they had crossed a continent to practice; and statehood came in 1896 on terms written into their own constitution. The jurisdiction followed them across a desert and beat them. Exit did not merely cost them something. It failed. Espinoza (2020) marks the room the partial exit enjoys, and Bob Jones (1983) marks the ceiling. There is room, but never sovereignty.

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Except one. Prayer requires no charter, no Royal Assent, no favorable judgment from any court. Parliament altered a church’s doctrine by statute and could not touch it; Congress dissolved a church and seized its property and could not touch it. It is the one unconquered ground in a story whose burden is that the ground ran out, and why the Benedict Option was never about real estate. The man who proved it shares the name. In 2013 Benedict XVI laid down an office he no longer had the strength to hold, moved into a monastery inside the Vatican walls, and gave the rest of his life to prayer. He wrote until he died at ninety-five, and his 2019 essay on the abuse crisis caused as much trouble as anything he wrote while wearing the ring. Withdrawal, in his hands, was redeployment. Ann Widdecombe at daily Mass, in a country that had made her convictions a punchline, is the same fact in a smaller frame. The temptation to justify this instrumentally, prayer as fuel for activism, must be refused. Prayer is not first because it powers the rest. It is first because it is the end, and the rest follow.

England, which never had a frontier, has an old name for what a people do when exit is closed. They become recusants. You stay. You refuse conformity. You pay the fine, twenty pounds a month under Elizabeth, ruinous by design. You keep going to the wrong Mass. The Act of Settlement of 1701 stands today, so that the sovereign may marry a Catholic but may not be one, and in 1993 Ann Widdecombe converted into the one church her country’s constitution still bars from the throne. Then she stayed in that country, on Dartmoor, name on the door, taking the invitations. A polity that has made certain convictions unspeakable rather than merely wrong has taught everyone that those holding them are not quite persons, and violence against unpersons requires no organization. Whatever the Crown proves about the man in custody, the fact that matters is fixed. She stayed, and staying made her reachable.

Which brings us to the question her death forces and our culture cannot answer. What is old age for? An entire economy is trained on the old, the pharmaceutical advertising and the cruise brochures and the continuing-care campuses with their pages of golf. No group is courted more diligently as a source of revenue, and none told more plainly that its opinions are an embarrassment. The same culture that will sell a woman of eighty a stairlift will not sit still for thirty seconds of what she believes about marriage or country or God, and has coined a two-word phrase for ending the conversation. De Beauvoir held that a society’s treatment of its old exposes whatever its professed humanism is worth. Ours has resolved that they may purchase and may not speak, and the result is visible in every parish and subdivision, in men and women solvent, medicated, entertained, superfluous, whose telephones never ring. Superfluity was Arendt’s word for what totalitarian systems accomplished by design; it describes with precision a condition nobody here designed at all. They have been given everything except a reason to be here.

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We have made the last third of life a reward rather than an office. That is not what leisure ever meant. Aristotle’s scholē was the condition of the activities that constitute a life, contemplation and the affairs of the city, and it stood opposed not to work but to amusement. Leisure filled with diversion is only labor working a second shift. Cicero put the political version in Cato’s mouth, that great affairs are carried not by strength or speed but by counsel, authority, and judgment, faculties age does not remove and often supplies. The old republic had an office for the old. Ours has a market segment.

The tradition knows better. Polycarp of Smyrna was eighty-six when the proconsul offered him the recantation, and his answer, that he had served Christ these many years, is remembered because of them. The strongest objection comes from inside that tradition, whose two most celebrated martyrs are young mothers. Perpetua was twenty-two with a nursing infant, and Felicity gave birth in prison days before the arena. If courage were the special province of the old, the Passio would make nonsense of the claim. But the claim is prudential rather than vocational, and Perpetua is its proof, since her greatness is measured by what made her boldness expensive, that the price fell in a currency never hers alone. The young are bound by obligations that make courage costly to people who never chose it. The old are past the mortgage, past the school fees, past the years when a child needs a living parent more than a brave one. That freedom is not a discharge but an assignment. Benedict’s word for the mechanism is exact. The heart is too small for its destiny, and must be stretched. The world sells the last decades as the contraction into comfort. They are the last chance to be enlarged.

Three things follow, and only after the praying. Stand. Widdecombe took a party spokesmanship at seventy-six with nothing left to gain, and the school board, the zoning commission, and the parish council are offices nobody wants and everybody needs, belonging to those with no career to protect. Give, while you can still be blamed for where it went. The generation holding most of the nation’s wealth means to move nearly all of it by death rather than decision, which is the parable of the rich fool. Found the school rather than endow a chair at one, and buy the building and hand the congregation the deed. And stay put. Keep the name on the door, keep taking the invitations, say the true thing under your own name in a town where everyone knows it. That is the least dramatic of the three, and the one that got her killed.

Return, then, to the table. A woman with no husband, no children, no constituency, and no obligation to be anywhere at all, at home in her own country, at lunch, still in the fight at seventy-eight. She had nothing left that the culture wanted, and she had not surrendered the one thing it could not reach. They found her because she had never once made herself hard to find.

Tim Rosenberger is a pastor and attorney and cofounder of Excelsior Action.

When Winston Churchill said on March 5, 1946, in Fulton, Missouri, that “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent,” he observed that Europe had become divided into two spheres of influence: one dominated by the Anglo-Saxon allies and the other by the Soviet Union.1 However, the division of Europe already had a longer history. The concepts of Western Europe (civilized, rich, progressive) and Eastern Europe (uncivilized, poor, backward) were already present in the European imagination in the eighteenth century.2 A Polish historian, Andrzej Nowak, has recently pointed out that the very concept of Eastern Europe can be traced back to the official justifications of the imperialistic expansion of Russia. For instance, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Emperor Peter I constructed an image of Russia as both European and Asian, with a mission of civilizing the uncivilized, and Eastern Europe was key to that allegedly civilizing and indeed imperialistic and colonialist project. Interestingly, it was during Peter’s reign that the ancient border of Europe on the river Don was replaced by Russian cartographers with a new border, on the Ural Mountains, which remains the accepted boundary even now. Nowak argues that the very concept of Eastern Europe is an ideological space of Russia’s special interests and rights, negotiated with what has become “Western Europe.”3

If we read the actual text of Churchill’s speech at Fulton, we’ll see that he speaks of the iron curtain dividing something unnamed (Europe?) from what he calls “the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe,” which have fallen into the Soviet sphere. Indeed, several important intellectuals from that miserable place in between “the West” and Russia protested, without much success, of course, against that ideological redrawing of the spiritual map of Europe. In 1983, Milan Kundera published an essay in the French journal Le Debat, entitled “Un Occident kidnappé ou la tragédie de l’Europe centrale” (A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe),4 in which he argued that Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary are in no sense “Eastern Europe” but instead lie at the heart of the continent and, spiritually, belong to what then was already called the West.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, when the countries of Central Europe were trying to repair the damage of the past centuries by reconnecting with the imaginary West, two Polish historians born in 1920s wrote histories of that part of Europe, trying to emphasize its peculiarities. In 1992, Piotr Wandycz, a Polish émigré teaching at Yale, published The Price of Freedom: A History of East Central Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present,5 while in 1998 Jerzy Kłoczowski (who, unlike Wandycz, remained in communist Poland after the war) published a groundbreaking study in Polish, whose title in English would be Younger Europe: Central-Eastern Europe and the Christian Civilization of the Middle Ages.6 What Kundera called “Central Europe,” Wandycz called “East Central Europe,” and Kłoczowski coined his own term, “Younger Europe,” but all of them were speaking about the three medieval kingdoms that joined Christian civilization in the eleventh century: Hungary, Bohemia, and Poland. In a broader sense, however, Kłoczowski speaks of Younger Europe as also comprising Scandinavia and the Eastern and Southern Slavic lands, baptized by the Byzantine Empire, so the whole region extends between the Baltic, the Adriatic, and the Black Seas.

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Both Wandycz and Kłoczowski argued that the identity of Central Europe is founded on a special relation to the idea of freedom, but also to the ideas of equality, justice, and tolerance or peaceful coexistence of different social groups. This part of Europe began to flourish during the European crisis of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Poland became the political center of the region at the dawn of modernity, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, by virtue of its union with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which included large parts of Ruthenia. At the same time, Bohemia and Hungary, under the Habsburg rule, went into decline. Even a short glance at history makes it clear that Central Europe developed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, because both its Western neighbor, Germany, and its Eastern neighbor, Ruthenia, were politically fragmented and in deep crisis. However, as soon as they became united and powerful, Central Europe started to diminish.

The identity of Younger Europe consists in a certain in-between status. Since its beginning it has looked toward the (imaginary) West as the source and root of Christian civilization, which it eagerly joined, but it has also looked toward the (imaginary) East as the force inimical to that civilization. As a result, it came to define itself as the antemurale Christianitatis (“bulwark of Christendom”). Already in the late Middle Ages it was subject to pressures from all geographical directions. From the West came the pressure of the older and more advanced German civilization, with German settlers arriving in large numbers to live in Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary. From the East, the pressure came from the more numerous East Slavic peoples, whom Moscow had the ambition to unite under its rule since the early fifteenth century. From the South, the pressure of the Muslim expansion continued, which, in the form of the Ottoman Empire, strived to conquer the whole of Christian Europe since the second half of the fourteenth century. This has been, certainly, quite a tragic situation, for Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary, but, at the same time, the constant effort of defending their spiritual and political identity against these three pressures created a strong sense of freedom as the highest political and moral good. The matter was more complex because one of those pressures, the German culture, did not only act through sheer force, like Russia and Turkey; on the contrary, it was attractive as the mediator of the ancient European civilization as it was consistent and at times ruthless in its eastward expansion.

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Another highly significant factor, when we talk about Central Europe, is its internal diversity. From the Middle Ages, Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland have had to contain various ethnicities, languages, and cultures. The Finno-Ugric Hungarians ruled over Slovaks in the north, Croatians and Serbs in the south, and Wallachians (or Romanians) in the East. In fourteenth-century Bohemia there were already numerous German settlers, particularly in cities, which could be seen also in Poland, especially in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the inhabitants of the rich, northern region, reconquered by Poland from the hands of the Teutonic Order, were increasingly German speaking. Hungary had its own, large and internally coherent population of “Saxons” in Transylvania.

Poland also invited a large population of Jews, which grew enormously and were given royal privileges; when the Jews were expelled from Spain and most of the Western European kingdoms, they were welcomed in Poland. The union with Lithuania and Ruthenia created additional opportunities and problems. A similar, maybe even more important challenge was religious diversity, which followed the ethnic and linguistic one. First, Eastern Orthodox and Catholics, but then also Protestants of different denominations, and even Muslims were living together in Central Europe. And there were neither large-scale persecutions nor religious civil wars (apart from Hussite Wars in the fifteenth century). There were conflicts, of course, but historians point out that the religious identity of Catholics and Protestants in Central Europe was more “fuzzy-edged” than in other parts of Europe. There was vitriolic polemic, as everywhere, but also serious attempts at reconciliation and never an idea of eliminating the heretics altogether by force. This was very different from what was going on in Italy, Spain, France, England, or Sweden at the time (not to mention Russia and Turkey, of course).

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Another point is the social structure of Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland, which also developed differently in the late Middle Ages. The political nation in these kingdoms consisted of an unusually large nobility, which enjoyed, as an estate, equal rights and liberties unheard of in other parts of Europe. Political power was not centralized, as in the West (absolutism) or the East and South (despotism). The political constitution sought for in Bohemia and Hungary, and established successfully in Poland-Lithuania in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is called either proto-democratic, by historians who like it, or anarchic, by those who do not. The Western or Russian historiography of the last two centuries blamed the fall of Central Europe on its “excessive freedom.” However, there is a different narrative to be told as well: freedom, equality, and tolerance run in the veins of Central Europe, despite its miserable history, or perhaps because of it.

In my recent book Plato and Jesus, not Caesar,7 I have argued that because of all these factors, and also because of its “younger,” aspiring status with regard to “older” Christian kingdoms (to use Kłoczowski’s terminology), the spiritual identity of Central Europe is based on a specific relationship with metaphysics and religion. I think two points are essential. First, modernity in Central Europe did not follow the path of relentless atheism, materialism, and liberalism, but retained some links to the premodern Christian Platonic vision of reality as theophanic, that is, as a manifestation of God and deeply “enchanted” (to use Max Weber’s term).

Second, from that theophanic vision, preserved for a very long time despite secularization, stems a political vision, which, in very premodern terms, is grounded in metaphysics and, especially, in the theophanic idea that Man is the image of God and therefore dynamically participates in God’s nature. In Central Europe there is, paradoxically, both a great emphasis on the practice of politics in contrast with speculation and theory, and a great stress that politics and morality must be ultimately grounded in God who is the source of all reality and of humankind in particular. The modern, liberal project of destroying the link between politics and metaphysics, and of making metaphysics and religion private affairs outside the political sphere, was never fully embraced in Central Europe, despite its serious devotion to what in the modern period came to be called “the West,” but was and is, in fact, “the past” (as a living inspiration).

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In the late fourteenth century, when the University of Paris and German universities were dominated by nominalism, at the University of Prague Jan Hus and his followers were staunch Platonists, claiming that dedication to eternal Truth is the ultimate reason of religious, political, and social reforms. Around the same time, when the German lawyers representing the Teutonic Order were arguing before the pope and emperor that Pagan Prussians or Lithuanians should be exterminated by Christians and their land taken, Paweł Włodkowic from the University of Cracow argued, following Thomas Aquinas, that all men, regardless of ethnicity and religion, are the image of God and enjoy the same rights based on natural law and the metaphysical structure of created reality.

A bit later, the Hungarian court of Matthias Corvinus was fascinated by the Florentine Platonism of Marsilio Ficino with all its Neoplatonism, astrology, magic, alchemy, and hermeticism, and Ficino himself was invited to create a second Platonic Academy in Buda (although he never made it to Hungary). These medieval seeds developed and bore fruit in early seventeenth-century Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland, where philosophers such as Jan Jesenský (or Jeszenszky, since he claimed to be a Hungarian subject), Jan Amos Komenský, and Valerian Magni were engaging in not only theoretical but practical politics, following their metaphysical and religious principles.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the nations of Central Europe were colonized by the German Empires of Hohenzollerns and Habsburgs from the West, and the Russian Empire from the East, this tradition could still be seen. In Czechia, Tomaš Masaryk, Jan Patočka, and Václav Havel belong to this Christian Platonic tradition. In Poland, Adam Mickiewicz, Wincenty Lutosławski, and Józef Czapski, not to mention John Paul II, represent this spiritual heritage. The same goes for Polish Hassidism, which was the modern, highly original version of the Neoplatonic mysticism of the Kabbala in Central Eastern Europe, which inspired Martin Buber, who grew up in Lwów (Lviv) and once described himself as “a Polish Jew.” In Hungary, Béla Hamvas and György Lukács can be seen as intellectual giants of that tradition as well. Lukács, who was fascinated by Platonism and was mocked by his comrade Béla Kun for being a “Communist theologian,” represents a perverted relationship between metaphysics and politics. Hamvas, one of the (still unknown) geniuses of the twentieth century, was censored and persecuted in Hungary on personal orders from Lukács because he rejected all the modern political ideologies and believed that humans cannot turn the earth into heaven, but still can and even must live on earth in a heavenly way.

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Despite the dominance of liberalism in Europe and its former colonies, we have been hearing in recent decades, in the so-called “West,” increasingly metaphysical and religious language in politics. Usually, it is domesticated and toned down to ideas such as “identity” and “meaning,” when it is argued that the West must be self-confident and recover the meaning of its existence if it is to face the challenge of mass migration, Islam, or the autocratic axis of China, Russia, and Iran. This language seems less prominent in internal affairs, where the right-wing parties in Western Europe, like their left-wing counterparts, seem to be non-metaphysical and non-religious, often in an openly Nietzschean way.

The countries of Central or Younger Europe (including the countries historically influenced by them, like the Baltic states or Ukraine) have in significant ways tried to imitate “the West” and have become secularized and liberal as a result. However, I think that on some deeper level they have retained their historical spiritual identity—perhaps in their national subconscious, if there is such a thing. The countries between Germany and Russia or between the Baltic, the Adriatic, and the Black Seas have their own peculiar spiritual identity, and, perhaps because their experience of modernity didn’t consist in the enjoyment of power, wealth, and prestige but in the loss of all these things, they may be indispensable to Europe, or to “the West” broadly conceived. Not by creating some alternative European Union or by a naïve belief that virtue will be rewarded in worldly terms. Central Europe has been as pragmatic in terms of politics as it has been Platonic and Romantic. These are no contradictions. What Central Europe has to offer operates on a different level of reality, and we may yet come to appreciate that level, not only in our individual but also in our social and political lives.

Mateusz Stróżyński is Professor of Classics and Philosophy at the Institute of Classical Philology of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (Poland). His recent books include Plotinus on the Contemplation of the Intelligible World (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and Plato and Jesus, not Caesar: Metaphysics of Freedom and Tyranny in Younger Europe (Brill, 2026).

In the aftermath of the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, China cast itself as an ostensibly neutral advocate of peace. In its initial Foreign Ministry response, Beijing condemned acts harming civilians, called for restraint, and presented the two-state solution as the fundamental way out of the conflict. In subsequent diplomatic contacts, it urged both parties to remain calm and said that China would promote “impartial conciliation and mediation.”

Yet the language of impartiality sat uneasily with Beijing’s account of the war. China neither severed relations with Israel nor openly endorsed Hamas, but its terminology, legal interventions, and convenor diplomacy consistently gave greater historical and moral specificity to Palestinian claims while stripping Israeli victimhood after October 7 of comparable historical and moral specificity. Palestinian suffering was situated within a developed account of occupation, dispossession, and failed statehood; Israeli suffering was more often absorbed into general language concerning civilian harm, escalation, and instability.

What is at stake is how October 7 itself is understood. It was not simply another episode in an undifferentiated cycle of violence. Israel suffered a deliberate mass assault against civilians and deserved the sympathy and solidarity ordinarily extended to a society subjected to such violence. Much of the international response, including China’s, moved almost immediately from the attack itself to the historical structure surrounding it. Context did not simply supplement moral judgment; it frequently became a means of withholding it.

China’s claim to neutrality should therefore be assessed not only against its formal relations but against the categories through which it allocated agency, victimhood, legitimacy, and responsibility. Beijing preserved pragmatic relations with Israel, but in the narrative and diplomatic struggle that followed October 7, it consistently privileged pro-Palestinian framings. That preference was not improvised after October 7. It reflected a much longer investment in Palestinian national claims and in China’s cultivated role as an authoritative voice of the Global South.

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A Longer History of Alignment

China’s posture after October 7 did not emerge from nowhere. It drew on a much longer history of support for the Palestinian national movement, articulated through the political vocabulary of national liberation, anti-colonial struggle, and the restoration of legitimate rights.

The People’s Republic was among the first states to support Fatah and permitted the Palestine Liberation Organization to establish an office in Beijing in 1965. China recognized the State of Palestine in 1988, has consistently endorsed the Palestinian people’s “just cause of restoring their legitimate national rights,” and upgraded the relationship to a strategic partnership in 2023. China’s own account presents this as a history of sustained support for Palestinian national liberation.

This language also supports China’s effort to present itself as an authoritative voice of the Global South—an important source of influence in institutions such as the United Nations, where formally equal voting rights give developing states considerable collective weight. Beijing depicts its own experience of foreign domination and struggle against hegemony as the basis of a natural affinity with postcolonial societies, and has repeatedly described itself—despite being the world’s second-largest economy—as a “natural member” of the Global South.

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The Palestinian cause is especially useful within this political imaginary. It allows Beijing to connect support for self-determination with opposition to colonialism, Western hegemony, and the unequal application of international law—an accusation China levels readily at others, even as it has itself disregarded adverse legal rulings.

Beijing has not, as far as the public record shows, explicitly described Hamas as a “freedom-fighting” organization. Yet it has placed Hamas within a larger Palestinian diplomatic and ideological field already framed through national liberation and anti-colonial justice. In the Beijing Declaration, China framed reconciliation among Palestinian factions as part of the overarching national liberation project. This preexisting interpretive alignment made it easier to treat Hamas as one Palestinian faction among several, rather than first and foremost as the perpetrator of October 7.

Condemning Harm without Naming Its Author

China’s initial response established the basic pattern. At the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ regular press conference on October 9, 2023, the spokesperson said that China was deeply concerned by the escalation, opposed and condemned “acts that harm civilians” (反对和谴责伤害平民的行为), and called for an end to hostilities and the implementation of the two-state solution.

At first glance, this appeared to be a conventional appeal for restraint. Yet when directly asked whether Hamas’s actions constituted terrorism, the spokesperson avoided the label and returned to Beijing’s general position on de-escalation, civilian protection, and political settlement.

This omission was politically consequential. China did not merely decline to support every Israeli response to October 7; it declined, in the attack’s immediate aftermath, to recognize the event in terms commensurate with its particular character. The deliberate killing and abduction of civilians were translated into a broader category of harm within an escalating conflict, allowing the attack’s agent, intention, and ideological character to recede behind its humanitarian effects.

This was not solely diplomatic caution, but exposure management. The formulation remained acceptable to pro-Palestinian publics, Arab governments, and wider anti-hegemonic constituencies, while allowing Beijing to avoid the costs of openly defending Hamas. Israel’s experience of October 7 was acknowledged through generalized, depoliticized humanitarian concern rather than direct recognition of perpetrators and victims—much to Israel’s express frustration.

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Notably, this caution persisted despite Chinese nationals having themselves been affected: four Chinese citizens were killed, while others were missing or injured. This did not require Beijing to endorse Israel’s subsequent campaign, but they did warrant an unambiguous identification of the perpetrators. Even this was withheld. The inference is difficult to avoid: the strategic value of Beijing’s broader diplomatic posture outweighed the pressure to give its own citizens’ deaths moral and diplomatic specificity.

This withholding of acknowledgment is especially notable given Beijing’s own insistence, especially in relation to Xinjiang and Hong Kong, that terrorism and extremism be named without ambiguity and that Chinese counterterrorism not be subjected to “different yardsticks.” China has demanded that others take its security concerns seriously even as the policies justified in those terms have produced mass arbitrary detention, pervasive surveillance, and severe restrictions on Uyghur religious and cultural life, in part constituting crimes against humanity: Beijing expects threats directed against the Chinese state to be interpreted through clear categories of agency and terrorism, while declining to extend comparable recognition to Israel after October 7.

From Atrocity to Structure

China’s response also shifted the scale on which October 7 was interpreted. The attack could be treated first as a discrete moral and political event involving the deliberate targeting of civilians and hostage-taking, or reframed through a broader narrative of occupation, blockade, statelessness, and dispossession. That larger context is relevant to understanding the conflict, but it does not deprive particular acts of their independent moral character.

Beijing’s rhetoric moved rapidly from the particular event to the larger historical and political structure. Within days of October 7, Chinese officials were identifying the conflict’s “root cause” as the failure to resolve the Palestinian question justly. In this framing, the attack was not denied but re-situated as a manifestation of a longer injustice.

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The scale of explanation determines the visibility of guilt. Foregrounding the act keeps Hamas’s agency central; foregrounding the structure can relativize or displace it. The attack is thereby reduced to an eruption produced by an unjust order, rather than judged as an act in its own right.

Much of the international response did not deny that October 7 occurred. It denied Israel the right to have the event understood first as an atrocity against Israelis. By immediately translating the attack into the language of occupation, resistance, and root causes, contextualization did more than withhold sympathy: it elevated that refusal into a token of moral seriousness.

China did not invent this discourse. It recognized its utility and placed itself within it. In doing so, Beijing aligned itself with a familiar political grammar: colonizer and colonized, oppressor and victim, state power and resistance, Western hypocrisy and postcolonial authenticity. Within such frameworks, moral status may be assigned structurally before particular actions are examined. Recognizing Palestinian political rights does not require accepting this hierarchy, in which Palestinian suffering supplies the conflict’s primary moral meaning while Israeli suffering appears mainly as an unfortunate complication of it.

Vocabulary as Policy

The political work performed by Chinese language becomes especially visible in the terminology used for those taken hostage. A recurring formulation in Chinese official and semi-official discourse was “被扣押人员,” which may be translated as “persons held,” “detained persons,” or “people being held.” In Chinese reporting on a December 2023 Foreign Ministry response, the term appeared in connection with an Israeli request that China assist in relation to the hostages. The official answer called for the release of all “被扣押人员.”

The expression is elastic enough to encompass civilians abducted from their homes, soldiers captured in combat, Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, and persons detained through formal legal procedures. These categories are not interchangeable. Civilian hostage-taking is a distinct form of coercion, while state detention raises separate questions of legality, due process, and treatment. Placing all such persons within one category of being “held” produces a degree of equivalence, making the distinction between hostage and prisoner less visible and release appear as a reciprocal humanitarian exchange.

This is not semantic pedantry. Political language decides which distinctions survive. Where hostage-taking is not named as such, the specific obligation to release civilians abducted during an attack becomes less distinct. China did not explicitly declare Israeli hostages equivalent to Palestinian prisoners; it chose a vocabulary within which such equivalence could readily be sustained.

Universal Principle, Selective Application

China’s approach was more systematic than simple opportunism. It practiced a form of strategic universalism: invoking civilian protection, international law, national self-determination, and humanitarian restraint while distributing agency, recognition, and responsibility unevenly.

China’s position at the International Court of Justice illustrates this process. On February 22, 2024, Foreign Ministry legal adviser Ma Xinmin presented Beijing’s stance during proceedings concerning the legal consequences of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory. The proceedings concerned serious questions of occupation, self-determination, and international law. Yet China’s intervention also fitted its wider discursive architecture. The Palestinian cause was articulated through developed categories of occupation, self-determination, and legal entitlement, while Israeli demands for recognition, security and justice arising from October 7 remained comparatively abstract.

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The same pattern became visible in July 2024, when China hosted talks bringing together fourteen Palestinian factions, culminating in the Beijing Declaration emphasizing Palestinian unity, a ceasefire, “Palestinians governing Palestine” (巴人治巴), and progress toward a two-state settlement.

Palestinian reconciliation may be necessary for a sustainable settlement, but convenor diplomacy is never just procedural: it determines who is treated as a legitimate interlocutor. By hosting Hamas alongside other factions, Beijing helped reposition Hamas from the perpetrator of October 7 to one political actor among several participating in a future Palestinian order.

China accrued mediator credit at relatively low cost. Al Jazeera described the war in October 2024 as an opportunity for Beijing to display diplomatic influence while accepting limited risk. The Beijing Declaration did not merely mediate; it conferred standing.

Selective Postcolonialism

China’s anti-colonial framing also contains an unresolved historical selectivity. By the mid-twentieth century, the Palestinian cause had been incorporated into the twentieth-century political world of decolonization and national liberation. Yet Zionism, too, understood itself as a movement of national restoration among a persecuted and stateless people, and its dominant early institutions were substantially shaped by Labor Zionism and socialist organization.

Beijing resolves this ambiguity not through a consistent historical principle, but through contemporary geopolitical classification. Palestine is positioned as colonized, dispossessed, and part of the Global South; Israel is cast as powerful, Western-aligned, and occupying. The anti-colonial category is therefore allocated according to a simplified, politically convenient reading of present geopolitical configuration rather than applied consistently to competing histories of national liberation.

This apparent contradiction is less a diplomatic mystery than a division of function, allowing Beijing to maintain relations with Israel while lending its rhetorical weight to the Palestinian cause, a tension noted explicitly in Arabic-language commentary: Israel remains useful as a partner in trade, technology, and diplomacy. Palestine performs a different office, serving as a vehicle through which to speak the moral language of anti-colonial justice and Global South solidarity. The former supplies material advantage, the latter moral standing.

The Choice behind the Claim to Neutrality

China’s continued engagement with Israel did not vindicate its claim to neutrality; it revealed only the limits of the costs Beijing was prepared to incur, not proof of evenhandedness.

Its choice was not simply between Israel and Palestine as diplomatic partners. It concerned which suffering would be named, which agency obscured, and which history permitted to organize the moral meaning of the war.

China preserved its relationship with Israel but denied Israel the recognition owed to a society attacked on October 7. A genuinely universal politics would have recognized Palestinian political rights without subordinating Israeli victimhood to another people’s historical narrative. China’s claim to principle failed because its universalism was universal only where politically convenient.

Felix Brender 王哲謙 is the incoming Hou Family Fellow at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. He holds a PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science, where his fieldwork-based doctoral research examined Chinese relational approaches to security in Juba, South Sudan.

While Donald Trump is playing his cards for the upcoming election, a diverse range of reactions has emerged among Iranian opposition groups regarding his stance on Iran. Much of the opposition continues to attack one another, with Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi receiving the overwhelming share of the criticism. Meanwhile, many Iranians are being held in solitary confinement, many more have been arbitrarily arrested, and others remain at risk of execution. Notably, the Islamic Republic executed 1,634 people in 2025, accounting for 82 percent of all recorded executions worldwide. Unfortunately, the statistics for the first six months of 2026 show a further sharp increase. Yet the fate of many protesters who have been disappeared since January 2026 remains unclear to this day. Let us delve into the convergence of catastrophes in Iran, both present and historical.

Ceasefire

After almost forty days of war, a ceasefire was implemented on April 8, 2026, initially planned to last two weeks, although it was later extended until a deal acceptable to the United States was reached. The Islamic regime’s media presented the ceasefire as a victory. During the war several high-profile figures were assassinated, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and, allegedly, his son Mojtaba Khamenei, who was first reported to have been severely injured and later was said to have succeeded his father. Meanwhile, the Islamic regime remains in power, continuing its long-standing rhetoric against Israel and the United States, even after being unable to hold a funeral for its leader for more than four months. The funeral was later made possible after permission was granted and arrangements were made with the United States.

The death of Ali Larijani—the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council and philosopher—made it feasible for Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the spokesperson of the Islamic parliament, to establish himself as a main decision-maker. Ghalibaf has been a member of the IRGC since its early days and has been an unsuccessful candidate in presidential elections four times. He was one of the main figures during the Iran–Iraq War, which many believe led to unnecessary deaths of Iranian soldiers. Later, he served as chief of the Police Command and mayor of Tehran. During the 1999 student protests, while serving as commander of the IRGC Air Force, he was among the officials accused by some of involvement in the crackdown, during which several students were reportedly injured or killed, with some allegedly thrown from rooftops. His tenure as mayor was also marked by corruption allegations. He has been a member of the Islamic parliament since 2020, during which time he played a key role in both the Iranian–Russian treaty signed in 2025 and the Iran–China 25-year Cooperation Program signed in 2021. Many believe that the content of these agreements has led Iran to lose part of its sovereignty, along with causing significant economic damage.

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Considering Ghalibaf’s background, he could be anything but a desirable representative of Iranians; however, due to his entanglement with different fundamentalist groups within the regime—which are equally corrupt—he might be able to convince the main body of regime members to comply with the agreement with the United States. In this context, some fear that Trump’s only aim is to halt Iran’s nuclear and missile programs in order to secure the safety of the West and neighboring countries in the Persian Gulf, while using the deaths of over 36,500 Iranians as a bargaining tool without addressing the deeper problems within Iran and leaving Iranians to come to terms with the Islamic regime on their own.

Particularization of Suffering

Iran is a land rich in tales, poetry, and literature. This is also reflected in its political discourse, where different groups promote their own versions of events. This was especially visible in the aftermath of the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022 while in the custody of the morality police, which led to widespread protests across Iran known as the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement. Some estimates report that at least five hundred people were killed in connection with the subsequent unrest. Four years later, the fate of many individuals arrested during these protests remains unclear. In particular, six protesters linked to the “Ekbatan Town” case have remained in prison since then, with their fates unknown.

However, after the death of Amini, left-leaning human rights activists promoted a meticulously engineered narrative framing her death primarily as a case of Kurdish oppression. The reality is that many groups in Iran are subjected to discrimination. Before Amini’s death, in one example, Reyhaneh Jabbari was executed after, in an act of self-defense, she caused the death of a former agent of the Ministry of Intelligence. In a broader perspective, under the ideology of the Islamic Republic, national identity is often subordinated to religious identity, where Shia Islam is intended to function as the glue of an ummah. In fact, all ordinary Iranians are subjected to discrimination, though the intensity of oppression varies across groups and genders.

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Most recently, the Minab incident was framed by the different groups in favor of their own narratives, including Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who condemned it as a crime against humanity, accusing the United States of violating international humanitarian law. Simultaneously, Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari along with U.S. House Democrats tried to introduce articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, accusing him of committing war crimes based on the Minab incident. Whether these developments are coincidental or part of a coordinated narrative remains an open question. It is not clear what their stances are regarding the deaths of more than 36,500 people in January 2026, the ongoing persecution of protesters, and the frequent executions of those held in captivity.

Appropriation of suffering by a single group could indeed constitute a distortion of reality, given that large segments of society are being affected. The reality is that Iranians are facing a level of brutality with no historical precedent. Even the destruction caused by the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century is not an adequate analogy, given the intensity of the current turmoil and the indiscriminate cruelty toward the protesters. It could be seen as a continuation of the suppression imposed on Iranians by the Safavid dynasty, during which the majority of the population was forcibly converted to Shi’ism in the sixteenth century. This might have marked the beginning of injecting apocalyptic ideas into society.

The effects of the current situation will resonate throughout Iranian society for generations to come. It is not only that many families, in some cases, have lost several loved ones simultaneously, but also that their properties have been confiscated. Economically, many jobs have been eliminated, and people are experiencing significant hardship. The cost of medicine has increased sharply, and much of the available medication is of low quality, adding another layer of complexity to patient care. The educational system had already been severely compromised by COVID-19 and the war in June 2025, and the recent conflict has only exacerbated the situation. Malnutrition among a large proportion of the population due to inflation is another unfortunate reality that could lower the average cognitive potential of future generations. All of these factors are draining the capacity of Iranians to rebuild their country, and more irreversible damage will be inflicted on Iranians as long as the Islamic regime remains in power.

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Iranian Mentality

The trajectory of developments in Iran and in the Middle East in general is characterized by endless cycles of violence, followed by the perpetual victimization of the survivors. The prevailing narrative traces the current tragic situation back to the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 and overemphasizes the role of SAVAK, whose activities had drastically tarnished the reputation of the Shah Mohammad Reza in the West. However, it does not encapsulate the whole complexity of the Iranian mentality, which is intertwined with superstition, nihilism, and religion, and compounded by a lack of knowledge about the modern world. The role of Ali Shariati, Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, Reza Baraheni, and many others known in the West as intellectuals in shaping such an amalgam should be taken into account. The appearance of a charismatic figure like Khomeini, who opposed modernization yet attracted many ostensible intellectuals, indicates that Iranians have developed a particular mentality throughout history.

Many Iranians hold two striking views to delegate their own responsibility when it comes to assigning blame for the current situation, namely, Islam and Iran. On one hand, among those with secular tendencies who are inclined toward a pre-Islamic vision of Iran, Islam is presented as the sole cause, with the medieval epos Shahnameh serving as the primary source of inspiration for their ideal society. On the other hand, some opposition groups seem to have rejected the Islamic regime, while remaining inclined toward a more religious but moderate stance. They often present themselves within a human rights framework, commonly associated with left-leaning views. In their view, the concept of Iran itself is an obstacle to addressing discrimination against minorities.

Both groups have failed to recognize that today’s adversary will inevitably become tomorrow’s neighbor, even in the case of a transition to a secular government in Iran or the recognition of varying degrees of autonomy for different minorities with unclear territorial boundaries. Sustained hostility in such a context would lead to prolonged instability, given the region’s strong interdependence and the fact that neighboring states share deep historical, cultural, and religious ties. In the absence of durable external guarantees or cooperative regional frameworks, small and newly formed states would face significant challenges in maintaining stability and security.

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Furthermore, neither group places sufficient emphasis on individual responsibility within Iranian society. What has emerged is a mentality shaped over centuries of common political and cultural experiences, marked by a tension between collective memory and present political frustration. This is often expressed through the idealization of the past and unrealized expectations for the future. In Kierkegaardian terms, this can be interpreted as a form of anxiety arising from an unresolved relation between possibility and actuality. Any viable political or institutional framework would need to account for this historically sedimented tension, rather than assuming a purely event-driven account of social behavior.

Iranians were driven into a more passive way of life due to the conquest of the country by the Safavid dynasty at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was reflected by the fact that the quality and quantity of men of letters, culture, and science dwindled significantly. Needless to say, the Safavids originally emerged from a Sufi order. Historically, the idea of Velayat-e Faqih (guardianship of the Islamic jurist), the main pillar of the Islamic regime, can be traced back to this era, when many Shia clerics were invited to Iran from Lebanon to strengthen the ideological backbone of the newly established Shia state.

Reincarnation of the Islamic Regime?

There is a risk that the Islamic regime might reincarnate in another form, such as a military or oligarchic dictatorship, leading to another abortive attempt by Iranians to reconcile their potential with their actuality and reclaim their country. This aim would not have been realized without addressing the underlying cause, i.e., the Iranian mentality. Iranians have not yet honestly answered the question of what was truly wrong with the Shah’s regime. In their attempt to remove him, they appealed to seemingly contradictory ideologies, ranging from Marxism and communism to Shia Islam, ultimately contributing to the emergence of revolutionary martyrology. Given the developments after 9/11, one can say that the Islamic Revolution of 1979 was the epicenter of many of the events that have unfolded to this day.

In recent years, there has been overwhelming interest in Prince Reza Pahlavi among the younger generations. However, such a burning desire for him might be just another detour, allowing Iranians to remain passive by assigning their own responsibilities to him and postponing their collective task of achieving the level of individual growth needed to develop a modern mentality and build a modern society. Time seems to have a different existence in the Middle East and Iran, and experience is a rare commodity that is not transmitted, leaving each generation prone to repeating the same set of mistakes. Under such conditions, progress will never be born.

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In fact, a constitutional monarchy might be the optimal outcome of Iran’s political history. Many argue that the Islamic Revolution represented a profound deviation in the development of a modern Iranian society. During the constitutional era, which included participation from a diverse range of groups, e.g., Azeris, the central issue was not “Should Iran remain intact or should parts of it secede?” but rather “How should Iran be governed?” The concept of ethnic separation in its current form had not yet fully taken shape. Organized ethnic separatist movements gained strength in the twentieth century, particularly in the period after World War I and the formation of modern nation-states in the region. Therefore, they offer limited relevance for understanding the main political trajectory of Iran today.

The Islamic Revolution was fueled by widespread perceptions of the Shah’s regime as corrupt, repressive, and overly reliant on foreign powers, at the expense of Iran’s sovereignty and cultural identity—perceptions that, in retrospect, seem to be significantly exaggerated. Today, Iran is on the edge of becoming a failed state: no functioning economy remains, people are worn out, and the education and healthcare systems are failing. Inside Iran, people often see the problem differently from activists outside the country. What is most important for ordinary Iranians is a return to a normal life, which includes a separation between state and religion. However, what is unfolding before the eyes of millions of helpless observers is the replacement of a theocratic dictatorship with a military and oligarchic one.

Given the Shah’s mindset, one criticism is that he did not grant people sufficient political agency, while economically many Iranians experienced a comfortable life, at least in the major cities. Consequently, the majority of the population, being religious despite their Western appearance, tried to replace a secular leader with a religious one, expecting the same level of comfort after removing the Shah while remaining passive. This is more evident among the upper-middle-class population, who continued to enjoy comfortable lives until quite recently, when nuclear sanctions were introduced, although many lower-class people had been struggling for much longer.

Conclusion

After the January 2026 massacre, it might seem that Iranian society has become suicidal. Yet even the deaths of thousands of the most promising members of the younger generation have not led to a regime change. It seems that Iranians must first address the rejection of revolutionary martyrology, including the weaponization of death and the instrumentalization of suffering (shahadat), primarily promoted in the 1960s and 1970s by Shariati. Given the perceived emotional character of Iranian society, expecting the emergence of a purely rational society may not be realistic. Perhaps a more moderate framework could be built upon Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea of amor fati: the love of life as it is, understood as active rather than passive. Let us do what we can, although we know it may not lead to a desirable outcome.

Azam Jahandideh holds a PhD in mathematics from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. Her primary research interest is mathematical physics, while her hobbies include philosophy, history, and literature. In her spare time, she occasionally contributes reports on Iran to the Polish press.

Tomasz Wiśniewski is a postdoctoral researcher in the Faculty of History at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. He is interested in political theology, philosophy of history, and intellectual history of modernity. From March to June 2026, he was a Józef Tischner Junior Visiting Fellow at Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Institute for Human Sciences) in Vienna.

“No cooperation, no toleration, nothing at all”—that’s how German chancellor Friedrich Merz described his relationship with the right-populist AfD (Alternative for Germany). It’s a pledge he repeated once again this July, just before retreating into his summer break. “I will do everything in my power to stop Germany’s right-populists from gaining power,” he said.

“Brandmauer” (firewall) is the term used to describe the established parties’ joint pledge to exclude the populists from any meaningful parliamentary participation.

With important state elections due in September in three federal states, nervousness within the establishment over how long this Brandmauer can hold has reached fever pitch. The AfD, which has been topping national polls for months, is expected to emerge as the strongest party in at least two states. In one, Saxony-Anhalt, polls suggest the populists could become so strong that no government could be formed against them, a scenario Merz alluded to in his summer speech, and one that has led some within his own party to question the logic of a policy they now see as increasingly self-limiting.

In official rhetoric, the Brandmauer is aimed at a party and its leadership. In reality, it is also an attempt to quarantine the party’s voters—a voter base that has not shrunk but grown. In the February 2025 national election, the AfD came out as the second-strongest political force, securing over 20 percent of the vote. It is now polling at around 27 percent, comfortably ahead of the ruling CDU (polling at 22 percent).

As such, the Brandmauer is more than a technical matter of vote counts and coalition arithmetic. It goes to the heart of a basic question: who owns democracy?

“The firewall is not a tactical maneuver, but a shield for democracy. It protects us from a situation where parties that call into question our freedom, human dignity, and equality—in other words, the very foundations of our democracy—come to be regarded, step by step, as the norm,” says YouTuber and Green Party member Chantal Kopf.

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The justification for excluding the biggest opposition party rests partly on Germany’s doctrine of “defensive democracy.” The AfD, the argument goes, is not a normal party: if allowed to expand unchecked, it will pull the country back into the abyss of far-right dictatorship. The doctrine was established after the war, ostensibly as a lesson drawn from the Nazi era. Intended to protect the fledgling democracy from any Nazi revival, it gives the state—governments and courts alike—far-reaching powers, including the power to ban parties deemed a threat to the constitutional order (“freiheitliche demokratische Grundordnung”). The call to ban the party—a demand made by leading politicians from within all the mainstream parties—would of course be the most radical imposition of the Brandmauer.

But there is a deep flaw in the idea that democracy needs protecting from the people, the demos itself. And the firewall has had a genuinely corrosive effect on Germany’s democratic culture.

One such effect is that it has forced parties that would once have seen themselves standing at quite different, even opposite, ends of the political spectrum into what amount to permanent coalitions.

A case in point is Germany’s current, deeply unpopular governing coalition between the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD). Merz’s CDU was pushed into this arrangement after winning only 28 percent of the vote. Its coalition partner was even less popular: the SPD received just 16 percent, its worst result since the Second World War, making it the biggest loser of the election.

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The result was that voters who wanted change, including many who had voted CDU precisely to get rid of the old guard, instead saw politics dominated once more by a party they had hoped to see gone. Small wonder that four out of five Germans today say they are dissatisfied with the government’s work. Part of this deep unpopularity stems from the fact that a coalition built this way can only ever reach compromises based on the lowest common denominator—and, tellingly, the chancellor’s own pre-summer-break assessment presented the coalition’s mere survival as its greatest achievement.

Then there are the self-restricting effects on parliamentary debate. The Brandmauer forbids parties from voting alongside the AfD on any issue, however minor. When a Green Party motion to protect small butcher shops passed in the Saxony state parliament in May with the help of AfD votes, it caused a scandal, and the Greens felt compelled to publicly distance themselves from their own vote.

The AfD has even been barred from forming a government in places where it won the election outright, as in Thuringia in 2024, where it took over 34 percent of the vote. Because every other party—including the Left Party, toward which the CDU officially also maintains a noncooperation policy—banded together, the post of minister-president went to the CDU instead. This was not an exclusion of the AfD based on failed negotiations, but an outcome of the pre-committed Brandmauer. AfD members are likewise excluded from standard parliamentary posts, such as deputy speaker or committee chair, that would normally go to the second-largest group.

All this has given the AfD a certain martyr status. It has also underscored a new political reality: an increasingly homogeneous party landscape, with the AfD in the role of the main, if not the only, opposition party.

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As in other countries where populism has risen against a tired establishment, the AfD has long since stopped being a mere protest party and become a genuine movement for change. There is, of course, room for fair and rational criticism of the AfD—its continuing difficulty purging individual members who hold openly revisionist views of history, or its muted criticism of Putin’s authoritarianism, to name two. But there is more than a little authoritarianism in the effort to exclude—and, as some now demand, even ban—a party backed by roughly a quarter of the electorate.

It would be wrong to see the AfD’s success as simply a backlash against individual policy decisions. As the sociologist Frank Furedi argues, the rise of populism is driven by a broader rejection of the modern elite’s values: its embrace of multiculturalism, supranationalism, open borders, and net-zero, among others.

The barely concealed disdain often shown toward ordinary voters’ concerns has only fueled the party’s rise—disdain exemplified by Germany’s labor minister, Bärbel Bas (SPD), who in a May speech celebrating diversity argued that migration was needed not just for economic reasons but also to prevent a slide into what she called societal “Einheitsgrau” (uniform gray) or “Einheitsbraun” (uniform brown). With this, she implied that traditional German society was either dull (“gray”) or outright Nazi (“brown”). Her statement confirmed the suspicions of those who had long believed that the establishment’s embrace of mass migration was linked to attempts to change and “reform” society.

A lack of dissenting voices within the mainstream consensus contributed to the formation of the AfD in the first place. As early as 2012—a year before the party’s founding, at the height of the eurozone debt crisis, when every party in Germany had rallied behind Angela Merkel’s leadership—the sociologist Philip Manow described a “race to outdo one another in pro-EU rhetoric” between government and opposition, one that produced a sense of “complete powerlessness on the part of the sovereign, who is in fact the democratic authority.”1

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This uniformity of mainstream opinion has been repeated many times, not least in the decision to phase out nuclear power in favor of renewables. True, the Greens and the Left might want to reach net-zero somewhat faster than much of the CDU. Some parties have even promised stricter border controls in response to the AfD’s rise, though only within existing EU rules. But the underlying pattern holds: voters who want real change gravitate to the populists. The formation of a new governing coalition drawn entirely from the parties that have ruled Germany for decades—parties that many blame for the country’s deep social and economic problems—has only proven them right.

Supporters of the Brandmauer may invoke human rights and freedom, but their version of freedom clearly excludes one of the most important rights of all: the right of voters to express discontent with mainstream politics in a way that actually matters.

Democracy, as the American political scientist James Burnham wrote in 1943, means a political system built on liberty—a liberty “summed up and focused in the right of opposition, the right of the opponents of the currently governing élite to express publicly their opposition views and to organize to implement those views.”2

Until now, AfD voters have been able to express their concerns, and the populist opposition in Germany has grown so strong that no governing party can afford to ignore them. But the ever louder calls to ban the party outright, together with the ongoing effort to keep AfD politicians away from executive power, show that a serious problem remains.

Defending democracy means speaking out against the Brandmauer.

Sabine Beppler-Spahl is an economist and a freelance writer and author. She lives in Berlin and is chair of the liberal think tank Freiblickinstitut.

K. saw only a single tower, and could not make out whether it was a dwelling or belonged to a church. Flocks of crows were circling around it. His eyes fixed on the castle, K. went on, paying no attention to anything else. But as he came closer he thought the castle disappointing . . .1

Kafka’s description of the castle in The Castle resonates strangely when standing before the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. K. approaches what should be a meaningful structure, only to find it “disappointing”—a word that lands with quiet devastation. The castle fails not through ugliness but through a kind of deliberate withholding: it will not give itself to you. The Obama Presidential Center invites comparison with Kafka’s castle in its remoteness and opacity.

Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects has cited the work of Constantin Brâncuși as a formal inspiration for the tower’s monolithic presence. As architect Billie Tsien told the Guardian, “He talked a lot about his love of Brâncuși,” describing how Obama’s own enthusiasm for the sculptor shaped the building’s form.2 But formal inspiration borrowed from sculpture does not transfer cleanly to architecture. Brâncuși’s power lies precisely in the self-contained wholeness of objects that ask nothing of the body except to look. A building cannot make that demand. It must be entered, navigated, and lived in, and on those terms the Brâncuși analogy collapses. This comparison reveals a fundamental confusion between two different arts. Sculpture is an object you read from the outside; its meaning is surface and silhouette. Nobody enters a sculpture. Architecture, by contrast, is an art you inhabit—its obligation is not just to be seen, but to receive the human body, and to negotiate between outside and inside.

More critically, this sculptural ambition runs against the very grain of what modern architecture historically stood for. From Mies van der Rohe’s glass curtain walls to Le Corbusier’s pilotis and the democratic ideals of the Bauhaus, modernism was founded on the principles of transparency, accessibility, and human scale. It sought an architecture for everyone, rejecting monumentality, opacity, and aristocratic grandeur. The Obama Center presents a formal language more readily associated with monumentality and enclosure than with architectural transparency or civic accessibility. Like Kafka’s castle, it is visible but unreachable in spirit—a monument that humbles the visitor rather than welcoming them.

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Chicago is one of the most architecturally consequential cities in the world, where American architecture found its own voice. Louis Sullivan developed his ornamental organicism there, rejecting European historicism in favor of an architecture rooted in the American experience.3 Frank Lloyd Wright extended this impulse, developing an architecture that spread across the land and treated topography and nature as generative forces rather than obstacles. What defined both men, beyond formal language, was a deep commitment to the human being as the measure of architecture. Wright’s buildings, though monumental in ambition, remain approachable. Their understated entrances draw visitors in through curiosity rather than grandeur.4 This contrasts with churches or castles, where scale and verticality emphasize hierarchy and the individual’s smallness before authority.

The Obama Center departs from the modernist emphasis on transparency and civic openness, as well as from the Chicago tradition of human-scaled democratic architecture. Instead, it borrows the language of sculpture and monument, achieving presence at the cost of belonging. The result is a contradiction between architectural language and democratic ideals.

If Chicago offers one local standard against which to measure this failure, a global one confirms it. More broadly, community centers succeed when they are grounded, literal, and responsive to the communities they serve. They work with local materials, engage local builders, and subordinate architectural ambition to human need. Renzo Piano’s work in Nouméa, the Tjibaou Cultural Center, and Alvar Aalto’s civic buildings such as the Säynätsalo Town Hall in Finland operate on this principle.

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Piano studied local building traditions, translating the form of traditional Kanak buildings into a structure built from iroko wood and steel, designed to breathe with the Pacific wind rather than resist it. It does not announce itself from a distance. It reveals itself slowly, at walking pace, at human scale.5 Alvar Aalto’s Säynätsalo Town Hall follows the same principle: built for a small industrial community in local red brick, with an intimate council chamber and a courtyard that invites rather than commands. For a civic building, its modesty is almost radical. It tells the people it serves that they are not subjects of authority but participants in it.6 However refined their architecture, they remain fundamentally down to earth, oriented toward the people who will use them daily rather than toward the skyline or the history books.

The Obama Center does not belong to this tradition. It belongs instead to a much older and more troubling one: the architecture of power that uses scale and monumentality to assert authority rather than invite participation. The great medieval universities, the cathedrals, the fortified institutions of learning were deliberately forbidding, their gates a threshold that filtered the worthy from the unworthy. Modern architecture was born precisely as a rejection of this logic. It emerged from an urgent social need, housing for factory workers, schools, functional and dignified spaces for ordinary people who had been excluded from beauty and comfort as a matter of course.

There was, in fact, a closer and more fitting architectural lineage available to this project than either modernism or the Chicago school. Given Obama’s own Kenyan heritage, the building’s silence on Kenyan architectural traditions is a missed opportunity rather than a neutral omission. As architectural historian Itohan Osayimwese argues in African Buildings, Kenyan architectural traditions were once marked by considerable formal and spatial complexity before being disrupted, dismantled, and displaced through colonial extraction, looting, and collecting practices.7 This history offers another architectural lineage that the Obama Presidential Center might have engaged more directly. Such a lineage would not have answered the modernist critique by itself, since transparency and human scale are formal commitments that any tradition can honor or ignore, but it would have grounded the building in a history more specifically its own.

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To erect a sculptural monument in the name of community, in the name of a presidency that presented itself as belonging to everyday people, is a symbolic contradiction that cannot be designed away. The architecture of self-aggrandizing monumentality, of power made stone, was precisely what dictators favored, all of whom despised modernism and suppressed it, replacing it with their own inflated classicism. That is not the lineage a democratic legacy should claim. The ultimate test of any building is not how it photographs from above but how it feels to stand before it, to enter it, to inhabit it. Architecture is experienced from the ground, at human speed, by human bodies. When a building only resolves itself from a distance or from the air, when its logic is compositional rather than inhabitable, it has answered the wrong question entirely.

Measured against the modernist tradition from which it departs, the Chicago architectural legacy it ignores, and the civic community it seeks to serve, the Obama Presidential Center remains most legible from a bird’s eye view. That is precisely the problem. A presidential legacy that defined itself through proximity to ordinary people deserved an architecture that works at eye level, at the scale of the street, the entrance, the hand on the door. Instead, it received a monument. And monuments, as Kafka understood about castles, can be seen by everyone and reached by no one.

Mohadeseh Salari Sardari grew up in Bandar Abbas in southern Iran and trained as an architect in Iran before pursuing her PhD in the United States. She is completing her PhD dissertation, Literary Selves and Architectural Space, in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Brown University. Her research explores the intersections of architecture, literature, gender, and spatial politics in modern Iran. She is currently a lecturer in Stanford University’s Department of Comparative Literature and has worked with museum collections and exhibitions at institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the RISD Museum. Her work on Iranian literature, art, and culture has been published in both Persian and English.

The Islamic Republic presents itself as something new, a revolution, a rupture, a divine mandate with no precedent in Iranian history. The historical record suggests otherwise. What looks like novelty is better understood as memory, a set of instincts about power, knowledge, women, and the West that the clerical establishment did not invent in 1979 but inherited from a much older arrangement. To understand where those instincts come from is to understand why the regime and the society it governs have never made peace.

The Pahlavi era is usually read as the great turning point in modern Iranian history, the moment the country broke from the Qajar dynasty (1786–1925)1—its despotism and clerical rule—toward secular modernization. They built modern schools, curtailed clerical authority over law, and pursued industrialization the Qajars never attempted. More than that, they built citizens: a growing professional class, women in universities and the workforce, a public increasingly literate, mobile, and accustomed to a state that had to at least perform responsiveness. By 1979, two different Irans existed in the same country: a society that had moved decisively toward citizenship, and a clerical apparatus that had never stopped thinking in the Qajar register of subjects to be governed. The revolution was not the clergy completing a process the Pahlavis began. It was the clergy capturing a revolution that belonged, at the outset, to the citizens the Pahlavis had created, and then using state power to force that society backward into the relationship the Qajars would have recognized. The Islamic Republic is not the fruit of Pahlavi Iran. It is the Qajar relationship reasserting itself against a Pahlavi society, which is exactly why the two have been at war for over four decades. Had the Pahlavi dynasty never come to power, it would be reasonable to argue that the Islamic Republic, not constitutional monarchy or secular nationalism, was the more “logical” successor to the Qajars. The Qajar kings rarely acted without the clergy’s consent, and in exchange the clergy was granted free rein over law, education, and the public. The clergy controlled the public sphere, while the shahs were left free to do as they pleased in private.

Nasser al-Din Shah (1831–1896), the fourth and longest-reigning ruler of the Qajar dynasty, is the clearest example of this arrangement.2 He lived a lifestyle forbidden to ordinary Muslims, protected by the simple fact that his transgressions stayed behind palace walls. He famously married two sisters simultaneously, a union prohibited even under Islam’s own rules of polygamy. He drank wine freely, but only within the confines of his harem, where it could not offend the clergy. The same logic governed his relationship to art and spectacle. Having encountered European theaters firsthand, Nasser al-Din Shah wanted one built in Tehran, but commissioning a public theater would have invited immediate charges of immorality. The solution was taxonomic: relabel the building as a venue for taziyeh, the ritual passion play commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Hossein. The result was the Tekyeh Dowlat, a structure that was a theater in every architectural sense and a religious space in name only.

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What emerges is a system built on a simple compromise: the clergy governed the public face of Iranian life, while the monarchy was permitted private exemption from the rules it nominally enforced. This is precisely the structure the Islamic Republic would later inherit and formalize, except without the harem walls to contain it. This hypocrisy is not an invention of the Islamic Republic. Its roots lie in the Qajar state, which institutionalized the rigid split between private indulgence and public piety that earlier Iranian dynasties were not similarly bound by.

The Qajars were fascinated by Western progress yet did almost nothing to bring its substance—its technology, institutions, or knowledge—into Iran. The monarchy’s response to modernity was not reform but suppression. Iranians were barred from traveling abroad, travelogues and foreign magazines were restricted, and modern schools were banned. The target in each case was the same: any channel through which new ideas about governance, rights, or the organization of society might reach the population. The parallel between Qajar and Islamic Republic approaches to knowledge runs deeper than selective adoption of technology. It is structural. In both cases, the state pursued Western science and technology not to improve the conditions of the population but to strengthen its hold over them. Nasser al-Din Shah wanted new sources of tax revenue and a surveillance apparatus capable of suppressing popular uprisings.3 The Islamic Republic wants precisely the same things. The technology is newer; the logic is identical.

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The car offers the sharpest illustration. Iran had no roads. Travel between cities was possible only on horseback or by mule, and even carriages were largely unusable. When Qajar kings acquired automobiles, the vehicles had to be shipped across the Caspian Sea and then carried on horseback to Tehran, where they were driven inside the walled enclosure of the harem.4 The country had no infrastructure that could accommodate them. That was not the point. The continuity into the present is difficult to ignore. The Islamic Republic’s ruling families drive luxury foreign cars in Tehran while imports of the same vehicles remain banned for the general public. The logic is identical to the Qajar court: modern technology is permitted, even embraced, as a tool of private pleasure and elite comfort, while any form of it that might empower or connect the broader population is kept out of reach. Modernity, across both dynasties, was not rejected but privatized.

When Christian missionaries sought to open schools in Iran, they were permitted to do so only in a few cities of the country, and only for Assyrian and Armenian Christians. Muslims were barred from attending.5 In Tehran’s first census, literacy and education statistics placed Zoroastrians, Jews, and Armenians at the top, and Muslims at the bottom.6 Persecution of religious minorities was nonetheless real and often brutal. Under the Qajar dynasty, Jews faced systematic legal discrimination alongside recurring communal violence. Mobs attacked Jewish neighborhoods in Shiraz, Tehran, and other cities, looting and burning homes. The situation in Mashhad was more extreme still. There, clergies forced the entire Jewish community to convert to Islam and forbade them from leaving the city—a condition that remained in place until the Pahlavi dynasty took power.7 Yet these same communities maintained robust internal traditions of literacy and learning—institutions that Muslim Iranians, excluded from any comparable secular education, were structurally prevented from developing. It was this preserved intellectual infrastructure that positioned the Jewish community as primary custodians of the Iranian musical tradition, keeping alive a body of knowledge that the state’s own policies had ensured no one else was equipped to hold.

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The logic behind Muslim exclusion was spelled out in the texts of the period. Muslims had no need for secular education. They had the seminary. The clergy’s position was unambiguous. Modern schools spread heresy. This opposition extended to Iranian-run institutions as much as foreign ones. Iranian-owned schools were attacked and in multiple cases burned by mobs acting under clerical direction. The target was content, not origin. Any curriculum placing empirical inquiry or civic knowledge alongside religious instruction was treated as an assault on the clerical order. What emerged was a workaround. Elite families hired private tutors for their sons. Daughters received nothing. The reasoning was that female literacy was not merely unnecessary but dangerous. A woman who could write could compose letters to strange men, conduct secret correspondence, and find lovers. Writing was treated not as a cognitive skill but as a vector of sexual transgression, and suppressed on those grounds.8

The Islamic Republic inherited this logic and built it into the architecture of the state. By labeling the entire education system “Islamic,” it ensured that theology is not a separate subject but a constant undercurrent—present from a child’s first day of school through to a doctorate, regardless of whether the field is biology, architecture, or engineering. Students are taught the Quranic account of creation alongside the scientific one, embedding a direct contradiction at the center of the curriculum. Science is permitted where it serves the state and contained where it threatens the order on which the state depends.

The same principle governs universities. Shortly after the 1979 revolution, the regime shut down all higher education for three years under the banner of a “Cultural Revolution,” purging faculty deemed insufficiently loyal. When institutions reopened, hiring was governed not by academic merit but by gozinesh-e aqidati—a formal screening process testing candidates on Islamic doctrine and political allegiance. Admissions follow the same principle: Basij members and IRGC families receive priority placement, women compete for whatever remains, and certain fields are closed to them entirely as “unsuitable.”9 The system is designed less to cultivate knowledge than to reproduce political loyalty.

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The treatment of women and children follows an equally direct line. During the Qajar era, girls were often married as young as eight or nine. Men could take multiple wives and as many sigheh—temporary wives—as they wished, while women had no rights in matters of divorce or consent.10 It is no coincidence that one of the first acts of the Islamic Republic after the revolution was to dismantle the Pahlavi-era Family Protection Law. The law had set the minimum marriage age for girls at eighteen and placed significant restrictions on polygamy.11 Both were abolished. The state goes further, actively promoting polygamy. State television runs segments featuring polygamous families, presenting the arrangement as the normatively correct form of household organization. The format is instructive, featuring young wives, multiple children, a shared domestic space, and no visible exit. The message is that this is what a properly ordered Muslim family looks like, and that the desire for anything else is a deviation to be corrected rather than a right to be protected.

The case of Aliakbar Sanati is illustrative. When Sanati attempted to establish an orphanage in Kerman during the Qajar era, the clergy mobilized against him. Documented accounts from the period describe children as young as four being put to work, by both Iranian and foreign companies, producing the fine carpets and textiles for which Kerman was famous.12 Sanati spent two years fighting for permission to open the orphanage, and even then was allowed to take in only boys; girls, the clergy maintained, were better off married as young as possible. The same logic governs the Islamic Republic’s promotion of early marriage today. Girls are not viewed as children with a claim to education, autonomy, or protection, but as reproductive resources. The state’s interest in early marriage is demographic and military: more births, younger, producing a larger pool of men available for conscription and ideological formation.

The Qajar kings maintained vast harems and hundreds of wives, and their sons were dispatched as governors across Iran from a young age, making kinship the backbone of imperial administration. The Islamic Republic operates on a similar principle. Since the revolution, a tight circle of clerical families, bound together by marriage, has held Iran in its grip, parceling out power among themselves.13 What Pahlavi modernization accomplished was cracking this circle open. Education and state-building carved real pathways upward for people born into rural poverty or urban obscurity, letting them rise into professional and even ministerial ranks.

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The clergy’s objection to Pahlavi was never to dynastic or authoritarian rule in principle. They had supported the Qajars until their final days. What they opposed was the idea that ordinary people have the right to govern themselves. The doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih, the ideological foundation of the Islamic Republic, holds that only qualified religious jurists are fit to rule. In this framework, democracy is not simply impractical but sinful. A state that allowed anyone, regardless of background, to rise and govern was not an alternative model but a violation of divine order. The Guardian Council is where this theology becomes policy. Every candidate for elected office must pass clerical vetting before reaching the ballot, ensuring that the range of political choice is decided in advance by a small group of jurists. Elections happen, but the question of who may participate is settled before any vote is cast. This logic of controlled access extended well beyond politics. In culture, architecture, and the details of everyday life, the same impulse asserted itself: the clergy’s role was not only to determine who could govern but to decide what people may see, build, wear, and become. That ambition, total and ancient, is the thread running through everything this essay has traced, from the harem walls of the Qajar court to the ballot-vetting of the Guardian Council, a single unbroken insistence that the people governed are not the people who decide.

The war between the Islamic Republic and Iranian society is, at its core, a war between two different ideas of what a human being is. The Pahlavis, whatever their failures, built a society of citizens, people who understood themselves as having rights, futures, and a claim on the institutions that governed them. The Islamic Republic has spent many years trying to unmake that understanding, to reduce a citizenry back into subjects: governable, reproducible, conscriptable, and silent. That project has deep roots, older than the revolution and older than the Pahlavis. But the Qajar inheritance is not only a story about power and its abuses. It is also a story about the limits of that power, and about what happens when a state built on the logic of subjects encounters a population that has already decided it is something else entirely.

Mohadeseh Salari Sardari grew up in Bandar Abbas in southern Iran and trained as an architect in Iran before pursuing her PhD in the United States. She is completing her PhD dissertation, Literary Selves and Architectural Space, in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Brown University. Her research explores the intersections of architecture, literature, gender, and spatial politics in modern Iran. She is currently a lecturer in Stanford University’s Department of Comparative Literature and has worked with museum collections and exhibitions at institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the RISD Museum. Her work on Iranian literature, art, and culture has been published in both Persian and English.

Colombia has just had its own political earthquake. The metaphor of a tectonic shift, which Adrian Pabst recently used in these pages to frame the outcome of May’s local elections in the UK, is just as apt here, perhaps more so, given the results of Colombia’s presidential election. Thanks to a razor-thin margin, but with more of the electorate voting than ever before, Abelardo de la Espriella, a political unknown less than a year ago, a defense attorney to the indefensible, a candidate pledging support to (and seeking support from) America and Israel, a proud Catholic (married with four young children), and an unapologetic nationalist, will become president on August 7. On that day, too, diplomatic relations with Israel, broken by the present government in response to Israel’s military response to October 7, will be restored.

Some context: While Colombia is the Americas’ second oldest continuous democracy, it has nonetheless suffered almost constantly from internal instability, as elites (and their local followers) with differing convictions, liberal and conservative, have battled each other via all means, including open violence, to establish control not so much over the national territory but over the regions deemed worth fighting over. An authoritative history of the country by David Bushnell is called Colombia: A Nation in Spite of Itself. The title, however, like many headlines, is betrayed by the content of the story. A more honest one might have emphasized that Colombia is, rather, a nation like any other, meaning that it struggles (perhaps more intensely, perhaps less successfully, so far) to actually be a nation (just like Spain and France, the United States and the United Kingdom do). And certainly, no one doubts that the last six decades or so have been marked by intensified internal conflict, which, though dressed up as political, is fundamentally driven by rent-seeking criminal groups that extract massive utilities via narcotrafficking and other illegal activities from the territories and populations they control. Perhaps the most compelling evidence supporting this claim is that since a peace agreement was signed now ten years ago, supposedly to end the internal conflict, cocaine production has only increased along with the criminality necessary to make it so.

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A first real response to Colombia’s modern internal problems rooted in the criminal control of vast swathes of the national territory was attempted during the two presidential periods of Álvaro Uribe (2002–2006, 2006–2010). Uribe employed the country’s armed forces in an attempt to assert sovereignty against well-armed, well-organized, and well-financed enemies. His initiative weakened them such that, during the second Juan Manuel Santos period (2010–2014, 2014–2018), the biggest criminal group sat at the negotiating table and a peace agreement was signed. It is of note that though Santos was Uribe’s minister of defense and designated successor, ratified by the vote, he broke with Uribe in pursuing an impetuous peace with actors who still held some cards at the negotiating table, whereas Uribe was pursuing their total defeat. Colombians themselves voted against the peace accords in a national plebiscite. This in 2016, the year of Brexit and Trump. But politics in Colombia is such that the accords were signed despite popular rejection; this act of popular sovereignty was annulled when Santos ushered the accords through the Congress, which, as is said, represents the people, though it is perhaps more pliable than they are.

Critics of the accords had argued that they gave too much to rebels and secured too little basis for peace and prosperity in Colombia, and Ivan Duque (2018–2022) seemed to win his election by promising to modify them to favor sovereignty and state legitimacy. Doomed perhaps by the Covid pandemic in 2020, Duque produced no heir for the elections of 2022, and former guerrillero Gustavo Petro, who has held various political posts since demobilizing in 1990, and boosted by the socialist ethos that seemed necessary to many during lockdowns, finally became Colombia’s president. Heading what is known as the Pacto Histórico, which represents itself as the broadest movement ever of Colombia’s diverse subaltern populations, Petro promised Paz Total (Total Peace) and committed the state to what he called a “politics of life.”

What this meant was that the state would implement a one-sided ceasefire policy toward criminal organizations, making a farce of Colombian sovereignty, and invite them to the negotiating table. Petro’s avowedly progressive government would set an example by refusing violence outright, by meeting its antagonists as equals, treating them with dignity and respect, so as to hash out a way forward that would break Colombia’s cycles of violence once and for all.

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Though the good intentions didn’t produce the hoped-for results, the Petro government has simply ignored this reality. As anyone approaching the situation disinterestedly would have expected, criminal groups have used the government’s ceasefire-first policy to further organize and control more territory even as they sit at negotiation tables. The result of the government’s pacifism is that murder and extortion are up and coca production is reaching record highs. Nonetheless, the realities of clientelism seemed to convince observers that Petro’s chosen heir, Iván Cepeda, who pledged continuity with the failed Petro policies, would likely win the presidential elections in the first round. Even as the state’s armed forces came under attack from emboldened criminal organizations in the run-up to these elections, Cepeda reiterated his unmitigated commitment to the politics of life and Total Peace. He was so sure of victory that he barely even campaigned, expecting to receive more than fifty percent of the vote and thus win the presidency in the first round.

Meanwhile many Colombians, approaching fifty percent as it turns out, judged the present government’s policies more harshly. The numbers coming in on the night of May 31, the first round of voting, revealed a country polarized, despite the presence of multiple candidates on the ballot representing a range of political options. Though he led in the pre-election polls, though he enjoyed all the advantages of incumbency (since Petro actively supported him), Iván Cepeda took only 40.90 percent of the vote. It was enough for second place. Taking a distant third place, and thus evidencing the collapse of uribista conservatism, was Paloma Valencia, senator of the Centro Democrático. After acknowledging her loss, both she and Uribe himself threw their weight behind the night’s winner, Abelardo de la Espriella, the outsider, who invoked the nation, the pueblo, the patria, with every other breath, who called Colombia’s rebel criminal organizations bandidos and promised to treat them as such. Indeed, it is most likely for this last reason that he won the night, showing the polls once more to be little better than guesses, with 43.74 percent of the vote. He and Cepeda went head-to-head in the June 21 runoff.

The polls got it wrong again leading up to the runoff, showing a comfortable win for de la Espriella. In the event, the margins were close. He eked out victory by only a 250,000-vote margin. Of course, a one-vote margin is enough. The loser demanded a recount, but this is normal and amounted to nothing. De la Espriella will become president.

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What is an observer to make of all this? Where is the interest for readers of Telos? What seems to be contested here are two different understandings of sovereignty. The conception of sovereignty espoused by the left-wing government of Petro (and by his successor manqué) is entirely performative. It consists in denouncing imperialism in one form or another, peaking with calls to U.S. servicemen by Petro in New York encouraging them to disobey orders and with the breaking of relations with Israel. Such a move reeks of a lack of self-awareness, since one could easily make the case against Colombia that is made against Israel, of being some kind of illegitimate entity. But sovereignty so conceived is entirely inconsequential at home, where it counts. It sees armed, criminal groups as equals to the state. Though the post-Uribe governments of Santos and Duque ceded real sovereignty to the criminal groups, it was Petro’s Pacto Histórico that made the practice of state pacifism normative, that made abdication of sovereignty a point of principle and doctrine (unless it amounted to denouncing sovereign acts by other governments).

Here is the problem that a so-called “politics of life” cannot face in any adequate way, but which at least one half of the Colombian electorate seems to understand. The criminal, armed organizations of Colombia are not committed to peace or life, or even to Colombia. Their comparative advantage and their core competency, the thing that lets them establish their own de facto republics, taxing and conscripting and indeed governing where the Republic of Colombia does not (cannot), is precisely their willingness to kill. They operate in terms Charles Tilly would recognize, enriching themselves by engaging in war-making and (para)state-making while the state itself looks on, or looks away. And there is nothing that would incentivize them to wind things down. That off-ramp, the peace accords of 2016, has shown itself already to be the beginning of a road to nowhere. To sit across a table from such organizations and offer them the dignity of recognition is surrender. You treat them like equals. They treat you like a mug. Colombia’s political earthquake is rattling the status quo because while the supposedly viable politicians of the right and left offered the population more negotiations, the largest segment of the Colombian electorate appears to have rejected that strategy, to have understood that negotiation with people who will kill for cash cedes too much. It cedes the thing a state cannot cede and remain a state: the monopoly on legitimate violence.

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De la Espriella, like all leaders since at least Biblical times, is a flawed vessel. But in giving him the presidency, voters seem to recognize that he is the only candidate who says out loud what ails Colombia: you do not negotiate with enemies who do not share your ideals and goals, your axioms. You simply give them a choice: surrender, or we will defeat you. Everyone wants to end the violence that plagues Colombia, but while Cepeda’s program of continued recognition would have led to only more futile dialogue, the electorate appears to have opted for something more effective.

This is why the result of presidential voting in Colombia should not be read as merely a swing of the political pendulum, following a trend seen in other countries of the region. This is not really about a more or less expected oscillation between left and right. Nor is it what some have described as a salto al vacío, a leap into the void (New York Times) or de la Espriella’s shortcomings in matters of taste or style (The Guardian). Such characterizations simply avoid reality. What we’re seeing most acutely in Colombia is that the liberal-procedural settlement (the “end of history,” as a wit once described it), based on the conviction that every conflict yields to inclusion, that the circle of legitimate interlocutors can be extended indefinitely, that recognition dissolves antagonism, has foundered. That supposedly irresistible historical force has collided with an immovable social object, with the one actor it cannot absorb: the criminal anti-liberal, the criminal egoist. The left reacts to the victory of de la Espriella fearing that he will repeat the real mistakes made by Uribe. This is possible, of course, but there is no reason to assume it probable, especially given the rotund condemnation of Uribe’s mistakes. The left seems quite unconcerned, however, when it comes to the reality of all the freedoms curtailed, all the lives cut short, all the children recruited, all the sexual abuse and forced abortions, which is the empirical consequence of allowing criminal control of territories and populations heretofore abandoned or ignored by the state. In short, the left seems quite unperturbed about the continued viability, via endless and fruitless negotiations, of the organized criminal who makes civilized life impossible. De la Espriella’s presidency, properly understood, promises not a rejection of rights or of democracy, but the recovery of their precondition. It insists on Hobbes before Locke. There is, obviously, no rule of law where the criminal rules.

By empowering him, the Colombian electorate, albeit by only the slightest plurality, shows that it has concluded that there is no need for more recognition. There is a need for the state to be sovereign. First, then, the monopoly on violence, then the land registries and rural courts, the local credit and primary schools and health posts and enforceable property rights that the country needs. These needs cannot be met when the territory is governed by criminals. The armed groups will not permit the second. And the first will never be settled by treating them as allies in the cause of life.

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It is not all so simple, of course. Cepeda won the vote by large margins in some regions. Still, some of his strongest results came from territories where criminal organizations expanded significantly during the Petro administration, where the state’s Paz Total strategy ceded sovereignty to groups it was supposedly seeking to demobilize. In Roberto Payán, Nariño, for instance, Cepeda took nearly 95 percent of the vote. Whether such results reflect differing incentives, differing priorities for voters, or coercion of them by armed actors is difficult to determine. On the one hand, communities living amid chronic violence may rationally prefer an imperfect status quo to a possibly catastrophic military confrontation. On the other, government by criminal groups suggests the possibility of political intimidation. As the local “joke” has it, citizens in these areas had to vote for la política de la vida . . . or face the mortal consequences. Cepeda’s success in these regions therefore cannot by itself settle the debate over security policy. Indeed, if life in large parts of the country is increasingly dominated by criminal organizations, that may itself be perhaps the clearest evidence of the need for a properly military solution to the problem.

That said, even though the voters have given him the presidency, there is no guarantee that de la Espriella and his team will be successful in their attempt to do what needs to be done. The state is riven with egoists driven by petty and sectoral interests of their own, for starters. And then again, the criminal organizations, in one guise or another, have confronted many seeking to bring them to heel, whether with carrots or sticks, and they’ve outlasted them all. But de la Espriella, at least, has spelled out the solution, in practical, non-utopian terms—in what are, in fact, human terms. For you cannot build a country on territory you do not control, by negotiating with those who control it in your place, whose state-making does not aspire to anything like nationness, but is content and indeed motivated to remain at the level of organized, criminal rent-seeking. In a better world, the world of Macondo perhaps, negotiation would be enough. But this is Colombia, and the reality is that life here, for far too many, is far from magical. Though many still seem to be able to vote as if yet more words were enough to change that reality, de la Espriella, by making sovereignty the fundamental issue, has forged a plurality that believes otherwise.

Gregory J. Lobo is a philosophical anthropologist at the Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia. His most recent book is Nationism. In Defence of Open Societies (Alibri, 2024).

Money is essentially the property of the community, not of the prince.
—Nicole Oresme, De Moneta, c. 1360

In a single hour on the last Monday of June, the Supreme Court buried and half-resurrected nearly a century of bad New Deal–era precedent. In Trump v. Slaughter, the chief justice interred Humphrey’s Executor, restoring the constitutional rule that officers who wield the executive power answer to the president, who answers to the people. Minutes later, in Trump v. Cook, the same chief justice exempted a single institution from the rule he had just restored. The Federal Reserve, five justices held, stands apart. Its governors may not be removed except for a “cause” that courts will scrutinize. Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Barrett dissented in various registers. The lineup alone should give pause; the reasoning gives more.

What is remarkable about Cook is not its bottom line, which resolved only an application for a stay and left the merits for another day, but the material out of which the exemption was built. The Court did not rest on constitutional text; there is none. It did not rest on structure; the structural argument had just prevailed, in the other case, for the other side. It rested on a genealogy. The United States, the Court declared, has a “long tradition of independent central banking,” descending from the Bank of North America, which “predates even our Constitution,” through the First and Second Banks of the United States, to the Eccles Building. The Fed, we are assured, “maintains the balance struck by the founding generation under modern circumstances”; the Court would not unsettle what it called, borrowing Justice Alito’s phrase, a “special arrangement sanctioned by history.”

When a court can no longer justify an institution’s insulation by argument, it reaches for pedigree. And pedigree, as any student of religion knows, is the signature of sacral rather than constitutional authority. Churches legitimate themselves by apostolic succession; constitutional institutions are supposed to legitimate themselves by conferred and accountable power. The question Cook raises, and the question this essay pursues, is what it means that the American republic now secures its most powerful domestic institution by the first method rather than the second.

Begin with the tradition itself, because it will not bear the weight. The First Bank was chartered in 1791 over the constitutional objections of Madison and Jefferson, who argued that Congress possessed no enumerated power to charter a corporation and that “necessary and proper” meant necessary, not merely convenient; the objections were serious enough that Washington solicited formal opinions before signing. The Bank’s recharter died in 1811, substantially on constitutional grounds. Madison acquiesced in the Second Bank in 1816 only through his doctrine that repeated practice had “liquidated” the constitutional question, a theory of settlement by exhaustion. McCulloch blessed the Bank in 1819, and Andrew Jackson refused the blessing. His 1832 veto message denied that the Court’s precedent could bind the political branches, and the people ratified the refusal by reelecting him overwhelmingly. The Bank died in 1836. There followed seventy-seven years, more than a third of the republic’s existence, in which the United States deliberately had no central bank at all. This, then, is the “long tradition,” an institution contested for every year of its life, killed twice, and then renounced for two generations. Examined honestly, the majority’s own history of the Banks testifies for the dissent.

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The deeper problem is that even a friendlier reading of the Banks proves the wrong proposition. The First and Second Banks were majority privately owned, profit-seeking commercial corporations in which the government held a minority stake; Hamilton defended the First Bank precisely on the ground that its powers resembled those of a private mercantile partnership. They set no policy rates, conducted no open market operations, pursued no employment mandate, and were disciplined externally by specie convertibility. Their independence was the independence of private property from the state. The Federal Reserve’s independence is the inverse, sovereign public power insulated from the elected executive, whose appointment authority operates on a fourteen-year lag, insulation by calendar where the law would not suffice. Justice Thomas’s dissent presses this point, and presses one more that the majority leaves discreetly unexamined. The Fed’s actual intellectual ancestry runs not to Philadelphia in 1791 but to Berlin. Paul Warburg, the architect of the Federal Reserve Act, campaigned openly to transplant the model of the German Reichsbank, and Woodrow Wilson, who insisted on a governing board of experts, had spent a career admiring Prussian administration and doubting the competence of democratic publics. The First Bank is the Fed’s icon, not its parent. Its parent is the European administrative state.

Which is why Europe is not a digression here but the experiment’s completion. If one wants to know where the Cook premises lead, one looks where they have been carried to their logical end. The euro liquidated national currencies that were condensed national narratives—the Deutsche Mark above all, that strange vessel into which postwar Germany, remembering the wheelbarrows of Weimar, poured the pride it was forbidden to invest elsewhere—and replaced them with money belonging to no people, issued by an institution answerable to none. Or answerable, as the Greeks would learn, to one nation in particular. The euro did not so much create money belonging to no one as universalize German money without German accountability, ordoliberal discipline exported without representation. The European Central Bank is the purest independence design ever attempted. Its mandate and insulation are entrenched at treaty level, revisable only by the unanimous consent of every member state, which is to say never. The Federal Reserve’s independence is a statute Congress could amend on any Tuesday. Britain is more candid still. The Bank of England’s independence is a statutory grant of 1997, and the Treasury retains the power to direct the Bank in extremis, delegation with the string left visible. The ECB’s independence is placed beyond politics by construction. It is Cook’s footnote grown into a constitution.

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And the record of that perfected independence is a record of coercion. In 2011, the ECB’s president sent confidential letters to the elected governments of Italy and Spain dictating labor market and fiscal reforms as the tacit price of bond purchases. Ireland was informed that emergency liquidity would end unless it accepted a program and made bank creditors whole. Cyprus was given days to accept EU and IMF reforms before its economy would be shuttered. And in the summer of 2015, the ECB capped emergency assistance to Greek banks in the middle of a standoff with a newly elected government, closing the country’s banking system less than a fortnight after a referendum in which the voters had rejected the creditors’ terms; the government capitulated inside a month. Whatever one thinks of that government’s economics, the mechanism deserves a name: an unelected monetary authority used control of the payment system to break an elected ministry. Berlusconi’s replacement by a technocratic cabinet under bond market pressure in 2011 belongs to the same file. Independence from voters revealed itself, under stress, as discipline administered to voters. The institution was never neutral between Greek citizens and Greek creditors; it simply had a constituency other than the demos.

The German Federal Constitutional Court has spent three decades naming this drift in juridical language. From its Maastricht judgment of 1993, warning that the Union must never seize Kompetenz-Kompetenz, the power to define its own powers, through Gauweiler, to the Weiss judgment of 2020, in which the court at Karlsruhe, a hundred miles and a full theory of legitimacy from the ECB’s towers in Frankfurt, for the first time declared an act of a European institution ultra vires in open defiance of the European Court of Justice, the anxiety has been constant. Monetary policy, once insulated and self-interpreting, silently annexes fiscal and economic competence, and no one can call it home because it answers to no one. Jackson’s veto message and the Weiss judgment are the same protest separated by two centuries: the political sovereign refusing to concede that a monetary institution’s self-description settles the constitutional question.

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There remains the case that unmasks the whole arrangement. The Bank of Russia is, on paper, an independent central bank, and by common consent a superbly run one. Its governor, Elvira Nabiullina, was named central bank governor of the year by Euromoney in 2015 and by The Banker in 2017, celebrated by the very Western institutions her craft would later frustrate. She even perfected the sacral communication style of the guild. For years, markets parsed the brooches she wore to press conferences as oracular guidance, a hawk when rates rose, a dove when they fell, a language she eventually acknowledged as her own. Then came February 2022. With half the reserves frozen, she executed the textbook without flaw, the policy rate to twenty percent, capital controls, the exchange closed, the pre-built payment infrastructure switched on. The war economy quickly returned to vigor. Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the discussions, that she sought to resign in the invasion’s first weeks and was told by Putin to stay. At her emergency address she wore black, and no brooch at all.

The lesson is not that Russia has a good central banker, though it does, and her excellence is precisely what makes the case damning. The lesson is that in the hour of the exception, independence evaporated, as it always does, because when sovereignty is genuinely at stake every central bank aligns with the state that houses it. Carl Schmitt compressed the point into a sentence long ago: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” The corollary from Moscow is that the priesthood serves whoever commands the temple. Nor did the West behave differently in kind. By freezing another central bank’s reserves, it proved a plain proposition. Money held inside another sovereign’s system is held at that sovereign’s pleasure, and reserves are not property but permission. It also wielded the ultimate sanction of any communion, excommunication, at civilizational scale, and the response has been schism, parallel payment rails, bilateral settlement, a counter-communion under construction. Excommunication disciplines only those who cannot found a rival church.

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In Frankfurt, insulation from voters became coercion of voters; in Moscow, statutory independence dissolved on contact with the sovereign decision. What, then, does independence produce in Washington? Not neutrality; there is no such thing. Insulation never removes an institution from politics; it only selects its master. Cut off from the constitutional chain that runs from officer to president to electorate, the institution answers instead to whatever constituency can still discipline it, which in Washington means the bond market, the banks it regulates and rescues, the profession that credentials its staff, the peer consensus of Basel and Jackson Hole. What the American vernacular has come to call the deep state is, in the monetary context, exactly this and nothing more occult, not a cabal but a class, a permanent estate to which accountability silently migrates when the removal chain is severed, its governance laundered as expertise. Autocracy assigns money to the prince. Technocracy assigns it to the priesthood. The constitutional wager, the American wager, was that whoever holds it must give account.

The pragmatist will answer that the Fed, whatever its pedigree, works. The nineteenth century was one panic after another, they will say, and no sane nation would hand the money supply to a new institution in a deranged age. The ledger is more mixed than the memory, including as it does the Depression the Fed deepened, the great inflation it accommodated, and the recent one it pronounced transitory; “it works” is the epitaph of every establishment, composed a year too early. But grant the premise whole. Prudence is an argument addressed to the wrong branch. If insulation is wise, Congress may enact it with open eyes, as Parliament did in 1997. Wisdom is a case for legislation, not a license for a Court to find immunity in a pedigree.

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This is why the theological vocabulary is not ornament but diagnosis. Central bank independence is secularized libertas ecclesiae, the medieval freedom of the church from lay investiture reborn as the freedom of the monetary magisterium from presidential removal, and the Cook opinion reads like nothing so much as a concordat, the temporal power conceding the temple’s immunity in exchange for peace.

And the sacred, once transferred, can be turned against its former custodian. In January 2013 the Bank of Italy, citing the Holy See’s failures against money laundering, forbade Deutsche Bank’s Italian unit from processing electronic payments inside Vatican City. For six weeks the original sacral institution of the West could not accept a card or dispense cash from a machine; the Vatican Museums, five million visitors a year, went cash-only amid the Vatileaks winter and the scandals then engulfing the Institute for the Works of Religion, the Holy See’s own bank, whose accounts had drawn money-laundering scrutiny for decades. On February 11, Benedict XVI announced the first papal abdication in six centuries. The next day, the terminals came back on, switched to a Swiss processor conveniently beyond the reach of European banking law; Rome escaped the interdict the way the excommunicated always have, by finding a communion outside the writ of the new church. Benedict spoke only of his failing strength, and nothing requires disbelieving him. But no medieval chronicler would have missed the shape of the story: an interdict laid upon Rome and lifted the day after the pontiff announced his departure. For a thousand years the Church suspended sacraments to discipline princes. In 2013 a central bank suspended payments to discipline the Church, and the discipline held until the throne was vacated. Libertas ecclesiae now runs at the pleasure of the bank. Whatever can excommunicate the Vatican has become the thing the Vatican used to be.

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René Girard taught that founding myths exist to conceal founding conflict, and the Court’s serene procession from 1781 to 2026 is such a myth, now canonized. Even the concurrence confesses the sacral reflex. Justice Kavanaugh would not risk the upheaval of leaving the Fed’s status uncertain, some settled questions being too dangerous to reopen. Treating a constitutional question as unthinkable is precisely how one recognizes that an institution has left the constitutional order for the sacred one. In the most iconoclastic era in American memory, the one icon the Court chose to preserve was the temple of money.

The objection will come that America is thin soil for the sacred, that a nation of Congregationalists who take communion with Wonder Bread and tap water never truly sacralized anything. It sacralized one thing: the Book, as text and as object, read by every plowboy and sworn upon in every courtroom. American sacrality is textual, and so is American constitutionalism. Sanford Levinson long ago distinguished what he called “protestant” constitutional interpretation, which locates authority in the text alone, open to every citizen, from “catholic” interpretation, which supplements text with unwritten tradition mediated by an authoritative magisterium. Originalism is not one method among many; it is the hermeneutic of a sola scriptura republic, whose founding document lies in a marble shrine under honor guard. Measured against the nation’s own civil religion, Cook is a category error, a catholic ruling delivered in a protestant church, apostolic succession through the Bank of North America offered to a people that swears on the text. Jackson understood this in his bones. His veto message, with its warning that mere precedent is a dangerous source of authority, is the protestant hermeneutic in action, the layman reading the text against the magisterium.

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Luther, who watched a temporal power drape itself in spiritual immunity, supplies the closing word, along with the bishop of Lisieux. Money is a creature, Luther insisted, and the most seductive idol on earth; whatever we are told must never be questioned has become a god, and the Large Catechism warns where hearts that cling to it end. Money belongs to the temporal kingdom, where everything gives account. And Oresme, writing while princes debased coin, located the ownership of money neither in the prince nor in any guild of experts but in the community itself. The American founders carried Oresme’s point one step further. In a republic, even the prince gives account. That is the principle Slaughter honored on the same June morning that Cook abandoned. And the problem with Cook is not that the Federal Reserve won. There are serious constitutional arguments for an insulated central bank, and Congress is free to write them into law. The problem is how the Fed won. The Court did not point to any power the Constitution confers. It pointed to a pedigree, and it warned that the question was too dangerous to reopen. That is how a priesthood defends itself, not how a court reasons. Whether the Federal Reserve deserves its independence is a question the American people, through the leaders they elect, may still answer. What they should not accept is a Court that placed the question beyond asking. Nothing in this republic is sacred in that sense. Whatever governs must answer.

Tim Rosenberger is a pastor and attorney and cofounder of Excelsior Action.

In recent times, Christianity has been used by the British far right as a symbol of national identity. However, the historical developments and demographic changes in British Christianity make this invocation more complicated than it first appears. Proponents of far-right rhetoric, most notably Tommy Robinson in his 2025 Christmas Carol Service, often use Christian language to present Britain as culturally unified and rooted in a particular moral tradition. This rhetoric is then used to justify political positions, especially vis-à-vis “wokeism,” immigration, or other religions.

However, within these spaces, Christianity functions as a national symbol under circumstances and realities that complicate its coherence. These include the historical role Christianity has played in shaping Britain’s liberal secular institutions and culture of tolerance, as well as the fact that white Britons attending church and practicing Christianity are declining, with active Christian communities increasingly concentrated among immigrant and minority groups: Christian Britain is less white than some imagine. In light of these considerations, we must ask: can Christianity still function as a coherent and legitimate national identity marker for the far right?

The Telos-Paul Piccone Institute is delighted to present this essay in collaboration with The Wilberforce Society at the University of Cambridge.

Christianity and the Formation of Modern British Political Culture

“Woke ideology” is one of the principal irritants of the contemporary far right. This term generally means a discourse emphasizing systemic injustices, particularly concerning race and gender, and, less frequently, class inequality. The right often deems this stance oversensitive, performative, or coercive, arguing that it enables a repressive “cancel culture,” prioritizes identity politics over merit, threatens traditional societal structures, and enforces ideological conformity, thereby eroding freedom of speech. By invoking a rhetoric of Christianity in response, the far-right attempts to construct a moral buffer against the perceived excesses of secularism. For example, when Ceirion Dewar, a bishop in the small, conservative Confessing Anglican Church, opened a Tommy Robinson rally in prayer, he stated that Great Britain was “founded on Christian principles and from the Christian faith” and that this foundation was being “eroded.”1

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Rather than treating modern tolerant society as antithetical to Christianity, one can point to historical links between tolerance and the development of British Christianity. There is significant scholarly discussion over how modern liberalism developed out of Christian values.2 Graeme Smith argues that ideas of individual human worth and dignity, shared public reason, historical progress, and humanity’s ability to investigate its world can all be traced to Christian theological sources.3 Even among Robinson’s supporters, Christianity is framed as the source of an emancipatory civilization rather than strictly devotional or theological. Gareth Talbot, for example, stated:

It’s not that I’ve found God. I’ve never felt you need to go to church to be a Christian, but it’s always been the Christian religion that’s kept our values and freedoms, and that’s why I need to support it now.4

However, others argue that liberalism and a tolerant society are products of early modern secular humanism and the Enlightenment, rather than Christianity itself. Needless to add, political and philosophical ideas do not emerge from the void, and the sources may be multifold. While Enlightenment figures propagated what we now call liberal ideas in nonreligious terms, such as the rights of man, reason, and equality before the law, there were also Christian peers advancing similar arguments. Christian culture and ideas have undeniably played a significant role in British and European history. The Religious Society of Friends, founded in seventeenth-century England by George Fox, emphasized the “Inner Light” and promoted peace, equality, and social justice. It was generally Protestant dissenters, often marginalized themselves, who were key propagators of tolerance and social justice. For instance, William Wilberforce was a devout evangelical Anglican who fused faith and politics in his forty-year campaign to abolish the slave trade.

Meanwhile, at every stage in history, liberal Christianity also had its conservative counterpart. The far right today appears to lean into that conservative strand. Robinson’s appeal to England as a “Christian nation” is ambiguously Anglican due to his affiliations,5 suggesting that his Christianity is civilizational and traditional, rooted in the history of the Church of England, rather than deeply theological or biblical. Historically, therefore, his invocation of Christianity as a source for his politics is not unfounded. Especially in an Anglican context, Christianity has always contained both progressive and conservative strands.

Christianity vs. Civilizational Identity in Contemporary Far-Right Discourse

It is crucial to differentiate between Christianity as a devotion or a belief structure and Christianity as an identity marker. Many far-right figures claim to be Christian because they were born and raised in Britain, a “Christian country,” yet they do not practice in any meaningful sense. Robinson himself converted in prison and claims to practice, yet this isn’t integral because his rhetoric suggests something more civilizational than devotional. When Dame Sarah Mullally was named the next Archbishop of Canterbury in 2025, Robinson retweeted a past statement of hers supporting Black Lives Matter, adding: “Their churches will stay empty; a Christian revival will grow on the streets. Masculine Christianity [sic] is coming not this weak drivel.”6

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Here, he is infusing Christianity with gendered traditionalism to serve as a vehicle for narratives of strength, masculinity, and cultural defense. Similarly in his September Unite the Kingdom rally, some attendants were dressed as crusader soldiers. Gareth Talbot similarly admitted he does not necessarily believe in God but has started attending church because he fears Christianity could be “replaced.”7 This concession undermines the notion that far-right politics’ attachment to Christianity is biblically rooted, or indeed that it even has to be in order to be acceptable. Rather, Christianity functions as cultural heritage and national memory, an integral part of British history and therefore culture. It operates independently of church attendance or doctrinal adherence.

Crucially, appeals to Christianity in this rhetoric often function as a boundary marker against Islam. While the far right mobilizes Christian language against “woke ideology,” its primary usage of “Christian Britain” emerges in debates about immigration and perceived Islamic cultural difference. Some argue that Robinson’s rhetoric about this being a Christian country is code for a “white” and specifically “not Muslim” country.8 However, this boundary-marking becomes unstable when confronted with demographic realities.

Demographic Transformation of British Christianity

The demographic transformation of Christianity in Britain is central to assessing the validity of the far right’s invocation. According to the 2021 Census, for the first time less than half of the population of England and Wales, 46.2 percent, or 27.5 million people, described themselves as Christian. This was a 13.1 percentage point drop from 59.3 percent, or 33.3 million people, in 2011. Furthermore, while the Muslim population increased from 1.5 million to 3.8 million between 2001 and 2021, and Hindus from 0.5 million to 1 million, the number of people with no religion rose far more dramatically, from 7.2 million to 20.7 million.9 This suggests that secularization, rather than Islam, is the most significant shift. Therefore, the invocation of a Christian Britain against a perceived outside threat does not hold as much weight as one may initially think. Church attendance is even lower, with only around 5 percent of Britons attending church on a typical Sunday.10 Thus, the 46.2 percent identifying as Christian includes many nominal rather than practicing believers.

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At the same time, there has been a dramatic shift in ethnic makeup. In 2001, 82 percent of white British respondents identified as Christian. By 2021, this had fallen to 49 percent. Among young people aged 16 to 24, religious practice among persons of color is two to three times higher than among white youths.

Migration has also significantly shaped the Christian population. Between 2001 and 2011, 1.2 million Christians migrated to the United Kingdom. Between 2011 and 2021, that number rose to 1.9 million. Christians were the largest group among the foreign-born population at 50 percent, comparable to Great Britain overall at 54 percent at the time. The proportion of foreign-born people with no religion, 18 percent, was half that of Great Britain overall at 36 percent.11

These data indicate that immigration has not diluted Christianity in Britain but rather, in many respects, has sustained it. More Britons are atheists than immigrants, and so advocacy for a “Christian Britain” cannot coherently function as a buffer against immigration as it is migrants themselves that significantly contribute to Christian vitality. Christianity in Britain is increasingly ethnically diverse and globally connected, and although the diverse Christians may not all be of the Anglican profession, they are increasingly the carriers of Christian values or ideology in whatever form. In fact, many of the Christian immigrants from the Global South may themselves carry conservative cultural values. In any case, the “Christian nation” invoked by the far right, implicitly white and ethnically British, diverges sharply from sociological reality: if one wishes for a more Christian Britain, one arguably ought to support current immigration trends, not oppose them.

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Conclusion

Historically, invoking Christianity against liberal cultural values has fair grounding, given Christianity’s complex relationship with liberalism: there are definitely conservative streams within historical Christianity. Using Christianity as a civilizational counterpoint to Islam also has historical precedent, whether through crusader narratives or broader European self-understandings. However, the invocation of Christianity is not useful in pursuit of an anti-immigrant or ethnically exclusivist program. Christianity in Britain is on average more common amongst a given migrant community than an increasingly secular white or British-born population, and the demographics within the faith continue to shift in this direction.12 This is why many Christian leaders have expressed discomfort with the far-right positions. In September, a group of Church of England bishops joined leaders from other denominations to condemn what they described as the “co-opting of the cross” at Robinson’s rally as a means of causing division and excluding others.13

The morality of co-opting is not the primary concern here. Observationally, the tension lies in this: an increasingly ethnically diverse and immigrant-sustained faith is being instrumentalized by a movement that positions itself, at best, as anti-immigrant and, at worst, as racially exclusionary. Given that young people (especially those of color) are often more politically disengaged,14 and given that young Christians of color are statistically more religiously active than their white counterparts, this dynamic may produce unexpected political realignments. As a result of the projected link between Christianity and right-wing politics—or at least with aspects of cultural conservatism—some Christians of color might be drawn toward conservative voting habits or at least lead them to align with more “traditional” political stances, for example, around gender politics. However, this is a speculation at this point and requires more evidence.

Anita Ukaenwe is a penultimate-year History undergraduate at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge. She is interested in using historical research to better understand contemporary social and policy issues.

The belief in a savior, ultimate salvation, and the final battle between good and evil has deep roots in Iranian cultural imagination, even before Islam. This is particularly evident in late Zoroastrian eschatological traditions surrounding the figure of the Saoshyant and the final renovation of the world (Frashokereti).1 The “horizon of the end” in Iranian political theology cannot be solely reduced to Shi’a theology or its later political formulations. Over the centuries, in conjunction with Shi’a messianism, this developed a distinct form of religious and historical imagination that can be understood as a type of “Iranian Shi’ism.” This outcome is not merely an achievement of the modern state or ideology but a result of the historical sedimentation of two traditions in the collective consciousness of the people. Consequently, apocalyptic concepts in Iran typically intensify during times of crisis, instability, and disorder, becoming a language for interpreting the situation and the possibility of rupture. The reflection of this convergence can be found not only in official texts but also in popular narratives—for example, in the Rostam-nāmeh, an anonymous epic poem where Rostam, the legendary hero of the Iranian epic tradition, eventually converts to Shi’ism upon encountering Ali, the first Imam of the Shi’a.2 Its significance lies not in historical authenticity but in its cultural implications: the link between Iran’s mythical hero and the central figure of Shi’ism, and the fusion of Iranian epic imagination with the messianic eschatological horizon.

It is precisely this deep-seated cultural and symbolic grammar that structures contemporary Iranian politics, presenting a scene of “unequal symmetry” between state power and popular resistance. Power has co-opted this eschatological grammar, transforming it into a “katechonic” logic of deterrence and delay to preserve the existing order and postpone the end. Conversely, resistance draws on this same horizon—often secularized as demands for justice, dignity, and truth—to urge a decisive “rupture” and “acceleration” toward that very end. Though vastly unequal in means—pitting state violence against popular vulnerability—both sides are bound by a shared, end-oriented semantic framework within their historical imagination. This distinguishes Iranian politics from mere power calculations, turning it into a stage for realizing or postponing a final moment.

This linguistic horizon extends beyond religious or revolutionary discourses, permeating modern Iranian politics. For instance, during the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905–1911)—a period when messianic groups like the Shaykhis, Babis, and Azalis actively blended political reform with apocalyptic zeal—the naming of certain newspapers, such as Sur-e Esrâfil (The Trumpet of Israfil), Sobh-e Sadegh (The True Dawn), and Habl al-Matin (The Firm Rope), attests to a similar presence of religious-eschatological language in the public sphere. In 1974, Mohammad Reza Shah’s establishment of the “Rastakhiz Party” (Resurgence Party) articulated a political project laden with resurrectionist overtones, indicating that the Pahlavi state’s political imagination retained a revivalist language. This experience was, of course, not unprecedented. Such examples demonstrate that the language of the end, resurrection, and impending collapse becomes part of the common articulation of political action in Iran during periods of political crisis, whether in the guise of the state or resistance.

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When this fertile intellectual terrain encountered modernity, it confronted the fundamental concept of “revolution.” From the moment of its arrival, the concept appeared structured by a temporal tension. From the Latin revolvere—to roll back or return—the term evoked restoration of an original principle. Yet within modern political language, it simultaneously signified rupture, transformation, and the opening of a new historical horizon. The concept thus carried a Janus‑faced orientation: toward return and restoration, and toward rupture and the creation of the new. When it entered the Iranian context, this tension did not disappear; the concept arrived already bearing this dual temporal structure. Rather, it intertwined with deep layers of ethics, theology, and ritual.3 In the Iranian experience, “revolution” was not merely a political upheaval but became an event that promised a new future while simultaneously demanding a return to an authentic, primordial, or suppressed truth. Consequently, it was able to link the modern concept of progress with an apocalyptic, messianic, and eschatological imagination, securing a distinguished position in Iranian politics in relation to the horizon of the end.

A significant example of this intersection is evident in Mirza Fath-Ali Akhundzadeh’s engagement with the concept of revolution. Akhundzadeh, an early socio-historical critic of Iran in the modern era and likely one of the first to introduce the modern connotation of this concept into the Iranian intellectual sphere, uses the word “révolution.” However, his significance lies not merely in transmitting a word. Within the framework of what he understood as a form of “Islamic Protestantism,” Akhundzadeh found a historical model for such a rupture in the medieval Isma‘ili declaration of Qiyama (Resurrection) at Alamut, which he interpreted as a symbolic abolition of religious law in favor of absolute freedom and the beginning of a new historical order. The importance of this narrative for the present discussion lies not in its historical authenticity but in Akhundzadeh’s use of it: he employs a model where freedom passes through the declaration of the Qiyamah and the eschatological moment to formulate his reformist ideals. Modern rupture in Iran is born not from the philosophy of progress but from an apocalyptic moment, where freedom, the abrogation of Sharia, and the establishment of a new order are linked to the declaration of the end of an era. Thus, the concept of “révolution” was shaped from its inception at the crossroads of the modern future and the symbolic apocalypse, a connection whose resonance reached its peak political dynamism in the twentieth century, in the views of figures like Ali Shariati and the activists of the 1979 Revolution.

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For Shariati, an intellectual influential among many revolutionaries, revolution is not reducible to a mere transfer of political power; rather, it is a form of historical, ethical, and existential awakening. Concepts such as “return to the self,” “resurrection,” “Alavi Shi’ism,” “martyrdom,” and “waiting” (Entezar) are interconnected in his works, transforming politics into an arena for the revival of a suppressed truth. While criticizing passive and fatalistic waiting, Shariati does not abandon Mahdist waiting; instead, he transforms it into a negating, historical, and revolutionary force:

belief in waiting, belief in the period of occultation, and belief in the inevitability of salvation in the end times, is not a sedative but rather the greatest negating force…the most powerful weapon for the destruction of corruption, the greatest blow for crushing oppression, and the greatest energy for moving toward the future.4

Within this framework, waiting is not a sign of stagnation but a source of historical energy and will directed toward the future. Occultation (Ghaybat) also does not mean the suspension of politics, but a state in which the believing and revolutionary subject becomes active. From this perspective, Shariati’s conception of revolution, while possessing that same Janus-faced aspect, also entails an eschatological imagination. History becomes the field of confrontation between truth and falsehood, uprising acquires a sacred meaning, and martyrdom is linked to the possibility of collective revival and the opening of a new horizon for history.

Following the 1979 Revolution, the eschatological horizon did not disappear but continued in a different logic within the governmental formulation. In Ruhollah Khomeini’s thought, politics finds meaning in the era of occultation: society cannot remain in suspension until the advent, so a vicegerent order must be established to preserve Sharia and prevent chaos. Hence, Wilayat al-Faqih is understood as a mechanism for managing the interval between occultation and advent. Here, too, the trace of the Janus-face is visible: while Khomeini understood the revolution within the horizon of a religious and promised future, he simultaneously spoke of reviving and returning to Islamic civilization; as if opening the future were only possible through rediscovering an authentic past.

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This logic is reinforced by the famous principle that “preserving the system is the most necessary of obligations,” now central to the political discourse of the Islamic Republic. Khomeini gave this principle one of its most radical formulations when he stated that “preserving the Islamic Republic is more obligatory than the life of the Twelfth Imam.”5 In this sense, the Islamic Republic may be said to possess a katechonic temporality: power understands itself not as the actualizer of the end times, but as the guardian of the order that precedes them. In Christian political theology, the katechon names the force that restrains the end and preserves historical order before the apocalypse. This comparison neither equates Shi’ism with Christianity nor simply transfers a Christian concept into Shi’a jurisprudence; rather, it clarifies a temporal logic in which “preparing the ground for the advent” becomes tied to “preserving the system,” and Mahdist waiting shifts from rupture to continuity and delay. Within this official interpretation, the system is represented as protected from ultimate harm, even endowed with a kind of divine guarantee, as reflected in Ayatollah Araki’s claim that “Imam Mahdi pays attention to this country.”6 Power thereby casts itself under the protection of the promised savior, rendering survival and delay natural and legitimate.

This logic can be linked to the broader discussion of political theology in Iran: as Shahin Nasiri emphasizes the political theology of Iranian despotism,7 resistance against despotism also does not stand entirely outside this horizon. If power formulates itself in a sacred, salvific, historical, and sometimes apocalyptic language, many forms of resistance operate within the same semantic reservoir. Therefore, political conflict in Iran is not merely a confrontation between religion and secularism or two secular forces, but rather a clash of two theological imaginations that both define politics in relation to salvation, the end, and the possibility of a new foundation. However, emphasis must be placed on the concept of “unequal symmetry”: the shared horizon of language between power and resistance does not mean their equality, because the state possesses the instruments of repression, prisons, law, media, and the official organization of power, while resistance usually operates from a vulnerable, scattered, and costly position. Nevertheless, both can draw from common concepts such as the end, salvation, martyrdom, purification, standing to the end, and the moment of judgment at the level of language, imagination, and temporal relation.

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If the political theology of power in Iran is linked to preserving order, delaying the end, and managing the era of occultation, the political theology of resistance often operates differently: by constructing a subject who prepares themselves for danger, suffering, rupture, and steadfastness. However, this logic should not be sought solely at the level of abstract concepts; the language of the streets, media, and contemporary protest actions also shows that the apocalyptic mindset has permeated the public political culture. Expressions such as “We will stand to the end” on the walls of Khamenei’s supporters, “the last battle” in the slogans of Pahlavi supporters, and “the last chance” in the discourse of some diasporic Iranian media, all indicate that political crisis is often understood not as a problem for governance, compromise, and gradual organization, but within the horizon of rupture, judgment, and final confrontation. In such a horizon, politics slides from the logic of mechanism to the logic of revelation: a moment when truth must be revealed, evil must be eradicated, and a new order born.

It is at this point that the political theology of resistance intertwines with discussions of subjectivity, suffering, askesis, violence, and political mysticism. The political actor within this semantic framework is not merely a claimant or organizer but a subject who prepares themselves for danger, repression, violence, and sometimes direct confrontation. Askesis—understood as practice, discipline, and self-cultivation through discipline and endurance of suffering—in the context of resistance becomes a form of self-care amidst transgression. The streets, prisons, mourning, repression, and violence can be arenas for such practice; places where political suffering finds meaning in a language close to political mysticism. In this logic, encountering violence is not merely a destructive experience but is sometimes understood as a form of catharsis: passing through pain and danger as moral purification, overcoming fear, and the rebirth of the protesting subject. Therefore, violence, whether as state violence or as the imagination of confrontation and reciprocal response, can acquire a meaning beyond political tactic within the apocalyptic horizon, becoming a sign of passage, purification, and entry into a new phase.

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This form of political mysticism in Iran is shaped by a cultural background that encompasses a wide range of apocalyptic concepts, particularly the tradition of martyrdom. Hence, even in the discourse of secular forces, this language can be reproduced: suffering, blood, the names of the deceased, and collective mourning become signs of truth, authenticity, and the beginning of a new order. In the course of contemporary protests, this logic has intensified: while the Green Movement still spoke, to some extent, in the language of law, votes, reform, and a return to official mechanisms, in subsequent uprisings—and particularly in the violent situation experienced during the late December 2025–early January 2026 protests—the horizon of rupture, confrontation, and the end of the existing order became more pronounced. This shift indicates that protest politics is gradually moving from demanding the reform of mechanisms to imagining the final moment and a decisive rupture.

However, this “mysticism of resistance,” despite generating immense moral force and astonishing courage, carries a profound structural risk. The capture of the political arena by apocalyptic theology empties politics of its fundamental meaning—namely, the step-by-step management of the public sphere and the understanding of protracted temporality. When every act of protest is understood as the “last battle” and a final confrontation, the slow, terrestrial time of politics is devoured in favor of the accelerated, theological time. In this messianic horizon, the necessity of arduous work for organization, institutional building, networking, and creating stable coalitions is marginalized; for subjects who see themselves on the verge of a moment of rupture find no reason to invest in the long-term politics and representative mechanisms. Consequently, despite passionate uprisings and sacrifices, the lack of institutions and organization in Iranian resistance is not merely a tactical flaw or sociological weakness but is linked to the dominance of this very rupture-oriented theology, which ceaselessly sacrifices the long-term “strategy” before the promised moment of “salvation,” preventing the effervescent energy of revolts from transforming into stable institutional capacity.

Mahdi Panjalipour is an independent researcher focusing on political theology, political economy, and contemporary social movements in Iran. His research explores the intersection of messianic imaginaries, political mysticism, theories of resistance, and counterrevolution in the Middle East.

The sudden spectacular rise of a right-wing populist party in Australia might seem entirely unsurprising given that something similar seems to be happening in many Western countries. Australia’s One Nation (technically Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party, often referred to by the acronym PHON) can thus be easily understood as a local correlate to Reform UK or the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).

Living in Australia, and specifically in the rural hinterland where PHON’s rise has been most pronounced, I have however been puzzled by this as perhaps by no other political phenomenon I have encountered in my life. The most puzzling—indeed uncanny—aspect of this is the way I see absolutely nothing anywhere either online or in real life that reflects this phenomenon. I have heard or seen no one signal any support for this party. It has come up in conversation only with the very politically interested in the context of discussions of the polling, and even then this does not seem to be much discussed.

Moreover, not only are there no outward signs of this psephological phenomenon but nothing seems to have changed either that might have caused it. Yes, we are beset by several crises that have been occurring in much the same way in many other countries with the same results, but none of these have particularly coincided with the rise of One Nation. One Nation has existed for almost thirty years, far longer than the aforementioned populist right-wing formations in other countries. We have endemic cost-of-living crises and the highest rates of immigration anywhere in the world, but these are respectively a slow-burning issue and a long-standing one: this is very different from the UK, where record high immigration suddenly occurred in a discrete event a few years ago, increasingly and accurately referred to as the “Boriswave,” which might directly be linked to anti-immigrant sentiment. One might say that Australia is, as so often, rather late to the party, but this doesn’t explain why it has decided to arrive at this point. One might point to the appearance of prominent new backers of ON, to billionaire mining magnate Gina Reinhart and former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce, but in both cases we can see this as much of an effect of the party’s trajectory as a cause: certainly it began well before they climbed on board.

I have reached the conclusion that the cause is quite simple, amounting to the recent playing out of what has been referred to as the Great Realignment. In Australia as elsewhere in the West, social liberalism increasingly aligns with higher income and educational attainment and thus traditional center-left and center-right parties that draw their key personnel and support from the university-educated have found themselves increasingly detached from a working class with quite different values. This has tended to make conventional center-right political formations, such as the mainstream U.S. GOP, the Conservatives in Britain, or Christian Democrats in Germany, which depended on an unspoken alignment of the wealthy with the lower orders around social conservatism, increasingly unviable as a political proposition, and hence is one of the main causes of the growth of Reform and the AfD, as well as, of course, MAGA in the United States.

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In Australia specifically, the rise of One Nation is therefore a symptom of the collapse of a quite peculiar conventional center-right formation, called the Coalition or LNP (Liberal-National Party—although technically this appellation refers only to its Queensland branch). The Coalition is a permanent coalition of two political parties: the National Party, which represented rural interests, and the Liberal Party, which can best be thought of as itself a broad church of urban and suburban opponents of the Labor Party, including some social liberals (so-called “wets”) but typically dominated by economically and socially conservative views. The Coalition has thus operated for decades on the basis of economic neoliberalism (with a partial protectionist carve-out for agriculture to please the Nationals) and social conservatism that appealed to sections of the wealthy, working class, and rural voters.

The Coalition model collapsed in essence because relatively wealthy electorates have become overwhelmingly socially progressive. Wealthy parts of Sydney and Melbourne were the absolute core of the historic Liberal Party, but many dramatically flipped in 2022 to so-called “teal” challengers (so called after their campaign color-coding), women candidates who were economically conservative but in particular rejected Coalition hesitancy on climate action. This altered the electoral dynamics so as to make Coalition government in many states and at a federal level suddenly seem impossible.

In light of this, the Liberal Party chose a new leader (ex officio also then the leader of the Coalition), Sussan Ley. In effect, Ley, a moderate, attempted to tail the teals and move the Coalition back towards the center. It was this that proximally caused One Nation’s rise. One Nation itself did nothing in particular to catalyze it; rather, the Coalition began unsuccessfully chasing its own lost core and in so doing thoroughly alienated its outer suburban and rural voters.

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One Nation’s new rise terminated in a plateau when the Liberals ditched Ley and replaced her with outer-suburban right winger Angus Taylor, who immediately began moving the party back toward the right. While this stemmed the hemorrhaging of support to One Nation, it has done little to win any voters back, and offers no particular prospect of winning back the lost urbanite core, where indeed the teals are beginning to coalesce into a formal political party.

It might be added that the Nationals had their own considerable woes stretching back a decade, emanating principally from rural perceptions they were too compromised and insufficiently representing “the bush.” Consequently, they had already been partially displaced by an alternative rural party, the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party, before they declined in turn, clearing the ground for One Nation apparently to become the new countryside default.

The Labor Party’s response to the rise of One Nation has been muted. While promising to cut immigration numbers and alleviate cost-of-living pressures, there is little evidence of the government delivering either thing, and the electorate certainly doesn’t seem convinced. By far their most voluble response so far has been the May 2026 budget, in which Labor quite deliberately broke a campaign promise and restricted so-called “negative gearing” on investment property. A long-standing third rail of Australian politics, negative gearing allows owners to deduct costs of maintenance from their taxable income, which has long been seen as a subsidy to older, wealthier real estate investors, and hence a force for house price growth in the context of ever-cratering housing affordability. Far from seeing off One Nation, this is clearly oriented toward the youth vote and thus seems if anything directed to head off the threat to Labor from the left, specifically the Australian Greens who, like the Green Party in England, have made significant gains from Labor among left-wing and Muslim voters due to widespread outrage over Israeli actions in Gaza. This makes tactical sense for the Australian Labor Party, for which the rise of One Nation might be seen as nonthreatening due to its effect of dividing the right to Labor’s advantage. Nonetheless, the budget was generally panned, and, while it did swiftly reverse creeping Green gains against Labor, its main effect seems to have been to restart One Nation’s previously stalled rise at the expense of both Liberals and Labor, leading to a novel situation in which One Nation has now become the front-running party in some polls.

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The below graph shows One Nation’s meteoric rise in orange, beginning steadily from the last Australian federal election in 2025—Ley became Liberal leader effectively immediately at the election as her relatively right-wing predecessor lost his seat. The apparently exponential growth in PHON support terminates abruptly exactly when Angus Taylor becomes Liberal leader in February 2026, and it instead begins to slowly decline until Labor present their May budget, when it begins to grow again rapidly—May also saw the by-election triggered by the resignation of Sussan Ley upon her leadership ouster, which was won by One Nation. Notably, when PHON polling waxes, both Coalition and Labor wane, whereas the Liberal-National rebound under Taylor corresponded to both Labor and PHON decline.

One Nation is itself a very strange beast. It has always been centered on—though has not always been led by or even included—the figure of Pauline Hanson, an unprepossessing regional shopkeeper turned politician who was dumped by the Liberal Party as a candidate on the eve of the 1996 general election over her views but won anyway. She formed a new party, which within two years took 23 percent of the vote in the state election in her native Queensland. However, it failed to replicate this success at the national poll later the same year: Hanson herself lost her seat, and the party descended into infighting, culminating in it losing so many members that it not only could not maintain its registration but was also found to have registered itself illegally, for which Hanson and a key ally were briefly imprisoned. The party then spent more than two decades vacillating in the electoral wilderness: it has continued to exist, sometimes under slightly different names, sometimes without its eponymous founder, and occasionally one or two members have been elected, often then to leave the party or lose their seats in due course.

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Reputationally, the party has long been perceived by many, particularly on the left, in the way parties of the far right typically are: as fascists, beyond the pale of polite consideration. Again typically, this is rather hyperbolic. One Nation’s distinction had always been opposition to immigration, but a culturalist one: the name referred to the ideal of a singular Australian nation that welcomed immigrants who assimilated to Australian norms and conversely demanded that Australians Aborigines also assimilate to this singular culture. In the context of Australia’s extraordinarily high per capita migration intake, this meant a position on immigration that would retain substantial if much reduced levels. Of course, critics, particularly on the left, have seen all this as a barely veiled racism. In our hyperpoliticized times, there is no shortage of critics on the online right who, contrariwise, see One Nation as weak beer and not racist enough. Importantly, though, there is no significant political force to the right of them. Until recently, the largest political force in Australia to the right of Hanson was the explicitly Nazi National Socialist Network (NSN), which has since disbanded and been banned.

PHON support is anti-immigrant, anti-elite, relatively conservative, a complaint about cost-of-living pressure, etc. But I do not believe the rise in One Nation’s support betokens any particularly shift in public views on these questions, so much as a conclusion that neither the Coalition nor Labor will address them, after years or decades of signaling that they would and then not delivering. In this regard, the shift is very similar to that seen in the UK contemporarily.

One Nation is growing then effectively as a repository for sentiments that have no other vehicle. The party has little to commend it. It is organizationally fragile such that it is hard to believe it would cohere in the event it won any significant representation. It is ideologically inconsistent such that it does not represent any clear proposition. Scarcely a week passes without a prominent figure in the party contradicting previously announced policy positions. Its platform is a hodgepodge and, for example, involves no foreign policy position. One Nation is not so much isolationist as simply uninterested in the outside world, engaging with it largely through trying to outflank the major parties to the right in opposing China and supporting Israel. Generally PHON has deliberately aligned itself with Trump’s America, but just last week a senior member of the party shocked almost everyone by describing the United States as “the world’s greatest terrorist organisation.”

Of course, similar things might be said about other right-wing populist parties abroad, but in their cases this is more a matter of them being new and unproven organizations. One Nation might be unique in the longevity of its track record of dysfunction and cognitive vacuousness. In such a situation, one might reasonably expect some new, more coherent force to emerge. The Liberal Party actually does have, in its not insubstantial hard right, the resources to become a more competent vehicle of this type.

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It is worth mentioning in this regard that Australia’s electoral system is dramatically different from those of most other countries in at least two relevant respects. One is that voting is compulsory, meaning that there is no significant reservoir of nonvoters that might be mobilized by a movement that speaks to an unrepresented constituency. Mandatory preferential voting in Australia means that, in the crucial federal lower house at least, all voters must direct their votes in preferential order such that every single valid ballot will ultimately be cast for one of the two front-running parties. This means that all left- and right-wing votes tend to fall behind the leading left and right candidates, which would mean the determining question of which party will dominate will depend on whether One Nation or Coalition can lead in first preferences. That said, many Coalition preferences may in fact flow instead to Labor as moderate voters of the right prefer the center-left to the hard right, constituting an effective cordon sanitaire against One Nation. This implies that One Nation besting the Coalition in first preferences across the country might redound to the electoral benefit of the currently governing Labor Party in the House of Representatives. The prognosis for Australian politics from here remains necessarily unclear. The remaining question, much as with Reform UK, is whether PHON can attract enough Labor voters for it to break through, not just by displacing the Tories but also by leveraging alienation of relatively socially conservative suburban Laborites.

The silence I hear at backyard barbecues around One Nation’s rise may thus be attributed to the quietness of the politics it displaces: no one was loudly declaring their intention to vote for the Coalition previously either. Voting in Australia’s compulsory, preferential system, away from the heated invectives of university campuses and inner-city protests, lends itself to a quiet, resigned lesser-evilism. Our Saturday elections revolve for many more around getting a “democracy sausage” at the polling place than around the numbers they put on the ballot. Of course, this banality of process does not rule out that dramatic results might yet emanate from it.

Mark G. E. Kelly is Executive Director of the Telos–Paul Piccone Institute. He is Associate Professor and Program Lead in Philosophy at Western Sydney University. He is the author of six books, most recently Normal Now: Individualism as Conformity (Polity, 2022).

Article 5(1) of the German Basic Law (Grundgesetz) declares: “Everyone shall have the right to freely express and disseminate his opinions. There shall be no censorship.” As a foundational constitutional guarantee, the provision appears unambiguous.

That commitment to free speech has been hollowed out through a set of overlapping criminal statutes, government-backed enforcement networks, and targeted prosecutions—particularly since 2015. As a result, the space for political speech has narrowed, with concrete and measurable consequences: thousands of criminal prosecutions per year, police raids on private homes over social media posts, and a documented chilling effect on public discourse. Polling by the Allensbach Institute, Germany’s foremost survey organization, indicates that a majority of German citizens feel unable to express their political views freely.

The phenomenon has attracted comments from international observers, including the Economist and a segment on the CBS program 60 Minutes. This program drew wider Anglophone attention to the issue and featured prosecutors who described, with obvious schadenfreude, how painful it is for people when their mobile phones are taken away.

Section 188 and the Criminalization of Political Insult

This situation has been brought about by a series of new laws, such as Section 188 of Germany’s criminal code (Strafgesetzbuch), enacted in 2021 during the final year of Angela Merkel’s chancellorship, which creates a specific criminal offense for insult, malicious gossip, and defamation directed at persons in political life. Its immediate legislative pretext was the assassination in 2019 of Walter Lübcke, a regional politician murdered by a far-right extremist with a documented history of violent activity stretching back to his adolescence—largely predating the era of social media. The invocation of Lübcke’s killing as justification for a law regulating online expression was, from the outset, strained: incitement to violence and acts of violence were already criminalized under existing provisions of German law, and the perpetrator’s radicalization bore no evident causal relationship to unmoderated social media commentary.

The law’s actual scope is much broader and does not restrict itself to far-right speech, threats, or incitement. It applies to any expression deemed sufficiently insulting or defamatory toward a public figure in political life—a category whose boundaries are determined through prosecution and judicial interpretation rather than statutory precision. The result has been a wave of criminal proceedings against private citizens for comments that, in most comparable liberal democracies, would fall within the ordinary protections afforded to political speech.

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Enforcement has been facilitated by a network of organizations whose business model it is to monitor digital platforms for potential violations. Among the most prominent of these are So Done or HateAid, NGOs that provide legal assistance to complainants and which work in close cooperation with politicians who bring charges. The institutional architecture thus combines state prosecutorial power with quasi-private surveillance infrastructure.

Documented cases illustrate the range of conduct now subject to criminal sanction. In one recent and widely reported instance, police initiated an investigation against a retired citizen who had shared a Facebook graphic depicting CDU leader Friedrich Merz as Pinocchio; the case, which caused some public amusement, was ultimately dropped, but only after the formal machinery of criminal investigation had been set in motion. More consequentially, Stefan Niehof—also a pensioner—had his home searched and his computer seized following a social media post characterizing Robert Habeck, then Federal Minister for Economic Affairs, as a moron. The circulation of a photograph showing Niehof accompanied by his daughter, who has Down syndrome, also generated substantial public attention and briefly brought the disproportionality of such enforcement into sharp relief.

The case of a construction engineer from Dortmund is perhaps the most instructive for the purposes of assessing the law’s scope. In April 2022, the man sent a letter to Manuela Schwesig, Minister-President of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, expressing sharp criticism of her role in promoting the Nord Stream 2 pipeline with Russia—a project subsequently discredited in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The letter was intemperate in tone (he invited her to join his colleagues in construction, rather than selling the public lies) but contained no threat. The public prosecutor nonetheless sought a monetary fine of €3,000. When the defendant declined to pay, the matter proceeded to a custodial sentence. In August 2023, he was arrested at his workplace and imprisoned for thirty days.

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Defensive Democracy and Its Transformation

The intellectual and constitutional foundations of Germany’s restrictive approach to political speech lie in the concept of streitbare Demokratie—variously translated as “militant,” “fortified,” or “defensive” democracy. Developed in the postwar Federal Republic, the doctrine holds that a democratic order need not remain neutral in the face of movements that seek to exploit its freedoms in order to destroy it. The concept finds expression in several constitutional provisions, including Article 18 (forfeiture of basic rights for anti-constitutional purposes) and Article 21(2) (the prohibition of political parties whose aims threaten the free democratic basic order).

The concept was accompanied by a promise not to repeat the mistakes of the Weimar Republic. From the outset, however, it was also linked to a fear of the electorate, whom many within the elites held responsible for the rise of fascism. The architects of the Basic Law sought to build a constitutional order that would de facto protect democracy from the electorate.

Originally, the concept was designed to address existential threats to constitutional order—the prospect of organized movements dismantling democratic institutions from within. Yet the logic of defensive democracy has proved very flexible. As the concept’s boundaries have been extended, and as the designation of “threats to democracy” has been applied to an increasingly broad range of political positions and speech acts, the doctrine has been transformed from a safeguard against authoritarianism into a mechanism for entrenching political incumbency, especially with the rise of new populism.

The 2015 refugee crisis was a structural catalyst for this transformation. The scale and speed of irregular migration into Germany exposed deep divisions within the electorate, accelerating the growth of the right-wing populist party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The party’s electoral success confounded the expectations of the established parties. Unable to win back the trust of large sections of voters, mainstream politicians and their media supporters attempted to delegitimize their critics. The expansion of speech restrictions was central to this strategy. Critics of migration policy were characterized as xenophobes, their speech was labeled hateful or far-right adjacent, and legal mechanisms were used to penalize its expression.

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The Broader Legislative Framework

Section 188 operates within a wider statutory architecture that compounds its restrictive effects. Section 130 of the Criminal Code—the Volksverhetzung provision, or incitement to hatred—has a longer history, originating in postwar efforts to suppress neo-Nazi agitation. It criminalizes the disturbance of public peace through incitement to hatred, violence, or arbitrariness against national, racial, religious, or ethnic groups, or against individuals on the basis of group membership. The provision has been subject to repeated legislative amendment, and its scope too has expanded considerably in the past years.

The application of Section 130 to critics of Islam is particularly revealing. In May 2024, Michael Stürzenberger, an activist associated with the anti-Islam organization Pax Europa, and a victim of an Islamist-motivated attack, was fined €3,600 under the provision for statements made at a rally in October 2020. This was an extension of an earlier conviction in a lower court, where Stürzenberger had received a six-month prison sentence without probation—a sentence that he successfully appealed. However, before the appeal case began, Stürzenberger was seriously injured in a terrorist attack in which a policeman was killed (the attacker had pledged allegiance to ISIS). The irony could not be starker: while terrorism attempted to silence him through violence, the state has attempted to do so through its anti-free speech laws.

Further provisions include Section 166 (defamation of religious beliefs), Section 86 (dissemination of material from unconstitutional or terrorist organizations) and Section 86a (use of symbols of such organizations). The application of Section 86a to far-right AfD politician Björn Höcke in May 2024—resulting in a fine of €13,000 for using the phrase “Alles für Deutschland” (“Everything for Germany”), a slogan associated with the SA during the Third Reich—illustrates the operation of these provisions. The charge was initiated by a member of the Green Party. That Höcke’s party subsequently won 32.8 percent of the vote in the September 2024 Thuringian state election—the largest share of any party—suggests that legal stigmatization has not achieved its intended deterrent effect on the electorate.

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Consequences: Alienation, Chilling Effects, and Political Failure

The scale of enforcement under these provisions is substantial. The cumulative total of individuals affected by speech-related criminal proceedings over the preceding several years runs to tens of thousands. Police crime statistics recorded over 4,500 breaches of Section 188 in 2025 alone, and in 2024 the Federal Ministry of Justice recorded approximately 26,000 prosecutions for various “propaganda offences.”

The chilling effect of speech restrictions is not merely theoretical but can be observed empirically in patterns of self-censorship, as shown in the Allensbach surveys. This effect is particularly pronounced in debates around highly contested issues such as migration, climate change, and measures to combat the coronavirus pandemic.

But citizens who feel that legitimate avenues of expression have been foreclosed do not moderate their views; they redirect their political energy and anger. The electoral growth of the AfD is, at least in part, a structural consequence of a strategy that attempted to contain populist sentiment through legal coercion rather than political engagement.

In Defense of Classical Liberal Protections

Hans-Georg Maassen, the former President of the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution), has characterized Section 188 as cementing “a two-tier society” and has questioned why elected politicians—who possess greater institutional resources than private citizens to rebut criticism—should receive elevated legal protection from public insult. Indeed, in a truly free and liberal society, the arrow of constitutional protection should run from citizen to state, not the reverse. Public figures who seek and exercise power accept heightened scrutiny, including scrutiny that is immoderate in tone, as a condition of democratic accountability.

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The German case raises a question of broader comparative relevance: at what point does a democracy’s institutional self-defense become indistinguishable from the authoritarianism it purports to resist? The doctrine of streitbare Demokratie was conceived as a safeguard against totalitarian subversion. Its contemporary application—the prosecution of pensioners for satirical Facebook posts, the imprisonment of citizens for critical correspondence with politicians, the fining of opposition politicians for the use of historically resonant phrases—has departed so far from that original purpose as to constitute a qualitative transformation rather than a mere extension.

The case for robust free expression rests not on the intrinsic value of any particular utterance but on the systemic properties of open discourse: its capacity to surface legitimate grievances, to subject power to scrutiny, to allow bad ideas to be challenged and refuted rather than suppressed and preserved. Germany’s legislative trajectory over the past decade suggests a governing class that has lost confidence in these systemic properties—that has concluded, in effect, that political competition can be managed more reliably through legal constraint than through the persuasive resources of democratic argument. This is both empirically mistaken and normatively dangerous.

Sabine Beppler-Spahl studied economics at Hamburg University. She is chair of the German liberal think tank Freiblickinstitut and the Germany correspondent for Spiked. She also writes regularly for the European Conservative.

Omer Bartov, distinguished historian and now public intellectual, does not like what Israel has become. In his view, Israel has become its own Greek tragedy. Originating as a response to the Holocaust, Israel committed, and continues to commit, its own genocide against the Palestinian people. Zionism, “a movement that sought to emancipate European Jewry from oppression and persecution” (3), has morphed into an ideology defined by the “oppression and persecution” of the Palestinians. Even worse, Israel responded to the Hamas invasion of 10/7 with a genocidal war against Gaza’s inhabitants that was “conducted with the wide support, laced with denial and indifference, of most its own Jewish citizens” (3). How Israel became such a monster is the question Bartov explores in this short, maddening book.

Before I get to the many problems, errors, and omissions in Bartov’s argument, let me give credit where credit is due: unlike other examples of what Matti Friedman terms “Gazology”—a new literary genre that blames everything on Israel and grants the Palestinians total immunity—Bartov does not let Hamas or the Palestinians off the hook. The Hamas attack on 10/7 “is a war crime and a crime against humanity” (20–21), “akin,” Bartov says later in the book, “to the attack on the United States on September 11, 2001” (120). Bartov even admits (in a qualified way) that maybe “the Arab and Palestinian rejection of the partition was a mistake” (137).

But these moments are few and far between. For the most part, everything is Israel’s fault, and Zionism is ultimately the reason why, Bartov repeats over and over and over again, Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.

Such an incendiary claim requires evidence, and here is where Bartov’s argument falls apart.

His evidence for Israel’s genocide is, to put mildly, shaky at best. Bartov asserts at the book’s start that “68,000 Palestinians were killed, about 80 percent of whom were civilians, the majority of them children” (5). Bartov does not specify his source, but the numbers likely come from Gaza’s Health Ministry, which is of course Hamas. But Hamas is hardly a reliable source. Bartov surely knows that Hamas doesn’t distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, and they have been caught inflating the number of deaths. In addition, Hamas counts anyone up to the age of 18 as a “child,” which includes combatants. But instead of qualifying his numbers and acknowledging that Hamas manipulates statistics for propaganda, Bartov accepts what Hamas says at face value and repeatedly states that Israel kills children.

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Nor does Bartov take into account the type of combat Israel faced in Gaza—urban combat—and how that might have impacted civilian casualties. Hamas is not a conventional army with uniforms, nor did they fight Israel on a field well outside population centers. Instead, Hamas fighters hid among civilians, used protected facilities, hospitals in particular, for military purposes, and booby-trapped buildings.

That’s above ground. Below ground, there was even more. Bartov mentions the vast tunnel system Hamas constructed in Gaza only twice (36, 122), and even though Bartov is deeply concerned about civilian casualties, he ignores how Hamas refused to let civilians into the tunnels for protection. Mousa Abu Marzouk, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, admitted that “the tunnels are meant to protect us [Hamas fighters] from airplanes”; it’s someone else’s responsibility to take care of civilians. Which is not to say that innocent civilians didn’t die, but surely Hamas bears a significant amount of responsibility for those deaths by using the civilian population as human shields and refusing them shelter. Yet Bartov gives them a pass.

There was a mordant joke circulating after 10/7 that if Israel really wanted to commit genocide, the war would have been over on 10/8. Instead, the IDF took many steps—all ignored by Bartov—to protect, as far as possible, the civilian population. To quote noted military historian and expert on urban warfare John Spencer:

The IDF has telegraphed almost every move ahead of time so civilians can relocate, nearly always ceding the element of surprise. . . . Israel gave warning, in some cases for weeks, for civilians to evacuate the major urban areas of northern Gaza before it launched its ground campaign in the fall. The IDF reported dropping over 7 million flyers, but it also deployed technologies never used anywhere in the world, as I witnessed firsthand on a recent trip to Gaza and southern Israel. Israel has made over 70,000 direct phone calls, sent over 13 million text messages and left over 15 million pre-recorded voicemails to notify civilians that they should leave combat areas, where they should go, and what route they should take. They deployed drones with speakers and dropped giant speakers by parachute that began broadcasting for civilians to leave combat areas once they hit the ground. They announced and conducted daily pauses of all operations to allow any civilians left in combat areas to evacuate.

A responsible analysis of the Gaza war would take these warnings and precautions into account. But not this one.

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Bartov inadvertently reveals how his bias against Israel shapes his reporting when he writes about his interactions with Israeli and American college students. In 2024, after his New York Times op-ed warning about genocide, Bartov gave a talk at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He was confronted by a group protesting his lecture and calling for it to be canceled. But instead of being silenced, Bartov (to his credit) invited the students in for a conversation. The students, Bartov noted, “had recently returned from reserve service, during which they had been deployed in the Gaza Strip” (38). They tried to rebut Bartov’s accusation that Israel was committing genocide. Instead, they blamed the destruction on Hamas “using civilians as human shields”; even more, “They showed me photos on their phones to prove that they had behaved admirably toward children, denied that there was any hunger in Gaza, insisted that the systemic destruction of schools, universities, hospitals, public buildings, residence, and infrastructure was necessary and justifiable” (39).

Even though these students had “lived experience” with Gaza, and provided photographic evidence, Bartov is having none of it. Instead, Bartov dismisses them as deluded because they had “internalized a particular view that had become commonplace in Israel” (39), namely, that Hamas are “human animals” (39). Given that more Jews were killed on 10/7 than at any time after the Holocaust, and given the barbarity of Hamas’s behavior, including rape, which Hamas live-streamed, hatred of the enemy should not be surprising. Instead, Bartov refuses to give any credence to people who are in a much better position than most to judge the IDF’s behavior. Instead, Bartov says, condescendingly, that he feels sorry for them because they “were unaware of how they had been manipulated” (43).

It’s deeply ironic that Bartov condemns Israel for its lack of empathy concerning Gaza because he seems to have zero empathy for Israel. He condemns the Israeli media, for example, for refusing to cover the joyous reception Palestinian prisoners got when they returned (126) while privileging the reception Israeli hostages received. But Bartov seems to excuse Hamas returning the body of a “young Palestinian woman” instead of the corpses of the Bibas children by calling it “an apparent mix-up” (126). Rather than condemning this macabre trick, Bartov focuses his outrage on the Israeli media for saying that murdering these two children demonstrated how Hamas’s cruelty “knows no bounds” (127). He doesn’t seem to care that they were murdered, not killed by an Israeli strike. Instead, Bartov is more concerned with blaming Israeli authorities for “[inflaming] public opinion” (125). It’s more than clear that Bartov has a lot more sympathy for Hamas—which, we should always remember, started this war—than for Israel.

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A little later, Bartov talks about the protests at American universities, and he takes a very different approach. He grants that “in the early days following the Hamas attack, there were voices among protestors that justified or even glorified the massacre of Israeli civilians . . . or simply denied the atrocities” (60). But Bartov immediately tries to downplay them, claiming “these were minority voices among the protestors,” and a little further, “it must be stressed that the vast majority of the protestors in the United States have not condoned the crimes of Hamas” (60).

Yet Bartov does not provide any evidence to back up these assertions. How does he know that “the vast majority” didn’t condone Hamas? How does he know these were “minority voices”?

When Cornell history professor Russell Rickford exclaimed that not only was he “exhilarated” by 10/7 but that if you weren’t, you were “not human,” the crowd of students around him cheered. At an encampment protest at the University of California, Los Angeles, students wrote in chalk: “Oh Qassam [referencing the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing], oh beloved, we want to burn Tel Aviv.” You can find many more examples. So there is good reason to doubt that support for Hamas was a “minority” position. But the skepticism Bartov extends toward the Israeli students disappears when dealing with American anti-Israel protests.

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Let me finish by unpacking a sentence that sums up everything wrong with this book: Israel’s establishment in 1948 “was followed by an invasion of Palestine by several Arab armies and the expansion of the intercommunal clashes into a full-scale war” (139).

First, “several armies”: “several” typically refers to two or three items, not many, and implies that the exact number is not very important. In fact, FIVE armies invaded: Egypt, Transjordan (now Jordan), Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. Six if you want to include the soldiers that Saudi Arabia sent to fight with Egypt. Bartov’s use of “several” deliberately minimizes the forces arrayed against the new state, as if the threat they posed were not very great.

Next “intercommunal clashes” is a remarkably mild way of describing the bloody, anti-Jewish, and anti-Arab violence roiling pre-independence Israel.

Finally, the five armies did not invade “Palestine.” On November 29, 1947, the United Nations passed a resolution partitioning the British protectorate, Palestine, into an Arab and Jewish state. On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion reads the Declaration of Independence, and 11 minutes later, President Harry Truman recognized the new state. One day later (May 15), the five armies invade, not Palestine, but Israel, for the express purpose of destroying the nascent Jewish state.

Why would Omer Bartov—a distinguished historian—make such a mistake? The answer is that Bartov thinks that Israel’s founding is a grievous, historical error, and he’s nostalgic for the Arab League’s plan for a “‘unitary state’ that would have an Arab majority and allow minority rights for the Jews” (138). Think about that. Bartov is okay with Jews as second-class citizens.

There are many more errors and omissions. Bartov repeatedly says that Gaza is “occupied,” but Israel left the Gaza Strip in 2005 (rockets were launched from Gaza a month later). Granted, Israel tries to control Gaza’s borders to try to prevent weapons smuggling (apparently, unsuccessfully), but so does Egypt, which Bartov neglects to mention, and Egypt built the mother of all walls to keep the Gazans out.

Bartov asserts that “the rise in anti-Jewish violence around the world . . . [is] associated first and foremost with extreme right, racist, and white supremacist elements” (102), which surely will come as a surprise to the victims of the Bondi Massacre and the Boulder attack. In fact, Bartov completely neglects radical Islam, even though there is a very long history of anti-Jewish sentiment in Islam and Hamas is an explicitly Islamist organization.

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Bartov’s use of sources is also unreliable. He claims, for example, that a June 2025 op-ed in the Washington Post by Norman Goda and Jeffrey Herf presents “not only Hamas but all Palestinian resistance to Israeli oppression as Holocaust-like genocidal actions” (114). But a quick look at the article shows that’s not true. Instead, Goda and Herf argue that the genocide accusation against Israel is unfounded, and they show how anyone challenging the accusation will be subject to all manner of abuse, including being called a “Zionist rat.”

What makes this book so frustrating is that in detailing only some (there are a lot more, but space does not allow) of Bartov’s errors, it may seem that I fully endorse Benjamin Netanyahu and all his works. But that’s not true. Pointing out that it’s a mistake to call Gaza “occupied” does not mean that the West Bank is not occupied, just as stating that the IDF’s tactics in Gaza don’t amount to genocide does not excuse the settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. There is a great deal that Netanyahu has to answer for, not the least being bringing the most extreme, and racist, elements into the government. But instead of a rational, evidence-based discussion about where and how Israeli policy has erred, Bartov’s screed only supports those who want to deny Israel’s right to exist and ally themselves with Hamas and Hezbollah. Israel: What Went Wrong? is not antisemitic, but it gives intellectual cover for those who are antisemitic, and that’s unforgivable.

Peter C. Herman is emeritus professor of English literature at San Diego State University. He has published books on Shakespeare, Milton, and the literature of terrorism, and essays in Quillette, Newsweek, Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, Inside Higher Ed, and Times of San Diego. His latest book is Early Modern Others: Resisting Bias in Renaissance Literature (Routledge).

Modern journalism confronts a contradiction it cannot fully acknowledge. The institutional demand for continuous moral clarity now exceeds the temporal and epistemic conditions under which truth can responsibly emerge. Contemporary media organizations are no longer expected to investigate events while contextualizing uncertainty and complexity. They are now required to position themselves visibly, publicly, and under conditions of permanent exposure, vis-à-vis unfolding reality in real time.

This transformation changes not only the speed of journalism but its institutional character. News institutions now draw legitimacy from demonstrating synchronization with rapidly consolidating public perception, rather than from interrupting collective normative consolidation through evidentiary restraint. Journalism itself operates inside accelerating ethical judgment rather than standing at meaningful distance from it.

The controversy surrounding Nicholas Kristof’s recent New York Times column on alleged sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees by Israeli personnel exposed this transformation with unusual clarity. Critics accused the article of relying on activist NGOs, anonymous testimony, and fragile evidentiary conditions. Defenders responded that Palestinian testimony is routinely dismissed, that abuse in Israeli detention facilities has been documented, and that demands for exceptional verification often emerge selectively when Palestinian suffering is involved.

The significance of the controversy extends far beyond the factual status of any individual allegation. Journalism under wartime conditions necessarily unfolds amid uncertainty, emotional intensity, incomplete verification, and competing testimonial worlds. What became visible in the Kristof controversy was not the possibility of error alone, but a broader transformation in the temporal organization of epistemic legitimacy itself.

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Epistemic Latency

Classical liberal journalism depended upon what might be called epistemic latency. The institutional capacity to remain within uncertainty long enough for verification, contradiction, corroboration, contextualization, and interpretive judgment to occur before normative consolidation crystallized into public certainty. Latency was not a weakness of journalism but one of its central ethical conditions. Responsible reporting required delay precisely because public seriousness depended upon evidentiary seriousness. Journalism derived legitimacy from disciplined restraint under conditions where closure was emotionally and politically desirable, rather than from immediate normative positioning.

This temporal structure is now weakening. The current information environment increasingly rewards immediacy over epistemic duration. Ethical positioning circulates faster than evidentiary consolidation. Public actors now operate under conditions of continuous visibility in which hesitation itself risks appearing ethically compromised. Under such circumstances, the temporal interval separating event, interpretation, verification, and judgment steadily contracts. The distinction between investigation and authorization becomes increasingly difficult to sustain.

This transformation should not be reduced to ideological bias alone. Bias implies deviation from an otherwise stable epistemic framework. What became visible through this episode was not the possibility of error alone, but a broader transformation in the temporal organization of epistemic legitimacy itself. Media organizations now derive authority not only from their ability to verify information, but from their capacity to consolidate public meaning under conditions of volatility and acceleration. Modern journalism no longer functions solely as a system that describes reality. It now participates in organizing which realities become collectively actionable in the first place.

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Some narratives become publicly coherent before they become epistemically stable. Under present conditions, social recognition depends upon rapid ethical recognizability. Narratives aligned with established structures of suffering, domination, victimhood, and exposure begin acquiring plausibility prior to evidentiary maturation. Testimony itself acquires anticipatory normative authority whenever it echoes recognizable interpretive grammars.

The Kristof controversy exposed this mechanism with unusual clarity because the allegations themselves occupied a uniquely charged symbolic position. Sexual violence functions within liberal discourse not just as criminality but as civilizational transgression. Once allegations of sexual assault become attached to imprisonment, military domination, humiliation, ethnic conflict, and dehumanization, they acquire force far exceeding ordinary evidentiary thresholds. Such allegations rapidly cease functioning as empirical propositions subject to verification. They become ethically saturated objects around which institutional authority itself becomes entangled.

The dynamics visible here did not emerge uniquely within the context of Israel–Palestine. Similar pressures became visible during the MeToo moment, when institutions increasingly confronted moral environments in which skepticism toward accusation itself risked appearing ethically compromised. In many settings, the obligation to demonstrate responsiveness to suffering began competing directly with procedural norms historically associated with evidentiary restraint. The issue is not that such accusations were false or that older procedures were neutral. It is that anticipatory moral recognition increasingly preceded adversarial verification, compressing the interval within which judgment could remain open.

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Most revealing is that many institutions now most susceptible to these pressures were historically understood as gatekeepers tasked with slowing judgment through evidentiary restraint. News organizations no longer operate primarily as relatively insulated intermediaries standing between event and public interpretation. They now operate inside continuously circulating environments of escalation in which institutional credibility becomes dependent upon visible responsiveness. Editorial decisions no longer unfold under conditions where interpretation can mature gradually before normative consolidation crystallizes collectively. They unfold inside ecosystems where judgment is already circulating, intensifying, and imposing reputational pressure before verification processes have concluded.

Digital media intensified this transformation, but importantly, it did not create it. Nor can the transformation be reduced simply to partisan bias or the decline of journalistic professionalism, since many of the institutions most susceptible to these dynamics were historically understood precisely as guardians of evidentiary restraint and procedural authority. The decentralization of evidentiary visibility shattered the monopoly that older journalistic systems once possessed over the production of public reality. Images, testimony, activist framings, counterevidence, and interpretive communities now circulate simultaneously outside traditional editorial mediation. This fragmentation can expose realities older systems ignored or suppressed. Yet it also intensifies pressure upon public actors to synchronize rapidly with emerging consensus under conditions where verification, interpretation, emotional consolidation, and public judgment unfold simultaneously rather than sequentially.

Media systems participate in recursive legitimacy structures in which their own authority depends upon demonstrating synchronization with rapidly consolidating interpretive coherence. Classical journalism partially derived authority from temporal asymmetry with the crowd. Journalism now derives legitimacy from temporal synchronization with normative acceleration itself. This synchronization is not just behavioral. It has become structural necessity. Under conditions of permanent circulation, visible desynchronization from rapidly consolidating narratives threatens institutional credibility itself. Public actors therefore experience latency not only as slowness, but as vulnerability.

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Moral Acceleration

One could observe this mechanism concretely throughout the post–October 7 media environment. Allegations, images, fragments of testimony, short video clips, activist framings, and emotionally saturated narratives circulated through digital networks at extraordinary speed. Normative consolidation often began before verification processes had meaningfully matured. Under such conditions, editorial caution no longer appeared simply professional. It now risked appearing ethically suspect. Institutions confronted not only the possibility of factual error, but the reputational danger of moral lateness.

These processes did not remain confined to questions of testimonial credibility alone. Allegations concerning starvation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide frequently achieved rapid normative consolidation long before the evidentiary and legal conditions necessary for responsible adjudication had matured. This does not mean that such claims are necessarily false, but rather that contemporary informational environments now accelerate maximal moral convergence under conditions where narrative closure arrives faster than epistemic consolidation. Once such categories harden collectively, they begin organizing the conditions under which subsequent evidence is interpreted in the first place. Contradictory information may still emerge, but it no longer enters an open interpretive environment. It arrives within discursive structures already synchronized around conclusions that had already sedimented socially, where its disruptive capacity becomes significantly diminished.

In such environments, truth no longer emerges primarily through the slow accumulation of corroboration alone. Narratives acquire the status of truth because they satisfy preexisting moral expectations, restore explanatory coherence, and synchronize successfully with emotional and organizational environments already prepared to recognize them as such. The issue is not simply deception or propaganda. It is that contemporary informational systems now blur the distinction between evidentiary consolidation and socially desired intelligibility.

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Viewed through this lens, the asymmetrical distribution of latency and acceleration becomes profoundly revealing. Extensive evidence concerning sexual violence committed against Israelis on October 7 often encountered institutional hesitation, fragmentation, or delayed recognition despite survivor testimony, forensic evidence, independent investigations, and substantial documentation, including delayed acknowledgment by organizations such as UN Women and skepticism within elite media discourse. As many institutions struggled to translate such evidence into stable ethical recognition, allegations concerning Israeli abuses against Palestinians achieved rapid public plausibility under far more unstable evidentiary conditions.

The issue is not that allegations concerning Palestinian detainees required the same skepticism directed toward early reports of sexual violence on October 7. Nor is the argument that epistemic hesitation itself constitutes injustice. The asymmetry is diagnostically revealing precisely because latency and acceleration were distributed differently according to already established structures of moral recognizability. In one case, extensive evidentiary accumulation struggled for durable public recognition despite substantial documentation. In the other, moral certainty cohered rapidly before comparable epistemic maturation had occurred. The issue is therefore not inconsistency alone, but the differential organization of epistemic activation itself.

The differential distribution of latency and acceleration across these cases was not accidental. It tracked the moral architecture of contemporary progressive discourse, which now organizes legitimacy through symbolic frameworks centered on anti-colonialism, structural domination, racial asymmetry, carceral violence, and the exposure of hidden abuse. Palestinian suffering now enters Western institutional consciousness through already sedimented moral vocabularies that make such allegations rapidly plausible. This does not invalidate Palestinian testimony. It means the allegations entered a discursive environment already primed for anticipatory moral recognition.

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By contrast, Israeli and Jewish victimhood now encounters symbolic instability precisely because Jews no longer occupy a secure position within inherited liberal moral grammars. Jews appear simultaneously vulnerable and sovereign, traumatized and militarized, historically persecuted yet visibly powerful. Within this symbolic structure, Jewish suffering becomes difficult to metabolize because it no longer maps cleanly onto contemporary moral legitimacy.

Historically, evidentiary restraint functioned as a condition of public seriousness. The ethical obligation to expose suffering intensified rather than weakened the obligation to verify claims. Today, under conditions of acceleration, restraint risks appearing as moral insufficiency. Institutions no longer experience delay primarily as responsibility, but as exposure. The result is not the disappearance of judgment but its temporal compression. Institutions now consolidate normative authority before the epistemic conditions necessary for responsible judgment have fully emerged.

What emerges within this transformation is more than institutional bias alone. It is a reconfiguration of the relationship between procedure, judgment, and legitimacy themselves. Weber anticipated aspects of this transformation in his account of rationalization and procedural legitimacy, through which modern institutions increasingly secure authority through formally recognizable procedures rather than through historically situated judgment. Yet procedural legitimacy cannot resolve the problem of judgment itself. Arendt understood judgment not as the mechanical application of moral rules, but as the difficult activity of remaining within spaces of competing perspectives, incomplete evidence, and unresolved ambiguity without surrendering either thought or responsibility. Judgment required temporality, distance, and resistance to collective consolidation. What disappears under conditions of acceleration is precisely this interval between event and closure. Institutions continue speaking in ethical vocabularies while losing the temporal conditions necessary for reflective judgment.

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None of this means epistemic latency was historically neutral or universally just. Delay often protected entrenched power. Journalistic hesitation contributed historically to the marginalization of lynching testimony and the dismissal of early reports concerning totalitarian violence. Latency could function both as epistemic discipline and as institutional inertia. The point is not that older journalism represented a lost golden age of objectivity. The point is that liberal institutions historically depended upon temporal intervals within which judgment could remain accountable to evidentiary maturation even when those intervals were imperfectly distributed.

The collapse of latency therefore produces a genuine dialectical problem. Acceleration can expose hidden suffering more rapidly than older information systems permitted. Yet it can also dissolve the temporal conditions necessary for epistemic responsibility itself. The issue is not speed alone. The issue is what happens when public coherence begins outrunning institutional capacities for reflective judgment.

Antisemitism without Antisemites

The consequences are especially serious in relation to Jews because antisemitism historically functioned not only through hatred, exclusion, or dehumanization, but through explanatory condensation. Jews repeatedly became sites onto which broader civilizational anxieties, moral contradictions, political dislocations, and crises of legitimacy were projected and narratively fixed before they were politically understood.

This is what distinguishes antisemitism structurally from many other forms of prejudice. Antisemitism historically transforms Jews into overdetermined explanatory objects. They appear not as a minority among others, but as figures through which diffuse social contradictions can become narratively coherent under conditions of uncertainty and instability. Other groups may experience condensation episodically, but Jews have experienced it structurally across centuries and civilizations.

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Antisemitism therefore possesses a distinctive relationship to acceleration. Jewish meaning often coheres publicly before political reality coheres epistemically. Jews become “fast narratives.” Complexity condenses around them with unusual speed. They become narratively available as explanatory resolution mechanisms during moments of institutional disorientation and civilizational anxiety.

This is why antisemitism historically adapts so effectively to environments in which explanatory coherence outruns institutional restraint. Accelerated media systems reward explanatory condensation. They reward narratives capable of rapidly transforming complexity into politically actionable certainty. Antisemitism historically proves unusually adaptive to precisely this operation.

Historically, this process transformed Jews into explanatory infrastructure for diffuse crises. Jews became associated simultaneously with capitalism and anti-capitalism, cosmopolitanism and tribalism, weakness and hyper-power, rootlessness and hidden coordination, revolutionary disorder and financial control. Antisemitism repeatedly abstracted Jews beyond ordinary sociological concreteness and transformed them into portable explanatory mechanisms through which societies narrated disorientation back to themselves.

The issue, however, is not simply the production of negative narratives concerning Jews. It is the preemptive fixation of Jewish meaning before Jewish agency, testimony, ambiguity, or self-description can meaningfully interrupt the explanatory coherence already forming around them.

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Liberal institutions remain profoundly uncomfortable with explicit antisemitism and often highly vigilant against it in overt form. Yet antisemitism under contemporary liberal conditions operates not primarily through explicit hostility, but through instability in the institutional conditions under which Jewish vulnerability, agency, legitimacy, and violence become recognizable at all.

Antisemitism no longer necessarily requires antisemites. It can emerge infrastructurally through asymmetries in the thresholds governing plausibility, recognizability, and epistemic legitimacy. This does not mean every asymmetrical institutional outcome constitutes antisemitism. The claim is narrower and more structural. Institutional environments can reproduce historically recognizable asymmetries in the public legibility of Jewish experience without requiring explicit antisemitic intention among the actors operating within them.

The Collapse of Judgment

The danger under present conditions is therefore not simply prejudice in its familiar forms. It is the emergence of institutional environments unable to distinguish between explanatory coherence and epistemic consolidation itself. Once complexity begins collapsing directly into actionable certainty, institutions no longer risk factual error alone. They become susceptible to mythic forms of condensation that transform uncertainty into total explanation before judgment has had time to mature.

This is what makes the current moment so difficult to perceive from within. Institutions continue understanding themselves as ethically responsive even as the temporal conditions necessary for responsible judgment erode. Liberal journalism historically justified its authority not by eliminating uncertainty, but by preserving institutional spaces within which uncertainty could remain socially legitimate long enough for judgment to mature. Once institutions lose that capacity, they risk more than factual error. They risk losing the ability to perceive the distinction between reality and socially authorized meaning itself. And once epistemic latency collapses, institutions may lose the ability to recognize that they have lost it.

The author thanks Russell Berman for his thoughtful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this essay.

Eliyahu V. Sapir is a political scientist at Maastricht University. His recent work focuses on antisemitism in higher education, documenting the experiences of Jewish and Israeli students and faculty and analyzing institutional responses to antisemitic harm. He co-authored the 2024 report Unsafe Spaces: The Rise of Anti-Semitism in the Dutch Academic World and the 2025 book Het 7 oktober-effect, and regularly contributes to public debate on these issues through op-eds in Dutch media.

People feared for him—for his safety, even for his life—every time he returned to Algeria. And on November 16, 2024, the author Boualem Sansal disappeared upon arriving at Algiers airport. The worst was feared: the secret police of the dictatorship, the Islamists—the two once again allied, as in the past, in some dark combination? A complete blackout followed. As Rachel, the brilliant “math whiz” in his novel The German Mujahid (Le Village de l’Allemand), puts it, Boualem Sansal “entered, in a quantum manner, into a non-Euclidean space.” He became a character from his own narratives, which weave together all the threads of History between “Nazislamism” and Algerian “Stalinationalism.”

Finally, the authorities announced that Boualem Sansal had been arrested and charged with undermining state security. He was said to be in prison, then in a prison hospital; his lawyers were unable to meet with him, and concerns mounted over his health, known to be fragile. Absurdity, cynicism, arrogance, cruelty—the traits of a violent and enraged regime attacking so gentle a man: a writer, a poet, a lover of the French language and of numbers. Boualem Sansal is indeed inexhaustible when speaking about prime numbers, irrational numbers, remarkable numbers, complex numbers, real numbers. He speaks of them with tenderness and complicity; he caresses them, plays with them, and the white papercloth fills with arabesques of figures and cabalistic formulas.

And from numbers he moves to geometry and the tracing of family trees. His own genealogical tree links the two shores of the Mediterranean—from Spain to Kabylia, from Morocco to France, and even to Jerusalem, which he sometimes visits in memory of his brother Daoud-David and the “dusty old rabbi” of his novel Darwin Street. Like Mounia (another version of himself in the novel), Boualem then opens “a breach in space-time.” That, too, is something the Algerian regime cannot forgive him for: his sympathy toward Morocco, the brother-enemy, and perhaps even worse, his friendship toward Israel.

The Islamists are likewise revolted by his frequenting with Jews, whom Islam tolerates only as dhimmis (this pariah status of Jews under the caliphate and the Ottoman Empire). But they are not the only ones who want Boualem Sansal destroyed. An entire section of the Left—or those claiming to be such—the kind that prefers Sartre to Camus, attacks Boualem Sansal by accusing him of having “turned to the far right,” precisely because he stands with the luminous Algeria of Camus. This Left has chosen authoritarianism of every kind: that of the Global South, of dictators large and small, boastful or discreet, kleptocrats, bloodthirsty psychopaths, and self-proclaimed avengers driven by grievance and revenge—all of them threatening our freedom to think, to speak, to love, to live.

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Throughout Boualem Sansal’s captivity, left-wing intellectuals and politicians, commentators and polemicists, essentially maintained that he had brought his fate upon himself. By criticizing the Algerian regime so openly and delivering supposedly “Islamophobic” diatribes, they argued, he had only himself to blame. And after his release, criticism—even insults—erupted once again. Caught unwillingly in a politico-editorial imbroglio, he was reproached for changing publishers and for “selling himself” to a right-wing businessman who has become the Left’s great Satan: Vincent Bolloré, who recently acquired the publishing house Grasset, the publisher that Boualem Sansal had joined a few months earlier and to which he remained loyal after the change in ownership.

This so-called “revolutionary” Left has always exercised significant influence in France. Its hold over the broader Left and over intellectual and political circles has fluctuated through the decades but has more or less endured. Today, the “radical” political Left—characterized by an aggressive Islamo-woke ideology—dominates the cultural sphere, achieving, in Gramscian terms, a form of hegemony, while its electoral performances have reached heights comparable to the communist apex of the 1950s and 1960s. Viewing violence as revolutionary in itself, this Left has replaced the figure of the proletarian with that of the “Palestinian” as the emblematic “wretched of the earth” to be defended by any means necessary, according to the Bolshevik principle that “the end justifies the means.”

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The “Palestinian” is not a real individual—an Arab from Mandatory Palestine—but a mythical being who subsumes the Muslim supposedly victimized by “Islamophobia,” the Arab supposedly victimized by “systemic racism,” the immigrant, the colonized, the “dominated,” in short, supposedly victimized by the Westerner, by “the white man,” and above all by that alleged “super-white” figure, the Jew, once portrayed as an auxiliary of the French colonists in Algeria and now supposedly the Israeli “colonizer.” The absurd theory of “white privilege” has indeed produced a specifically antisemitic offshoot: echoing the hashtag #WhitePrivilege, the hashtag #JewishPrivilege appeared on Twitter in July 2020. The “foreigners” and “mixed bloods” vilified by the racist antisemitism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have now become the most hated “whites” in the racialized vision of a world once again radically divided by race.

Propalestinism, promoter of “Palestinian suffering,” instrumentalizes compassionate support for Palestinians—that is, for the Arabs of Palestine and their descendants, transformed into hereditary refugees cared for by the UNRWA since 1949 because the Arab states decided to preserve them as a permanent sore point. The strategic objective of propalestinism is the disappearance of the State of Israel, because the entirety of Mandatory British Palestine (that region of the defeated Ottoman Empire which the League of Nations entrusted to Great Britain for administration) is considered destined to remain Muslim and to belong exclusively to the Arabs. To achieve this aim, the tactic of propalestinism is to delegitimize the Jewish state, especially through the obsessive victimization of Palestinian populations and the demonization—literally and figuratively—of the Jew/Israeli.

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Yet Boualem Sansal stands against this phantasmatic worldview promoted by woke ideology and by this propalestinism, which has today become the doctrinal core of the neo-Bolshevik Left. As an Algerian, he does not conform to the archetype of the oppressed. If he suffers oppression, it comes not from France, from its culture, language, or Enlightenment philosophy—all of which he has fully embraced—but rather, on the one hand, from the Islamist offensive that, during Algeria’s “Black Decade,” carried out a true genocide against his country’s intelligentsia and, on the other hand, from the Algerian authoritarian regime.

Thus, he became a target, particularly in France for parties such as La France Insoumise and the New Anticapitalist Party, but also for ecologists of all kinds, who have made the struggle against so-called Islamophobia one of their main causes and who, at every opportunity, defend the wearing of the veil and various Islamist communitarian demands. The Communist Party is no exception, as shown by its connections with the PFLP, a Palestinian terrorist group, and its sustained relations with Iranian intellectuals close to the regime of the mullahs. Even the Socialist Party, drifting steadily downward in its decline, follows the same path. Having defended the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 and now rejoicing in the resilience of Iran’s military-religious regime after “Israeli-American” attacks, this fundamentally anti-Western and anti-democratic Left supports the Algerian regime and attacks the personalities it persecutes. Thus, Boualem Sansal—a free man even at the bottom of his prison cell—has become the ideal target for Islamo-woke leftist propaganda.

Renée Fregosi is a philosopher and political scientist, and president of the Centre Européen pour la Coopération Internationale et les Échanges Culturels (CECIEC). Her latest book is Le Sud global à la dérive: Entre décolonialisme et antisémitisme (The Global South Adrift: Between Decolonialism and Antisemitism; Paris: Intervalles Publishing, 2025).

German author Konrad Weiss (1880–1940) left a body of work including poetry, some prose fiction, art criticism, travel essays, and—this is our concern now—his 1933 essay on the “Christian Epimetheus.” This figure of thought makes several appearances in the writings of Carl Schmitt. Schmitt and Weiss both participated in German Catholic thinking of the era, although they take that legacy in alternative directions along the religious spectrum between activism and mysticism: Schmitt’s decisionism versus Weiss’s negative theology. Understanding Weiss can shed light on Schmitt.

The Christian Epimetheus treats several distinct topics. First, it presents a political diary from the Hindenburg election of 1932 to Hitler’s accession to power in 1933. This record of contemporary history includes reflections on political personalities as well as constitutional technicalities, e.g., whether Hindenburg’s presidency could have been extended by the Reichstag alone rather than going to a general election—which Hindenburg won but which gave Hitler a significant boost in public presence.

Second, the essay includes implicit reflections on party politics, in particular regarding the Catholic Center Party, which had been a core part of the Weimar coalition supporting the Republic but which found itself at loose ends in the context of the crises after 1930. Weiss also provides a critical analysis and parallel rejections of two competing tendencies: Nazi racial thinking and liberal humanism. Normally seen as opposites, Weiss rejects them symmetrically from a distinctive Catholic conservative position: both proceed from positive assumptions of nature; in contrast, Weiss invokes a German history of overcoming nature in the early medieval transition from paganism to Christianity.

Third, Weiss develops a negative theology centered on Mary and culminating in the Pietà, which he also projects onto a theory of visual art. The aesthetic points to a program for abstraction with theological foundations: the image (Inbild) involves a spiritual core that necessarily remains elusive. Works of art do not depict; they withhold. Paintings are representational as icons rather than as realistic mimesis. While Weiss often invokes medieval architecture as a reference point, he was in fact a proponent of modern art in Munich of the early twentieth century and was close to the painter Karl Caspar, whom the Nazis would declare as “degenerate.”

To begin to make Weiss legible to contemporary theoretical concerns, it is worth recognizing how The Christian Epimetheus has a set of divergent ambitions—in addition to its significance as a companion text to Schmitt.

Weiss’s essay offers at times a powerful critique of modernity—Weimar culture and its excess—as a regime of unbounded production, reminiscent of Walter Benjamin on “mechanical reproduction” or Jean Baudrillard’s later attack on “productivism.” Weiss might be misunderstood as standing near a Lukácsian critique of reification, though without Georg Lukács’s Marxist framework, certainly without his progressivist philosophy of history, and of course phrased in a very different idiom. For Lukács, modernity dissolves the relation between form and substance, with a resulting loss of unity. The aspiration to repair that fragmentation reveals an underlying classicism in his Marxism. In contrast, for Weiss unity is always and necessarily illusory, insofar as it conceals the unsurpassable gap between creator and created. This argument is particularly strong in Weiss’s attacks on liberalism and humanitarianism: Menschlichkeit or humane-ness turns out to be unconcerned with genuine Menschheit or humanity.

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Second, the essay unfolds a theological account of absence and measure. The insistence on human creatureliness and creation in general does not flow into a pantheistic endorsement of the whole cosmos as a divine accomplishment. On the contrary, the claim of createdness indicates the distance between the creator and the creature. Art and politics should, he suggests, proceed from an internalization of this gap rather than attempting to feign completeness.

At the center of Weiss’s thought lies a theological anthropology structured by absence. The Inbild—the inner image or figural ground—is not present as a stable center; it is withdrawn, operative precisely through its iconic non-presence. Meaning therefore “takes place outside the center,” and the individual is constituted by a detachment from this absent ground. Behind this account, one can recognize Weiss’s ultimate dogmatic assumption of a flawed state of fallenness, or original sin, although he does not use that terminology.

The figure of Epimetheus names the retrospective stance; his Christianity adds a component of regret or mourning. Against the Promethean drive to project, create, and dominate, Epimetheus embodies after-knowledge, receptivity to the point of passivity and measure. Rather than initiating action, he responds to what is given—and what is given is marked by lack. The “Epimethean justice” that Weiss invokes is not distributive justice in a conventional sense, but a sense of appropriate order coupled with a refusal to exceed what can be rightly borne by the absent center.

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A third aspect brings into focus the explicitly political vocabulary that emerges in the text: justice, measure, division, and opposition. Here Weiss can be read as offering a political theology, though his position is not reducible to Schmitt’s. Schmitt proposes a decisionism that is necessarily activist; Weiss articulates a witnessing of catastrophe that leads him toward a set of passive mystical stances: reclusa, or withdrawal from the world; immaculata, or awareness without intervention; and pieta, the figure of mournful comfort. Compared to Schmitt, he is apolitical, outside the state, yet perhaps close to Ernst Jünger’s figure of the anarch as described in his novel Eumeswil.

Weiss’s invocation of justice marks a shift from epistemology to political form. Justice, however, is not grounded in unity; it arises from distance and division. His formula—“distances are justices”—turns into the insistence that forms involve structured separations. Justice is not a matter of normative equality. At stake instead are propriety of order, hierarchical structure, and empathy, most pronounced when he addresses the question of “the poor man.”

His term Gegenschaft is crucial. It designates a condition of being set against, a structural field in which differentiation becomes constitutive. Political reality is not a harmonious whole—neither democratic egalitarianism nor Nazi Volksgemeinschaft—but an arrangement of separating pillars. In fact, Weiss returns repeatedly to architectural images from cathedrals, where pillars structure the interior space: a spatialized order of divisions. Justice, in this context, is the regulation of these divisions through measure. Weiss may even be pointing toward a corporativist politics (one might think of “pillarized” societies of Verzuiling as in the Netherlands).

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What distinguishes Weiss from more familiar political theological frameworks is that his argument is not grounded in sovereignty or decision, but in absence and proportion. This removes the possibility of a fully self-grounding political order. Instead, political life becomes a site in which the absence of the center must be negotiated through measure, without ever being overcome. It would be fair to say that he does not offer a political theory, let alone a party program, but instead a reflection on the limitations of the political altogether, perhaps a negative political theology. It is worth recalling here Schmitt’s judgment on the essay: “One may dismiss his Marian image of history as mere historical mysticism. However, its dark truth is thereby not disconfirmed, and neither is its significance as a historical counterforce against the leveling of history to the status of universal humanity, to the museum of the past, and an exchangeable costume to conceal the bluntness of activist attempts to give meaning to the meaningless.”1

After Catastrophe

Epimetheus looks backward, and the end of the essay places him in a storm. That image anticipates the storm of progress that traps Benjamin’s “angel of history” in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” of 1940. The same image of “storm” figures at the conclusion of Martin Heidegger’s 1933 speech on “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” although the reference there was arguably to the “Storm Troopers” attending the lecture. Weiss does not specify which storm or the catastrophe that is at stake for Epimetheus, but one can speculate: the carnage of World War I, the end of the German Empire, or the catastrophe of modernity in general—the Reformation, perhaps, since Weiss references the tensions between Catholics and Protestants in Germany. Alternatively the catastrophe can be read in religious terms: the Crucifixion, the banishment from Eden, or even creation as such that places us at irreducible distance from the creator.

This post-catastrophic historic sensibility explains the usefulness as well as the limits of Weiss’s account today. As much as he is a critic of the Nazis, he concedes that Germany faced a profound crisis involving a substantively national culture (hence a national, but not an ethno-national argument). A conservative anti-Nazi, he attempts to rescue an understanding of German nationhood as a precondition to achieving some social stabilization. Reading Weiss today therefore leaves us with the question as to the standing of any national history, e.g., American national history, as a key to contemporary phenomena. Does (deep) national history still matter at all in the age of globalization, mass migration, and “world citizenship”? What place should national memory play in curricula—if any at all? Similarly, one can ask about the pertinence of Weiss’s parallel dismantlings of liberalism and racialism—the racial epistemologies of the ethno-nationalists on the right and the identity-politicians on the left.

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Yet Weiss’s late Weimar catastrophism also appears incongruous in the United States of 2026 (at most we have a mood expecting catastrophe rather than a sense of already living in its aftermath). Are there nonetheless ways to read Weiss as having significance for our contemporary situation? Most obviously is the challenge to ask about the importance of religion in our cultural self-understanding. Weiss was looking for a theological response to the Weimar crisis, a solution that the Catholic Center Party had failed to supply. His essay therefore prompts us to ask the question about the status of religion today. In fact it appears that a sort of religious revival may be underway, evidenced in increasing church attendance.

While Weiss’s ambience of mournful quietism nonetheless seems distant, there is an argument to be made building on the earlier reference to Jünger’s anarch. The Weissian three-part prescription—reclusa, immaculata, pieta—could be transposed onto a variant of anarchic libertarianism: the urgency of developing effective postures outside the state and conventional politics, but driven by integrity, commitment, and solace, rather than by obedience or citizenship. In any case, Weiss does not leave us fully stateless: the essay includes surprisingly sympathetic portraits of Brüning (explicitly as Catholic chancellor and wise leader) and of Hindenburg, so politics in the conventional sense is not fully excluded; it is just not at the center of his account. Weiss’s emphasis on the existential gap that defines human existence—his central point—does however preclude any world-remaking gnosticism, whether of the revolutionaries on the right or on the left.

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A translation of the full essay is in preparation; an English version of the conclusion follows. Weiss’s language is challenging. To facilitate understanding, it is worth remembering that the discussion of creation is primarily about the gap between creator and created (in contrast to the American creationist discourse). Similarly references to image or likeness involve non-identity. Secondly the language of “angulation” and “disposition” involves a theory of history as textured, not an empty continuum (another point of intersection with Benjamin). History should not be understood as chronology but rather as an alternative to nature and, more importantly, as incarnation. Finally, the concluding reference to 1 John 5:6–8 appears to offer a forceful affirmation at odds with the quietism of Weiss’s triad of reclusa, immaculata, and pieta, indeed a sudden shift from Mary to Jesus. We are left with an interpretive puzzle about the relationship of this conclusion to the Marian theology at the core of the essay.

The Conclusion of Konrad Weiss, The Christian Epimetheus

If, therefore, the middle is, like justice, extinguished in the image, then the world of the earth becomes richest. But how does this great and beautiful abandonment come about? For—this is God’s mystery with His creation—the richness within the image produces abandonment. We are given to understand that creation knows nothing of the honor that is communicated in God’s own sight and not in conception; and what we conceive we must carry over, through the Virgin, into fervent honor and into createdness [Geschöpflichkeit]—yet it robs us through excess. And what we receive, purified in a historical sense, brings us all the more from the earth: it leads us into the dispositive essence of the earth.

Seemingly—that is, if one reflects on the methodical concept of the Christian order of history (and that a true metaphysics is possible only through a gap in which the earth becomes image and the assistance of meaning becomes foundation, in contrast to the mere form of analogy)—and if one sees that the degree of the Christian form lies in overcoming the merely analogical—then it appears that the Christian measure, as a prior exclusion, negates the inclusive classical worldview, which is bound to its own self-clarification.

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Is the Christian form, then, one that does not bind its content to its essence through clarification, but rather, the more it separates content from non-content, the more it receives it as life and thereby departs from it? Does it then appear to be merely a technique? (Indeed, even the old Christian architectural form contains a technique within itself, as an integrated fervor.)

And yet, through the comparative exchange of substance between inside and outside, there arise angulation, intermediate position, and disposition: formed both negatively and positively through comparative selection, they signify exchanged forces—through angulation and proportion, determination and contribution—with the defense of immaculate justice, with the strength of deed and of nature attributed to it, and with transgression in the true meaning, as an inner-sense. The order itself gathers wealth and bears its own consequence—until meaning itself is understood in honor. But here begins what creation itself does not know as honor: the order cannot itself rule as concept within its own receptivity; it is broken off, like a creature, from witnessing. We must be deprived and held in counterbalance with the Virgin; and she herself cannot enter into order as into an honor. She—who, without meaning in herself, holds all things within meaning and gives meaning to history—looks expectantly upon creation and stands, as it were, abandoned [ausgeliefert] within witnessing. What is decided in meaning arises more deeply, as desire, within witness; this is the path of time, and the meaning of salvation cannot be enacted apart from creation. It is through the meaning of history that we have honor.

But we, Epimetheus, are swept along in witnessing as in a storm. This is the threefold witnessing on earth: and corresponding to the Trinity in heaven, it is—as John says—the three who bear witness on earth: the Spirit, the water, and the blood (and these three are one). In these testimonies, history storms [stürmt die Geschichte], and we are caught up within this great dispositive reversal.

Russell A. Berman is Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and former editor of Telos. He is now President of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute.

The elections in Britain on May 7th mark a tectonic shift in UK politics with implications for both Europe and the Anglosphere. After a century of two-party rule, the country’s political landscape is profoundly fragmented, mirroring the deep economic, cultural, and social divides. The country is more atomized and fractured today than even in the run-up to the Brexit referendum ten years ago. Keir Starmer will likely face a challenge as prime minister, and his successor would be the seventh since 2016. Yet successive government have failed to rebuild state capacity for renewed prosperity at home or defending national and shared Western interests against the threats from hostile foreign powers such as China or Russia.

In the English local elections, the governing center-left Labour Party and to a lesser extent the center-right Conservative Party suffered heavy losses to the radical-right populist Reform UK party and the far-left populist Green Party. Meanwhile, in the Scottish and Welsh parliamentary elections, the nationalists emerged triumphant, with Reform in second place and the Greens progressing while Labour lost dramatically and the Conservatives shed support too.

Thus, in one sense the populist backlash against progressivist technocracy continues apace. Labour, which won a landslide victory in the UK national elections less than two years ago, are losing everywhere to everyone. In their former heartlands in the North-East, North-West, and the Midlands, they are being replaced by Reform. In London and university towns, their vote is squeezed by the Greens. And in some of the so-called home counties—the wealthy middle-class regions around the capital—Labour is ceding ground to the centrist Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives, though the latter are losing to Reform in working-class areas across southern England.

Geography and social class largely coincide. Labour’s electoral coalition used to stretch from Hampstead (north London), home to Fabian-style intellectuals, to Hull (northern England), home to the industrial working class. This coalition has fractured, with parts of the progressive professional managerial class abandoning Labour in favor of the Green Party and the nationalists in Scotland and Wales, while the socially conservative ex-industrial working class have switched their support to Reform. The Conservatives are now the party of the older, more affluent voters, a small yet stable rump.

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In another sense, Britain is witnessing a decomposition of mainstream parties and a realignment. The two-party system that has underpinned UK politics for two centuries—first Liberals and Conservatives, then Labour and Conservatives—has given way to a contest of five UK-wide parties (Labour, Conservative, LibDem, Reform, and Green) and three nationalist parties in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland (Scottish Nationalist Party, Plaid Cymru, and Sinn Féin). We might be seeing the demise of Labour and the Conservatives as national parties, with their national share of the vote well below 20 percent each, while Reform UK got about 26 percent and, so far, has the advantage of building a relatively stable electoral coalition out of the working and lower middle classes across England and now Wales too.

But at this juncture, no party can govern on its own, and the prospect of coalition government for years to come adds to the sense of paralysis. Scotland, where the SNP has been in power for over twenty years and governed either as a minority party or in coalition with the Greens, has some of the worst public services and other economic outcomes, showing that a governing strategy of the lowest common denominator accelerates decline. Something similar applies to the Conservative/LibDem coalition in Westminster from 2010 to 2015, which gave the country the lasting damage wrought by austerity, depressing economic growth and involving draconian cuts to public services and defense spending. So far coalitions have existed within the national parties, not between them. Over time, the very legitimacy of British parliamentary democracy will be in question.

Ideologically, the defeat of centrist technocracy does not represent the demise of progressivism or the tempering of the populist right—as with Italy’s Giorgia Meloni. Instead, the energy is with two rival forms of populism—the nationalist, sovereignist populist brand of Reform versus the globalist, “inclusive” populist brand of the Greens. While Reform’s leader, Nigel Farage, led the charge for Brexit and is a staunch defender of President Trump (albeit not in favor of the Iran war), the leader of the Green Party, Zack Polanski, sides with those who accuse Israel of genocide and champions ultra-progressive causes ranging from trans-activism to the decolonization of the school curriculum. Progressivist politics is growing on the populist far left of the spectrum.

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Yet this clash of the two brands of populism conceals a deeper fusion of certain libertarian with specific statist views. Both Reform and the Greens accuse the old mainstream parties of liberticide and a sustained crackdown on free speech, combined with censorship and surveillance. All this is couched in the familiar terms of elite coercive control versus popular resistance. The Greens are even more libertarian than Reform in promoting the legalization of recreational drugs and euthanasia. At the same time, both parties support statist solutions to the economic crisis, advocating vast public spending on welfare and public services in the hope of boosting the living standards of people left behind by globalization and austerity.

Moreover, each of the two insurgent forces is deeply divided. Reform oscillates between statist intervention to support its working-class voters and a Thatcherite low-tax, low-spend economy to placate its suburban middle-class support. The Greens are simultaneously appealing to socially ultra-progressive secular graduates and middle-class voters and socially more conservative Muslim voters.

It is therefore highly uncertain whether their political positioning or policy platforms command greater popular support in a general election for the UK Parliament, due by July 2029 when the current parliamentary term expires. Arguably the fusion of libertarian with statist ideas will limit their appeal among voters as time—and scrutiny—goes on. A majority of British people remain much more small-“c” communitarian in terms of family, work, and a sense of national belonging. Most people are culturally and socially moderate while wanting to see a radically different economic model that allows them and their children to flourish once more.

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A broad section of the UK population are opposed to the ethno-nationalist atavism of Reform’s radical wing, who seek to deport millions of foreign-born Brits, as much as to the globalist reverse racism of Green’s militant activists, who blame the white indigenous people for all the ills of the country and the whole world.

So far, no political party or politicians seems to have grasped the sheer depth of the crisis or worked out how to confront the structural drivers. Reform UK says that the United Kingdom is broken but falls back on old ideas such as Global Britain as a buccaneering free-trade country in a world of great-power blocs and growing protectionism. It also speaks the language of the “special relationship” with the United States at a time when historically close diplomatic, military, intelligence, and economic ties are giving way to more transactional deals based on very short-term calculations rather than longer-term strategic interests.

While Reform UK has consistently criticized high levels of immigration and the associated cultural changes, it has so far failed to connect these to economic pressures. Free trade will only exacerbate the divides between globally traded service sectors and the foundational economy of non-traded goods and services. Linked to this is the reliance on importing skilled, cheap(er) labor to fill vacancies in more vocational and technical sectors such as healthcare, adult social care, construction, and adjacent activities. Crucially, Reform UK seems fully invested in the “culture wars” pitting ultra-progressive woke activists against national-populists, when a majority of voters reject identity-driven politics and do not view the underlying divisions as set in stone.

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How will its current political outlook and nascent policy platform speak to the two parts of the electoral coalition that it needs to hold together and grow, i.e., working-class voters in ex-industrial towns, suburban zones, but also rural and coastal areas (who used to vote Labour), as well as lower-middle-class voters in cities and more affluent pensioners (who are disillusioned by the Conservatives)?

Amid political fragmentation, fracturing communities, and material fault lines, what’s missing from British politics is a broad UK-wide party with a vision that balances tradition with transformation. An economic model that creates value, not financial speculation or the extraction of rents, and rewards hard work. An economic model that fosters firms with a social and not only an economic purpose, such as public-interest companies, cooperatives, and mutuals that pool risk, resources, and rewards. An economic model that reduces energy costs for both households and businesses, and that replaces dependency on energy imports with real energy security based on a combination of nuclear with renewables.

A central state that devolves power and resources to local and regional tiers of government, which know better about the needs of their citizens and are accountable to them. A central state that abandons managerial micro-management with decisive action in favor of reindustrialization, affordable and good-quality public services run by organizations governed by funders, workers, and users. A central state that clamps down on rent-seeking and profiteering, invests in innovation, and deploys technology for public benefit. A central state that enforces strong borders and takes decisive action to eliminate illegal immigration.

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Good government at all levels of the country to celebrate the United Kingdom’s shared history, strengthen communities, go after those preaching hate, and deal with the scourge of antisemitism and ethno-sectarian intolerance. All this requires less focus on process and rules and instead a much greater exercise of both ethical and political leadership based on courage and conviction.

For the past decade or so, Western politics has been characterized by the opposition between progressives and populists amid growing cultural and economic polarization. Today, politics is fragmented as old parties lose their popular base while new insurgent forces still struggle to command majority support. A majority politics can be built on solidarity and subsidiarity instead of diversity and coercion, the common good and flourishing rather than the right to have rights or the maximization of utility, freedom and duties instead of servitude and entitlement.

The sway of both social and economic liberalism, which was dominant for forty years, is being undermined by the intrusion of new political polarities that do not readily fit into a left–right spectrum. These new polarities concern variously common sense and common decency versus the binary of technocracy and populism, rootedness and tolerance versus mobility and the division of culture wars, the local and national versus the uniformly global or atavistic ethno-nationalism. Such and similar political polarities require a more paradoxical conception that fuses the defense of tried and tested tradition with the promotion of radical yet realistic transformation.

Britain’s much-vaunted stability and majority rule are unraveling in a world of great-power rivalry. The current capacity of the British state and the ruling establishment to offer remedies is as small as the scale of the task is big. Only a new virtuous elite combined with greater popular participation in power and wealth can reverse decades of decline and renew the United Kingdom before it breaks apart and ceases to play a vital role in the promotion of the wider West both geopolitically and civilizationally.

Topics: Beyond State and Market • Reflections & Dialogues

Adrian Pabst is Honorary Professor of Politics at the University of Kent, UK, and Deputy Director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. Since 2012 he has been an Associate Editor of Telos. His research is at the interstice of political thought, political economy, and political theology. He is the co-editor of Blue Labour: Forging a New Politics (2015) and the co-author (with John Milbank) of The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future (2016). Author of several other monographs, his most recent book is Penser l’ère post-libérale (2025). Since October 2025 he has been a Member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.